Looking into the legend of Saint Nick, I learned that Saint Nicholas lived early in the fourth century in what is now Turkey. Orphaned as a young boy, he was left with substantial financial means by his parents. He used this inheritance to benefit others, especially children. Deeply religious, Nicholas became the Bishop of Myra in Turkey and played an important leadership role in the church. Called the Wonderworker, he was well known for his generosity to children, hence his association with the legend of Santa Claus. The story of a benevolent soul giving gifts to children is a part of many cultures with many names. Saint Nick as another name for Santa Claus persists to this day.

I also discovered that Saint Nicholas is a patron saint of virgins. In the Catholic tradition, a patron saint is one who prays to God on behalf of a petitioner. So, if one wants to remain chaste, one may pray to Saint Nicholas who will then lift up the petitioner in spiritual prayer to God. As an aside, his patronage may explain at least one of the criteria for being in either the naughty or nice category when Saint Nick checks and rechecks his list. But I digress. There is more to this story.

Legend has it that Saint Nicholas became aware of a desperately poor parishioner having three daughters with no dowry to recommend them for marriage. The father had planned to sell them into prostitution to provide some means of support. By night, Saint Nicholas secretly brought bags of gold on three separate occasions to the man’s home. These generous visitations allowed the three daughters to have sufficient means to avoid whoredom and later strike a marriage covenant. On the third visit to deliver the gift, Nicholas was caught in the act of generosity by the grateful father.

Many make the Santa Claus-like association of this story to Saint Nicholas the gift giver. I see an additional angle. For reasons that often involve money, women today have few benefactors, few Saint Nicks. Bob Dylan sang truly two decades ago that today’s culture seems to promote “old men turning young daughters into whores.” A look at any magazine rack will tell you that there is a market for flesh and the demographic is predominantly male. Research company Visiongain estimated that the pornography market was a 70 billion industry in 2006. That is a lot of gold being used to degrade women rather than enhance their virtue.

Blending traditional gender roles has been little help here. Women today are not, nor should they be, as helpless as those three girls aided by Saint Nicholas. However, girls gone wild with sexual freedom most often leads to exploitation by men. I doubt we would see as much skin if there were no gawking male purchasers, eager to buy and sell innocence as commerce.

Harmful to both men and women, graphic sexuality, even the somewhat scaled down prime time variety, contributes to the overall commoditization of sex. Viewed through the eyes of a pornographer, sex is commerce and sexual purity is restraint of trade.

We need Saint Nicholas today. We need the gifts of chastity and modesty. We need more respecters of purity and fewer of those who would sell young people into the brothel of commercialism.

We need you today Saint Nicholas, the Wonderworker. Our sons and daughters need the good gifts of those who truly value their health and purity.

Well, no I didn't have an abortion, but I could buy a T-shirt that says I did. Recently Planned Parenthood began marketing a T-shirt with that cheery slogan and even some of the Planned Parenthood affiliate clinics are not happy with the promotion. I can understand why they are upset. The T-shirt states what has been latent in the minds of many people on both sides of the abortion debate for quite awhile: pro-choice really means pro-abortion.

According to an August 2 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article by Scott Williams, the designer of the shirt, Jennifer Baumgardner, said the T-shirt “is a bold statement that having an abortion is a medical procedure for which no apology is needed.”

Are we ready for abortion pride?

I fear, ready or not, such a sentiment is on the rise. Just in time for the T-shirt was a shocking article in the New York Times by Amy Barrett about abortion-rights advocate Amy Richards who discovered she was pregnant with triplets. It being her first pregnancy, she was surprised and feeling ill, but more than that she felt three children would be inconvenient. So she decided that she could not bear to have them all. What to do? Engage in subtraction by abortion. The math is simple: three minus two is one.

Sad but true, she consulted a specialist and asked “Can we get rid of one or two of them?” Called “selective reduction,” this euphemism means that you can basically eliminate an unwanted fetus even if the baby is healthy. There were identical twins and a boy in the line of fire. She took the boy and the doctor took the twins with a shot of potassium chloride to their beating hearts. Throughout the article, we are solicited to feel sorry for Ms. Richards because she just couldn't have a pregnancy with triplets. It would be so inconvenient; she wouldn't be able to work; she would need bed rest; she would have to shop at Costco (she really said that). She was feeling ill and only wanted to eat sour-apple gum. So despite no threat to her safety or health, keeping all three miracles would be out of the question.

I cannot imagine being the father in this case. I would look at a sonogram of three healthy offspring and think now which ones do we sacrifice so mom can work and have no stomach distress. I wonder what would have happened if the remaining child caused mom to have gas or worse, PUPPPS, a rash from hell that often afflicts new moms in the last trimester. According to Ms. Richards, the remaining pregnancy was “seamless” and the little guy survived the womb. We could call him lucky. Or we could call him the last man standing.

I wonder if T-shirt designer Baumgardner has crafted an abortion-pride T-shirt in maternity sizes. Ms. Richards could have gotten one as a sign of her pride. Perhaps the maternity version for moms who have “selective reduction” would have the “I Had An Abortion” slogan across the chest and “Survivor on Board” across the tummy.

Not a big market now, but wait until abortion pride catches on.

I guess I am naïve; I didn’t realize one could legally engage in “selective reduction.” But I shouldn’t be too surprised. Support for such procedures has helped some people get elected to political office. We have a presidential candidate that says he believes that life begins at conception, but says he can’t impose that truth on others. That of course would be Senator Kerry, whose strength of conviction wilts at the thought of proud pro-abortion voters staying home.

In a society that tolerates the ethics of selective reduction and calls it the right to choose, one should expect that eventually people would not just tolerate callousness but take pride in it.

(Dr. Warren Throckmorton is director of college counseling and an associate professor of psychology at Grove City College. His research “Initial Empirical and Clinical Findings Concerning the Change Process for Ex-Gays,” was published in the June 2002 issue of the American Psychological Association's publication Professional Psychology: Research and Practice.).