Opinion

The value of a human life

Several government agencies recently put a dollar value on a single human life.  The EPA says that one life is worth $9.1 million, the FDA $7.9 million, and the DOT $6 million.

Taking the DOT’s low-ball estimate of a mere $6 Million per person and multiplying it times 52 Million, the number of surgical abortions since Roe v Wade, the total value of human life lost to our nation due to slaughtering our innocent children is $31,200,000,000,000 ($31.2 Trillion).

If the number of lives lost and missing due to contraception were added, how many zeros would follow the number and what would we call that number? We cannot even imagine such numbers. Abortion and contraception are defined by the Catholic Church as being intrinsically evil. Whatever name we would give to a number with so many zeros, that unimaginable number is the cost of unimaginable evil.

Denver Sallee
Novelty, Ohio, USA

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Where are all the men?

Several weeks ago, one of my friends from Vancouver contacted me to ask for advice. A girl she knew was planning to have an abortion, and my friend needed advice on what to say. Over the next two weeks, I and another one of my pro-life friends from Vancouver, attempted to help her to convince this young woman not to abort her child. The girl, initially open to discussion, had her phone taken away by her boyfriend, and was eventually coerced into having an abortion by a man who saw his own future as more important than the offspring he had fathered.

This is when a question struck me: what has manhood in today’s culture become when two girls in Vancouver are fighting harder for the life of a child than his or her own father?

While the abortion debate is often centred on the woman and the pre-born child, the male is almost never mentioned. Increasingly, I have noticed in dozens of debates on campuses and in the streets that women often state that they can’t raise a child on their own as if it is a foregone conclusion that the father of this child will not step up to his responsibilities. Even more often, women cite their significant other leaving them as one of the motivations behind aborting their children in the first place.

This brings a glaring question to the forefront of the debate: where are all the men?

Traditionally, manhood was defined by a number of things. Men were supposed to be loyal, courageous, responsible, and above all, willing to sacrifice for those they had a duty to protect – namely, women and children. This protective instinct was considered to be as natural as the female maternal instinct.

In American historian William Manchester’s classic narrative history of America, The Glory and the Dream, Manchester describes young men during the first half of the 21st century gleaning their values from heroes of the past, noting that the virtue which brought victory was most frequently an ability to control the self, for instance, to be brave.

Today, popular culture seems to measure manhood up against how many women a man has slept with.

When debating others, I have often found myself facing this same ideal. One university student asked how I was a man if I wasn’t sleeping with chicks, to which I informed him that I held to the quaint point of view that it took more of a man to keep one woman happy for a lifetime than dozens for ten minutes.

When I was doing Choice Chain on the streets of Vancouver with two of my pro-life friends, one middle-aged man walked past and asked us, “shouldn’t you guys be out trying to get laid or something?” This actually shocked me. Whether or not you agree with our position, surely it is more admirable to defend your beliefs in your free time rather than trying to “get laid?”

This is why catch phrases such as “pro-choice” are heralded by many men with such ferocity because “pro-choice” to them doesn’t just mean the woman’s right to kill her pre-born child, it also means they are “pro-choice” in regards to whether or not they have to stick around and care for the offspring they fathered.

One of my friends who regularly pickets abortion clinics has informed me that we would be shocked to see how many sobbing girls are pushed into abortion clinics by their angry boyfriends and fathers. Perhaps more women would stop being “pro-choice” about killing pre-born children if the fathers of these children would stop being “pro-choice” about actually shouldering their responsibilities, as has been the tradition of true manhood in the past.

That men think that sex is purely recreational and has no consequences is imbecilic and delusional.

That men would send their girlfriends, sisters, and wives to have their bodies violated in an absurd crime against nature and have their offspring dismembered is the most disgusting abrogation of responsibility by males in this century.

Maybe the old values of fidelity, responsibility, and self-sacrifice are scorned by many of today’s ˜academic” elites, but I can assure you that deep down, everyone recognizes that these men do not deserve the title of “man”, for their actions defy the term.

While responsibility for abortion is shared equally by men and women, I believe that many women would choose life if men chose to be men. Instead, thousands of pre-born children are sacrificed on the altar of their fathers’ selfishness.

Jonathon Arie Van Maren
Calgary, Alberta

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Re: Archbishop Chaput: Refusing to act on pro-abort Catholic politicians hasn’t worked

I commend Denver Archbishop Charles J Chaput for admitting what many have know about our Catholic bishops for years i.e. that most of them often act not as bishops but hack politicians. The Archbishop rightly suggests that the vast majority of Catholic bishops do not speak out against or censor Catholic politicians who support homosexuality and abortion for fear these politicians will not get elected. They think that once in power these politicians will somehow have an epiphany and reverse their creed. But in never happens. In fact the advancement of abortion and homosexuality has been to a large degree the direct result of actions by Catholic politicians.

The fact of the matter is that these bishops indicate little faith in God and more in their own perceived ability to be practical and compromising. Rather than do the right thing and let God take care of the rest, they resort to their own graceless ingenuity.

Voters, perceiving that no party will challenge the status quo on moral issues, like abortion and homosexual marriage, vote for the party who will best represent their own desires. And so our politicians promise everything to everyone. In the end, everyone loses because the common good loses.

It’s time out Catholic bishops put their pride behind them and start going after these wayward politicians. Voters, for their part, should vote against politicians and parties that tacitly or otherwise support abortion and homosexual special rights. If there is not an honest person among them to vote for they should spoil their ballot.

Paul Kokoski
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

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Re: Catholic teachers union vs. Ontario bishops: who will win on gay clubs?

Ontario’s Catholic Teachers union president, James Ryan said of LSN, ” They have proven themselves to be no friend of OECTA, the Ontario Bishops, Catholic Development & Peace, the Ministry of Education, inclusion or publicly funded Catholic education.”
In lieu of this, I am increasing our donation to LSN by 20% this year.

Ken O’Day, chairman,
Eganville, Ontario, Canada