The Sanctity of Life

A year or so ago, the pastor of our church asked me to speak to the subject of the Sanctity of Life. My purpose was not to judge because there are times when we just can't see our way clearly and we react. By way of introduction, I need to mention that I believe in the sacredness of life and yes in the same breath I can admit to believing in the death penalty. However, I do not believe in the hypocrisy of the Left that breaths fire into the coals of infanticide if the mother chooses but shouts double-homicide when a man is "convicted" of killing his wife and an 8 month old fetus. To take the life of someone at our hands, with the exception of the death penalty, we have euphemisms for ending life: termination of a pregnancy; assisted suicide; and euthanasia. When the government gets involved with the termination of life, such as China's policy of one child per family, they have the unintended consequence of fewer girl babies being born and hence many young men in China today will not be able to find marital partners. In Denmark, we have euthanasia. There is no profit in keeping ill people alive when the "state" pays for the "health care." In the United States - for the time being - euthanasia is generally viewed as a crime or as murder but the bottom line is that in America, there is medical insurance which guarantees income for keeping the person alive whereas with socialized medicine, there is no value in prolonging life. In the United States, the sanctity of life exists because many of us place value on life. We have moral and ethical issues = our fundamental beliefs in God and in the value or sacredness of life. Decisions are individual and not easy. I believe they are intimately personal and with regard to minor girls, I believe parents must be notified because we have no way of knowing if the abortionists are covering for the rapists. When we disucss the sanctity of life, we generally focus on abortion and frequently to the heinous method of "partial birth abortion" which in my humble opinion is infanticide. I would like to mention the adverse impact of abortions on the sanctity of our nation and its future health as a Judeo-Christian beacon of light and hope. Since 1973, this scourge of abortion has killed approximately 50,000,000 souls in the United States alone, not to mention the children and grandchildren they would have had by now. We are an aging population - no wonder as we are killing our young; our values are being attacked; and many of the youth who would have secured our future as well as their own have been killed/aborted. Illegal immigrants are filling the void - overrunning our borders, draining our resources, and these resources cannot be replenished because we have killed many of the very people who would have replenished them. Nature abhors a vacuum and our nation and our courts have aided and abetted its creation. Before I sound as though I am somehow breaking a law by discussing church and state, allow me to say - we do not live in a vacuum. And every action has a consequence. Of those 50,000,000 tiny souls, at least 80% of them would have been Christians. To put the number in perspective, at the moment no ethnic minority in our nation has 50 million people as legal citizens. France has a population of about 60 million people; England has about 55 million. Could you imagine how horrific a thought it is to imagine the eradication of 50,000,000 citizens? To systematically eradicate the entire population of France or England - legally? Unthinkable. Yet, that is what we have done, 1,300,000 defenseless souls per year. We have separation of church and state but it only works in one direction. In this case, the killing of our unborn, the lack of respect for their right to life, the enormous amount of money to be made through their slaughter, is condoned and encouraged through government regulation over this most intimately personal of issues. At one time in our land, unwed moms often married the unwed dads - we were controlled by our values and our beliefs in life and God. Today, putting the expanse of the issue aside, our women are denigrated by hideous procedures and their babies killed - and to add insult to degredating injury - the baby's body parts are often sold. Make no mistake, the abortion issue is not a matter of choice; it is a matter of money. If there were no money to be made, the abortions would not be occurring, certainly not in the numbers that they are. How many Billy Grahams or Einsteins have we killed? How many grandchildren have grandparents lost? How many families find their blood lines ending? Our heritage is being replaced. The value of life is being eroded. To what end? At what cost? Our society has been undermined in ways we can hardly or fully comprehend. And this erosion goes beyond the immediate abortion to the erosion of our national character. A nation that kills its unborn with reckless abandon couched as "a woman's right to choose" and kills the helpless like Terri Shiavo so ruthlessly through dehydration and starvation has lost its way. A nation that shows more kindness to the family pet at the end of life than it does to a brain-damaged adult woman has become confused and has priorities confused. Yes, a heavy dose of morphine for Terri Shiavo would have been far more kind than having her flesh fall from her body, a body that took 12 - 14 days to die. Life is a gift. The conception and birth of our young is a miracle - one look into the gurgling face of a new born proves the miracle of life and the love of God - the God with the Golden Rule; the God whose Holy Book teaches kindness and love. If I were to pray during this time of honoring the Sanctity of Life, I would ask God to place his hand on our hearts, to place his hand on the hearts of those who perpetuate this madness for financial gain and from misguided emotions and to show them that when they look into the face of a nearly born baby - ripped from the womb - they are looking into the face that holds a tiny spark of God in its fluttering heartbeat. When their time comes to pass on, it is from these tiny, once beating hearts that they must seek mercy. As one person, I do not know the answers to all of the issues relating to our national abandonment of the sanctity of life or the shift to see us all as less than valuable. I do know, however, that the answers rest in God's love and I further know that while our nation's policies seem to have abandoned God with the push toward secularism, God simply will not abandon us. But we have to do our part. We have to remember the miracle of life. There are some who believe in the "cult of death." I have seen some senators on the floor of the senate shrieking about a woman's right to kill her unborn child. [I say abortion is not a form of birth control, not in this day and age.] I hear some senators defending the unborn but in vain. Abortions will always exist in America. But at the very least, the laws governing abortions should be under the jurisdiction of the states. Since 1973, our moral compass has gone off kilter. Today, I simply ask that you remember when you get into a discussion of abortion, that you are the miracle. Life is a gift and life is a miracle. You are the miracle. One question: How can we be a "God fearing" nation and deny by our very hands the gift of life to our unborn? See: http://www.abort73.com http://usr-bin-mom.com/index.php?page=entry&id=1463 [Since the beginning of the Iraq War, 5.497,230 American children have died from abortion.]