That’s what CBS Outdoor thought:

This time CBS said that the picture needed to go because abortion “is a potentially emotional topic that might be unduly disturbing to young women who may have made the kinds of choices that the displays deal with,” according to the complaint.

A message from the company to Counsel board member Betty LaRosa stated that CBS could not accept “images which might be deemed shocking, unsettling or even manipulative,” the complaint states….

CBS “insisted that if LEC would just get rid of the baby picture, the advertisement may run,” the plaintiffs says.

HT: Jill Stanek

Pregnancy should be the most exciting time in a young woman’s life.  It should be the time where you count the days (and sometimes hours) until the new life inside the womb makes an appearance on the world’s stage.

Unfortunately, for many new mothers, pregnancy is accompanied by worry, concern, and shame.

Pregnancy Changes You

There are few milestones in life that are as big as the one where a new life enters the stage.  Things like marriage, death of a friend, and perhaps choice of college rank up there.

Unfortunately, many soon to be parents do not think this through until after they are already parents—they’ve engaged in the activity that leads to life, without thought to that life, and now they have entered a new reality from which they can never return.  They can never go back to not being a mom.  They cannot say they never had a child—that child was created and alive and well in the womb.

It’s at times like these, times of life changing events, that the most solid anchor we can have are those people that will love us no matter what—our spouse, our best friend perhaps, and our parents.

Notice how I did not list the boyfriend, the school nurse or Planned Parenthood.  While the boyfriend or father of the child should definitely have some input—it is his child as well—if you’re not married and you’re pregnant you need to talk with your parents.

Parents Are There For You

Ultimately, the parents are responsible for the lives of their children when they live with them.  The school is a caretaker and an educator, but should never play the role of the parent.  It is the parent’s job to set morals, to teach right and wrong.

Which is what makes the fact that this mother was not even told that her daughter was having an abortion so morally repulsive:

"She took a pregnancy test at school at the teen health center," she said. "Nowhere in this paperwork does it mention abortion or facilitating abortion."

Jill says her daughter, a pro-life advocate, was given a pass, put in a taxi and sent off to have an abortion during school hours all without her family knowing.

"We had no idea this was being facilitated on campus," said Jill. "They just told her that if she concealed it from her family, that it would be free of charge and no financial responsibility."

Obviously, a pro-life advocate would not want to be found pregnant—as most of them preach abstinence as well.  For some reason, it escapes this girl that having an abortion is a bigger hypocrisy.

But besides that, leaving the parents out of the equation was the wrong thing to do.

Permission to Go On A Field Trip

See, I understand the argument that says “if we tell the parents, they could hurt her for getting pregnant, or talk her out of ‘her choice’.”  I really get that.

The problem that I have is that they allow a student to go to an abortion clinic, to have major surgery performed on her, to terminate the grandparent’s first child, and yet if it this same girl wanted to leave school early, go on a field trip to the local historical site, or wanted to have someone else pick them up from school there’d have to be a signed note.

Do you see how incongruous this is?

If there was really a fear for the daughter’s life in telling the parents, have a parent/teacher conference, send in a social worker, do something where the parents were notified in a controlled setting, and have the daughter check in at intervals.

Obviously, the school doesn’t really care about the girl—which is worse, the fact that you got pregnant or that you got pregnant, had an abortion, and then lied to your parents?  As far as the parents that I have dealt with, the lie is worse than the truth.  And even in the case of the hostile parent, which do you think is going to set them off more?

The schools get in between the parent and the child, and think nothing of it.  They sever the bond between the two, and figure that’s ok because they are protecting the daughter’s right to choose.

And who is left to pick up the pieces?

For all the cheering from the feminists about how science may yet prove that men are not necessary because women may be able to have children without the need for that pesky X chromosome, the truth is that it’s not the male gender that is in danger—but the female.

A Tragedy

The article, Gendercide: The worldwide war on baby girls starts with a grim tale.  A Chinese author is at the birth of a child, but when the child is found out to be a girl, she is discarded into a pail, left for dead, with the following dialog, starting with the author:

“‘But that’s…murder…and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

This grim picture is not unique to our time—there were babies that were sacrificed to ancient idols or left on the hillside to die—but the technology of the day, and the attitude toward children has made it much worse.

The Value of a Child

The truth of the matter is that societies around the globe have started to devalue children.  I link some of this thought to the arrival of sex education, birth control, and a promiscuous culture.

Instead of a couple getting together, getting married for the purpose of raising a family, the culture of many countries list many reasons why you shouldn’t have children:

• If you have a child, it will be tougher to break up (because you’re probably not married in the first place).
• Having kids is a “choice”.
• Children take the fun out of life.
• You need to have more time with your spouse together before you’re ready.
• People can have children into their 40’s so what’s the rush.

Even in “Christian” Universities the students are taught to get married and then put off children for five years or so until you are settled and know each other as a couple.

What they’ve unwittingly done is devalue their children.

The Greatest Contribution to Society

Very few of us will ever do anything that the world will call great.  We will live, work and die, and within a generation or two no one may know that we ever existed.

However, with our children, we have the chance to have our values and worldview carry down to multiple generations and to effect change for the better.  The most powerful position in the nation right now is not the President of the United States, but mothers and fathers as they raise their children.

Especially the mothers.

Is it any wonder that there is such a desire to get children away from the parents influence as soon as possible.  It’s not fast enough to have them go to school at 6—we need them in preschool at 4… I mean, 3.  Day care’s a great thing, don’t you know—it’ll help their socialization!

And who can forget “It Takes a Village.”

The government knows how valuable your children are.  The Catholic church famously said that if you give them a child until they are 8 they’ll be a Catholic for their lifetime.

Children are an enormous blessing to families in terms of happiness, healthiness, and well being, but our society puts them off.  And in other countries chooses to limit the sex of the offspring they’ll have.

It’s a tragedy that breaks this dad’s heart.

We’re going to resurrect Pro-Life Fridays and start looking again at life in the womb by answering some more Pro-Choice questions.

This is an exciting time for the Pro-Life movement, for in the middle of a terrible health care bill came a surprise in the further limiting of Federal Funding when it comes abortions.

So, this should be an interesting topic as the question of life comes back to the foreground.

When it comes to sex, America is considered prudish compared to the rest of the world.  The rest of the world sees itself as liberated, without the moral boundaries that some in the States still cling to.

From England, we read this shocking piece of news:

More than 450 teenagers below the age of 14 terminated pregnancies between 2005 and 2008, including 23 girls aged 12, the statistics from the Department of Health disclosed. Over the same period, 52 teenagers terminated four or more pregnancies before they reached their 18th birthday, as the total number of “repeat terminations” hit record levels across England and Wales.  [Telegraph – Scandal of the girls as young as 12 having abortions every year]

I would argue that a society’s attitude toward teen sex has a direct correlation to teen pregnancy.  Now, most people will say they are against teen pregnancy—hence why this article is titled “scandal”.  We all agree that we do not want teen pregnancies, both for the health of the mother as well as the child.

The problem is that we’re inconsistent in that the society glorifies and encourages a sex saturated environment in which experimentation and random coupling are seen as great things.  Our movies and television shows glorify this culture, and rarely show couples dealing with sexually transmitted diseases.

Society knows that sex leads to babies, but they also want the pleasure that’s involved with intimacy.  So they seek to justify their inability to practice self control with a panacea—they require sex education.  This is so that, instead of educating that sex outside of a monogamous relationship (read “marriage”) is wrong, they can feel good giving their children enough to make them dangerous.

It’s like giving a child a loaded gun, and saying, “Hey, here’s how you pull the trigger, and here’s the safety.  Now, this gun won’t do anything without the safety off, so don’t turn it off.  But feel free to go play with this gun with your friends.”  No parent would do this with their kids, but we’ll give them some birth control and let them go out and sleep around knowing that they’re “this close” to contracting an illness they’ll either have for the rest of their life or kill them.

Is that knowledge really that beneficial without the moral guidepost, or does it do more harm than good?

Says the person with a conflicted conscience.

The society that we live in today has a problem.  It is at the same time very opinionated as well as believing that the moral high ground rests in not telling others their opinion, all the while telling you their opinion.

Karen sent me this article that discussed a woman working at a Crisis Pregnancy Center that was not pro-life.  Well, she said that she was personally pro-life, but that she believed that women should have a choice, and should be educated about the choice.

Personally, when I hear something from this point of view, my first thought is that this woman is a plant and didn’t work for a crisis pregnancy center at all.  If you read her post on the topic, you begin to wonder why she was there in the first place.

My Experience with CPC

Back in the late 1900s I was counseling some people online in terms of abortion, pro-life, etc. and felt the desire to get involved.  I sought out my local Crisis Pregnancy Center and contacted them for training.  We had to go through multi-week training (I believe 10 weeks) which we paid for, and it included everything from what you could and could not say to how to counsel people in need.  Reminded me a lot of counseling classes in college.

At the end of that time we gave testimonies and then were told what we could do to help out.  Of course, being a guy, I couldn’t counsel women in crisis pregnancies, but I could help with classroom settings and the like.

However, I didn’t get to be a regular presenter.

I went with a couple of young ladies to a presentation done in a school.  I thought I was part of the group, and tried to help, though I guess I was only supposed to be observing.

During a lunch that followed, I expressed my opinion to the two ladies, and I must have sent off red flags as being too religious or something, because I was told that I was not going to be allowed to go into the classroom.

So, then I was taken to a church setting, and I watched the church presentation that differed only slightly from the classroom.  On my way out I expressed even more reservations.

It was ok, I thought, to stress the disease and pregnancy issue in the public school classroom, but the emphasis in a church should be (I thought) on what God expects of me.  I cringed when the young ladies doing the presentation said their number one reason for not wanting to have sex was to keep themselves pure for their husband, when in private they said it was because God told them not to.  I cringed when I had to hear talks about the “disease that keeps on giving” with like 5 minutes about the Bible in the church.

I’m not trying to treat them badly.

I had a talk with the head of the local center at the end of the two presentations.  She told me that they would not permit me to go to either of these places to present.  I had no problems with them.  They and I had two different worldviews.  I wrote them a letter to express my position.

I say all this not to try to treat them badly or exact revenge but to illustrate a point.

A lot of what I read from this post is exactly the opposite of my experience with the Crisis Pregnancy Center.  Now, every place is different, and every person that counsels is different, but when I start reading about a center talking about “facts that aren’t facts” or taking advantage of people in need, I start to think that this is more just a bunch of talking points than it is a real experience.

The center that I was affiliated with didn’t want a passionate speaker on the topic to be in a classroom because he might “say the wrong thing” or “make the teacher uncomfortable” or “have them asked to not return.”  She didn’t want me in a church setting because I believed too much about God’s commands and thought I’d get too preachy—imagine that.

When a person that claims that their pro-life starts using the term “fetuses” instead of babies, when they say that the reason that they quit was there was too much of an emphasis on life in the womb it tells me that either they didn’t know what they were getting into in the first place, or they knew all too well and wanted to be credible.

And that brings us back to the title.  You can’t be “personally pro-life” as well as “pro-choice” or pro-abortion.  Their political and moral positions about what you believe that life is in the womb.  It’s morally inconsistent, it’s a way to compartmentalize your beliefs, and it’s irrational.

Pro-Life causes took a hard hit last night.  First, the selection of Sen. Obama means that we will have a President with a 100% approval rating from NARAL.  There were also two Pro-Life Constitutional Amendments on the ballot—in Colorado and South Dakota—that were intended to challenge Roe v. Wade.

In some small way it’s good that they didn’t pass.  You would want them to pass when you have a good chance of getting it to the high court, and I’m not sure if there will be a good one in an Obama Administration.

However, buried in the AP article on all of these measures is an interesting bit of news:

A first-of-its-kind measure in Colorado, which was defeated soundly, would have defined life as beginning at conception. Its opponents said the proposal could lead to the outlawing of some types of birth control as well as abortion.

Do you find the last sentence shocking?  You shouldn’t.  Many forms of birth control attempt to prevent pregnancy by preventing implantation using hormones, but the downside (if you believe life begins at conception) is that the same effect prevents implantation of the new life into the mother’s womb.

What you see here in this statement, and by the opponents of the Colorado Pro-Life Amendment, is an acknowledgement of this fact.  If you’re Christian, or your Pro-Life, you need to understand this and come out of denial.

If you use a chemical birth control, you may be aborting your children.

This includes the depo shot, the patch, the pill or anything you ingest or apply to prevent pregnancy.  Read the specs on these things.  And then prayerfully consider what it is you truly believe and what is important.

Holly’s asking a very valid question over at her blog—why should a person of faith vote for someone that will not protect innocent life?

I would add, that Sen. Obama goes further than that, seeking to protect “the right of the mother to kill her baby” at the price of not wanting to vote to protect those babies that are born via botched abortions and left to die in “comfort rooms” because of intent.

He doesn’t respect innocent life, why do you trust him?

“In this same spirit, as defenders of the culture of life, John McCain and I believe in the goodness and potential of every innocent life. I believe the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who are least able to defend and speak for themselves. And who is more vulnerable, or more innocent, than a child?

When I learned that my son Trig would have special needs, I had to prepare my heart for the challenges to come. At first I was scared, and Todd and I had to ask for strength and understanding. But I can tell you a few things I’ve learned already.

Yes, every innocent life matters. Everyone belongs in the circle of protection. Every child has something to contribute to the world, if we give them that chance. There are the world’s standards of perfection … and then there are God’s, and these are the final measure. Every child is beautiful before God, and dear to Him for their own sake.

As for our beautiful baby boy, for Todd and me, he is only more precious because he is vulnerable. In some ways, I think we stand to learn more from him than he does from us. When we hold Trig and care for him, we don’t feel scared anymore. We feel blessed.

It’s hard to think of many issues that could possibly be more important than who is protected in law and who isn’t – who is granted life and who is denied it. So when our opponent, Senator Obama, speaks about questions of life, I listen very carefully.

I listened when he defended his unconditional support for unlimited abortions. He said that a woman shouldn’t have to be – quote – “punished with a baby.” He said that right here in Johnstown –“punished with a baby” – and it’s about time we called him on it. The more I hear from Senator Obama, the more I understand why he is so vague and evasive on the subject. Americans need to see his record for what it is. It’s not negative or mean-spirited to talk to about his record. Whatever party you belong to, there are facts you need to know.

Senator Obama has voted against bills to end partial-birth abortion. In the Illinois Senate, a bipartisan majority passed legislation against that practice. Senator Obama opposed that bill. He voted against it in committee, and voted “present” on the Senate floor. In that legislature, “present” is how you vote when you’re against something, but don’t want to be held to account.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, described partial-birth abortion as “too close to infanticide.” Barack Obama thinks it’s a constitutional right, but he is wrong.

Most troubling, as a state senator, Barack Obama wouldn’t even stand up for the rights of infants born alive during an abortion. These infants – often babies with special needs – are simply left to die.

In 2002, Congress unanimously passed a federal law to require medical care for those babies who survive an abortion. They’re living, breathing babies, but Senator Obama describes them as “pre-viable.” This merciful law was called the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Illinois had a version of the same law. Obama voted against it.

Asked about this vote, Senator Obama assured a reporter that he’d have voted “yes” on that bill if it had contained language similar to the federal version of the Born Alive Act. There’s just one little problem with that story: the language of both the state and federal bills was identical.

In short, Senator Obama is a politician who has long since left behind even the middle ground on the issue of life. He has sided with those who won’t even protect a child born alive. And this exposes the emptiness of his promises to move beyond the “old politics.”

In both parties, Americans have many concerns to be weighed in the votes they cast on November fourth. In times like these, with wars and a financial crisis, it’s easy to forget even as deep and abiding a concern as the right to life. And it seems our opponent hopes that you will forget. Like so much else in his agenda, he hopes you won’t notice how radical his ideas and record are until it’s too late.

Read the rest here.

Humans are a weird bunch, and I say this with myself included.  We typically have a set of moral guidelines that we each keep, modify, and operate by.  We also have a set of beliefs that we hold to, defend, argue, and proclaim.

The problem is that many times what we say and what we choose to do are two very different things.

I think that this had to be the background upon which Christ’s command “if you love me, keep my commandments” must have came from.  It wasn’t enough to say that you love Him.  It had to be shown—because we all know that actions speak louder than words.

So, it’s with great sadness and yet understanding that I happened upon a page of stories that talked about women that were anti-abortion, except when it came to them.  Things like:

"I have done several abortions on women who have regularly picketed my clinics, including a 16 year old schoolgirl who came back to picket the day after her abortion, about three years ago. During her whole stay at the clinic, we felt that she was not quite right, but there were no real warning bells. She insisted that the abortion was her idea and assured us that all was OK. She went through the procedure very smoothly and was discharged with no problems. A quite routine operation. Next morning she was with her mother and several school mates in front of the clinic with the usual anti posters and chants. It appears that she got the abortion she needed and still displayed the appropriate anti views expected of her by her parents, teachers, and peers." (Physician, Australia)

The page tries to make the case that abortion needs to stay legal and safe, even for us “anti-choicers” because we’re a hypocritical and shallow bunch—spouting off that abortion should be illegal while having the procedure done.

What this says to me is somewhat different—that there are ladies standing on the picket line and protesting abortion that are there for reasons other than that it’s something that they truly believe.

Because if they truly believed it, they wouldn’t be having one.

Just like I believe that the Christian that truly believes that there is a Heaven and a Hell and that Christ is returning will be compelled to share as much, I believe that those that are truly against abortion would not have one.  Each of these groups, though, has status, pressure and hangers-on, though.  People that say that they believe it, but when it comes down to a situation where they have to make a choice, they show what they truly believe.

What is it that you believe?  Are you sure that you truly believe it?  Are you putting that belief into action?