"Life on the Rock" features leaders of 40 Days for Life Movement

Last night I watched "Life on the Rock" live on the Catholic Network on my blog list with guests Shawn Carney, Father LeCroix and Juliet Cassell telling us just what 40 Days for Life is all about. Father Mark Mary presided over the discussion who came across as a kindly man. How much I trust a kindly man, for it is hard to come across as kindly when such tough issues as abortion are being featured.
In fact 40 Days for Life leadership emphasized over and over that this is a prayerful protest which is the only way they believe they can make headway protesting at an abortion clinic site. 40 days for life people are instructed to pray as they gather there to try to intervene at the very place where life will be taken.
Protest at the abortion clinic site is of course what the media often covers in a very negative way, so I was very interested in the discussion of why this needs to be done and what the best techniques might be to achieve success.
It is a little bit harder to lose control of your emotions while you are praying constantly which is what seems to be so important in protesting abortion. Time and time again we have seen how violent protesters get featured over and over in the news in order to discredit the pro life movement.
Shawn Carney and Father LeCroix, co-leader, and Juliet Cassell all talked about the role that prayer plays in keeping protests non violent.
Another thing the Catholic priest, Father Mark Mary, said that impressed me was that we must succeed in stemming the abortion tides, we cannot fail if we are to truly worship God, that abortion truly is all of our sin, because we know in our hearts we cannot stem the red tide, the massive shedding of blood of the unborn that has resulted in 60 million abortions in our country alone since 1973, unless many of us commit ourselves to the cause.
40 Days for Life is an out reach to people of all churches. Although Catholic in origin this movement has grown to include pastors from other churches bringing in some of their flock.
The Mormon Church into which I was baptized at 8 years old is strongly against abortion, and because I still have many family members who are active Mormons, I refrain from affiliating with any other church. I feel more at peace independent but still acknowledging my tie to the Mormon Church with many ancestors on both sides members as well.
But this discussion was so fulfilling to me as it might be to you, too. It will be repeated Friday, the 17th, at 9 am eastern time and Saturday 1 am on the Catholic network on my blog list. It was so good to listen to strong men and women committed to a cause so difficult as fighting legalized abortion. It reaffirmed to me again that this is not being done by mad fanatics who cannot be reasoned with, in fact, those most successful in fighting abortion are doing it with peaceful prayerful means, but they are not shrinking from going to the abortion mills, the killing fields of abortion.
They know they cannot avoid the front lines and win this fight. Shawn Carney talked of having prayerful thoughts for the workers inside the clinics who are performing the abortions, trying to reach them as well. So the prayers are for the baby, the mother, and the abortion clinic workers, trying to save the baby's lives by changing the hearts of the mother and the workers.
I had chronic fatigue syndrome so knew I would have to fight this battle with my pen rather than by standing on the front lines at the abortion clinics. I did not have the stamina for that, so I made the media my field of protest, writing letters regarding every single piece of abortion propaganda I read, and there was a great deal of that being printed on my newspaper's editorial page during those early years. The Arizona Republic, one of the biggest newspapers in America at the time, went pro choice in a big way, a shocking surprising development to me.
That kind of propaganda is not being printed now days in most newspapers I would say, for the media has learned there is a cost to it. It has turned off the public in ways not really understood yet by them or by the protesters, but a great deal of brain washing by the media was effective in turning the young especially into believers in 'pro choice.'
"A woman's right to choose" has probably been one of the most successful propaganda slogans ever. Women are still saying it not thinking they are becoming abortion advocates to do it without restraints or limitations. Embracing this slogan is giving way to the insidious lure of propaganda, for what woman has not struggled for the rights of women to be respected? A woman's right to choose as long as she does not hurt someone else is what we must not forget. If we have sex that results in a child then we must acknowledge that child as real with the right not to be attacked and killed in the womb of all places, where it should feel the most safe. If we remember that abortion cannot be accomplished without the violent act of killing the child then we are recognizing there must be limitations to a 'woman's right to choose.'
Those who believe in abortion knew that the killing of the unborn would be the sin easiest to justify, and they have justified it in so many different ways, for years and years. It is the sin of killing easiest to hide for no one has seen the face of that child. Abortion in our midst can be accomplished in silence and secrecy, and that is why the protest at the abortion clinic site is needed to call attention to the fact that the killing goes on in our midst most of the time without protest.
We cannot stop millions of deaths without more commitment, more awareness of the killing fields, and more determination to change hearts and minds.
I am sure many think that stemming this red tide is too overwhelming a task, but with a strong belief in God and dedication a way to stop it will open up. I believe that people are capable of a great deal more than the abortion advocates think they are. They have underestimated people.
In the presence of these strong men and women last night, I could feel that God was real, made real by deeds of courageous people who believe that right can triumph over wrong, good over evil. First of all we have to go into the presence of death, we have to let ourselves think about the slaughter, the sadness of it. We have to become aware of the constant migration of tiny souls from this world, children who have never been allowed even to draw breath on the earth, who died before they could leave the womb, real, nether the less, full of life.
A woman abortion clinic worker who had a change of heart said that 'we used to lie to the women, telling them that this was not a baby and yet after the abortion we would have to go and put the aborted baby together to make sure we had gotten all of its parts'. She repeated several times that they just simply lied to the mothers, telling them what they wanted to hear rather than what they knew to be the truth. Women who believe in 'a woman's right to choose' as preached by the abortion advocate does not want to think that abortion advocates have lied about many things in order to make abortion go down easier, for what reasons it is hard to fathom. But there is insanity in this. Wrong thinking, and yes I believe that the abortion advocate or clinic worker has to be reached as well.
With such propaganda millions of young people have been persuaded abortion is just an unpleasant fact of life but necessary. We have a lot of work to do to undo the effects of abortion propaganda. But we have to remember we were vulnerable as a nation. We were not strong enough to to keep this philosophy of life from taking over. Abortion came in the backdoor you might say as a fait accompli with the Supreme Court decision, and we were not prepared to fight a Supreme Court decision. We were still wanting to think that Supreme Court Justices were infallible. Instead of people who could be persuaded that such a violent solution was unpleasant but necessary for many reasons.
We have to face that there were people who believed abortion was necessary with a passion that overwhelmed the opposition's resistance to the violence of abortion. In the years since Roe vs Wade we have had to examine our beliefs to the core, we have had to see that if we are to believe abortion is a sin then we must welcome the babies who would live were it not used. The fact that we have not been able to welcome the babies is a big problem.
We have decided the earth isn't big enough for all these babies, that we cannot learn to control our families according to our resources. We can look out at the stars without end and still say there isn't room. It is hard to have faith that there will be room, that people can find a way to live without using abortion to control population. People are always afraid of the challenge to find room for babies.
I know they can find the room. There is very little abortion in Utah and it is a flourishing state. And people there do learn to control the size of their families without resorting to abortion. I grew up in a society where illegal abortion was rare. In fact, we have discovered that abortion advocates also lied about the numbers of back street abortions that were occurring as well as self induced ones. If people will exaggerate such numbers to promote abortion, we cannot trust them. Again trying to justify killing which cannot be justified given the innocence of the unborn.
Oh the challenge to transform society into one that will not resort to abortion is huge. We may think we have forever failed at this task, but as the Catholic Priest said we have to succeed at stopping the red tide of abortions to believe in God. We know very well that a just God would ask us to be responsible for the lives we create. He did not intend for us to take these lives. If we are given the power to create we need to believe we have the power to preserve the lives of those we create, our children. We have to find a way to be responsible, and to accept the fact that to take these lives is wrong.
I think of God as having the personality of a great kindly priest, of a loving father.
Even in the presence of death there is life. Men have time and time again reaffirmed the existence of God by showing strength. With great strength we can imagine eternity.
The abortion clinic dispose of the unborn aborted babies like garbage, but the priests bless these children and acknowledge their deaths as those of a human being in the first stages, so reaffirming that life exists from conception to be preserved without being harmed.
To believe in God is an intellectual challenge beyond any that the abortion advocate can conjure up. Killing the fetus is killing the great potential of these human beings rather than rising to the challenge of providing for them.
Prayer at the site of the abortion clinic is a challenge to the abortion advocate to match it with anything as powerful. Killing a person gives people who transgress in this direction a sense of power. To save a life is more powerful for it becomes a life long challenge to come up to.
The young respond to challenge. They wither and grow weak without it.