We're Sill Here

Sorta. But yeah.

Been a topsy-turvy last couple years, but this blog is still here, and as Ash Wednesday approaches (same day as Valentine's Day, how karma is that?), I want to leave up a reference to the "Lumina - a ray of light in abortion's darkness" blog by Theresa Bonopartis. Just go there, to that link. Every day. God bless her, she's stayed strong and vividly helping women in the moment, day by day, all these most recent years when we at After Abortion blog just haven't been able to keep up the daily commitment (not even a monthly or annual one either).

There are other projects we have each felt a strong grace, a sometimes not-so-subtle push to take on. No idea in heaven how to really do these things, but if they're meant to happen, they will.

But as for the blogging, we'll try harder. We promise. Maybe for Lent, at least for starters? Instead of giving up something for Lent, we're wondering if it might be better to try to give something more. We can try, at least.

Prayers for all our readers, and then some.

A Video Worth Watching But--

...at the end, Youtube shows a "next" video with a very graphic image that I know could trigger for some of us, so just close the screen/tab or stop this video before it ends:

Got To Get & Read Anthony Perry's Book After This Article

I know I'm a month or so late on this, but at least I'm noting it now. Here's a secular blogger's review of the book and what follows are excerpts from another article citing it:

Abortion Breaks Men’s Hearts, Too

(by D.C. McAllister, in The Federalist)

When I’ve written on this subject in the past, I’ve received letters from men across the globe heartbroken that they weren’t a part of the decision to either keep or abort their babies. They would have loved to have had the chance to tell the mother that he’s there to support her and the child, to step up and raise the child they created together. If nothing more, these men would have appreciated the opportunity to grieve the loss of their baby if the mother was determined to abort.

But women sometimes don’t want to hear what the man has to say. Women often assume abortion is just a women’s issue. It’s not. It’s a man’s issue too. But just like in many areas of parenting, including divorce and child custody, fathers are too often dismissed as irrelevant. But they’re not. They’re integral to creating a child and to that child’s development after he or she is born.
...

What Real Men Do about Their Kids

Some men—like Anthony Perry, who wrote a touching memoir about the loss of his child to abortion [titled "A Father's Choice: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Hope"]—don’t just go along with a woman’s decision to have an abortion as if he has no interest in what happens, as if it’s all about the woman. When Perry found out his girlfriend was pregnant, he tried to reassure her that her life wouldn’t spiral into meaninglessness if she kept the baby. Her life would change, but he’d be there by her side as they experienced the joy of bringing a new life into this world. He saw hope, not despair.

His girlfriend decided to abort the baby anyway. He comforted her, of course. He loved her. But his pain, his loss was real. When she told him the baby was gone, he said, “A part of me had also died though the tears were too heavy to fall. The weight of my sorrow fell into my chest instead, pressing against my lungs and leaving me fighting for air.”

Ultimately, he blamed himself for his girlfriend’s choice, but not in the same way Dorsey did with Rivera. He blamed himself for failing to convince his girlfriend to keep the child. “I had done all I could to persuade her that I would be a good father and a good partner in our child’s life. Our child would have had a passion for life, inspired by us both, and would have seen the world. I had done all I could to save this child, and I failed.”

This is a testimony of why abortion is not just a woman’s issue.

McAllister goes on to relate the story of a young man named Alan, and link to a video about him:

He was overwhelmed as he struggled to handle an unplanned pregnancy. But after years of making the wrong choices, he decided to get help so he could finally make the right one. Love and joy are his reward.

Abortion By Any Other Name

"The old evil was only hibernating. Now reawakened, instead of spouting hate words, it hides behind a supposed compassion and a call for respecting autonomy. But beneath that veneer, the infanticide message is the same today as it was in the 1920s and 1930s. We ignore the approaching darkness at our own peril."

"Crony Feminism"- You Heard It Here First, We Think?

Actually, it's over at our sister blog, AbortionPundit, where we believe we may have been the first to coin the phrase "Crony Feminism", as embodied by HRC, Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright, in triplicate, this past week.

(But then again, maybe this guy coined the phrase first, which appears to have been written in July 2014. Credit where credit is due.)

"There's never a moment in your life when you're beyond the reach of God's grace"

"He really gives them hope, that God's not done with them either."

I think I was watching the taped Youtubes of a recent Presidential candidates' debate, and one of the ads I could've skipped after five seconds, was that. I couldn't not watch it. It really got to me.

Has nothing to do with abortion. But it has everything to do with feeling unworthy, of feeling beyond reach, beyond peace, beyond grace, beyond rescue. Like I have felt, and hundreds of thousands, probably millions of us, who regret our abortions.

As a side note, Catholic Charities does a lot of the same good works the Salvation Army does (in fact, CC is the reason I live my life here in the Northeast and was adopted by my family here, instead of living out in the Heartland of America). Here's a couple of videos about CC, though they don't have the heart-tugging feel of the first one, above.

If you regret an abortion, or your involvement in one, whether you're a sibling, a mother, grandfather, uncle, whoever... a few more minutes with the videos that follow can help you begin finding out that God's not done with you yet either:

The women in the above video are mostly reading from their written stories, precisely because we are not professional actors, not professional speakers, not professional media people, and in most if not all cases, these would be the very first times we told our stories, not just in public, but in front of crowds, and with microphones amplifying our shame and our remorse. The only way to be sure we didn't choke or break down in tears, was to write it down beforehand.

There are a ton of Youtubes I could post, for the many more abortion recovery ministries and services out there. But if I did, this blog post would never end, and I'd never get some sleep. Our sidebar has all the links to those services. They are all confidential, you remain anonymous. And they can all be free, if you need that kind of assistance. All you have to do is ask.

Super Bowl 50 Doritos Ad Trashed

Honestly, you just can't make this stuff up:

Abortion Activists Respond To Funny Doritos Ad About Babies With Bizarre Twitter Rants:
A Doritos ad depicting a hungry, unborn baby upset abortion rights activists. The ridiculous response shows the lack of art and beauty in pro-choice messages.

I didn't watch the Super Bowl, but I presume this is the ad, shown at this link (scroll down)

New England Journal of Medicine "fails to show significant harm from Texas’s defunding of Planned Parenthood"

It is disappointing to see the New England Journal of Medicine once again use its prestige and influence in such a partisan manner. The release of this study was doubtless timed to coincide with oral arguments in Zubik v. Burwell on the Department of Health and Human Services contraception mandate. Unfortunately, this has become standard operating procedure for the New England Journal of Medicine. During the debate over the Affordable Care Act in 2010, it published a very superficial analysis of abortion trends in Massachusetts to make the case that wider health-care coverage could reduce the abortion rate. In reality, abortion numbers in Massachusetts had been falling for a long time, as they are virtually everywhere, and the enactment of Commonwealth Care in 2006 had little impact on the trend.

Overall good public-health data from Texas indicates that since Planned Parenthood was defunded, abortions have gone down significantly. Additionally, the overall birth rate has gone down slightly. Most importantly, there is no evidence that the unintended-pregnancy rate has gone up. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, these important statistics have gone largely unreported by the mainstream media.

Read the rest of the National Review piece. Read how the mainstream media spun even this to make it seem like they and the abortion industry were correct, when in fact, they're not quite, after all.

Former Pro-Choice, Cosmo Writer On The Real Women's Movement

"The women’s movement in the beginning was very united around issues of equal access to education and opportunities in the work force. Abortion split the women’s movement in two. The pro-life movement has not declared a “war on women.” The pro-life movement represents an authentic branch of feminism that walked out the door the very night abortion was inserted into the women’s movement by a mere 57 people under some very diabolic influences.
...
"Early suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were adamantly prolife. Alice Paul, mother of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, called abortion “the ultimate exploitation of women.” Although Betty Friedan eventually did succumb to abortion’s siren song, she didn’t even mention abortion in 1963 when she launched second wave feminism with The Feminine Mystique.

"...Having once been fired for being pregnant, [Betty] Friedan wrote in 2000, 'Ideologically, I was never for abortion. Motherhood is a value to me, and even today abortion is not...'
...
"Well, I woke up. After years of promoting the 'Cosmo Girl' lifestyle as a pathway to freedom, I realized the sexual revolution lifestyle is destroying women’s lives, wrecking families, and tearing apart our nation. On some level, I think I always was, at heart, a 'pro-life family feminist.' I just didn’t know it.
...
"Pro-life family feminists plainly see abortion for what it truly is: the debasement and betrayal of women."

- Susan Browder, on "The hijacking of the women’s movement, and the resurgence of pro-life feminism", January 22, 2016

The Most Important One Word in the Planned Parenthood Videographers' Indictment

It is also the one word Planned Parenthood and their media lapdogs hope you won't focus on:

"Daleiden was indicted for “prohibition of the purchase and sale of

human

organs.”

It isn't just "a clump of cells," anymore. It isn't just a "blob of tissue," anymore. These were human beings, with human organs.

A few other facts to know:

1. "...Planned Parenthood has announced a dubious 'policy change' to end these ...quality-based specimen payments from fetal tissue vendors ... After months of defending them as perfectly legal and appropriate, this seems like an admission of guilt."
2. "Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, has already announced that the state’s investigation of Planned Parenthood and the 'shameful disregard for human life of the abortion industry' is ongoing."
3. "In this case, one of the prosecutors in the Harris County district attorney’s office sits on the board of Planned Parenthood, Gulf Coast."
4. "When a second firm, Coalfire, found there hadn’t been such deception [in the editing of the videos], former Get Religionista Mollie Hemingway pointed out that almost no one covered those findings."
5. "...if the grand jury believes that Daleiden should be charged with offering to buy a human organ, based on the videos, it almost inconceivable that the same grand jury would not also conclude that Planned Parenthood should be charged with violating the same statute by offering to sell him human organs."
6. "Planned Parenthood attorney Josh Schaffer said a prosecutor told him the grand jury never even voted on possible criminal charges against the nation's largest abortion provider."
7. "Over the past decades, there have been countless undercover video operations conducted by major news organizations at ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, CNN, and others, as well as local at news stations all over the country. Today, the Internet has made it possible for citizen-journalists and investigators to employ the same techniques to expose wrongdoing without the need for the major resources required by shows like CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

   "While this is not the case with the Texas statutes at issue, there are even some federal laws that encourage this type of behavior. For example, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the Fair Housing Act) authorizes private undercover testers and sponsoring organizations to recover damages if they discover discriminatory racial treatment in housing, even if they had no intention of moving in, or used fake identities (tampering with a government document!), or even if the conduct was illegal under state law!"

8. "...one can’t help but notice the double standard. NBC’s David Gregory once waved an illegal high-capacity magazine at the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre during a contentious interview on Meet the Press. Gregory wasn’t prosecuted, even though District of Columbia police explicitly warned his news editor prior to the program that possessing the magazine was illegal under D.C. law; the police recommended showing a photograph instead. The prosecutor simply exercised his “prosecutorial discretion” to let Gregory off, scot-free, although Gregory had intentionally and knowingly defied the law. But there Gregory was taking on the NRA, the Left’s favorite bogeyman. Here, Daleiden had the misfortune of confronting the corporate heroes of the sexual revolution."
9. "I’ve been following the coverage of five people who were arrested for blocking an oil train at a shipyard in Everett, Wash. They are climate activists who are using the necessity defense; an area of law that excuses criminal action if the defendant was doing so to avoid greater harm. They ended up being cleared of the train-blocking charge and only charged $200 each for criminal trespass, which was widely considered as being let off the hook and media such as the Seattle Weekly lauded this ruling as a 'victory.' So, why is the necessity defense OK when it comes to climate change but not acceptable when it comes to aborted remains being sold in a insider trade industry that was caught on film?"
10. "Not a single Planned Parenthood executive caught on camera has come forward to deny that it is her voice, image or statements being depicted..."

"A Strange New Form of Oppression"

"Abortion can’t really turn back the clock. It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so that she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made. Abortion can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle.

"This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.

"If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, 'Something must be really wrong in this environment.' Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

"The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be 'her choice,' yet so many women say, 'I really didn’t have a choice.'"

Ms. Frederica Mathewes-Green asks some good questions. "When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child?"

"I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people?"

"Do we really want to say that 'unwanted' people might as well be dead?"

Mathewes-Green, who used to be an avid pro-choice feminist, became famous originally because of this quote:

“No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

She continues today in this article:

"Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience. That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it. Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2,800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression."

And she believes there is an eventual tide turning:

"Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters. One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of ours. And they are not obligated to be kind."

In the meantime, the real pro-life folks will just keep offering help in the form of concrete assistance avoiding abortions while still managing to live, to survive, to thrive in their own lives. Multiple links for all that assistance, at the top of both our blogs, and in the sidebars. The evening news won't tell you about all that assistance though, because they're afraid to, politically correct creatures that they are.