Please be on the South Lawn of the state Capitol at 11:30 a.m. on Friday, January 22nd for a pro-life prayer march (participants will be from a wide variety of Christian denominations and each are invited to pray as they see fit). Afterwards, at 12:30 p.m., we will meet in Room 310 in the Capitol to hear local pro-life speakers including FIC executive director Peter Wolfgang, Rachel’s Vineyard leader Freddy Martinez, Theresa Kranowski of St. Gerard’s Center, Deborah Quinn of Silent No More, Mary Timmis of the CT Coalition for Life and Bob Judd of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants.
Join Bound4LIFE CT at the State Supreme Court (231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford, CT) to intercede and stand in the gap for the voiceless and pray for the present day holocaust of abortion to be abolished. This is a prayer meeting, not a protest. Event will be held on Saturday, June 13th at 10 AM. For additional information, contact bound4lifect @ yahoo.com.
FIC Executive Director Peter Wolfgang will be on the Dan Lovallo radio program today at 4:05 pm to discuss the murder of the abortionist George Tiller. Go to www.talkofconnecticut.com to find the station near you.
Concerning Tiller, Professor Robert George of Princeton says,
Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller’s life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our “weapons” in the fight to defend the lives of abortion’s tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.
Bound4Life CT will lead a prayer siege on May 9th from 10:00 am-11:00 am, at the Supreme Court, 231 Capitol Avenue, Hartford. Please note, this is not a protest, this is a prayer event. You are invited to come and intercede and pray for the repentance of shedding of innocent blood and the sanctity of marriage. Bound4Life is a youth-driven national prayer movement called to pray and intercede for the unborn in America, especially those who are murdered through the horrors of abortion. Contact Cynthia Shone at bound4lifect @ yahoo.com for more information.
Great little story from the Assemblies of God news service about people working to stop the selective abortion of special needs children.
Down syndrome advocates fear the pressure to terminate Down syndrome pregnancies can be overwhelming when parents are presented with the diagnosis and warned of the lifelong health challenges and varying degrees of mental retardation associated with the syndrome.
Add to that the rate of so-called “false positives” resulting from the current screening techniques, estimated as low as 2 percent to as high as 10 percent in various studies. The prenatal testing itself carries a risk of compromising a pregnancy.
“Sadly, many of those babies actually had no abnormalities,” laments Paula Wilburn, the mother of a child with Down syndrome and founder of Fun Coast Down Syndrome Association, a ministry of Praise Assembly of God in Bunnell, Florida, where she and husband Donald serve as senior pastors.
Wilburn and others fought for three years to get Congress to address the issue, and last September finally saw their efforts pay off when the House and Senate passed The Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act — a bill aimed at reducing the number of Down syndrome-related abortions in the United States.
In a nutshell, the act requires a pregnant woman receiving a Down diagnosis — prenatally or up to a year after birth — to be given current information about both the syndrome and referrals to support services and networks dedicated to assisting parents in raising a child with Down syndrome and other disabilities.
Thirty-six years into this quiet holocaust even the blind are now coming to see that society has been drinking hemlock in the guise of champagne. America and the West have been toasting themselves and congratulating themselves on being rid of the old god and his inability to appreciate our desire to have a good time. And so our vocabulary becomes ever more clinical, our discourse ever more shallow. Political enemies are routinely and flippantly demonized as Nazis, as the West ironically continues to absorb and inculcate to its young the Nazi ethos nearly in its entirety. Moral relativism, utilitarianism and depersonalization have written DNR on our collective chart.
No better epitaph could be written than that penned by Paul 1,950 years ago:
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.
I hope we continue to pray against this scourge of abortion even after the attention it receives in January fades away.
Biting like the winter chill that brought the mercury down to -7 F here in Western Connecticut the other morning, Demographic Winter – the coming population collapse – is hitting Connecticut. We’ve written about this before (see post here) and we agree with those who say that the entire developed world is headed for disruptive declines in population. Of course, this runs counter to the expectations of those who were schooled in the 60’s and 70’s, who were inculcated with a strong belief in the threat of world overpopulation. However, factors such as the legalization of abortion, the popularization of homosexuality, and the delay of marriage have created a disastrous decline in the fertility rate. In many nations, women are bearing children at a rate which isn’t even sufficient to maintain the existing population, much less to increase it or create a “population explosion.”
As a little thought will suggest, this wave will hit the so-called “blue states” and thoroughly secularized nations first and hardest. So I was interested to see a frank discussion of this (hat tip: WoodstockTruth.com) from none other than the Connecticut State Data Center. In a remarkable document, it seems that the State Data Center has even adopted the rhetoric of those concerned about Demographic Winter, issuing a press release entitled “Where Have All the Children Gone?“ This document should be read and clearly understood by all. If the State school enrollement peaked last year and is going to decline 17% by 2020 – not so far away – what does this say about the viability of our State economy and institutions? In other words, if you think taxes will go up and services be cut this year, just wait!
The press release says:
Orlando Rodriguez, Demographer and Manager of CtSDC, states:
“We have been expecting this downward enrollment trend to begin. The leading edge of Baby Boomers are approaching retirement and the trailing edge of their children have aged beyond K to 12 schooling.”
In Connecticut, the public school population, grades 1 to 12, peaked at approximately 523,100 in the 2003/4 and 2004/5 school years. This population dropped to approximately 516,400 in the just completed 2007/8 school year. CtSDC projects that this population will continue to decline, reaching a low of approximately 432,300 in 2020. This is a loss of approximately 90,800, or 17%, from the highs of 2003/4 and 2004/5.
Low fertility rates are the root cause of this decline. The Boomer generation, now approaching retirement, had fewer children than their parents. Thus the size of the “Echo Boom” generation, the children of Boomers, is smaller than that of the Boomers. In effect, Boomers did not replace their own generation. Looking forward, Echo Boomers are expected to have lower fertility rates than their parents thereby exacerbating the projected decline. Each progressive generation is failing to replace itself.
It is unlikely that the enrollment peaks of 2003/4 and 2004/5 will return. Connecticut has some of the lowest fertility rates, across all ethnic groups, in the country. Foreign in-migration is too low to offset a long-persistent pattern of domestic out-migration. Indeed, Connecticut’s population is skirting negative growth with only foreign in-migrants keeping the population numbers afloat. (Emphasis in the original.)
This is alarming. The anti-life, anti-marriage, anti-fertility doctrines of the secular left do have consequences, consequences which we are only beginning to see but which will undoubtedly cause great hardship and something else, too: a diminution of the joy within society as we become ever more childless.
See a fuller report on enrollment projections here.
The Bush Adminstration is still in power for a few more weeks, to the chagrin of Attorney-General Blumenthal. Federal regulations are being proposed that could supersede the plan under which Connecticut hospitals give contraception to rape victims. From the Courant:
The rule, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reinforces protections for health care workers and institutions who refuse to provide services they object to, including abortion.
When it takes effect Jan. 18, the regulation will override the 2007 Connecticut law that requires hospitals to provide emergency contraception, commonly known as Plan B, to rape victims, Blumenthal said.
“We went through a very lengthy, painstaking, contentious process to reach our statute in Connecticut, which has worked well for everyone,” Blumenthal said. “This administration’s new regulation threatens to blow apart that very significant balance of interests and compromise.”
“I will fight this outrageous rule — the outgoing Bush Administration’s latest and last swipe at women’s health. This rule is an appalling insult and abuse — a midnight power grab to deny access to health care services and information, including even to victims of rape. Our strong coalition of states will fight fiercely to block this reprehensible threat to hard-fought patient and victim rights.
“This Provider Conscience Rule, thinly veiled as a promise of fairness to doctors, jeopardizes assurances that sexual assault victims are provided emergency contraception. This new rule puts personal agendas before patient care — protecting doctor objections, but entirely ignoring the rights of rape victims and others to access birth control and other vital services. This rule upsets the careful balance between physician beliefs and a patient’s right to affordable, accessible health care.
In September 2007 Connecticut Catholic Archbishop Mansell described the Connecticut bishops’ policy as follows:
Catholic hospitals will continue to administer a pregnancy test to determine if the woman has conceived.
If the pregnancy test is positive, contraceptive medication will not be administered.
This policy is consistent with the new law and with the Ethical and Religious Directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Catholic teaching is adamantly opposed to abortion, but not opposed to emergency contraception for a woman who is a victim of rape.
This position has been criticized and even satirized by some other Catholics who feel it does not go far enough in upholding Catholic teaching. See discussion here at the FIC Blog.
The unabashedly pro-life LifeSiteNews.com tells the story of country music superstar Kenny Chesney’s song There Goes My Life and how it’s touching people’s hearts by making them re-think abortion in cases of “unwanted pregnancies.”
The song’s deeply human story deals a devastating blow to the abortion mentality, which casts an “unwanted” child as a mere disruption in its parents’ lives. It’s pro-life message has evidently resonated deeply with its audience: “There Goes My Life” spent seven weeks as #1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart the year it debuted, and its YouTube video has over 1.4 million hits to date.
For many, the song cast into relief the absurdity of choosing abortion, and many gave vent to how the song made them painfully aware of their regret for an abortion, or relief at having chosen against it.
“This song came right on the radio as my wife told me she was pregnant and wanted an abortion,” one commentator wrote on the Youtube page. “It’s been a year and now our lovely baby boy is the most important thing in both our lives, and I can’t help shed tears every time I hear this song.”
The Youtube forum has been flooded with comments from mothers and fathers who saw a reflection of their own lives in the bittersweet song, and those of frightened young parents who were strengthened by the song’s example of courageous fatherhood.
Another commentator wrote, “I recently found out that I am going to be a father, and this song describes exactly what was going through my head. I am starting look forward to it and every time I hear this I cry.”
“I can relate,” wrote another commenter. “My birth parents were unmarried college students. I was adopted at 2 months old and have always considered my adoptive parents better than a kid could ask for. I thank God and my birth parents for making the tough decision not to abort me, and maybe even the tougher decision to give me up after I was born.”
and how it’s touching people’s hearts by making them re-think abortion in cases of “unwanted pregnancies.”