Somber thoughts on reading the news about another little child murdered by his father

Reading the news this morning, I felt like I got punched in the stomach when I read that a young father killed his 7 month old daughter in his care. He was also caring for his 2 year old son.  His wife and he had separated but were sharing custody in an agreement they had worked out themselves.  The father said he put the baby to bed, but she did not go to sleep for a couple of hours and after she did she woke up at 3 am.  He became very annoyed, and before morning he had hit and punched her until she no longer showed signs of life, and then he called the paramedics but it was too late, she had expired.
He had ruined his own life and as well as took hers, for he will be charged with murder and will probably spend many years in prison.
I ask myself why there is so much violence especially toward children.  Last week a mother's boyfriend got angry because a four year old she left in his care soiled himself,. and he killed him! It is my belief that we are not doing enough as a society to help frustrated young people like these not to resort to such violence.
I believe legalized abortion has sent a terrible message to the young, making it legal to kill a child in the womb up to 9 months.  Once the child is born, then supposedly a regard for the sacredness of life will kick in and the young parents will not resort to violence that could kill a child.
Because there is such a mixed message going out with legalized abortion and the killing of the yet to be born, I think in many ways, society has stopped addressing the care and safe nurturing of the young after they are born. In hard times, a boyfriend may be out of work, and a young working mother will try to use him for child care because someone must go out and earn money.  Young people do not seem to be registering that if they hurt a child fatally, there is a terrible price to be paid.  Arrest, a trial and a sentence that might put the perpetrator of a serious crime in jail for years.
Yet, after abortion was legalized, literally millions of unborn children in this country have been killed and thrown away like garbage, around 48 million. I believe that the parents of these children get the idea that somehow their children have no value, for indeed, the justification for abortion is that it would be more acceptable if the unwanted were killed before they were born, if they are going to suffer deprivation and harsh conditions after wards.  That way there will be absolutely no penalty for killing.
I do not think some of these young fathers who have grown up with abortion even realize how serious it is going to be when they strike a child so severely it will not survive  Think how many other children must be enduring such traumas who don't die who will surely be mentally as well as physically damaged for life.
Legalized abortion is a heartless death sentence, and we can't expect to uphold such a solution without it sending that harsh message to the young especially, who in some households hear about abortion from the time they are little, for you can hardly have over a million abortions a year in this country for over 37 years without many households being affected by this act.  Children must hear parents talking about the need for an abortion for an unwanted baby.  Some of them are bound to know when a mother's baby simply ceased to exist, because it would cause hardship or some such  reason.
God knows there are plenty of babies who are going to cause hardship. The crunch in state budgets have made welfare and other such benefits harder for many to get. Jobs have become harder to find.  If there are a number of children in a poor household they may literally go hungry at times.
Perhaps those who believe in abortion simply thought that it would be better to be able to go and quietly get rid of a baby down to a clinic when times were hard.  What was so easily dismissed is that many churches were teaching their young parents that life was sacred, and for centuries, a Christian society was trying to figure out how all the children conceived could be cared for so that the commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill could be honored.  The Mormon Church has always offered church welfare to parents or widows who were struggling with poverty, due to many causes.
Abstinence, taught by the church, was soon sneered at in general modern society as ineffective and what is more depriving the young of 'healthy' sexual activities.What was not perceived is that teens who are not old enough to take on the duties of parenthood, who may have college to get through before they can hope to make a good enough living to take care of a family, need to have means of preventing pregnancy that is fool proof, and abstinence is the only fool proof method of not getting pregnant.  Once sexual intercourse is begun, there can always be slip ups especially among the young.
I cannot see that I was deprived at all by remaining a virgin until I was 20 and married.  I was still going to have plenty of years when I could possibly be sexually active. Most all the Mormon girls I encountered going to school in southern Utah, northern Utah, and the central Salt Lake area were going through their teens without sex as I was.  There was always a small minority who rebelled, but not many. 
But once legal, supporters could see all kinds of good reasons for abortion.  So they did not value the safeguards many had developed so as not to ever have to resort to an illegal abortion.
Some in this country now seem to think religion is such a bad thing, but I cannot think of any groups who have been more successful in keeping their young from getting ahead of themselves with sex.  I know that many young Mormons are not going to get pregnant in high school, I know that for a fact.  They didn't when I was growing up and they don't now, with the same teachings intact.
My parents were even on the wild side, but we daughters all attended church when young.  We didn't want to miss out on anything.  I never experimented with liquor either, as I was too horrified by the way my alcoholic dad acted, say as in comparison to both of my grandfathers and some of my uncles who did not drink.
My mother's people would get together in huge reunions and nobody would drink at all.  This was behavior to be wiped out?  Scorned?  Give me a break.
Religion can always be worked on, if doctrines are illogical or irrational. I know the Mormons seemed to think that baptizing people for the dead was more or less a harmless practice, couldn't really hurt, even though it did open the religion for a great deal of derision from the outside world.
I dare say such practices are a good deal more benign than the newspaper printing edicts by the CEO of Planned Parenthood saying all teens should have an abortion when they get pregnant, and not have to tell their parents because they may be zealots or fanatics who think abortion is wrong!!
Killing a child in the womb with a saline solution or special surgical abortion tools is not even to be questioned??  Some people don't seem to think so.  All depends on what you have been learning, what your society and the age teaches you.
Mormons accepted the federal government's restriction on polygamy when Utah became a state, and I doubt if they would have done so if many were not troubled about the doctrine themselves.  For a while, men who were caught still practicing polygamy went to jail or into hiding, as the main branch of the Mormon Church accepted a giant change in doctrine. I believe the women all breathed a collective sigh of relief when they no longer had to worry about their husbands bringing home a younger prettier wife or two or three who would soon be pregnant, filling up one large house with kids and more kids.
Many of the mainstream did not really approve of the branch of the church who came to be called Fundamentalists Mormons refusing to give up polygamy, and always had a troubled relationship with this sect in their midst along with others who came into the state, perceiving that it might be 'softer' on polygamy than other states.  Warren Jeffs has certainly given the Fundamentalists a black eye with his extremist practices of polygamy.
I went 'out in the world' to see if ideas developed there were better than those I had learned in Mormon Utah. I rebelled against the church because of how they handled the homosexual issue as well as the alcoholism one, which plagued my dad.  I felt they did not really want to study what happens when a young man or woman develops homosexual desires.  I think my dad had these desires which he fulfilled with other males for years before he married my mother when he was nearly 27 years old.  Nobody could have 'cured' him,  I didn't think, so he just went underground after he married and lied and kept secrets his whole life.  I stepped outside the church and said let's just have a rational conversation about this, about what we can realistically expect after these feelings are developed.
I think other churches have had a terrible problem with this issue, mainly the Catholic Church which developed a pedofile priest problem that has shaken the very foundations of the church.  They require abstinence from their priests who cannot marry, but homosexual feelings surfaced and caused numerous scandals.
I have always felt the democrat party has handled the homosexual issue better than the republicans, hence I became a registered democrat, but when the democrat party embraced legalized abortion, I had to disagree.
This issue was I felt a family problem for me.  It has not necessarily been one for my sisters some of whom do not even believe that my dad had this problem. 
On the other hand I think the gay community has had a great deal of trouble dealing with the homosexual pedofile problem.  There are heterosexual pedofiles as well, extremely hard for heterosexuals to deal with.
But I do think it is time to bring the churches back into play as important influences in our society with very good ways as well as some flawed ones in dealing with human problems.
Everybody needs to contribute some hard thinking about the deadly violence against children problem which is all too often reported in my newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona, how about yours?