Canada's pro-abortion stance destroys love, peace

The celebrations were spectacular!

It was Canada’s birthday. The day ended with wonderful crescendos of fireworks across the nation. Crowds cheered from coast to coast to coast. The enthusiastic applause could not drown out the reality that a segment of the population has been systematically and arbitrarily excluded from Canada’s human family. There was a haunting silence in the nurseries of millions of unborn children whose births were betrayed throughout forty years of abortion. Their silence bore stark and damning witness to almighty God against our culture that has, in large measure, forsaken the sanctity of human life.

MOTHER TERESA

Mother Teresa said, "It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish." And so it is. Canada is a wealthy nation yet we have sown our own poverty by accepting abortion as a legitimate human choice. It is not: Abortion is always a wrong choice because it denies life. Abortion is anti-child. It is the greatest violence because it kills one’s own offspring, denying love, and opens a great black gate of selfishness. Abortion is anti-life: It attacks life at its most vulnerable and dependent state. Abortion embraces the end of all things because it stops the beginning of all things for the life it kills.

In 1994, Mother Teresa went to Washington, DC, to deliver an address to the United States National Prayer Breakfast. The audience included US President Bill Clinton, many senators and Members of Congress. She used Christ’s words for the title of her speech: “Whatever You Did Unto the Least of These, You Did Unto Me.” Mother Teresa said this about national acceptance of abortion: “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.” She said that abortion brings people to great spiritual and moral blindness. The same is true of Canada. That is why I could not join in the applause for Canada’s 142nd birthday. There was something terribly wrong in the beloved land of my birth by betraying the births of others.

NATIONAL HYPOCRISY


How can we decry violence in our streets when we know thousands of our own innocent children are being slaughtered each week by deliberate decisions of their parents? This was the question raised by Mother Teresa in that historic speech in 1994. America has yet to answer her question: By extension Canada should answer it too because abortion confronts us as a point of national hypocrisy. We celebrate our peace-loving national identity but allow abortion on demand.

Canada does not recognize the humanity or protect unwanted prenatal life ― those who need care and protection most. The slaughter of innocents by abortion has become a nationally protected institution paid for with tax dollars. This makes you and me unwilling accomplices to the greatest destroyer love and peace.

Mother Teresa’s Washington speech can be accessed on the internet at http://www.luisprada.com/Protected/mother_teresa_on_abortion.htm . I invite all people to read her words. I wish Mother Teresa had also delivered it in Canada. It’s truths about family, love for neighbours, and Life equally apply to us. If her words spoke truth (and they did) they all truth seekers must heed what she said. If abortion really is the greatest destroyer of love and peace, then all peaceful countries must remove abortion from their national landscapes and encourage life affirming solutions for women facing crises pregnancies.

Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity say to women facing unwanted pregnancies, “Please don’t destroy the child; we will take the child. ... Come, we will take care of you, we will get a home for your child.” And so they do ― and so should we as followers of Jesus Christ.

There are thousands of couples who are unable to have children. They want to adopt and complete their families. There is no such thing as an unwanted child!

Many people in Canada say we are a “pro-choice” country. Canada funds a hundred thousand abortions a year, costing millions of dollars, but does not equally fund alternatives to abortions. Until the choice of life is equality weighted and supported as the choice of death for the children of crisis pregnancies, we are more accurately described as a pro-abortion nation. Follow the money trail. It speaks louder than rhetoric and reveals the heart and priorities of our nation.

If, as Mother Teresa said, abortion causes moral blindness then we are in desperate straits. Recession may increase financial poverty but hearts that are closed to God’s love and life are the poorest of all, for their poverty is spiritual and their internal blindness complete.

True patriots of the 21st Century will work to eradicate abortion from Canada’s social fabric and make it an unthinkable way to solve the social problem of unwanted pregnancy. Love and peace will find a home in people’s hearts. That is where true love and peace can be found.

Mark Pickup
HLM

(This article also appeared in the 20 July 2009 edition of Canada's Western Catholic Reporter under the same title.)

Pro-active population control and Roe v. Wade

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=103457
WorldNetDaily, 8 July 2009, "Ginsburg: I thought Roe was to rid undesirables: Justice discusses 'growth in populations we don't want to many of."

"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion." -- Justice Ruth Ginsburg in interview with New York Times Magazine apparently to be published this weekend. (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html)

Justice Ginsburg revealed that she thought abortion in America would have the effect of weeding out less desirable people from society. It made me think of the Nazi vision of creating a superior race which would be achieved, in part, by exterminating undesirable or inferior populations (minderwertigen) from the volk.

Mark Pickup

Intimidation and violence of the liberal left

Tiller, Terror and TV Tilt, American Life League
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzYIQxmjVUE

In the weeks after the George Tiller murder, so much of the mainstream media tried to blanket all the pro-Life community as terrorists. In truth the murderer of George Tiller was the work of a deranged loner unconnected with any legitimate pro-Life organization. Intimidation and violence toward pro-Life advocates by the liberal left is common.

Please view the American Life League's production Tiller, Terror and TV Tilt at the Youtube link above. Very enlightening.

Mark Pickup

Pain and the path to spiritual healing

"Only in surrender do we become pliable in the hands of God. He is the potter, we are the clay. Only in surrender to the will of God can we discover the reason for which we were created." taken from Mark Pickup's blog entry for 3 July 2009 under the title Pain and the path to spiritual healing.

Read the rest at http://markpickup.org

All life is sacred

On May 31st, America’s most notorious late-term abortionist was murdered. Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, performed second and third trimester abortions and even performed the horrible partial birth abortion procedure. Partial birth abortion is done by inducing labour prematurely in the mother and the baby is partially delivered breech but stopped with its head still in the birth canal. The abortionist kills the child in a way that is too grisly to mention to civilized readers. The abortionist then completes the delivery of the dead baby.

The man charged with George Tiller’s murder is Scott Roeder (51). At the time of writing this column very little is known about him, other than he was associated with an obscure anti-government militia group known as the Freeman movement. He also has a history of mental illness.

Pro-Life advocates across North America (including me) were quick to condemn the murder of George Tiller, although mainstream media have been trying hard to connect the pro-Life movement to the crime. They are not right.


I have been active with the pro-Life movement in Canada and the United States for more than twenty-five years. I’ve spoken to innumerable conferences and prolife gatherings and met countless pro-Life advocates. Not one advocated violence.

By definition, those who kill or advocate violence are not pro-Life. The shedding of blood, or promoting it, draws the clearest line of delineation and definition about who is pro-Life and who is not.

ALL LIFE IS SACRED

Being truly pro-Life involves holding the sanctity and dignity of all human life as something dear and worth cherishing ― even the life of a mass murderer like late-term abortionist George Tiller. We deplore what he did and work in non-violent ways to stop people like him. We reach out with love and support to mothers considering abortion. Our humanity demands it.

As a Christian, I mourn the death of George Tiller just as I mourn the thousands of children he killed. He (and they) were part of the human community. Our common bond is the image of God stamped indelibly upon us all. From conception on we are part of Mankind. The Seventeenth Century poet John Donne said, “Any Man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind."

Being pro-Life is more than decrying the shedding of innocent (or guilty) blood. It also entails working to create a cultural climate that is welcoming to the unwanted, the unloved, the deranged and the derelect.

.Being pro-Life means extending Christ-like love to the woman in crisis pregnancy and her baby. Being pro-Life means tenderly guiding post-abortive women toward Christ’s forgiveness and healing. Pro-Life advocates have the high and sacred honour of being Christ’s emissaries to hurting people. Whether they accept our overtures on Christ’s behalf is not within our power. Our task is point the way toward life and love, not death and despair. We align ourselves with Christ’s way. Having done this, we remember that not everyone accepted Christ’s way when he himself offered it.

The love and mercy that occupied Jesus’ heart brought healing to the sick, returned sanity to the deranged and forgiveness to the adulteress woman, but never did it include killing as an answer to life’s problems.

Peter drew a sword and cut off a man’s ear in defence of the personification of all that is sacred and good. Jesus rebuked his violence and healed the man’s ear. Men need ears to hear the Good News and renounce their inner violence. Interior violence precedes all outer violence to which Jesus relies, “Stop, no more of this.”

The assault on the sanctity and dignity of human life is the great struggle of the 21st Century. It is the spiritual battle for the hearts, minds and souls of humanity; it is manifested in the physical world by violence against the weakest and most vulnerable, the defeated, and the unloved in our midst. It is evil because it is the antithesis of Christ’s love.


Abortion, embryonic stem cell research, assisted suicide and euthanasia are all expressions of this evil. How you and I respond to it will help define our humanity and may even help to save the humanity of other people. The stark choice of the 21st Century is this: barbarity or beauty. Our individual choices about life will contribute to one or the other.

It is a daunting prospect, I know. But we have not been left without resources. We can take solace knowing that in Jesus Christ is life and the light of Mankind (John 1.4-5). We have the Word of God to assure us, the teachings of the Church and the Holy Spirit to guide us. Jesus told us he would not leave us orphans. He told us, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Mark Pickup

(This blog also appears in Canada's Western Catholic Reporter for the week of 15 June
2007, under the title "Pro-Life supporters never adevocate murder of anyone."
See http://www.wcr.ab.ca/columns/markpickup/2009/markpickup061509.shtml )

A Judeo Christian history?

See http://markpickup.org for blog "A Judeo-Christian history?

HLM

Reflections about Babyboomers on D-day anniversary

Read Mark Pickup's latest blog Throwing pearls before swine at http://markpickup.org