I met three fired-up homeschool teens at the Catholic Family Expo last June who had dreamed up a "Wash for Life" event. The idea was simple: teenagers wash cars to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers. They managed to get almost 3,000 teens involved, who together raised more than $80,000--not bad for a few homeschoolers who wanted to do something positive about abortion.
It has been 33 years since Roe v. Wade was decided. Many of my homeschooling friends with young children can't recall an America where abortion was illegal. It's all too easy in our comfortable homeschooling circles to just assume the people on the other side of this issue are evil as well as wrong. That attitude is so wrong in so many ways: it is prejudiced, judgmental, and it cripples our chances of making a difference. If we don't understand the people on the other side of the fence we'll never persuade them.
That's why I want as many homeschoolers as possible to really engage with the abortion issue. It's a perfect opportunity for Christian homeschool teens to look hard at some difficult issues. If your state requires "health education," just do a unit study on abortion! It will cover everything the state requires and then some.
Here's an assigment: have your teen enter the Homeschoolers for Life "Pro-Life Essay Contest." There are three age groups, so everybody has a chance to win. It isn't a huge chore: the essay for older students is only two or three pages long.
You have three weeks--entries are due on October 16!
Over 3,500 terminations per day, 1.3 MILLION per year in the United States alone.
50 or 60 MILLION per year World Wide.
I am a pro-lifer who has no religious convictions at all . I didn't need the fear of god or anything else to come to my decision, just a good sence of what is right and wrong.
You see we were all once a fetus. Is it beyond the realm of possibilities that when your mother first learned she was carrying you, she may have considered her options? What if she had decided to terminate? Would that have been OK?
You would not exist, if you have children they would not exist, and your (husband or wife) would be married to someone else. You would have been deprived of all your experiences and memories. In this day and age with terminations being so readily available and so many being carried out, if you make it to full term
you can consider yourself lucky. Lucky you had a mother that made the choice of life for you. Don't you think they all deserve the same basic human right, LIFE?
I'm all for contraception, prevention is certainly better than termination.
Did you know you can get an implant that is safe, 99.9% effective, and lasts for three years? Just think girls not even a show for three years, wouldn't that be great? I think too many people rely too heavily on the last option (abortion), I think if abortions weren't so readily available people would manage their reproductive system far better resulting in a fraction of the number of unwanted pregnancies.
World wide there are over 50 MILLION aborted pregnancies each year. In America 3,500 terminations carried out every day, that's over 1.3 million every year, 50% of all cases claimed that birth control had been used, 48% admitted they took no precaution, and 2% had a medical reason. That's a stagering 98% that may have been prevented had an effective birth control been used. Don't get me wrong, I suspect the percentages in Australia would be much the same.
Just a lot of unnessessary killing.
I am convinced that in the not too distant future, people will look back at many of the practices of today with disbelief and horror.
At the point of conception is when life began for you. This was the start of your existance. Your own personal big bang. Three weeks after conception heart started to beat. First brain waves recorded at six weeks after conception. Seen sucking thumb at seven weeks after conception.
How glib and insulting to any woman who's ever faced the realities of her own power to give life or live life, or find a way to combine both by sacrificing her own physical autonomy to the process.
I"I think if abortions weren't so readily available people would manage their reproductive system far better . . ."
And I think if free speech weren't so readily available people would manage their oipinions far better. . . but both of us will just have to live with the Constitution and law as it stands and manage our own thinking as best we can.
Maybe the homeschooled kids will be deeper thinkers with more public persuasion abilities at their disposal than pour generation has managed. If not I suppose I'll have to manage my own reproduction and ausblog his (surely not her?) opinions without interference from each other.
Primary Writers, ages 7 to 11
Junior Writers, ages 12 to 14
Senior Writers, ages 15 to 17
Me:
Aside from parroting what their parents and churches say, what sort of life experience and perspective can we expect from these children?
Not much, would be my guess.
But maybe they'll at least incorporate Scott's message that not all pro-choice people are evil. Thanks for that much anyway.
But here's a heads up -- don't bother to try to get to know me if your purpose is to persuade me that you are right about this. That is as likely as me persuading you to leave your church.
But I'm not trying to convert you or your children. I wish these children weren't be taught to try to convert me and mine.
When my children were in public school a teacher told me she thought my Pro-life beliefs were stifling my children's world view. They were in 2nd and 4th grade. I told her what my children knew. It surprised her to know they helped at the pregnancy centers washing clothes, cleaning cribs. They knew at that young age that pregnancy as a teen starts in tears no matter the choice. They also saw that when abortion was the choice the tears didn't stop. They saw joy in the celebration of life at Baby showers, adoptions and births. They prayed for women who had had abortions and for men who had fathered chilrdren they would never hold. Their compassion was great because they saw the pain abortion had caused in the heart of their mother. Facts are informational, and homeschooling parents can do more than give their children facts, they can give them a heart that reaches out to others and changes the world, one prayer, one deed at a time.
How glib and insulting to any woman who's ever faced the realities of her own power to give life or live life, or find a way to combine both by sacrificing her own physical autonomy to the process.
Did the commenter mean to write, "to give life or TAKE life" in the above statement? You can live life in most cases when a child is growing within. You can also take a life. But the two options are not just simply, to "live life" or to "give life." In abortion, you take a life, which is morally wrong, and should be legally wrong. In abortion, you kill another to preserve yourself emotionally, financially, healthfully or otherwise. It's the convenient, selfish choice, period.
I'm a 50-something year-old homeschooling mom who said EXACTLY what she meant. Women live life -- my life -- and as a part of that living, are singularly faced with the consideration of whether to "give life' to another, at a great sacrifice of their own physical autonomy, freedom, self-determination, etc. Becoming a mother is the most serious, important and moral choice I ever made but it was in fact my choice and when I made it, I became willing to give UP that life for the lives of my children. But I any girl obelieve it's deeply immoral to conscript any human into unwilling service to another.You say I'm selfish, I say you sanction slavery for females to your religion. Sahll we now discuss my opinion of sin after the child is born and being beaten to death with the Bible rods and whatever plumbing supplies are at hand?
No woman can morally OR legally have her life trumped by someone else's spiritual beliefs and I see tthis willful failure to acknowledge that it is in fact MY life being dismissed and disregarded in calling oneself "prolife" is the reason that the abortion issue cannot be discussed in polite company (what WERE you thinking, Scott??) Time for the final separation into our proper harness and yoking??
I get that de-personification of the girl or woman is part of the rhetoric, keep the idealistic young folks focused on the "baby" and not the full-fledged living, free human life they would kidnap and conscript into service for their faith, but don't try it on me please.
