May 2014 Newsletter
Posted By cmbuuck on May 5, 2014
Life Affirming News
Abortion Compounds the Grief of Many Women
Pope Francis / LifeNews Update
Pope Francis has won accolades for combining compassion and concern for unborn children killed in abortions and women who face grief and anguish after an abortion.
The leader of the Catholic Church has urged Christians to do more to reconnect women who have had abortions with God and the church and he continued that admonition of grace and mercy today in a meeting with Catholic bishops from South Africa.
“Abortion compounds the grief of many women who now carry with them deep physical and spiritual wounds after succumbing to the pressures of a secular culture which devalues God’s gift of sexuality and the right to life of the unborn,” he said. “The sacrament of reconciliation, in particular, must be rediscovered as a fundamental dimension of the life of grace.”
To read more on this story go to:
http://www.lifenews.com/2014/04/25/pope-francis-abortion-compounds-the-grief-of-many-women/
And Then There Were None
LifeNews Update
In a powerful and moving new video, Abby Johnson, the former manager of a Planned Parenthood abortion facility in southeast Texas reads a letter to an aborted baby she watched die in an abortion.
Since converting to the pro-life perspective and getting out of the abortion industry, Johnson has led a new organization called And Then There Were None, designed to assist other abortion facility workers to quit their jobs and provide them the spiritual, job placement, and other resources they need to leave their current places of employment.
In this powerful new video, Abby talks about her spiritual journey to find healing, grace and forgiveness from God after working in a position where she oversaw the destruction of so much human life. The letter is a powerful testimony of grace and mercy and seeking forgiveness.
“I’m stricken with sorry,” Johnson says. “I’m sorry I didn’t defend you and I’m sorry I stood there and watched you die.”
To read more on this story and view the video go to:
Doctors Groups Promote Denying Medical Treatment to Elderly and Disabled Patients
LifeNews Update
In “Treatment Cost Could Influence Doctors’ Advice,” the New York Times’s Andrew Pollack reports that several major physician groups are poised to begin openly considering cost when seeking to deny life-saving treatment—and that some of them are explicitly calling for factoring in patients’ “quality of life” in judging cost-effectiveness.
Last month the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association released a report calling for the use of “Quality Adjusted Life Years” or QALYs in assessing whether the added life associated with a treatment is worth the cost. This is the often criticized assessment process for approving or disapproving particular treatments employed by Great Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
It is essential to understand what is meant by the term “quality of life” to understand why this move is so dangerous.
AQALY would be used (and is used abroad) to deny treatments to patients against their will based on their age, expected length of life, or of the patient’s present or predicted disability or quality of life. Under such a system someone in a wheelchair, for example, is determined to have a lower quality of life compared with an able-bodied person. Thousands of subjective judgments enter mathematical equations – ones that treat those with disabilities of lower value, simply because those making judgments “would not want to live that way.”
Those developing QALY’s combine these value judgments and only those they deem quality lives can get more costly life-saving treatments. This is extremely dangerous territory fraught with dangers.
To read more on this story go to:
Speaking Up For Marriage
Adriane Dorr, editor of the Lutheran Witness
“So, how do we as a church reclaim holding out for marriage?… We pray. We repent. We spend lots of time in God’s Word. We receive the sacrament regularly. We talk about it. We talk about it with our kids when they’re young. We don’t fall prey to the ‘Well, they’re going to do it anyway, so I may at least tell them how to be protected.’ No. We tell our young women about their worth and their value. We tell our young men what it means to be a man. We lift up the values of waiting. And we wait with them.”
The Danger Of Compromise
Decision May 2014
Increasingly churches, Christian organizations and individual believers feel pressure to adapt to the culture instead of obeying what God has clearly stated in His Word. If we value popularity more than obedience, we will invariably present a false gospel that belittles the seriousness of sin and our need for God’s forgiveness and salvation. Never has the need been greater for Christians to speak the truth to a world stumbling in darkness.