My free advice this Friday....take it or leave it....

Sometimes I have something I have to say…no matter how unpopular or how up on my soapbox…I have to get this off my chest – but I am giving myself twenty minutes to write it or I could go on for days…Ready….

It is October, and hence Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Every shop I go into wants to know if I want to do this or that to support Susan G. Komen.

My answer is NO, and I won’t feel badly about it.

I fully support research and survivors and those currently battling with breast cancer, but I do not support Susan G. Komen, or the American Cancer Society…it is strictly political.

Susan G. Komen gives funds to Planned Parenthood, and I can’t get behind that – even with their letter that says two Catholic ethicists find that supporting Susan G. Komen doesn’t support abortion.  I will not give to a group that says it is better to give money to Planned Parenthood than to set up other services, to find other ways.  Planned Parenthood does harm, period. They provide abortion services, they undermine the family, they put furthering their agenda over the safety, health and well-being of young girls and women on a daily basis.

My issue with Planned Parenthood is so much greater than the fact that they provide abortions – it is the how and why and where. I could write books about it, but instead I want to tell you what I think the pro-life side is doing wrong…

My husband is a law student. Many of his fellow students are in school for the purposes of fighting pro-abortion laws.  I think abortion is bad, I think it is wrong and I believe it hurts women, children, families and the very fiber of our country…but laws change and making abortion illegal today doesn’t make any guarantee for tomorrow.

Pro-lifers have to win hearts and minds…they have to change women’s (girls’) lives.  Not hypothetically, or logically, but actually – actually change hearts and minds and lives!

I know several women who have had abortions, I have heard strangers talk about their experiences, and never once has anybody made a convincing argument that the choice she made was truly a choice. Not one woman has ever convinced me that she felt as if she had other options.

 Pro-lifers need to change that – today, no matter what the laws regarding abortion are.  We need to raise children to value their bodies and their sexuality. We need to provide safe living environments. We need to teach them what healthy relationships look like. We need to raise daughters to feel safe and secure telling their parents or partners they are pregnant. And we need to embrace those who haven’t been given those things.

No woman who is desperate enough to enter an abortion clinic needs someone in her face with a picture of a mutilated baby…she needs someone to hold her hand, to show her Christ’s love and compassion, to walk with her daily in a time that even for the strongest, healthiest, most supported women is trying.

If pro-lifers would embrace the idea of making all the other choices truly choices for women, we could take the power of groups like Planned Parenthood away…if we offered the other services that Planned Parenthood offered with the great media spin they offered it with, we could change the tide without changing the law.

Am I in the position to go down and stand outside the abortion clinic and bring a mother home who feels she has no other choice than to have an abortion? No, but if you can…..

If my math is right and better than 75% of this country is Christian and there were 1.21 million abortions last year that means that there should be roughly 185 people to help prevent every one abortion, to embrace with Christ's love and compassion every mother who feels so desperate, so alone, so whatever it is that has brought her to face the choice of abortion.

That I could be a part of... Could you?  

Life is a beautiful choice...now let’s make it a choice…truly, not just words…Let us work together to help every woman and child and family have better outcomes.  Let’s  make Planned Parenthood irrelevant. Let’s make women’s health not about politics or laws, but about women. Let’s make it okay to support Susan G. Komen.

And that is my free advice this Friday…