The Baby

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Reflection for January 2013:
Where would we be without the Baby?

Babies are such an assumed part of life, that few stop to think where we would be without babies.
Yet without babies, civilization would grind to a halt in less than 50 years.
We would all lie around in unstaffed nursing homes, with nobody to take care of us.
Getting rid of babies, even just a portion of them, contributes more to the demise of our civilization than some potential global warming or some imagined asteroid hit.

Babies replenish the human race.
Babies people the planet.
Babies turn into adults, who do the work.
Babies turn into taxpayers, who pay the bills.
Babies have always been around, and there has never been a shortage of them (until now).

God’s Wisdom

God in His wisdom designed the human race as male and female, designed the love between man and woman to be powerful, faithful and fruitful, providing a constant source of babies born out of that love.  God instructed us on how to live out that love in the family, the most basic and most successful method for the perpetuation of the human race.

The success of the family in the continuation of the human race rests in the sacrificial love found only in the family.
The family reflects the same sacrificial love God showed for us on His Cross.
The family reflects Christ’s kind of love, which gives up one’s life for others, as good parents would for the child that they love.

The Importance of the Baby

God, in addition to designing babies into the perpetuation of the human race, chose to come to us himself as a baby.

This says something. On the part of God, it was a very intentional and meaningful choice.

God could have come as a King, a warrior, a wise man, a superman, or even as an alien form of life.  He could have come as a teenager, as a woman, or as someone who is 130 years old.
He could have come as bodiless spirit with super powers (as Himself).

But God chose to come to us as a baby.
God also chose to retain the humility and the lack of worldliness which are characteristic of a baby throughout His life, in order to illustrate to us how we should live, and what is of utmost importance in this life.

We just finished celebrating the Nativity of Christ at Christmas.
In His arrival as a baby, God illustrated to us all the essential elements of a holy and successful family.
One man, one woman, for a lifetime, welcoming children.

Babies in History

God came to earth as a baby.
He survived Herod’s slaughter of baby boys by fleeing to Egypt, guided by his father Joseph, who was guided by God in a dream.
Apparently Herod knew the potential one baby can represent.
Long before that, Pharaoh knew the potential one baby can represent; Pharoah slaughtered all Hebrew babies in an attempt to get rid of Moses.

Today, many have forgotten the importance, the sacredness, and the potential of babies, as well as of all human life.

Today, we contracept and abort away our babies, our  future citizens, out of some misguided and short sighted attempt to avoid inconvenience.

Abortion: Convenience, or Suicidal Act?

Regrettably, in addition to taking away another human being’s right to life, the “convenience” achieved by the elimination of a baby is extremely short lived.  The guilt, the loss and the mourning caused by abortion overwhelms us, and our lives are damaged, not improved.  We deprive ourselves of our own children, and deprive our society of its future citizens.  We also suffer the economic impact of eliminating millions of human beings from future contribution to our nation.

Steve Jobs was almost aborted, but was put up for adoption instead. How fortunate!
President Obama, as the black child of a single mother, would today have faced a 77% probability of abortion. Is he grateful for his gift of life?  Was that gift from God, or was it from his parents, and should parents have the right to dispose of a child?  If disposal before birth is O.K., why not after birth?

One child can change the world, and it is not for us to decide which child lives and which child dies.  When we do that, we try to play God ourselves.

How Many Babies Do We Need?

God used to do a pretty good job of determining how many babies we need.
Now, if want to take over that job, the moral implications of terminating millions of lives aside, it would be wise to figure out how many babies our society needs.

For starters, we need to replace ourselves; an ever-shrinking society cannot maintain its infrastructure or take care of its aged.
It’s obvious that each married couple needs to have 2 children to replace themselves.

Plus another to make up for those who don’t marry?

Catholics used to have a tradition of firstborn sons going into the priesthood, and of encouraging at least one daughter to enter the convent.  The resulting supply of priests and religious who staff the Churches, schools, charitable institutions, orphanages and hospitals, helped families to raise moral and upstanding children, and helped to benefit all of humanity throughout the centuries.  These spiritual servants did not marry, did not have children, and had to be replaced in the society. So married couples should have a third child at least, to allow some of their children to make such saintly and dedicated career choices in life.

Disease, plague and accidents also claim lives. More replacements needed.
Some people are not fertile.  They have to be replaced as well.
Better add child #4 to the family.

So any determination of number of babies needed should account for all of the above factors and needs.  And the number of babies needed from each fertile couple is not going to be, by any calculation zero, nor one or two.  Those of us who do not have at least 4 children, unless we have fertility problems, are not pulling our weight, as far at the perpetuation of the human race is concerned.

And for every married couple with zero children, we need a married couple with 8 children.
May God bless large families and may the rest of us celebrate them and support them!

(BTW, for those looking for an economic motivation to add to moral and loving motivations, large families tend to take care of their elderly themselves, rather than relying on your taxpayer money and on nursing homes to take care of their elderly.  And their elderly are happier and healthier.)

The Job of Raising a Baby

The job of raising a Baby is the most important job in the world.
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

Babies raised with sacrificial love, most often found in parental love, can  turn into heroes and saints like Abraham Lincoln and Pope John Paul the Great.
Babies who are neglected or abused can often turn into cruel monsters like Saddam Hussein and Hitler, who were mistreated as children.
Those who rocked the cradles of these babies (or didn’t) are responsible, to some degree, for the deeds of the children.

The raising of a baby is important.  It brings the potential for the greatest joy, the greatest achievement, and the greatest fulfillment in life.
It also requires the greatest sacrifice and work, and brings the potential for the greatest heartache.  The Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Mother of Our Lord attest to that.

Ultimately, no matter what choices we make,  paradise will elude us on earth; our lives will contain both hardships and blessings.
Eradicating babies from our lives will not eliminate hardship from our lives; discarding babies will simply eliminate beauty and love from our lives.

Not a Union Job

The raising of a baby is not a 9 to 5 job.
It’s not accomplished in a few years.
You don’t get summers off.
Other people cannot be paid to perform the sacrificial level of service that a loving mother and father routinely provide for their children.
And, with all due respect to teachers, teachers and their unions do not provide all that is needed by a child; they can only complement, at best, the essential love, care, nurture and training that the parents provide.  You will never find an employee who provides the same level of love and sacrifice for a child that a parent can provide. The likelihood that teachers unions, which look out not for the welfare of the child, but for the comfort and benefits of union bosses and of teachers, the likelihood that these unions will substitute adequately for absentee parents or for working parents, is virtually zero.

A recent attempt to close the racial achievement gap in Madison, Wisconsin, with the establishment of a special school, Madison Prep, failed.  The failure was partially due the the fact that union regulations would not permit teachers to provide the sacrificial levels of time and dedication that would be required when attempting to compensate for reduced family and community involvement in the raising of children.
No union, kibbutz, nor Hillary Clinton’s “village” will compensate for the absence of devoted parents in the raising of a child.
Success in the rearing of quality human beings is always tied to love, to time, to adult involvement and to adult-student ratio, as has been proved repeatedly with “Big Brother” and other programs through  which adults invest time and love in children.

The Hardest, Yet the Most Rewarding

Despite the time-intensive hard work and sacrifice involved in child rearing,  when people are asked, in old age, what had given them the most joy in life,  they inevitably answer that a good marriage and their children provide them with the greatest joy and satisfaction, above all other things in life.

Responsibilities in Life

Most would agree that each of us is not born for the sole purpose of existing and being pampered and served by others.
Honestly, where would these people for serving us come from, anyway?  Who in their right mind would volunteer to be our servants when they could demand to be masters themselves?

So, particularly in democratic societies, we accept the fact that we are not born entitled to servants, and most of us have to work.  We have to do our laundry.  We have to shovel the snow, and we have to pay our taxes.

Neglect of work is even addressed in the Bible:

If anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat” – 2 Thessalonians 3:10.

So why would the perpetuation of the human race be considered optional, if all other work is not optional?

Are we entitled to evade the hard work of parenting, then to demand that the children of others look after us sacrificially and lovingly in our old age?
Will paid employees and union workiers show us the same kind of care we would get from our children?
Is not the raising of children a duty and a responsibility?
A duty which, incidentally, also provides the greatest satisfaction and joy in life?
The raising of a family remains the biggest source of love and satisfaction on earth.

Those who choose to discard their children through contraception and abortion are shortsightedly hurting themselves,  as well as hurting the entire society.

The Irony of Our Situation in 2013

The economic situation we are suffering in the United States at the moment, the staggering debt and the shortage of tax income, is due, in part, to the fact that we are starting to feel the shortage of young people and of babies which started in 1973 with the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade on January 21, 1973.

Since then, we have eliminated 54 million citizens from age 0 to 40.  And their potential children are missing. There are probably 100 million citizens, aged 0 to 40, missing from the United States right now.  That would be about 1/4 of the nation missing.
Our national deficit, the amount we are missing from taxes, is also about 1/4; 1/4 of the national budget is missing.
Coincidence?
Or lack of foresight, lack of planning, and cumulative effects of lack of baby-appreciation since 1973?

Baby-Appreciation Deficit

Baby-appreciation is at an all-time low in 2013.
Now we have the most pro-abortion President in U.S. history  in office.  Ironically, this is a man who would probably have been aborted himself, if abortion had been legal at the time of his birth.

• He is so pro-abortion that he supports the killing of a baby born accidentally in a botched 9-month term partial-birth abortion.  He voted for that while he was Senator.
• He is so pro-abortion that he supports the abortion of his own grandchildren.
• He is so pro-abortion that he has forced mandates on religious employers, forcing the employers to provide abortifacient drugs to their employees, against their own religious beliefs.  He added this emphasis on abortion after promising his pro-life Democrat colleagues (Stupak and his 11) that ObamaCare would not include abortion.

We now have a President who has forced abortion onto America, against the wishes of 2/3 of the American population, by deception and through lies.

An Ironic Historical Omen?

This first radically pro-abortion President will be re-inaugurated on January 21, 2013.
President Obama’s re-inauguration should have been one day earlier, on January 20, 2013.   But this year January 20th fell on a Sunday, so the date was pushed to Monday, January 21, 2013.
January 21, 2013  is, ironically, the eve of the 40th anniversary of the legalization of abortion in the United States by the Supreme Court Decision Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973.
Our most radically pro-abortion President will be re-inaugurated on the last day marking 40 years of abortion in  the United States, when the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion and started the elimination of now 1/4 of the population in the United States.

Christians (80% of us) realize the significance of the number 40 in salvation history:

• The Great Flood – 40 days
• The Exodus – 40 years
• Goliath challenging the Israelites – 40 days
• 40 lashes meted out by the Sanhedrin
• Christ’s fast and prayer in the desert – 40 days
• Resurrection to Ascension – 40 days
• Lent – 40 days

The increased ardor of pro-life prayer and pro-life political activity in recent years, particularly during the time approaching the last November 6, 2012 election, inspired many to believe that the election would displace Barack Obama from the Presidency and that the tide of abortion in the United States would be reversed.
This obviously did not occur.
My faith in God makes me suspect that although we did not guess God’s plan, all the prayers and efforts have not been in vain.  Those who wait and watch patiently will see the hand of God operating quietly in response to our prayers.

A Personal Note

Reflecting on babies in January is a personal pleasure for me, since my two sons were January babies.  They are no longer babies, but still, together with my husband, they are the joy of my life.
The joy and satisfaction of having their freindship does not approach in any way the satisfaction I have enjoyed from any other pursuit, professional or recreational.

Happy Birthday today to one of my January no-longer-babies!
Then Happy Birthday eleven days from now, to the other January no-longer-baby.
What’s my husband’s birthday?  All Saints Day. Really. 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roe v. Wade Turns 40

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Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion,
was issued on January 22, 1973.

This January 22, 2013, will commemorate
the 40th anniversary of that Supreme Court decision.

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To date, 55 million infants have been aborted in the United States, and are missing from our ranks as a nation.
55 million of us were not born, were not baptized, did not graduate, did not marry, did not have children, and did not contribute to the world in all areas, including philosophy, science, art, and religion.
At least one out of 6 Americans is missing.  If these children, who would now be 40, also had children, as many as one quarter of all Americans could be missing by now.

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One person who escaped abortion very narrowly, yet lived to contribute mind-boggling contributions to our society’s present capabilities, was Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple.  What would our world be now, without Steve Jobs?

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President Obama is another example of a person who might have been aborted, if Roe v. Wade had been legal at the time he was born.  As the black child of a single mother,  his chances of being aborted would have been extremely high. 77% of African-American pregnancies are aborted right now, a black child is 5 times as likely to be aborted as a white child.
Numerous potential Presidents may have been aborted in these past forty years.

Abortion is one of the biggest killers of history, and abortion is a much bigger deal than most people think.

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A Striking Coincidence

President Barack Hussein Obama,
the most radically pro-abortion President in United States history,
will be re-inaugurated on January 21, 2013,
the eve of the 40th anniversary,
of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

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The Significance of the number 40 for Christians

The number 40 is a very meaningful number in Judeo Christian history.

• During the Old Testament great flood, rain fell for forty nights and forty days, during which all living beings on earth perished, except those on Noah’s ark.
• Spies explored the land of Israel for forty days (Numbers 13).
• The Old Testament Exodus from Egypt lasted 40 years, with the Jewish people wandering the Sinai desert. This period of years represents the time it takes for a new generation to arise.
• Moses’ life is divided into 40 year segments in the Old Testament.
• Eli, Saul, David, and Solomon, Jewish leaders and kings of the Old Testament, ruled for forty years.
• Goliath challenged the Israelites twice a day for forty days before David defeated him.
• Moses spend three consecutive periods of forty days and forty nights on Mount Sinai.
• 40 lashes is one of the punishments meted out by the Sanhedrin.
• Christ fasted and prayed in the desert for 40 days prior to His Temptation, Ministry, Passion, Death and Resurrection.
• Forty days was the period from the Resurrection of Jesus to His Ascension into Heaven.
• Lent consists of the forty days preceding Easter.

Madison Will Commemorate 40 Years with Prayer

Madison will commemorate the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on January 12, 2013, by praying the rosary on the steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol. This event is sponsored by Pro-Life Wisconsin, Vigil for Life Madison, and the Diocese of Madison.
Details can be found in the flyer pictured below and the PDF flyer here.

January 12th, 2013
11AM at the State Street Steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol
Madison’s Capitol Square
Put It on Your Calendar
Come and Join Us!

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Abortion- a Much Bigger Deal Than You Think!

or

Taking Life and Death Out of the Hands of Providence and Placing them into the Hands of Human Beings Paves the Way for Tyranny

or

Why Democrats Should Rethink Abortion

Background

January 22, 2012 marked 39 years since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion in the United States (1973).

For 39 years, we have been terminating pregnancies clandestinely, most of us giving little thought to the ethics, economic implications, medical dangers, psychological effects, or any other aspect of abortion.

Media does not discuss abortion.  Friends and relatives rarely mention abortion.  Yet one third of all children conceived since 1973 in the US (54 million of them) have been aborted.  That means that 15% of our population is missing, and that one out of every 7 people is missing.  And, if you consider that they would also have had  some children, the number missing is even greater.  Many of us may be missing brothers and sisters about whom we know nothing.  Scores of women we know have aborted children, and most of us know nothing about it.

Purpose

The present article reviews the enormity of abortion, its effects on our entire society, and the exploitation of whole populations by modern politicians, who appear to be motivated by the same quest for power and gain as famous historical tyrants.

Questions

The central questions:

Is abortion right or wrong?
Is abortion a big deal?
How much is 52 million?
Do most Americans favor abortion?
Are women who have had abortions better off?
Why do most women avoid discussing their abortions?
Is a fetus a dispensable blob of tissue (see photo above), or is it a human being with a right to life guaranteed by the US Constitution?
Have we done anything to imbalance our society and our economy with all of this abortion?
What are the major motivations of abortion proponents?
continue reading…

You are reading this because nobody killed you while you were an embryo.

A pro-life vote in this election is a vote for human rights.  Unborn children have the right to life, and African-American babies have the right NOT to be selectively destroyed.   77%   of  African-American pregnancies are aborted right now, and African-American babies are three times more likely to be aborted than white babies.  Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, the black population in the U.S.has been reduced by over 25 percent( ref).

A nation which cares about 4,295 combat deaths (~430 per year) in the War on Terror , and cares about 40,000 motor vehicle deaths per year, should also care about  1 Million infant deaths by abortion per year.

For those who are hard-hearted enough to advocate     1 million yearly infant deaths for the sake of a promiscuous lifestyle without consequence– consider, too, the financial repercussions.  The tax dollar contributions, as well as social security contributions that would be made by the  45 million Americans who are missing  since Roe v. Wade, would be staggering.

The argument that unaborted babies would be a burden on society (given the racial abortion statistics quoted above) borders on racism.  Generally, the birth of a baby transforms people of any color into more mature, caring and motivated individuals who become an asset to society.

Pro-abortion arguments such as rape or incest are attempts to sensationalize the issue, and to circumvent the real ethical questions.  Rape and incest actually represent only 1% of abortions, and are introduced to distract from the fundamental moral issue.  Planned Parenthood actually often helps molesters and rapists to hide their crimes, by assisting them with abortion and failing to report their crimes.

Many don’t seem to realize that each embryo IS actually a new and unique human person, as important and valuable as we all are.  Size or age does not diminish the value of any human being.

This irreplaceable value of each human life  is at the heart of moral teachings and respect for human life, and is essential for the healthy and balanced survival of human society.

The ethical questions behind pro-life issues cannot be so trivially dismissed as some attempt to do by masquerading murder under the banner of “pro-choice.”

Whose choice?  Certainly not the unborn child’s choice!

Madison, vote Pro-Life!  In this election, that means vote Republican.