GENESIS, by Ramos David--amazing short film!

This is a non-graphic beautiful video showing the miracle of life. Please share! I don't know if Ramos David and his affiliates are officially pro-life (though it would certainly seem so), but promoting a culture of life is a way to stop abortion.

Yay Government

Birth Control

Perhaps some of you have heard the news the government is now forcing insurance companies to cover, among other things, birth control. Because we “deserve” it. And if you haven’t heard, well…you just did.

Planned Parenthood, no huge surprise here, is celebrating this “victory for women”. Now you can prevent pregnancies (or terminate very early ones with the “morning after” pill) all for free! Yay!

Except for, you know, all the problems with this new rule.

Moral convictions aside, regulations like this are the enemy of Capitalism and small government. Short Economics-In-The-Free-Market lesson: if free birth control was really widely wanted and demanded by The People, eventually one of the insurance companies would latch onto this profit-making idea. “Come to us!” their advertisements would say, “and get free birth control!” Then all the people who wanted free birth control would flock to them. The company would make money, and the people would get free birth control. And (here’s the key) everybody who didn’t want birth control wouldn’t go to that company, wouldn’t be morally compromised by being forced to pay for the others’ free birth control.

Because the insurance companies are greedy, right?

This is why the government made them cover birth control in the first place. Insurance companies want to make money. So if they want to make money, they would add free birth control as one of their benefits and make money.

But they didn’t do this on their own. So obviously free birth control isn’t in terribly high demand. Or they would do it without the government forcing them to.

But the government is also forcing The American People to pay for the free birth control. Because the birth control isn’t free. The insurance companies pay for the birth control. And The People pay the insurance companies. See the connection? The government is forcing The People to pay for something they do not want.

Sounds like the opposite of freedom to me. They're the government. We're The People. We tell them what to do, not the other way around.

Besides that, the federal government shouldn’t be messing around in health care at all. It’s not Constitutional. I thought we wanted our “right to privacy”? Simply put:

Dear Government,

Get out of our lives.

Love (or lack thereof),  

PS: American People, I'd appreciate it if you could vote in my polls over there to the right. Thanks!

Images found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.

Life Begins Now (Part 3)

In two previous posts, I’ve been going through a list. It’s a list of different opinions about when life (and/or personhood) begins. Today, I’ll finish explaining the last few things on that list, and, finally, give my own reasons for when life begins.

·        When the heart begins to beat

A baby’s heart begins to beat at eighteen days after conception. Though this, like most of the other opinions, doesn’t signify personhood in itself, it’s hard to ignore. Something that has a heartbeat is very obviously alive. And, other than insects and algae and the like, very few animals don’t have a heart. Also, not many animals have two hearts. See what this implies?

Not only is the baby alive, it also is its own person. The baby has its own blood and own heart, completely separate from the woman’s blood and heart. (As I’ve mentioned before, pro-abortioners say that a woman has a right to control her own body. So she does. The baby isn’t part of her body.)

·        When the first brain waves are recorded, or when the baby is conceived.

I “squished” these two last opinions together because they ran together while I was writing this.

A popular opinion among pro-lifers is that brain waves can be detected at six weeks, two days. A popular opinion among pro-abortioners is that this is bogus.

To be honest, since there is such an immense amount of controversy (even more so than with fetal pain) and such convincing arguments on both sides, and since I haven’t tried measuring fetal brain waves myself, I’m not comfortable with saying for sure which opinion is right. However, in The Biology of Prenatal Development, distributed by National Geographic, as well as many other sources that aren’t necessarily pro-life, it is stated as true. (Here is the segment where this is stated. I encourage you to watch some of the other videos as well—this is incredible footage of live embryos and fetuses.) (To be fair, it is also rebuffed as not true by multiple sources as well. However, I have yet to see something rebuff this claim that isn’t pro-abortion.)

There’s something else to this though. Wilder Penfield, a neural cartographer, electrically stimulated the brains of his patients (for necessary surgical reasons. You can read about it here.), often resulting in a body part (such as a hand) moving involuntarily. The patients would often hold down their own hand to keep it from moving. The brain can be stimulated to make physical aspects of people move, but you can’t stimulate the brain to, for example, make a person pro-life or pro-abortion. You can affect a person’s environment to influence their thinking, you can plant an idea like in “Inception”, but it is the person who makes the choice. You can’t stimulate their choice. It doesn’t work like that. My point? There is something non-physical about human beings. That's what makes human beings special. Despite all the scientific facts and evidence you can gather, there’s still something elusive that can’t be tracked down with a microscope. Who are we to ignore that? It's impossible to tell when this "starts".

Life begins now. When does the life gain personhood? The baby is a person when it is born. She is a person a few  hours before she is born. A few days. A few weeks? Where is the line? Where does this clump of tissue suddenly become a person? Preemies can be born at twenty-three weeks, and they are people then. They'll still be people a few hours before. A few days. A few weeks? Let's say babies become people at twenty weeks. Okay. Fine. So it's okay to kill them at nineteen weeks, six days? WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE? Does this really happen: not a person...not a person...BOOM! PERSON! What happens in a twenty-four hour time line? How is the baby less of a person at nineteen weeks, five days? Four days? Three days? What's the difference between eighteen weeks and seventeen weeks? 

From now until death, this human is alive.  Human beings are special. This human is her own unique person, non identical to any other living thing for all of creation. She is completely separate from her mother, and also completely dependent on her mother. Does it really matter what physical things are functioning or not? Before, she wasn't anybody. She was an it, devided into two halves. Egg, sperm. Nothing. Not growing, just sitting. Alive just as a finger or kidney is alive. And then...they join together. Conceived, and she now has eye color and height and personality and gender. From the instant she is conceived, she is growing. Conscious, aware, feeling, or not, this human is a person. Humans are people, not mere tissue.

People.

Image found via Google Images. No copyright infringement intended.