SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, April 2, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – The pain of an abortion can be erased; “no other pattern” can replace the natural family; and married couples have a privilege and “responsibility” to raise children.
These were the sentiments voiced at the 182 General Assembly of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City this weekend.
In an address entitled ”And a Little Child Shall Lead Them,” Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer called on church members to dedicate themselves to the nuclear family: marriage, parenthood, and spending “sacred time” together.
Packer, president of the LDS church’s second highest governing body, related the story of a woman who told him she regretted her abortion. “Tearfully,” he recalled, she “told me that as a college student she had made a serious mistake with her boyfriend. He had arranged for an abortion.”
“In due time they graduated and were married and had several other children,” he said. “She told me how tormented she now was to look at her family, her beautiful children, and see in her mind the empty place where that one child was missing. If this couple understands and applies the Atonement, they will know that those experiences and the pain connected with them can be erased. No pain will last forever…Repentance and the lasting hope that forgiveness brings will always be worth the effort.”
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Quoting Psalm 127:3-5, he said, “Children are an heritage of the Lord: and…happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.” He noted both in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon Third Book of Nephi record that Jesus blessed the little children.
“The creation of life is a great responsibility for a married couple,” he told attendees. “When we were first married, my wife and I agreed to accept the children that would be born to us.”
(Boyd Parker’s pro-life remarks begin at approximately 6:35 into video and continue into the second video, below).
When another young couple “tearfully” told him they were unable to have children of their own, he said, “their state was infinitely better than other couples who are capable of being parents but who rejected and selfishly avoided that responsibility.”
Despite attempts to remold the family, he said “neither man nor woman can bear children alone. It was meant that children have two parents — both a father and a mother. No other pattern or process can replace this one.”
Parenthood matures and refines the character, leading to “one of the greatest discoveries of parenthood”: “that we learn far more about what really matters from our children than we ever did from our parents.”
Packer, born 10th in a family of 11, said, “The ultimate end of all activity in the church is to see a husband and his wife and their children happy at home, protected by the principles and laws of the Gospel…Husbands and wives should understand that their first calling, from which they will never be released, is to one another and then to their children.”
He urged church leaders to make sure they did not overburden parents with church activities at the expense of their home lives. He said, “Family time is sacred time and should be protected and respected.”
The church’s website states the Mormon faith allows abortion “when pregnancy is the result of incest or rape, when the life or health of the mother is judged by competent medical authority to be in serious jeopardy, or when the fetus is known by competent medical authority to have severe defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth.”
The Mormon church’s pro-family leadership on behalf of California’s Proposition 8 led it to endure threats, vicious stereotypes, and the possibility of an IRS investigation.
The conference concluded on Sunday.