REASONS FOR ABORTION: Fear Tops the List

by Susan Fox

I love sitting in a restaurant by the water and looking out the window.

One day, I was doing just that when I saw a 9-year-old boy walk out on the dock with his fishing pole and drop his hook in the water.

It didn’t take very long before he excitedly pulled a wiggling fish out of the water onto the dock. Whoops! Somebody forgot to teach this young man what to do with a live fish! He became fearful and visibly distressed. Then he finally decided the matter. He stomped on the still-living, slippery fish with his shoes.

In many aspects of life, fear is something that can drive us to make poor choices. And while we may have compassion on the untrained fisher boy, we would argue that his actions were not merciful.  

Unfortunately, fear -- not mercy -- drives the abortion rate in the United States. The womb is probably the most dangerous place in America. But it’s not because of rape, incest, and maternal or fetal health. Even the most liberal statistics show that less than 2 percent of abortions are done for all those reasons combined. More conservative statistics put the number at less than 1 percent.

The vast majority are elective abortions: mothers state they are not ready, they can’t afford a baby, they don’t have a husband; they have no place to live with a child, their parent or significant other is pressuring them into the abortion. Having multiple reasons, 74 percent said they were afraid of how a baby would change their lives.  

Fifty-six million Americans have died in the womb since 1973 because their parents were afraid. Reasons for Having an Abortion in the United States

Pope Francis has been very blunt as to the Christian responsibility to oppose abortion. “A society that abandons children and that marginalizes the elderly will sever its roots and darken its future,” he said.

Last month, in an address to the Associations of Catholic Doctors, Pope Francis said there is, in secular society,  “a widespread mentality of profit, the ‘culture of waste,’ which now enslaves the hearts and minds of many, and has a very high cost. It requires us to eliminate human beings, especially if they are physically or socially weaker. Our response to this mentality is a decided and unhesitating ‘yes’ to life.”

“Every child who is not born, but unjustly condemned to be aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ, the Lord’s face, before he was born…and every senior, …every elderly, sick person or those at the end of his days, carries the face of Christ. You cannot discard (them), (this is) the ‘culture of waste’! You cannot discard (them)!”

Abortion is bullying. It is always done to a helpless person, who is weaker than you are. I know that the abortion lobby often characterizes people who are pro-life as lacking compassion for the mother. But it is precisely because I care about mothers and fathers that I am against abortion and I favor stable married families because secure married women are less likely to seek an abortion.

But for women not having the social safety net of a loving husband, what is wrong with American liberals that they can’t provide a place to live, medical care and emotional nourishment to unwed mothers? They just throw up their hands, refuse to help and favor the legal murder of the child in the womb? Don’t touch me with your problem, they say. Go to the abortionist. Oh, I forgot, we do pay for the abortion now through our taxes. How kind. The cash register rings and a child is delivered into a pool of blood.

I am pro-life, but don’t label me and put me away in your box, “pro-what” or “anti-what.” Every abortion has at least two victims, a woman and a child (unborn). A more accurate description of my position is PRO-WOMAN and PRO-CHILD. Hurl that insult at me.

Sometimes, abortion has three or more victims, including the father. Men grieve for the loss of their child – just like women do when they come to their senses. That makes me a PRO-HUMAN BEING FROM CONCEPTION TO NATURAL DEATH.

I have many close friends who have had abortions, and after they converted many of them realized their reasons were as flimsy as these statistics show and they were as appalled at their actions as I would be had I done the same thing.

One friend we called the One-Armed Bandit because she always had her baby girl on her arm. She was a well beloved and beautiful girl, a good Catholic at peace and free at last to do as she wished — have a baby.

This friend had four abortions. “Why did she have four abortions?” you may ask. Well, she was beautiful — she was a ballerina — and her mother felt pregnancy would mar her good looks. So when she got pregnant out of wedlock her mother got her an abortion. Trouble is she didn’t really want the abortion. She wanted the baby. So she got pregnant again, and again, and again. Four beautiful human beings – made in the image and likeness of God -- down the drain – all murdered at the altar of their grandmother’s fear.

When I met her she was married to a good Catholic man and she had her first live baby. She was so happy. He absolutely adored her. But her prior promiscuity and abortion robbed them of one of the greatest joys of married love.  The One-Armed Bandit spent so much time trying to undo the first abortion by getting pregnant again outside of wedlock that she gave me some advice for the day I got married.

She told me certain things I won’t mention that women can do in order to give their husbands marital relations without actually being involved in the act themselves. She was so burned out she really didn’t want a man. She just wanted a baby.

It’s horrible to treat a husband that way. It cheats him out of the rightful goods of marriage. It actually makes my heart hurt to think about it. But I do not judge my dear friend, the One-Armed Bandit, because she had an awful upbringing. Her mother’s sin continued to haunt the daughter and the son-in-law in their marriage. The wages of sin are death.

My roommate had a one-night stand with a guy in another city, got pregnant, and had an abortion. But that wasn’t the reason. Her mother did not want anyone to know that her daughter was pregnant out of wedlock so she insisted on the abortion. Keep it quiet, right? Her daughter dutifully had the abortion, but she also told a large number of people -- all her co-workers, friends and roommates -- what had happened and that she was having an abortion. Therefore the purpose of the abortion from her mother’s point of view was completely frustrated. I watched in anguish as she smoked dope to try and dull the pain of the choice she was making.

Another friend was a victim of rape in a mental hospital, one of those rare cases that supposedly makes abortion okay. But again, the abortion was not her choice. It was her mother’s. Because of her hospitalization, she was not in any position to resist her mother’s will.

Today, she is one of those people you derisively label “pro-life.” She marches and rallies against abortion, trying to save another woman from the same tragic mistake and a lifetime of heartache.

My physical therapist and I got into a political discussion. I went through my usual spiel — fifty-six million Americans won’t be able to hug their moms, won’t get their first kiss, will never buy your house, never marry, never have children because they have died in the abortion holocaust.

Like a frightened chicken, my physical therapist started shouting “rape and incest!” (My husband said I was lucky I didn’t get my neck broke because that’s where he was working when we had this discussion) Do you know that abortion clinics protect pedophiles? They cover up the result of the crime of rape and incest. Life Dynamics, a research organization out of Denton, Texas, has exposed the cover-up of child sex abuse by America’s two largest abortion providers, Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation.

Despite the obligation to report to the government when they find an underage girl, who is pregnant, in the majority of cases, abortion providers fail to file the relevant report, Life Dynamics found. Child Predators

On top of that Life Dynamics ran their own underground sting operation. They had a woman with a child’s voice tell the targeted clinics on the phone a) she was underage b) she was pregnant and c) the father of the child was over the age of 18. It’s laughable to hear the abortion clinic workers on the phone advising the girl how to come in and not tell them the truth – that she was a victim of statutory rape – in order to protect the male predator who impregnated her.

So with the crime covered up by an abortion, the girl is returned to her rapist and allowed to become a victim again.

It is very popular to refer to the unborn child in the early stages of gestation, and call it a “blob of cells.” This is part of the depersonalization of the unborn child.  I told one person who used that expression that the fifty-six million Americans murdered by abortion in the United States were not a blob of cells, they were human beings -- like he used to be before he got a stone for his heart. It’s ironic that the people accusing the unborn child of being a “blob of cells” are in fact turning themselves into a heartless “blob of cells.”

I myself had two miscarriages. The first one, my son, Raphael, came out six weeks from conception and you could see my husband’s face and long legs. I went to the hospital for the DNC after the miscarriage, and the male nurse said, “Did you bring the tissue?” I burst into tears, and shouted, “I didn’t bring the tissue! I brought the baby.” The doctor agreed. He was a perfectly formed baby. (We couldn’t really see the sex of the child at that age. I simply see him as a boy)

My daughter, Mary Christina, my third pregnancy came out in pieces. The doctor failed to give me adequate progesterone to keep the pregnancy even though we knew I had a defect that required it. So at 8 weeks from conception we had an ultrasound and there was no heartbeat. My young son (my second pregnancy) was with me. He was about three years old. He was so shocked he tried to sit down on a stool, but kept falling. He said, “Mommie, you have a dead baby in your belly!” I wanted to make sure that was true. So I let her come out in pieces. The ultrasound, though, before I miscarried showed she was beautifully formed, and terribly human.

There are two victims in every abortion and miscarriage — the mother and the child. And I have read accounts of fathers, too, who finding out that the woman in their life was going to have an abortion, tried frantically to talk her out of it. When they were unable to do so, they ended up at Rachel’s Vineyard Retreat along with the broken hearted mothers. Miscarriage, abortion — it is all heartache for the people involved.

The fourth victim of abortion that is not often recognized is the sibling of the aborted child. Many women reported that they had an abortion because they didn’t want any more kids. A close friend of mine had a recurring dream when she was growing up. Her beloved mother was planning to kill her and bury her. Her father was very sad, but he was digging her grave. She didn’t understand the dream, which made her feel insecure, until many years later when she found out that her mother had an abortion when she was a child.

Yet we have a president who says he wouldn’t punish his daughters with a baby if they got pregnant out of wedlock. In essence, he would kill his grandchildren to allow his daughters to live a “comfortable” life -- a life that is comfortable until they figure out what they have done.

The problem with a decision for abortion made out of fear is that it is absent of virtue and absent of justice. Virtue consists in the proper use of things as intended by God. For instance, the function of the eye is to see, therefore seeing is its virtue. The improper use of the eye is an injustice. Abortion is an abuse of the sexual act and its fecundity. It violates the law, “Thou shalt not kill.” Do you imagine that God gave us the law so that we might be unhappy? No, He gave it to us to us for the opposite reason, so we might have life and have it abundantly.

Many times the mothers who had abortions said they did so because they were in college and they needed to finish their education, or they weren’t ready and they needed to have a baby later when they were ready. They were deciding this based on an ugly materialistic worldview. Not a peep of goodness or happiness exists in this worldview: Man is nothing but a blob of cells, has no opportunity for eternal happiness, and lives on the level of an animal.

“In his riches, man lacks wisdom:

he is like the beasts that are destroyed.” (Psalm 49)

Living on this level of discernment, man’s life becomes instinctual. Like an animal, the drive to survive is paramount. Fear will be the arbitrator of all his decisions. And this decision to abort the child  -- the last decision made in the lives of many children -- is completely absent of joy, happiness, mercy, courage, wisdom, goodness and justice.

The liberal professes to be very concerned about justice. But they are blind men. They do not understand they are actively supporting the very injustice they hate.

Even though the choice to abort is always wrong, it carries with it great mercy --  Divine Mercy, in fact.  If you have had an abortion, you actually have a greater right to God's mercy than someone who has never been involved in abortion.  This is a mystery, a paradox that is impossible to fully explain.  But Jesus himself told us He came for sinners, not for the righteous.  God, our Father, is so close to you now that His ears are stuck to your lips, and He only waits for one word from you in order to embrace you and bring you back firmly into His Life:  "Lord."  My friends who had abortions would firmly tell you this is true.

“But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." (Matt 9:13)

And Jesus said that.

Other sources:

Woman have abortions because they feel trapped and hopeless

A Society that Abandons Children has a Dark Future

EXPECT CHANGE: Pope Consecrates World

by Susan Fox

All lay in ruins. Every bright hope that God held for mankind seemed to be lost.

He had brought matter out of nothing, separated the water from the land, brought forth green life and put living creatures on the earth. God continued to create, making a Paradise --- a garden full of lush fruit trees, sweet animals, rushing water and one beautiful companion. All this was done for one man, 
whom He had made from the clay of the earth, touched with His breath, and marked with His living image. His name was Adam.

There was only one rule in that garden: Do not eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 


Every day, Adam and God walked together in the garden in the cool of afternoon. They were the best of friends, sharing everything.  But on one inky black afternoon, overrun with snakes and self-doubt, Adam and Eve, his companion, knowingly ate the wrong fruit.  They forgot the gratitude they owed to God.

Now God went to the garden as usual, looking for them. “Where are you?” He called. But they were hiding. How that hurt. Now Paradise would unravel. The snake would crawl on his belly, the woman would labor in pain, and the man’s work would turn cruel.

But wait. What was that? God said something to the snake that didn’t make sense. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; 
he will crush your head, 
and you will strike his heel.” (Gen. 3:15)

And so God offered man a prophetic ray of hope. He promised a Woman and He promised a Son. Together, they would untie the knot that Adam and Eve had made with their sin.

On Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, the anniversary of the last apparition of Our Lady at Fatima, Portugal, the ever-wonderful and controversial Pope Francis entrusted everyone in the world to this Woman, so that she in turn could entrust us to Her Seed, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with the result that the snake’s head (all resistance to God) would be crushed once and for all.

“Bring everyone under your protection and entrust everyone to your beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus,” the Pope implored the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ offered the first Marian Consecration as He hung upon the cross dying:  "When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother "Woman, behold your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home." (John 19:26-27) Each Christian is asked to do the same thing – take Mary into your home.

 “It is a fact: Mary always brings us to Jesus,” the pope said on the vigil night before the consecration.

That was Our Lady’s purpose on Oct. 13, 1917, when she appeared to three Portuguese children and God made the sun dance for as many as 70,000 witnesses. In the sun, the children saw an image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Before the apparition, it rained terribly and everyone was wet until the sun whirled in the sky and seemed to rush to the earth. Then everyone’s clothes were dried, the mud hardened and the puddles emptied, leaving the ground as if it had never rained. The people knelt and prayed.

Such a fervent response to a miracle recalled Elijah’s triumph over the prophets of the god Ba’al on Mount Carmel. The people of Israel had been dithering between the Lord God and the god Ba’al. The Prophet Elijah asked the people, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba’al, then follow him.”

So he set up a test with the 450 prophets of Ba’al: two altars, two dead bulls, one for Ba’al and one for God. They would ask their gods to consume the sacrifice without lighting a fire themselves. So the priests of Ba’al prayed, cutting themselves and began using many words morning to night. When nothing happened, Elijah teased them, asking, “Has your god gone aside? (to the bathroom) Is he sleeping?”

But the god Ba’al did not consume his sacrifice. So Elijah built a moat around his altar and filled it with water, then soaked the sacrifice as well. He prayed, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word.” Then he prayed that the people’s hearts would turn back to the one true God.  

“Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt offering, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.” (1Kings18:38)

Elijah’s prayer was answered. The priests of Ba’al were slaughtered, and the drought the people had been suffering was ended. It rained. We heard a crunching sound and found a dead snake on the ground.

The water evaporated suddenly at Mount Carmel just like it did on Oct. 13, 1917 in Fatima, Portugal. The two miracles are related. The world was given a choice at Mount Carmel, and the world was given a choice at Fatima in 1917. Unfortunately, we postponed our response in 1917. And the price was quite high.

The consecration of Russia requested by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917 was delayed almost 70 years. In 1984 with the participation of the willing bishops of the world, Pope John Paul II consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia confirmed this consecration – unlike previous ones -- finally satisfied heaven’s 1917 request to consecrate Russia.

But Our Lady had warned that unless this consecration was done promptly, Russia would spread her errors around the world. Her errors – including abortion, euthanasia, contraception and its related gay marriage, loss of property rights, loss of religious freedom, mass murders -- have indeed spread all over the world. In the name of racial purity, Nazi Germany – with gays in all key positions in the military and homeland forces --killed 6 million Jews in World War II, but the total death toll was over 20 million from 1933 to 1945. Religious persecution played a prominent role in the deaths as well. Millions of Catholics died.

China adopted communism in 1949 and purged her population of property owners and business people, and tried to wipe out Catholicism. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million from 1975-1979 on the same principle – get rid of the rich, get rid of teachers. Anyone with glasses was likely to be killed, so the killing fields were full of eyeglasses!  

The same thinking now infests the United States. Our current U.S. president is trying to whip up class envy and hatred for the rich while increasing the government-dependent population. He has imposed legislation on the people that will result in forced euthanasia. It’s called ironically, Obama “care.” So in the U.S. we are suffering a loss of religious freedom, and a loss of the right to private property as the cost of health care is dramatically rising thanks to the federal government. We adopted abortion in 1973, and since then have killed 56 million Americans, a holocaust far worse than what happened in Nazi Germany, but no one seems to understand that.

In more recent years, from the vantage point of a UN pro-life lobbyist, I watched those errors – abortion and contraception -- start to slide into to Ireland, Africa and Catholic South America. And Ireland has lost its religious freedom completely as Catholic hospitals now MUST provide abortion and contraception.

However, only five years after the pope consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Iron Curtain did fall in 1989 – without any bloodshed. NO ONE ANTICIPATED THIS WOULD HAPPEN. The Cold War, which seemed so intractable for decades, ended. Communist governments collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was dissolved. And who’s to say that we didn’t avert a nuclear disaster in the making?

We should be dancing in the streets because Pope Francis said those few and momentous words on Oct. 13! Addressing the Woman of Genesis, he said, “Bring everyone under your protection and entrust everyone to your beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus!”

Instead, traditional Catholics are wondering whether he did a “real” consecration. “It didn’t sound like a consecration to me,” one Catholic posted on the National Catholic Register. Another said, “I agree that Pope Francis’ prayer … was clearly not a real consecration.  A nice gesture in commemoration of the anniversary, perhaps, but that appears to be all that was intended by it.”

“I’m sorry, but every prayer of “consecration” that I have seen and prayed for decades involves the total submission of oneself—including all our thoughts, deeds and possessions—to the divine Entity (God, Jesus or Mary) to be used by them as they wish.  In reading the “Consecration” prayer used by Pope Francis, it seems this is glaringly missing.  It is more of a prayer offering love and devotion as well as asking for guidance—not a true turning over of one’s heart, mind, body and soul,” another said, who was most familiar with the consecration prayer composed by St. Louis Marie de Montfort in the 17^th century.

Too bad Jesus wasn’t familiar with St. Louis Marie de Montfort’s consecration. He could have recited it on the cross. Instead, He just said seven words, four to his mother, “WOMAN, behold your son.” And three words to his disciple John, who stood in place of all mankind at the foot of the cross, “Behold your Mother.” Compared to Jesus, Pope Francis is a total blabbermouth.

“Bring everyone under your protection and entrust everyone to your beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus.” These words mean he gives every living human being to Jesus through Mary. I am glad to be handed over to Our Lord in such a manner. He didn’t need to say the rest of the prayer. Those words alone were adequate to consecrate the world. 

Now it is 2013 and the world lies again in ruins. God asks the people, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba’al, then follow him.”

Too many people have gone after the false god Ba’al – abortion, contraception, gay marriage, euthanasia, collectivism, and religious intolerance.

Stop dithering. Make a choice.