95 Days of Life: Prayer into Action, Mothers into a Home

This term the Supreme Court is getting ready to hear a case, McCullen v. Coakle, which will seek to define if a can state ban pro-life speech outside abortion facilities while allowing pro-abortion speech.   It will be interesting to see the arguments why praying or holding pro-life signs, on public property, are such a threat to abortionists like Planned Parenthood. 

 

While a later post hopes to highlight 40 Days for Life this post wants to focus on the good works that came from such prayer in a city close to my hometown, Syracuse, NY.   Here is the story from the Syracuse Post Standard.

 

Kitty Spinelli stood on the sidewalk outside Planned Parenthood Thursday, clutching her silver rosary beads. Every week for four years, that has been her spot. She prays that the women who walk by her will choose to have their babies instead of having abortions.

 

One day, her prayer became a call to action. She should create another option for the women and babies she prayed for, she said.

 

“The answer in my heart was you have a home where women go so they can have their children,” Spinelli said.

 

That was March 19, 2010. The idea of Joseph’s House was born. It will be a place where pregnant women who have no place to live will be able to come, have their babies and stay for up to two years. The home is on track to open in Syracuse in the spring.

 

And that ladies and gentlemen is the power of prayer that the state of Massachusetts and other pro-abortion folks find so dangerous.

 

To learn more about pregnancy care centers and how you can help them check out:

 

Heartbeat International

Carenet

Focus on the Family’s Heartlink

When Nellie Gray held the first March for Life in 1974 I am sure she understood how important this March would be in the United States – but who knew she would be an inspiration to pro-lifers worldwide? 

 

The Paris March for Life (Marche pour la vie) is an annual demonstration held in late January, close to the anniversary date of the 1975 law that legalized abortion in France. The event was created in 2005 by several French pro-life organizations to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of legal abortion.  The Paris March for Life has become the largest annual pro-life gathering in Europe.  The rally attracts delegations from European countries other than France, notably Italy, Spain, Belgium, the UK, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and Ireland. 2010 saw a sharp rise in attendance, possibly as high as 25,000, compared to 15,000 in 2009.

 

Not widely reported in any media was that this year there was a German March for Life that attracted about 4,500 marchers.  More can be found here.

 

The first March for Life in Warsaw, Poland (Marsz dla Życia i Rodziny) was in 2006 and attracts a few thousand every year.  In this birth country of Blessed Pope John Paul II the marchers are not only there to support life but marriage as well.  The most recent March was this past Sunday where marchers began at the symbolic monument to the Shipyard Workers victims of communism, which displays three crosses with crucified anchors. Some of the marchers carried long strips of cloth on which was inscribed the full text of the Vatican document, Donum Vitae (The gift of life) which addresses respect for human life at its origin and the dignity of procreation.

 

The Prague March for Life is an annual demonstration protesting abortion held in Prague in late March, close to Saturday, Day of the Unborn Child (25th March). The event was created in 2001.  Estimates of the number of marchers in 2013 is near 3,000.

 

Berlin was not the only surprise March this year as Slovakia recently held their first March ever and ended up attracting over 80,000 marchers!  LifeSiteNews.com has more on this March:

 

So many came that the 2.5 kilometer route was too short to accommodate all the marchers, according to an on-the-spot account by Hlavné Správy, a local news service, and the crowd shut down most streets in the city’s core. Although the March was supposed to have started by 12:30 pm, by 3 pm most of the crowd “had not yet budged because of the huge mass of people who completely fill the street”. 

 

The March for Life was held on the same weekend as the Gay Pride demonstration in the capital, Bratislava, which reportedly attracted about 1000 participants.

 

Organizers of the March for Life said their aim was to mobilize the public to advise legislators that the “protection of life, and family consisting of a married man and woman as indispensable basis for the stability and development of life in Slovakia has public support.” 

Last, but far from least, our own Jeanne Monahan participated in Italy’s third March for Life this past May.  Joining 40,000 other Marchers in Rome she heard inspiring words from Pope Francis:

 

“I greet the participants in the ‘March for Life,’ which took place this morning in Rome and I invite all to continue to be attentive to this very important issue of respect for human life from the moment of conception,”

 

While I didn’t know Nellie enough to know if she was a world traveler – her spirit and passion for life seems to have touched down on all parts of the globe!

On this day in 1916 eugenicist Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, with the help of her sister, Ethel Byrne in Brooklyn, New York.  This first facility laid the groundwork for the creation of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, which has turned the willful killing of babies in the womb into a profitable money making business.    In 2011 Planned Parenthood Federation of America committed 333,964 abortions for a profit of around $150 million and a total budget of $1.0482 billion.  In 2010 46 percent of the total PPFA budget comes from tax payer dollars in the form of government funding and they closed out the year with an excess of revenue over expenses of 18.5 million dollars

According to reports Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards makes over $400,000 in taxpayer subsidized salary.  While Ms. Richards IS a CEO of a billion dollar industry, Planned Parenthood also receives at least 46 percent (in 2010) their funding from various taxpayer sources.  Ms. Richards insists none of her salary comes from taxpayer funds – however just as taxpayer subsidies allows Planned Parenthood to do abortions by freeing the money that would be spent elsewhere, the same holds true for her compensation. 

Let us compare her salary to other jobs that are taxpayer subsidized:

• Average individual salary for a High School Teacher $43,795  
• Average individual salary for a Elementary School Teacher $40,199  
• Average individual salary for a Middle School Teacher $41,655  
• Average individual salary for a  Special Education Teacher, Preschool, Kindergarten, or Elementary School $41,260  
• Average individual salary for a Special Education Teacher, Secondary School $44,640  
• Average individual salary for a Special Education Teacher, Middle School $42,716  
• Average individual salary for a Secondary School Teacher $40,482
• Average salary of U.S. postal worker $40,000
• Average median salary for a firefighter is $42,053
• Average median salary for a police officer is $50,299
• Average Military enlisted pay $33,141*
• Salary of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder $199,700
• Salary of President Barack Obama $400,000
• Salary of Vice President Joe Biden $225,521 and all the cheese doodles he can eat
• Average salary of a Member of the House of Representatives $ 174,000

Ms. Richards is not the only highly paid individual who also receives federal subsidies.  Check out these subsidized salaries: 

• Salary of PBS President Paula Kerger $632,233
• Salary of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) President and CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison $298,884 (plus another $70,630 in other compensation from the organization and related organizations)
• Salary of president emeritus in 2009, Kevin Klose $1,200,000 
• Salary of Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell in 2008 $956,513
• Salary of Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who controls Big Bird $314,072

Please don’t miss the irony that while Big Bird is well paid to educate children, Ms. Richards is even better paid to eliminate them.

For more on abortion giant Planned Parenthood please visit Alliance Defending Freedom’s website Pretty Ugly.

As we countdown until the 2014 March for Life I thought I would try to post once a day an inspiring story, an interesting (to me at least) fact or just a random pro-life message, and to start out is one that came across my inbox this past weekend.

 

In a story just starting to go around pro-life circles Auburn University over the weekend elected an inspiring young woman to be their Homecoming Queen.  Molly Ann Dutton is not only a motivator due to her seemingly sunny disposition and can do attitude.  Molly’s inspiring story begins before she was even born.  Yellow Hammer News has more:

 

A couple of decades ago, Dutton’s biological mother, who was living in California at the time, was the victim of a sexual assault that resulted in her becoming pregnant. She was given an ultimatum by her husband: either abort the baby, or face divorce.

 

Lifeline Children’s Services, a Birmingham-based Christian adoption agency, got involved and helped the woman through her courageous decision to keep the baby and put her up for adoption instead of aborting.

 

This past weekend, the little girl born into those tough circumstances was elected her university’s homecoming queen after running on a platform entirely devoted to adoption advocacy.

 

“Because that resource was made available to my mother, she decided to give birth to me,” Dutton said. “And here I am talking to you guys 22 years later.”

 

“Light Up LIFE” was Dutton’s slogan, the perfect summation of her campaign’s goal to spread the word that adoption can bring light into a dark situation. It took Auburn’s campus by storm.

 

Ms. Dutton makes a better representation of the pro-life message then any politician can hope to.  It is stories like hers that bring home the importance of being solid in our convictions.  Cases of rape and incest are “hard cases” of abortion, which is why the Family Research Council put out the pamphlet “The ‘Hard Cases’ of Abortion: A Pro-life Response.”  In it the writers conclude:

 

Begin Excerpt:

“When the murder of the innocent is at issue, the only ‘pro-life’ posi­tion is to insist without compromise that the murder be forbidden in every case. . .

 

Exceptions undermine the pro-life position. If one holds the belief that life is valuable and every person has the right to life from the moment of conception, then how can he or she say that life is not precious if it was conceived during sexual assault? Children con­ceived in rape should not be punished for the rapists’ crime. Mary Meehan writes, ‘Our commitment to equality would be radically compromised if we were to say that children’s right to life depends on the circum­stances of their conception.’

 

If … the principle is that only a certain human life must be legally respected, it is not much of a principle. If every abortion really is a murder of an innocent human being, how can a movement be ‘pro-life’ unless it insists that the killing be stopped, absolutely?”

 

God bless Molly and the student body that recognized her contributions.   To learn more about LifeLine Children’s Services, and how you can help, please check out their website.