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Listen to Dr. Paul Kengor’s commentary here: Obama Mandate at Notre Dame

America’s Catholic bishops are princes of diplomacy, highly educated, erudite, men of tact, propriety. They’re asked to shepherd the flock with a long historical timeframe—like, say, eternity. They tend not to have knee-jerk reactions to issues of the moment.

And so, it’s not often when a paragon of decorum, namely, Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik, publishes a letter in his diocesan newspaper with a title like, “To hell with you.”

Gee, what could have provoked that? The answer is the Obama administration via its horrendous mandate to Catholic institutions to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients—that is, birth-control drugs that induce abortion. The Catholic Church defines these things as “evil.” The Church and its members are now being told they must provide them. By fiat, the Obama administration has issued that decree.

It sort of flies in the face of that old freedom of religion thing we’ve always had in America. And it’s certainly of concern not merely to Catholics but all Americans.

Here’s what happened:

Last August, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued guidelines for implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as, “Obama-care.” The guidelines mandated that by summer 2012 all health-insurance plans—yes, all of them—must cover any and all FDA-approved contraception, sterilization procedures, and pharmaceuticals, even those that produce or result in abortion. Every employer and employee must pay for these things, even if they violate the dictates of their conscience. The employers include all Catholic institutions, from colleges to hospitals to nursing homes to social-service agencies to charities … to whatever else. “All” means “all.”

How’s that for social justice?

Speaking of social justice, didn’t Notre Dame University give an honorary degree to President Obama?

Maybe it’s time for Notre Dame to revoke that degree. Does Notre Dame—and especially its trustees—have the moral courage to do that?

For Catholic Exchange.com and Ave Maria radio, I’m Paul Kengor.

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Listen to Dr. Paul Kengor’s commentary here: Mayor Bloomberg

It’s hard to say who’s the worst mayor in America, though I can certainly name one of the most disappointing: It’s New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

This isn’t the place to list every objection I might have to Mayor Bloomberg’s policies, but most notable is his unwavering stance in favor of abortion. Making it worse is that Bloomberg is a high-profile member of the Republican Party, which has become the pro-life party in America. Bloomberg flies in the face of that trend. He’s a throwback to the days of the liberal/Northeastern, so-called “Rockefeller Republican.” He’s a progressive Republican.

Bloomberg’s latest outrageous overture to the pro-abortion cause came when he stoically stepped forward to send a big, fact personal check to Planned Parenthood. Republican governors and legislatures nationwide have been reducing or ending taxpayer subsidies to Planned Parenthood. This has been a truly blessed development that has placed Margaret Sanger’s organization on the ropes. Apparently, there’s only so-much direct revenue available from killing unborn babies. To stay alive, poor Planned Parenthood needs those desperate taxpayer subsidies that Democrats have faithfully provided. There’s only so much blood money.

Apparently chagrined by Planned Parenthood’s hard-times, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has generously written a personal check for $250,000 to the nation’s largest abortion provider, which, as everyone knows, kills a far higher percentage of unborn black children than unborn white children. Those children are what racial-eugenicist Margaret Sanger referred to as “human weeds.”

Naturally, you won’t read that in the New York Times. Quite the contrary, the Times was elated with what it termed Bloomberg’s “generosity.” The Times’ headline rejoiced: “With Fine Timing, Bloomberg Makes a Financial Pledge That Excites and Engages.” The mayor’s pledge, celebrated the Times, was rejuvenating; it was Bloomberg’s “biggest political coup in years.” The gesture may have even got the mayor re-elected.

The Times was beside itself with joy. Planned Parenthood—propped up by the good mayor.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York Republican. He’s doing his part to help keep America’s premier abortion business in business.

For Catholic Exchange dot com and Ave Maria Radio, I’m Paul Kengor.

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Listen to Dr. Paul Kengor’s commentary here: The DP of Adoption.

My six-year-old daughter, Abigail, is the quiet one, shy, sensitive, sweet.

It was the Saturday morning of the baptism of our adopted son. Abby came to me holding a sign her sister had made for the March for Life in Washington two years ago. It had been tucked away in the garage. It was a cute, clever sign. In capital letters it read, “ABORTION,” but with the “B” and “R” crossed out and a “D” and a “P” scribbled above them. The converted slogan thus read, “ADOPTION” instead of “ABORTION.”

“Daddy, I think we should put out this sign today,” Abby told me, as it was our adopted son’s baptism day. His mother had chosen adoption instead of abortion.

What had inspired little Abby to grab that sign? This was surely God’s grace in our house.

As are those letters, “D” and “P.” They, too, have special meaning in our household. In our home, they stand for “Divine Plan,” the “DP.”

That unusual acronym has unique meaning in our home because of a man named Bill Clark, a devout Catholic, 80 years old, who lives in California. Clark was the closest adviser to President Ronald Reagan. More than any other figure, Clark helped Reagan peacefully take down the Soviet empire. I’m Clark’s biographer. My family knows him well, like a grandfather. We spent summers at his ranch.

Clark often told us about how he and Reagan referred to the “DP”—the “Divine Plan.” As we sat around Clark’s ranch discussing yet another remarkable thing that transpired between Clark and Reagan and the world—sometimes with John Paul II’s involvement—I would say, “Bill, that’s amazing. How did that happen?”

Clark’s frequent answer: “The ‘DP,’ Paul. The ‘DP.’”

It had been the Divine Plan.

Well, the “DP” manifests itself in all sorts of ways, in the lives of Clark, Reagan, John Paul II, all of us. One manifestation in my family’s life has been the “DP” of adoption instead of abortion.

As we think about the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, have you considered whether adoption is in your “DP?”

For Catholic Exchange dot com and Ave Maria Radio, I’m Paul Kengor.

The Human Life Review has issued a new book, The Debate Since Roe, that serves as a reference and primer for any student of the abortion issue.  It’s a must-read for the voter, the activist, the undecided.  The Review’s managing editor, Anne Conlon, talks openly about real life and the not-so-hidden pain that divides the nation.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Didn’t the concept of “The Debate Since Roe” sound like it could be an utterly depressing project?

ANNE CONLON: Jim McFadden, the late founding editor of The Human Life Review (he died in 1998), believed there had to be a record of the abortion debate so no one could claim, as some Germans did about the Nazis, that they didn’t know what was really going on. Distilling a 37-year record into a single volume, a pro-life reader of sorts, was a challenge. What was somewhat — not utterly but somewhat — depressing, during my long trek through the archive, was the growing realization that all the important arguments against abortion were being made, and eloquently so, from the very beginning of

the debate. It makes me nuts, for example, that anyone could have ever entertained the feminist claim that unborn children were simply “blobs of tissue.” I chose to include in the book Sen. James Buckley’s 1973 Senate address introducing his Human Life Amendment (a few months after the Roe decision), not simply because of its historical significance, but because in it he quotes an extended passage from the work of a researcher in fetal physiology whose description of the physical and biological characteristics of the unborn child is as illuminating as any sonogram.

LOPEZ: Why did you start with eugenics?

Anne Conlon, Managing Editor, The Human Life Review

CONLON: The book is largely, though not completely, chronological. I thought Mary Meehan’s “The Road to Abortion,” written several years after Roe v. Wade, was the right place to begin because it supplies important context for how such a culture-rupturing decision could have happened in the first place. Meehan, who’s one of the most formidable researchers about the eugenics movement — she spends a great deal of time in public libraries and private archives, excavating important facts and details from dusty old boxes of personal papers and correspondence — shows in that essay how the abortion movement of the Sixties was both peopled and paid for by supporters of an earlier eugenics movement, one very much committed to breeding a “better” human race. This included not only people like Margaret Sanger and Alan Guttmacher of Planned Parenthood fame, but also establishmentarians like John D. Rockefeller Jr. and George Eastman (of Eastman Kodak).

LOPEZ: You contend that in the years since Roe, the “bitterness” has “intensified.” What accounts for that? Pain?

CONLON: That’s a hard question. And I’m not sure I have a good answer. But here’s a roundabout way of telling you what I think. I’m 60 years old. When I was a freshman in college, in 1970, a dorm mate who suspected she might be pregnant breezily assured me that if she were she’d just go to New York and get an abortion. It wasn’t legal yet (it became so in New York in 1971), but loopholes in state law made getting an abortion there pretty easy, or at least that’s what she thought. I was shocked that she would even consider having an abortion, but it didn’t occur to me to think of her as a bad person.

Ten years later, when I was working as a copywriter at an ad agency, a colleague confided that while she would never have an abortion herself, she didn’t think she had the right to tell someone else she couldn’t have one. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was my introduction to the “personally opposed, but” abortion credo. And for a while, “personally opposed, but” pretty much described my attitude, too — though I would never let anyone get away with assuming I was pro-abortion, an assumption most people at my agency would make whenever the subject came up (there aren’t many pro-lifers on Madison Avenue). One day when I was about six months pregnant, my boss, the creative director of the agency, matter-of-factly asked if I’d had an amniocentesis yet, as I’d want to make sure everything was “okay.” No, I told him, I would take what I got.

That was in 1986. My obstetrician, of course, also expected I’d have an amnio and insisted I sign a note saying I had refused the test — why have it, I said, if I wouldn’t have an abortion. I didn’t know then that this doctor, who subsequently got my son safely through a tough delivery, was also dismembering the unborn children of her patients who didn’t want to give birth. I found that out after I started working for the Review in 1995, when on hearing about my new job, she replied, “Well, of course you must know that I do abortions. But only up to eight weeks.” She even assured me she had counseled patients carrying children with dwarfism not to abort them for that reason. Well, I hadn’t known about her abortion practice and I was shocked. But, because of our personal history I suppose, I couldn’t bring myself to think that even she — an abortionist, for heaven’s sake — was a bad person.

I saw her a few weeks ago. It happened to be my son’s 25th birthday and we recalled how what had begun as a routine induction ended 20 hours later in a 4 a.m. emergency Caesarian for a baby in acute distress. “The umbilical cord is wrapped around his neck and arm,” I heard her say as she went about rescuing him from what had become a lethal lifeline. She’s no longer delivering babies, and I’m not sure she’s still doing abortions, though something she said about “the Pope who wants to put us out of business” made me think that she is. She said it with a smile, but it was a bitter remark — and one which evoked a bitter feeling in me. Like me, she doesn’t think I’m a bad person because I disagree with her about abortion, but my disagreement, I realized at that moment, causes her pain, just as hers causes me pain.

There is no way to compromise on the matter of killing human beings. But today, in navigating a culture permeated by abortion, most of us have at least some people in our lives with whom, on this contentious subject, we have in essence agreed to disagree. But there is a cost for this uneasy agreement, and that cost is a massive suppression of pain — on both sides of the debate. So getting back to your question: I don’t think pain by itself causes people to become bitter. I think the suppression of it does.

LOPEZ: Why are people “more confused than committed”?

CONLON: It’s not just pain we’ve been suppressing for going on four decades, but common sense, and, for those old enough to remember it, logic. Most people tell pollsters they are against most abortions. Yet they still want it to be legal. This includes, in some polls, people who also say abortion is murder. This makes no sense — what other kind of “murder” would people be so blasé about? Then there are those who are against abortion but don’t have a problem with physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. Or maybe they reject both abortion and euthanasia but support embryonic-stem-cell research and cloning. A lot of people, I think, are feeling their way to a position on these issues rather than thinking them through. And it doesn’t help that our culture has substituted entertainment for imagination. It takes imagination — moral imagination — to see that so-called spare embryos created in petri dishes are our brothers and sisters. That they, too, being part of the human community, deserve our respect — and protection. The good news from recent polls is that young people are trending in a pro-life direction. But I don’t think logic has as much to do with it as perhaps a growing awareness on their part of the missing — siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles who may have been aborted — and an inchoate sense that “there but for the grace of my mother, go I.” They have also been taught that virtually any sort of discrimination is evil, and the unborn are indeed the tiniest and most helpless victims of discrimination.

But even if you think you’re keeping your logical head while all around you are losing theirs, you can still feel confused by the affection you feel for people — like my obstetrician — who either think abortion’s okay or don’t bother to think much about it at all. I’m a committed pro-lifer. But the last thing I want to do is hurt someone during a conversation about abortion. I think the statistic now is that one in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime. When you add in all the people who may be complicit in that abortion — expectant fathers, parents, siblings, grandparents, friends — I suspect we could be talking about a majority of people in the country. I sometimes feel like Hamlet: “Should I say something or not?”

But then there are the times when I don’t have much of a choice about saying something because someone who knows I’m against abortion is verbally accosting (or maybe just needling) me about it. After 16 years of working for the Review, I can articulate and defend the pro-life position pretty well. The Debate Since Roe is for anyone who wants to be able to do the same — it will give them greater command of the facts and arguments about abortion. But then we must remember, too, that it’s possible for even wise men to rush in where angels fear to tread. How we make our case is so important. And this is especially so for people who are representing the pro-life movement. I’ve been asked on a few occasions to do a talk-radio or TV interview on some abortion subject and I’ve always declined — I can be too much of a hothead when provoked.

LOPEZ: What does Tom Thumb have to do with anything?

CONLON: Earlier I talked about a researcher whose illuminating description of fetal development, quoted by Senator Buckley in a Senate address, is part of the Congressional Record. Tom Thumb — the fairy-tale character smaller than a thumb — is in the Congressional Record, too. He was put there by the French pediatrician and geneticist, Jérôme Lejeune, when, back in the Seventies and Eighties, he testified in the Senate, first in support of a Human Life Amendment, and later a Human Life Bill (the latter testimony is in the book). Doctor Lejeune was well known for having identified the chromosomal abnormality that causes Down syndrome — he received the Kennedy Prize for it in 1962 from the president himself. He used Tom Thumb to make the point that each individual’s unique physical character is contained in the chromosomal marriage that takes place at conception. At two months of development, he said, we were all Tom Thumbs in our mothers’ wombs, two inches long but complete with hands, feet, head, organs, and brain. As far as I know, no reputable scientist ever publicly defended the “blob of tissue” canard, but it’s also true that the science establishment as a whole wasn’t interested in taking on noisy feminists — and the influential politicians (like Ted Kennedy and Al Gore and Bill Clinton) they converted to the pro-abortion side — so there weren’t legions of scientists publicly denouncing it either. Just as there aren’t legions of scientists publicly denouncing Harry Blackmun’s “We don’t know when human life begins” canard — actually what he wrote in his majority opinion for Roe was “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.” Thanks to the silence of scientists and doctors and, of course, the press, that very-easy-to-answer question — just consult an embryology textbook — is still very much with us. Especially at election time, when it provides convenient cover for self-proclaimed Catholics like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.

LOPEZ: What did you learn from Sandi Merle?

CONLON: Sandi Merle was one of those people who walk into your life one day and make such an impression that now, six years after she died, I can conjure up our first meeting as if it had happened yesterday. Cardinal O’Connor — he and Sandi were great friends — sent her to us sometime back in 1999. Sandi, who was a novelist and Broadway lyricist, had started a group for Jewish women in the arts who were against partial-birth abortion. She had produced, along with Dr. Mary Nicholas, what they called a Jewish/Catholic Dialogue about partial-birth abortion, and the Cardinal thought we might be able to help them get it published. It was much too long for the Review, but a sister organization, the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life, did publish a lengthy excerpt as a pamphlet later that year. Sandi, bless her, made sure that pamphlet got into the hands of every member of Congress. This was the era of the partial-birth-abortion legislative battles, which Sandi vividly recounts — along with her friendship with Cardinal O’Connor — in the essay of hers in the book. I remember attending an event here in New York with Sandi years ago. Carlos Menem, a former president of Argentina and a great pro-lifer, was being honored by the Vatican. It was held in an auditorium, I can’t remember where, but Sandi was sitting on the aisle. I’ll never forget how, as Rep. Chris Smith, another great pro-lifer, walked up to take his seat, Sandi, in one smooth thrust, landed a copy of the pamphlet smack in his belly.

You asked what I learned from Sandi Merle? How to get stuff done. But on a more serious note, I learned how important it is for the pro-life movement to have a big tent. Unlike Sandi, not all the women in her group were against abortion per se; they just couldn’t believe that six-, seven-, eight-, and even nine-month-old unborn babies were being butchered in America. It was a start. Most people don’t know, as Sandi did, that Jewish law proscribes most abortions. In 2001, Sandi helped put together a conference at Fordham, titled “Exploring How Jews and Christians Can Work Together to Sanctify Human Life.” One of the speakers was Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. The text of the address he gave there, which has never appeared anywhere except in the Review, is also in The Debate Since Roe.

LOPEZ: What was the easiest essay to decide on including? The hardest?

CONLON: The easiest was Ronald Reagan’s “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.” When a sitting president writes an essay for your journal, as he did in 1983, you not only run it, you reprint it from time to time, and, if you’re doing a collection, it’s the first thing you think of including. What was hard was having to leave so many excellent essays out. My aim wasn’t to produce a “Best of The Human Life Review,” but rather a reader that would not only help pro-lifers become better articulators of their argument, but also give them some history, some understanding of the anti-abortion movement’s decades-long struggle. Along with Senator Buckley and Doctor Lejeune, I included such other legislative landmarks as Henry Hyde’s House speech introducing a Human Life Bill in 1982, and Hadley Arkes’s House testimony on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act — Professor Arkes’s brainchild, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2002. All of these, by the way, are beautifully written, compelling pieces. Jim McFadden always said that our side would get the best “vendors of words,” because what writer who was proud of his gift would want to “befoul” his reputation by defending the killing of unborn babies? He sure was right about that.

LOPEZ: How does one find herself managing editor of The Human Life Review?

CONLON: Actually, I have NR publisher Jack Fowler to thank for that. The ad agency where I worked for twelve years went out of business in 1991. After four years of working freelance, I decided I wanted a career change and sent NR a letter saying I’d be happy to start at the bottom again and would even make the coffee if they had a spot for me. They didn’t, but Jack dutifully filed the letter and résumé away. Not long after that, when the Review’s then-managing editor announced she was leaving in three weeks, Jack, who had worked for the Review before joining NR, pulled my letter out and gave it to Maria [McFadden, then executive editor, now editor], who gave it to her father, Jim. I came in for an interview, hauling my ad portfolio, which he didn’t look at, and a few letters to the editor I’d written about abortion, which he did. He hired me on the spot — that is, after I practically got down on my knees and begged him for the job. And, by the way, it was Jim who always got into the office first and made the coffee.

LOPEZ: Why would anyone want to subscribe to a journal that is all about abortion?

CONLON: Well, it’s not all about abortion. From the very beginning, and for obvious reasons, the Review was also focusing on euthanasia and other assaults on the sanctity-of-human-life ethic. Over the years, we’ve responded to what Roe has wrought with articles on physician-assisted suicide, fetal genetic testing and experimentation, designer babies, cloning, embryonic-stem-cell research, et al.

“What Roe Has Wrought” is the working title of another volume I’m putting together, of essays from our archive on these subjects. I had started off including them in The Debate Since Roe, but the project just got too unwieldy. That’s why some of our longtime contributors, anti-euthanasia advocates like Wesley J. Smith and Rita Marker, for instance, aren’t included here but will be in the second volume.

LOPEZ: What’s the single most effective piece HLR has run?

CONLON: Literally effective, as in having an effect? Probably President Reagan’s essay. It sure got us notice. But here’s what else I’d say: We aim to be effective in different ways. You never know what kind of argument will persuade an individual to change sides — political, philosophical, religious, psychological, legal, medical, or maybe some piece of personal testimony. We feature articles by doctors and lawyers, politicians and political scientists, philosophers and clerics, journalists and, as Jim once called them, “those who bring a layman’s view to the meaning of it all.” Most of the articles we run are written, as Reagan’s was, especially for the Review. But we’re keeping a record of the abortion debate, so along with original pieces we also reprint, as I’ve already mentioned, the texts of political speeches — and Supreme Court decisions — as well as essays and columns published elsewhere. For example, back in the mid-Nineties, the feminist Naomi Wolf created quite a stir with an essay she wrote for The New Republic, titled “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” in which she argued that abortion was a “necessary evil.” We not only reprinted it but ran a symposium addressing — and I don’t need to say, refuting, respectfully refuting — her argument. Her essay isn’t in the book but another one from that time is: George McKenna’s “On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position,” a masterful analysis of the abortion debate that originally appeared in The Atlantic. McKenna, a political scientist who has since written several original essays for the Review, told me back then that The Atlantic had never received as many letters to the editor as it had for that one.

LOPEZ: A few months ago, you honored Paul Greenberg at your annual Great Defender of Life fundraising dinner. How did you come to that decision?

CONLON: We wanted to honor him because he deserved to be honored — he is the epitome of what it means to be a Great Defender of Life. A fearless pundit — also a Pulitzer Prize–winning one — his writing is powerful and eloquent. The longtime editorial-page editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Greenberg writes three (long) columns a week, mostly on subjects that have nothing to do with the pro-life struggle, by the way. Bill Murchison, another syndicated columnist, and one of our senior editors, in his introduction to a collection of Greenberg’s pro-life columns we just put together, wrote that Greenberg “may be America’s most brilliant living newspaperman.” He wasn’t always pro-life; in fact, in the Eighties, while he was at the Pine Bluff Commercial, he sparred over the legality of abortion in that paper’s pages with a local pastor named Mike Huckabee. The first time Jim reprinted one of [Greenberg’s] columns, he wrote that Greenberg had been on “a slow road to Damascus.” But his conversion proved Jim’s point about “vendors of words” — Greenberg’s one of the best of them. He gave a wonderful address at the dinner, ruthlessly honest about the self-delusion he engaged in for years in order to defend abortion but was finally able to throw over. There’s comfort in that, he said. If he could change his mind, others could as well. Maria McFadden and I and the rest of the people at the Human Life Review believe that, too. That’s why we do what we do.

© 2012 by National Review, Inc., Reprinted by permission.  

The equivalent of the attack on Pearl Harbor has occurred in the midst of faith-based institutions throughout the land. The bomb dropped, in this case, is the decision to compel faith-based institutions to provide artificial contraception, sterilization procedures, and abortifacient pills in their health insurance packages. The attack comes not from any foreign government but from our own.

The positive side of all this is that it is a slow bomb—the bomb bay doors have opened, the payload has been released, but it will take a year to hit the ground: on January 13, 2013 the government’s decision will take full effect. So, unlike Pearl Harbor, the people have some time to react—to kick the bomb back into the plane.

D.C.-based Catholic Advocate is determined to see that happen. On January 20 of this year, the same day that the Department of Health and Human Services announced its new policy, Catholic Advocate president Matt Smith issued a scathing denouncement:

“For President Obama to say at Notre Dame he wanted to find ‘Common Ground’ with people of faith and then allow this decision to move forward, should
send a strong signal to people of faith that the ‘Closed’ sign is on the door.”

“The pro-abortion lobby is raising a toast today knowing their president came through for them again.”

Catholic Advocate was ringing the alarm bells about this months ago. In September of 2011 it was urging its constituents to contact Congress in favor of proposed legislation introduced to the House of Representatives that would “permit a health plan to decline coverage of specific items and services that are contrary to the religious beliefs of the sponsor…or…the purchaser…without penalty.”

The current administration is clearly opposed to this measure, but Catholic Advocate is not intimidated. On January 31 it issued an official press release, National Conscience Protection Grassroots Campaign Launched: Catholic Laity can receive toolkit to contact Congress at www.ProtectOurConscience.org:

“Catholic Advocate is asking for at least one leader per parish in this country to sign up at www.ProtectOurConscience.org. There they will have access to a grassroots toolbox to answer the call to rally faithful laity to reinstate our conscience rights.”

“There are 17,782 parishes in the United States…If faithful Catholics were able to average 115 letters per parish to their Representative and each Senator, Capitol Hill would receive over six million contacts on this issue. We would send a powerful message that cannot be ignored.”

“A primary focus of this nationwide grassroots campaign is building additional support for H.R. 1179/S. 1467 – the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act introduced by Representative Jeff Fortenberry (Nebraska, 1st District) and Senator Roy Blunt (Missouri) respectively.”

The full press release can be read here.

The response is increasingly powerful. President Matt Smith tells Catholic Exchange, “As of last night, we have the commitment of at least 1 parish leader in 147 congressional districts across 42 states. When you do the math, with letters being sent to two senators and one representative per state, that amounts to 43% of Congress.”

This is the kind of reaction that is needed. There is no excuse for Catholics to think that the Health and Human Services ruling will somehow evaporate between now and January 2013. The bomb is falling. It will hit the ground and an entirely new, darker chapter in the story of the Culture of Death will unfold. Catholics must act today.

The Hebrew Bible is not for the squeamish. And its harshest maledictions are called down upon those who practiced the abomination of child-sacrifice.

Thus the Psalmist:

“They sacrificed their sons and daughters to the demons/they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood./Thus they became unclean by their acts, and played the harlot in their doings./Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his heritage/….they were rebellious in their purposes, and were brought low because of their iniquity” [Psalm 106.38-40, 43].

And the prophet Ezekiel, delivering the word of the Lord:

“And you took yours sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me, and these you sacrificed to them to be devoured. Were your harlotries so small a matter that you slaughtered my children and delivered them up as an offering by fire to them?…Behold, therefore, I stretched out my hand against you, and diminished your allotted portion, and delivered you to the greed of your enemies…” [Ezekiel 16.20-21, 27].

Thirty-nine years after Roe v. Wade created an unrestricted abortion license in the United States, and during the week when hundreds of thousands of Americans pray and march for life, all Americans ought to ponder these words – and the kind of country to which Roe v. Wade led.

It was supposed to be a country in which women were liberated; it became a country in which women were ever more the victims of predatory and sexually irresponsible men, left alone with their “rights” to find a technological “fix” to the dilemma of unwanted pregnancy. It was supposed to become a more humane country; it became a country in which morally coarsened pundits can describe as “extreme” and “weird” the faith-filled response of the Santorum family to the loss of a newborn shortly after birth. It was supposed to be a country of greater equality; it became a country in which the fantasies of those who believed that America was for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants only, with emphasis on “white,” were realized beyond the wildest imaginings of the most crazed racists and eugenicists of the 1920s.

These hard truths have too often been hidden, especially where abortion is widely prevalent. Thus it is to the immense credit of the New York-based Chiaroscuro Foundation that it has compelled the New York City Department of Health to itemize separately abortion and pregnancy statistics in its annual reports. The 2010 numbers, just released, would make both the Psalmist and Ezekiel blanch:

Of the 208,541 pregnancies in New York City in 2010, 83,750 were terminated by abortion: four in ten. Among non-Hispanic blacks, there were 38,574 abortions and 26,635 live births: thus for every 1,000 African-American babies born, 1,448 were aborted. Those numbers were even more chilling among non-Hispanic black teenagers: for every 1,000 Africa-American babies born to teenagers, 2,630 were aborted. The overall teenage abortion rate was 63% in a city where 16% of all pregnancies were ten pregnancies.

New York City is not America, of course. And there is encouragement on various fronts in the battle for life. The national abortion rate is down over the past several decades. Science has vindicated the pro-life position. The pro-life/pro-choice opinion balance has tilted, if slightly, in favor of the pro-life cause. Younger people are more likely to be pro-life than aging baby-boomers. Legislated regulation of the abortion industry has driven abortuaries out of business in many places.

Yet the fact remains that America is a country in which almost one in four pregnancies ends in the willful, violent death of the unborn child. And this slaughter of the innocents has been going on, often in higher percentages, for almost four decades.

As the Psalmist and Ezekiel might have told us, feeding the demons inevitably leads to a terrible hardening of sensibilities. The warnings from ancient Israel about where that hardening leads are worth pondering in this election year, and indeed in every year.

On January 20, 2012, the Obama administration announced that faith-based institutions must cover free contraception for employees. While mainstream media tries to pass this off as merely covering “the pill,” it also includes sterilization and abortifacients. (See the AP story here.) Regardless, Catholics (and other religious denominations) are being forced to accept insurance coverage for procedures and chemicals that are mortally dangerous, both physically and spiritually. What’s more, we’re being forced to pay for others to accept such coverage also, or go without health care coverage ourselves. Of course, the administration attempted to soften the blow by allowing faith-based entities until August 2013 to make the necessary changes to their insurance packages.

The Obama administration timed the announcement perfectly – right smack in the middle of the United States Bishops ad limina visits with the Holy Father during which the threat to our religious liberty is a primary concern, and just before the March for Life in Washington, DC.

On Thursday, January 19, Pope Benedict XVI remarked about this in his address to Region IV of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB):

“In the light of these considerations, it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be clearly appreciated at every level of ecclesial life. Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion. Many of you have pointed out that concerted efforts have been made to deny the right of conscientious objection on the part of Catholic individuals and institutions with regard to cooperation in intrinsically evil practices. Others have spoken to me of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience.” (Read the full text here.)

The Holy Father cited this as a “grave threat” in which we’re being forced to cooperate in “intrinsically evil practices.”

Well, the USCCB isn’t going to take this lying down. They’ve vowed to fight this order as “literally unconscionable.” “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, USCCB president, in a LifeSiteNews interview on January 20. “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable,” he continued. “It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.” (Read the entire story here.)

Cardinal-designate also spoke out about the HHS ruling in a web video in which he urged Catholics and the public at large to speak out in protest. “Let your elected leaders know that you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration’s contraceptive mandate rescinded,” he said. (View the entire video here.)

Absolutely we have to do that, but we also have to do more. This is both a political and a spiritual battle. We need to educate ourselves about this issue so that we’ll really know what we’re talking about and how to fight it when it rolls out. Even more, we need to prepare ourselves spiritually by receiving the sacraments often and deepening our relationship with the Triune God. We also need to step up our prayer life, praying not only for ourselves and our loved ones, but also for our bishops in their part of the fight. We have to pray for the administration to change its ways, and for a new administration that will be able to undo the harm caused by the current one. Yet, there’s even more we can do. We can fast, make spiritual sacrifices, do works of mercy, increase our self-discipline, and offer it for a moral and acceptable resolution to this crisis because this is just a next step in the persecution of the Catholic faith in our country.

There’s much we can do, and we need to begin now. We simply can’t take this lying down.

It’s a harmless phrase really.

Many an expectant parent has said it: “We’re happy as long as he’s happy and healthy.” Well intentioned and true, no doubt. Who doesn’t want their child to be happy and healthy? Pregnant women forgo champagne toasts on New Year’s Eve, take prenatal vitamins with DHA and folic acid and make countless sacrifices — all for the health of their child.

But what if the child to be born is not perfectly healthy? How does a parent respond if the prenatal diagnosis indicates that the child has a birth defect or genetic anomaly such as Down syndrome?

Recently, while waiting with my wife for an ultrasound, I had occasion to think about such questions. In the room next door we heard the nurse call an expectant mother after she had undergone prenatal testing. The nurse reported, “No, no, we have great news for you. Everything looks good. No Down syndrome, no Trisomy, so you don’t need to worry — no need to come in, you can just keep on doing what you are doing.”

I could sense the anxiety and relief on the other side of the phone. It was clear that the woman would have been told to come in immediately if the nurse had different news to share. I could not help but wonder how often that phone call is made and how often the nurse says, “I’m sorry but I have bad news …”

When a woman receives a poor prenatal diagnosis she is likely to be crestfallen and confused, especially if she has little support. The news that a child has a disability is presented and received as an urgent matter that must be “fixed” immediately. As one mother of a disabled child wrote at BeNotAfraid.Net, “Fear is an emotion which can overwhelm a woman who has welcomed her pregnancy only to be told that something is terribly wrong. There is little information, if any, readily available to help the distraught and confused mother-to-be who wants to flee from her situation.”

What follows too often leads to a tragic decision. There is a tendency to distance oneself from that disabled child. “Options” are now considered and “termination” typically encouraged.

Sadly, Down syndrome equates to a death sentence as 90 percent of children prenatally diagnosed with the genetic disorder are aborted. Abortion is the greatest threat to persons with disabilities.

This is disheartening, but it need not be this way. Medical practitioners should approach their patients with compassion, tender love and genuine support. They can find resolve in the Church’s teaching that one with mental or physical disabilities, no matter how severe, must be treated as a unique person of incomparable worth, with the same right to life and to health care as anyone else. Every person is made in the image and likeness of God, possesses an intrinsic dignity and is precious in God’s sight.

But teaching alone is not enough — the Christian community is called to actively support parents who face a negative prenatal diagnosis. For example, Be Not Afraid (BNA) is a unique ministry that provides a community of hope and encouragement for these parents. Making the choice for life is difficult and raising children with disabilities brings a unique set of challenges. BNA’s ministry is a tremendous resource, especially in its publication of testimonies by those who received a poor prenatal diagnosis and chose life, as well as through the numerous means of support offered to parents. When offered supportive care and encouragement following a poor prenatal diagnosis, parents come to understand the blessing of accepting their child unconditionally.

All parents want their children to be happy and healthy. But an aborted child is deprived by his parents of both happiness and health in this life. The aborted child is deprived of the opportunity to ever experience love. Presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently said of his son Gabriel, who survived only two hours after birth, “For two hours he lived a life that knew only love.”

A child who is diagnosed before birth with a disability may have serious health problems, but if given the chance to live, she can experience great love and joy.

I know we’re all in a hurry. I am certain that right now, you have someplace to go or something very important to do. I probably do too, but there are times when it is necessary to “hit the pause button” on life, in order to reflect on the things that have deep and crucial meaning – the things that literally hold the rest of life together.

In preparation for the trip to DC for the March for Life, I wanted to read my eighth-grade son an article with a Catholic perspective on abortion. I found a wonderful article by Peter Kreeft. That same day, a friend’s tearful sharing about the painful, broken love relationships of two young people in her life left my heart grieving. Kreeft explains that the tragedy of abortion has to do with the tragedy of not understanding sex. The tragedy of not understanding sex has to do with a tragically deflated and empty definition of love. Dr. Kreeft’s words on radical love and the world’s definition of love seemed to clash in my mind.

What is this thing we call love?

We talk about it, sing about it, rely on it, desire it and, recognize that it holds us all together. But is there a real and true definition of it, which most of us don’t quite know about, let alone live up to? Can we just take a moment to at least ponder our own definitions and perhaps take note that we might be called to more? Something higher? Something deeper and ultimately more rewarding and joyful?

Dr. Kreeft writes:

“Our human loves are forms of desire, feeling, eros, need. These need-loves are very good things. ….But the love Christ brings is the love God is, and God does not need anything. God is sheer gift. That’s why Jesus came, and why He died, and why He shed so much blood. He didn’t have to. One drop would have saved the world. Why did He give 12 quarts? Because He had 12 quarts to give.”

Why do romantic, sexual relationships end up creating so much turmoil these days? Because people don’t hit the pause button. People don’t stop to think about what love is really all about. When a couple understands the love between the sexes is an image of the love between the persons of the Trinity, having its ultimate end in oneness with God Himself, they begin to see. Once blinded by a culture steeped in lesser definitions of love (most equated with physical gratification and good feelings), they now see! Real individual fulfillment is realized when they forget themselves and live for the other. And the crazy result is that they end up finding themselves!

We do our young people a disservice when we do not share this with them. If we do not at least try to counter the culture’s loud and booming voice that moans through every love song and unfolds in every movie scene of physical sensuality and intense emotion (which are certainly initial aspects of love, but which must never stop there), then we give them no hope of real joy. The result is usually a pattern of breakup after breakup, heartache after heartache. “Hitting the pause button” before this pattern begins may perpetuate a happier ending.

What we all long for is God, and Christ alone gives us this intimacy.

Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life of Real Love. He came for that reason. “Hitting the pause button” gives us time to reflect on the crucifix, for on that cross is the meaning of real love. When we run from suffering, we then deny the cross of its power! And we do not realize that we never suffer alone for He never abandons us and that if we accept the denial of ourselves for the good of the other, nothing less than Easter Joy will be ours.

May all who know Him pause to really study Him. May all who seek love hear His invitation to define it for them. “Hitting the pause button” to contemplate real love will never be a waste of our time. It can only lead to joy and hope.