Daly Focus Blog
For over 40 years, our society has promoted the idea that abortion is as simple as a woman’s choice. Abortion affects her and no one else.
Pro-abortion activists never mention the babies, the men, and the families who are impacted forever by an abortion.
They also never talk about children like Melissa. Her 19-year-old mother was in her third trimester when she was given a saline abortion. The procedure injects a toxic salt solution into the amniotic fluid surrounding the womb.
Last week’s extraordinary public debates about guns, both at the White House and at CNN’s Florida Town Hall, were highly emotional and contentious events. Over a week after the catastrophic carnage in Parkland, Florida, debate concerning what to do about it is raging red-hot, and understandably so. People committing violent acts with guns is a growing epidemic, particularly in schools. Since early January, in addition to Florida, there have been school shootings in Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Human trafficking is a part of the seedy underbelly of our society that most of us would rather not have a conversation about. It’s hard to conceive of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them children and women, being either kidnapped or manipulated into psychological enslavement. So we turn our attention to more pleasant topics.
That’s exactly the behavior traffickers count on from us to keep their activities hidden and their operations running smoothly.
Even the lowest estimates suggest that something like 100,000 kids are taken into human trafficking every year in the U.S.
Last night’s Democrat-led Senate filibuster of the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill that would make it illegal to abort a baby after 20 weeks, is an egregious and cowardly case of radical ideological politics coming at the expense of innocent life.
The Senate needed 60 votes in order to advance the bill. In the end, 51 senators voted for it and 46 against. Three Democrats crossed the aisle to support life – Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Bob Casey Jr.
Several colleagues and I were in Washington D.C. last week for our Evangelicals for Life Conference along with the annual March for Life.
A few observations:
Last week’s massive March for Life rally on the Mall unfolded in familiar fashion. Just before noon, pro-life stalwarts from every state convened to stand in solidarity, many of them carrying signs declaring life as the better choice. It was the 45th consecutive gathering and the longest-running demonstration of its kind.
From the White House:
Today, we focus our attention on the love and protection each person, born and unborn, deserves regardless of disability, gender, appearance, or ethnicity. Much of the greatest suffering in our Nation’s history — and, indeed, our planet’s history — has been the result of disgracefully misguided attempts to dehumanize whole classes of people based on these immutable characteristics. We cannot let this shameful history repeat itself in new forms, and we must be particularly vigilant to safeguard the most vulnerable lives among us.
Two-hundred and thirty-two years ago yesterday – January 16, 1786 – the Virginia General Assembly passed the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, legislation ensuring that no citizen would have to choose between their personal faith and the law of the land.
Prior to the American Revolution, Baptists were being harassed and arrested for worshipping in their own homes. Pastors were even being incarcerated.
It was amid this atmosphere that led Thomas Jefferson to pen, in part:
“All men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
Over two centuries later these foundational principles, which are enshrined in the First Amendment, are now tenuous and under assault.
I could have been aborted.
I was born in the ’60s prior to Roe v. Wade, but even then many people felt my mother would have been justified to abort me. She was the perfect candidate. She was 42 and in a high-risk pregnancy. My dad was an alcoholic, and I was the fifth child of a marriage that was already struggling to stay together. I was born into a household in turmoil.
I could have been aborted.
Joni Eareckson Tada says that suffering is “like a little splash-over of hell.”
Few people can talk about the intensity of suffering with more authority than Joni. A tragic accident fifty years ago left her a quadriplegic, requiring 24-hour care. She’s also survived a stage-3 breast cancer diagnosis, the removal of a 3-inch tumor, and months of chemotherapy that followed.
So when she talks about how to handle suffering in a way that enriches our lives and glorifies God, we all do well to listen.
Focus on the Family and The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) are once again co-hosting Evangelicals for Life, the only major prolife conference for evangelicals in conjunction with the March for Life, the flagship pro-life event.
The Evangelicals for Life event debuted in 2016, and was designed to help invigorate the evangelical pro-life community to greater service and involvement in the pro-life cause.
This year’s event will take place on Jan. 18–20 at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
