Everyone Has the Right to Pursue Happiness

ChelseaAbortion, Disabled, Embryo ScreeningLeave a Comment

It’s one of the fundamental human rights that our founding fathers here in the US formally recognized in our Declaration of Independence. And, yet, so many human beings here and throughout the world are judged by someone else’s standard of happiness and snuffed out (denied their other most basic human right to life) and never given the chance to pursue and determine happiness for themselves.

Last weekend, I read an article that really cut me to the core and confirmed a lot of what I wrote in a recent post about the able-bodied view of what life with a disability is like. Though I’m well aware that many, many children pre-natally diagnosed with various diseases and disabilities are killed in the womb, I was not prepared to read exactly what the thought process might be for one making such a decision. The description she gives of how awful she pictured the future would be for her unborn handicapped child was, as a disabled person myself, almost unbearable. My comments on it can be found over at Creative Minority Report where the wonderful Archibold boys are letting me borrow some space once a week for the next few weeks. Check it out.

Music for Your Monday: A Homeschool Family

ChelseaFamily, Humor, Music, video2 Comments

This is cute. From comedian Tim Hawkins:

Cute Laughing Baby Blogging

ChelseaCute Baby Blogging, video1 Comment

Because laughing babies make the world a better place (h/t The Anchoress):

“How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.” -Mother Teresa

See more laughing babies

Pro-Life Prayer to the Holy Spirit

ChelseaPrayer, Pro LifeLeave a Comment

come-holy-spirit.pngO Holy Spirit of God, You were promised to us by the Lord Jesus as an Advocate, as one who pleads our cause and speaks up for us in the heights of heaven. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever…”(Jn.14:15).

The apostle Paul has taught us that You intercede for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in speech (Rom. 8:26).

We praise You today for the gift of salvation, for we are deeply aware that we cannot save ourselves. We have sinned, and we cannot win forgiveness on our own. We need an Advocate.

We ask You, O Holy Spirit, to make us ever more aware of those who need us as advocates. Grant that we may hear the cries of our youngest, smallest brothers and sisters, those still in the womb, who cannot speak or defend themselves, and who cannot even pray.

Holy Spirit, as You are the Advocate, so make us advocates. As You hear our cries for mercy, so let us hear the cries of others for mercy. Save us from the misfortune of seeking mercy only for ourselves, while being deaf to others. As you loosened the tongues of the apostles at Pentecost, so grant us today a Pentecost for the unborn, that we may speak for them before the great and the small, before governments and institutions, and before all Your people. Amen.

Via Priests for Life

Veni, Sancte Spiritus!

ChelseaMusic, Prayer, Religion, videoLeave a Comment

PentecostI really love this:

The disciples spoke in the language of every nation. At Pentecost God chose this means to indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit: whoever had received the Spirit spoke in every kind fo tongue. We must realize, dear brothers, that this is the same Holy Spirit by whom love is poured out in our hearts. It was love that was to bring the Church of God together all over the world. And as individual men who received the Holy Spirit in those days could speak in all kinds of tongues, so today the Church, united by the Holy Spirit, speaks in the language of every people,

Therefore if somebody should say to one of us, “You have received the Holy Spirit, why do you not speak in tongues?” his reply should be, “I do indeed speak in the tongues of all men, because I belong to the body of Christ, that is the Church, and she speaks all languages. What else did the presence of the Holy Spirit indicate at Pentecost, except that God’s Church was to speak in the language of every people?” –An excerpt from an exposition of Ecclesiastes by St. Gregory of Agrigentum

The Potent Power of Forgiveness

ChelseaPro LifeLeave a Comment

Unforgiveness is like cancer. It will eat you from the inside out. -Mary Johnson

This is a wonderful story of forgiveness that reminds me a lot of Assunta Goretti, the mother of St. Maria Goretti, who forgave the man who attempted to rape and mortally wounded her the young saint:

h/t Deacon Greg

Of course justice should be sought and served, but always tempered with mercy and in accordance with the dignity of the human person. We are all called to forgive and to love our enemies – a hard task, but it’s not impossible. Love is not a feeling, it is a decision – an act of the will, not of emotion. A priest in our diocese, reflecting on Christ’s call to forgive your neighbor “seventy times seven” (Mt. 18:22), once said that, it’s not always the case that someone will repeatedly offend you, but you may have to repeatedly forgive someone in your heart for the same offense as the hurt does not easily – if ever – go away completely.

We don’t have to feel good about our enemies or even like them, per se, but we should always will them good – if not for their own sake, than at least to free our own souls from the “cancer” of unforgiveness.

Previous: Pro-Life is Whole-Life

Diaz: “Sex is My Favorite Sport”

ChelseaLove, Marriage, Sex, Sexuality1 Comment

Spoken like a true lady:
diaz.png

“Sex is my favorite sport,” Diaz gushed while promoting her new movie, “Bad Teacher.”
“Sex is the sexiest word in the English language,” she says in the June issue of Maxim Magazine. “Just the word is sexy to me. There’s something to it, don’t you think?”
Diaz, 38, who is cast as a foul-mouthed school mistress in her new comedy, said she is high on life but down on marriage.
“I don’t think we should live our lives in relationships based off old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer,” said Diaz, who insists she still believes in romance .

This exactly the kind of meaningless attitude towards sex and marriage that is poisoning our society, contributing to our culture of death, which is why Pope Benedict spent much of his recent visit to Croatia telling all people to recognize the beauty, joy and witness of Christian marriage and family life, and to reject secularism, artificial contraception, co-habitation and everything that is opposed to true love. He encouraged young people, especially, to “be courageous” and not afraid to make a real commitment to another person, showing that “it is possible, like Christ, to love without reserve.”

That men and women should be a sincere gift to one another, body and soul, united in a life-long commitment of love, is not, as Diaz suggests, some old, outdated tradition, but the true meaning of human sexuality and why we were created male and female. Society may have radically changed in the past 50 years, dulling our moral sensitivities, but the truth of who we are has human being has not and reclaiming this truth is paramount to building a true culture of life.

Suicide, Abortion and a Kevorkian Round-Up

ChelseaAbortion, Assisted SuicideLeave a Comment

Douthat_New.jpgRoss Douthat has a couple of good pieces at the NY Times. First, is his op-ed on death of Jack Kevorkian and the public’s approval of his deadly profession:

If participating in a suicide is legally and ethically acceptable, in other words, it can’t just be because cancer is brutal and dementia is dehumanizing. It can only be because there’s a right to suicide.

And once we allow that such a right exists, the arguments for confining it to the dying seem arbitrary at best. We are all dying, day by day: do the terminally ill really occupy a completely different moral category from the rest? A cancer patient’s suffering isn’t necessarily more unbearable than the more indefinite agony of someone living with multiple sclerosis or quadriplegia or manic depression. And not every unbearable agony is medical: if a man losing a battle with Parkinson’s disease can claim the relief of physician-assisted suicide, then why not a devastated widower, or a parent who has lost her only child?

Read the rest.

Really, anyone who thinks that legal assisted suicide (AS) would only be confined to the terminally ill is fooling himself. This is not a hypothetical “slippery slope” delusion of pro-lifers. Even many AS advocates agree that when killing is accepted in certain circumstances to relieve human suffering, it is “irrational to confine it to those who are terminally ill.” Jack Kevorkian is championed as a compassionate humanitarian who gave relief to those who had “no hope,” but in reality, some 60 % of the people he “helped” were not actually dying or terminally ill. In fact, in several cases, autopsies revealed “no anatomical evidence of disease.” And over in Switzerland, which has the most relaxed AS laws and a whole clinic devoted to killing people, several non-terminal patients have killed, including 23 year old Daniel James, who was paralyzed in a rugby accident.

Then, on his blog yesterday, Douthat has some smart commentary on Will Saletan’s Slate piece on the death of Jack Kevorkian in which he compared AS to abortion:

[I]t’s possible to accept that no government can “stop” assisted suicide or abortion completely (and that no government should create the kind of deeply- invasive mechanisms required to try) without believing that either practice should therefore be legalized and legitimated. Avoiding the police-state scenario doesn’t require treating self-slaughter as a protected right, and effectively licensing the Jack Kevorkians of the world to cater to anyone who wants to die badly enough to take the plunge. That’s how our laws treat abortion, and the result is a kind of abortion industry — in which the country’s largest abortion provider doubles as a major Democratic interest group, and for-profit freelancers take advantage of the vulnerable (a subject that Saletan has written about eloquently). If the right to die really became “a lot like” the right to abortion in America, there would be Swiss-style thanatoriums in most American cities, the Hemlock Society would be a major lobbying group (boasting, no doubt, that most of its resources go to palliative care rather than assisted suicide), and Kermit Gosnell-style thanatists would prey on the elderly while the courts looked the other way.

Read the rest

Speaking of Kevorkian, Wesley Smith has been keeping tabs on the MSM’s reportage of his “legacy” following his death last week and setting the record straight:

Washington Post Tells a Kevorkian Doozy
NYT Hagiographic Obit of Kevorkian Omits Hard Truths
Barbara Walters Pitches Jack the Compassionate “Dr. Life” Garbage
Bloomberg Obit Tells Facts About Macabre Kevorkian

Besides being a convicted murderer, Jack Kevorkian was a disturbed man who was obsessed with death and human experimentation. Maybe some part of him really did want to help ease human suffering, but the way he went about doing it was far from “dignified” and an arrogant intrusion into spiritual time. May his soul rest in peace.

Music for Your Monday: Cicada Song

ChelseaMusic, videoLeave a Comment

A bit of a different music Monday today. This song has no real pro-life message – unless you consider the fact that it’s their mating song.

Cicadas come out every 13 years here in Mid-Missouri to sing and mate. The last time they were out was 1998, so this year is their year to party and they’re out in full, loud and nasty force right now! You can’t see them too well in this video that I shot on my iPhone yesterday (I try not to get too close to them if I can possibly avoid it!!), but you can definitely hear them! There must be thousands in these trees.

They’ve definitely reached a fever-pitch here. I hope that means we’re at the peak of this brood and it won’t be lasting too much longer. I had to get a bunch of them swept out of my garage yesterday – so nasty!!

Here is a video my dad took. He got a little more up close and personal:

Most Paralyzed People are Happy to be Alive

ChelseaAssisted Suicide, Disabled3 Comments

emmerdale.pngPeter Saunders wrote recently at the MercatorNet euthanasia blog about how television dramas make rare events appear common and so distort public opinion on key issues. He talked specifically about the UK soap opera Emmerdale which is involved in an assisted suicide plot line involving a young man who is paralyzed in a car accident and asks his mom to help him end his life by administering a lethal dose of tablets in his drink. We saw a similar story told here in the US a few years ago in the movie Million Dollar Baby, about a female boxer about a female boxer who becomes paralyzed and seeks suicide help from her trainer. I know, depressing, right? Do these stories really represent of the reality of the majority of us who get this disability? Saunders found some interesting stats:

Spinal cord injury is actually not uncommon – about 11,000 new cases occur in the US every year and about 250,000 people are estimated to be living with the condition. On a population basis we would therefore expect about 2,000 new cases a year in the UK and 50,000 living with the condition at any one time. About half of these would involve the cervical spine, with the strong risk of tetraplegia (or quadraplegia).

The Guardian reported in 2009 that amongst over one hundred people who had killed themselves at Dignitas over ten years only two had tetraplegia. A 1985 British Medical Journal study of 21 people who were paralysed from the neck down and needed ventilators to help them breathe, found that only one person wished that she had been allowed to die. Two were undecided, but the remaining 18 were pleased to be alive. In other words the number of people with spinal cord injury wanting to kill themselves is very low indeed as a percentage of all those with the condition.

The Daniel Jameses and Dan Crewes of the world represent a very tiny percentage of sci patients who can’t accept or live with their injuries. But that’s who these filmmakers choose to focus on. Why? Not exactly uplifting entertainment, if you ask me (not that that’s always Hollywood’s goal…Monster’s Ball, anyone??). Part of the reason is, I think, because that is what fits with the “able-bodied” idea of life with such a disability: dark, limiting, lonely – depressing – and not worth living at all. I don’t want to believe that, but, as I’ve mentioned here before, one of the most common responses I get from people when I answer their questions about the permanence of my injury is a very shocked, ““wow…well you seem pretty positive despite that.”

Yes, a spinal cord injury is devastating to come to terms with and life in a wheelchair sometimes very difficult, but it’s not the end of the world. The reality is that the majority of us with spinal cord injuries (and many other disabilities, for that matter) choose to live with our disability and find that there’s still quite a lot to enjoy about our accident.pnglives. We live perfectly happy, healthy, active lives, even those with high level injuries. Sure, we have to do things a little differently (sometimes very inconveniently so) and some of us need more assistance than others for even the most simple, ordinary tasks, but the value and meaning of our lives are in no way diminished by some physical limitations.

Life with a disability is difficult for everyone to adjust to, friends and family members included. But, it is important that people with disabilities, especially right after a life altering injury, are given encouragement from their loved ones, even though the adjustment may be hard for them, as well. They need to be surrounded by positive people who don’t just focus on what the injury takes away, but affirm their life and show them what is still possible, what they still have to live for.