By Dave Andrusko

When there is even an ounce of honesty in them, any series of accounts of women who have undergone abortions will accomplish exactly the opposite of what proponents of “telling your story” believe it will. Instead of “de-stigmatizing” abortion, it makes the average person even more skeptical of abortion, even more convinced it is a horrible “choice.”

The latest example is a story in New York magazine which provided thumbnail sketches of the reasons 26 women had their abortion or abortions (see n0ymag.com/news/features/abortion-stories-2013-11/?mid=nymag_press).

The overwhelming takeaway I had was sorrow. Abortion’s ugly truth is everywhere.

I was very much impressed with the introduction written by Meaghan Winter. Take this paragraph, for example:

“And yet abortion is something we tend to be more comfortable discussing as an abstraction; the feelings it provokes are too complicated to face in all their particularities. Which is perhaps why, even in doggedly liberal parts of the country, very few people talk openly about the experience, leaving the reality of abortion, and the emotions that accompany it, a silent witness in our political discourse. Even now, four decades after Roe, some of the women we spoke with would talk only if we didn’t print their real names.”

Read More: http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2013/11/the-abortion-accounts-of-26-women-weep-pain-and-regret-and-remorse

The Bible tells us that human beings are unique amongst God’s creatures in being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) and it is on this basis, after the flood, that God introduces to all humankind the death penalty for murder (Genesis 9:6,7).

By Dr. Peter Saunders

Editor’s note. This appeared over the weekend on Dr. Saunders’s wonderful blog. To be clear this is a Christian understanding of what the Bible—Old and New Testaments–says about the sanctity of human life. This essay is particularly well written and very much worth reading.

Dr. Saunders is a former general surgeon and is CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organization with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members.

The Bible does not support the view that some human lives are worth less than others. All are made in the image of God and all are equally precious.

Devaluing or discriminating against any group of human beings is therefore inconsistent with God’s justice. He does not show partiality.

The heart of Christian ethical teaching is that we must love as Christ himself loved (John 13:34), that the strong should make sacrifices for the weak and if necessary lay down their lives for the weak (Philippians 2:5-8, Romans 5:6-8).

So to suggest that the weak might be sacrificed in the interests of the strong is simply not biblical morality.

But what about human life before birth? Do these principles apply here too?

It is striking just how many references there are in Scripture to human life in the womb.

Perhaps the most famous of these is Psalm 139. The Psalmist, looking back to the beginning of his life declares:

‘For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful…

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place…your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.’(Psalms 139:13-16)

John Stott has argued that this passage affirms three important things about the human life before birth.

First, it affirms that the preborn baby is God’s creation. It is God who knitted him together. The Hebrew word used by the Psalmist for ‘knit’ (other versions translate it as ‘weaved’) is raqam, a comparatively rare word in the Old Testament, which is used almost exclusively in texts that describe the curtains and veils of Israel’s wilderness tabernacle and the garments of the high priest.

To say that an unborn child is ‘roqem’ is therefore to say something about the cunning skill of the weaver and about the beauty of his fabric. The tabernacle was the place where the presence of God dwelt. The high priest acted as the mediator between God and man and was the only one able to enter the Holy Place. He also pointed forward to Christ, the true mediator and great High Priest to come who would deal with our sins once and for all (Hebrews 7:26-28).

With its allusions to the ‘roqem work’ of the tabernacle, the Psalm implies not only that God has made the infant in the womb, but also that the infant is being woven into a dwelling for God himself.

Next, God is in communion with the preborn baby. At this stage the baby in the womb can ‘know’ nothing and is in fact not even aware of its own existence. But this is not important. The key point is that God knows it. It is God’s love for the psalmist during his time in utero that gives him significance. We see echoes of John’s first epistle here, ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins’ (1 John 4:10). God’s relationship with the baby is a relationship of grace to which the baby itself contributes nothing. It is not its own attributes that give it value. It is the fact that God knows and loves it.

More: http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2013/11/what-does-the-bible-actually-say-about-life-before-birth

By Dave Andrusko

NBC News Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd interviews President Obama

NBC News’s Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd is hardly one of us nor is he a reporter looking for opportunities to hammer President Obama. In fact, most of the time, Todd excels at making up excuses for Mr. Obama, no matter how far-fetched.

But the fiasco which is the rollout of ObamaCare’s health insurance exchanges—the near impossibility of getting on the website and the truth that millions of people are going to lose the insurance they want—has even Todd in a cranky mood.

Nowhere was that better illustrated than when he appeared on a MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program panel and tried to get an honest response from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, former White House advisor for Health Policy. Emanuel told such a series of breathtaking, bald-faced lies that Joe Scarborough, the host, said more than once, “This is so beneath you” (to which Emanuel responded, “No, it isn’t”). After Todd offered a devastating rebuttal and Emanuel robotically stuck to the same talking point, Todd rolled his eyes and smiled in utter frustration.

Part of that may explain why President Obama sat down with Todd for an “exclusive” interview. The conventional line was (to quote the headline in the Washington Post) “President Obama apologizes to Americans who are losing their health insurance.”

And it IS true that the President expressed regret: “I am sorry that [people who’ve lost their health insurance] are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” That presumably is a reference to his oft-spoken, now-thoroughly discredited promise that (as he told the AMA in June 2009), “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”

What can be said?

For starters, early in the interview, Todd deferentially asked –with an excuse built into the question– “Feel like you owe these folks an apology for misleading them, even if you didn’t intentional do it?” That is giving the President a HUGE benefit of the doubt.

Also Obama keeps insisting “it’s a small percentage of folks who may be disadvantaged.” (A) It’s not small, it’s in the millions; (B) The same problem will crop up as ObamaCare sinks into the economy in the years to come, this time affecting many times more millions of Americans.

Here are some other responses to Mr. Obama’s “apology.” The first is from Ron Fournier of the National Journal who wrote…

More: http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2013/11/a-deeper-look-at-president-obamas-apology-to-americans-who-are-losing-their-health-insurance