A really scary column appeared in the July 22 issue of the New York Times by Barbara Ehrenreich. What Barbara is trying to do is take all the stigma out of abortion.
Ehrenreich Proud of Her Abortions
Ehrenreich complains that too many women who have had abortions are ashamed of them, and try to fabricate medical excuses for having an abortion, not willing to admit that, she reminds them, abortion is really a good idea after all. She points out that in a survey taken last year, only thirty percent of women were unambivalently pro-abortion. She gathers from this poll that there may be “an appalling number of women who are willing to deny others the right that they once freely exercised themselves.”
But Barbara says that honesty begins at home, and so she freely acknowledges that she had two abortions because she and her husband couldn’t afford children at the time, but that she feels no guilt, and that she loves the children she kept. She says the choice to have the others aborted was easy.
She urges women to speak up proudly for their right to abortion, and concludes: “freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away.” This is a scary article, because it reminds one of a talk given by Heinrich Himmler to a gathering of the SS discussing the progress of the final solution, where he boasts that despite all the killing they had done, they remained gentlemen still. History has ruled otherwise.
Laity Stepping Up on Communion Issue
While the majority of Catholic bishops seem reluctant to deny the Blessed Sacrament to pro-abortion Catholic politicians, some of the good old activist laity are doing what they can to at least embarrass these so-called Catholics. For example, Bill Cotter of Boston is holding a four day protest in Boston which includes a prayer vigil at John Kerry’s home in Louisburg Square, Beacon Hill on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday evenings.
Cotter is disappointed in the decision of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the U. S. Task Force on Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians. The task force does not advocate denial of Communion for pro-abortion Catholic politicians or Catholic voters, for fear that it could further divide the Church and have serious unintended consequences.
Cotter believes, along with many others, that faithful Catholics would prefer some of these “unintended consequences” rather than widespread sacrilegious Communions. But in any event, Cotter and his Boston Rescuers plan on doing what they can to keep the issue alive during the Democrat Convention in Boston. Good luck, Bill!
Opening the Casket on Abortion
In an article in the July 15 issue of the Wanderer, Dexter Duggan quotes pro-life speaker Steve Wagner who tells his audiences that the move to television changed the way people take in information. Their attention span is very short. They think in sound bites and learn with pictures. Wagner insists that if a person expresses resentment over seeing an accurate pictures of an aborted baby, they are forgetting that people need pictures to move the debate over abortion from the abstract to the real, and that it has to become visual.
He reminds his audience of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black youth who was beaten and drowned, and that his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral because, “I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy.” Wagner tells of a student who immediately changed his thinking on abortion and commented, “I think what you’re doing by showing these horrible abortion pictures is opening the casket on abortion.” Makes sense to me.
Incidentally, Face the Truth half-days will commence in August and continue throughout the year, once a month.
