As president and founder of American Life League , Judie Brown focuses on the urgent need for America to restore respect for innocent human beings--in society, in the law and in daily life. American Life League began in 1979. It is the nation's largest grass-roots pro-life educational organization, with more than 300,000 American families supporting its work in prayer and with donations.
Website:http://www.all.org/
When I first learned that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had lied about how the birth control pill worked, way back in the mid-1970s, I was incredulous. It never occurred to me that a public official or government agency would deny the facts by simply not mentioning them. Boy, was I naïve! ... There is a flurry of news regarding the possibility that reprogrammed cells, from umbilical cord blood, could be an ethical replacement for the research currently being done using human embryonic stem cells.†Since a human embryo must die in order for his or her stem cells to be used, the use of those cells is totally unethical and immoral. So could the news about the reprogrammed cord blood cells be positive or simply another sham?
Date posted: 2009-11-05
Webster tells us that the transitive verb "pillar" means "to provide or strengthen with or as if with pillars." At the opposite end, we find those who "piller" women - that is, they weaken them by prescribing chemicals to ingest that will eventually damage them physically, emotionally and/or spiritually. To make matters even worse, many medical practitioners do so with impunity. Indeed, the birth control pill is a recreational drug with serious side effects. The most recent example of this is the story of Patti Kelly of Austin, Texas, who.....
Date posted: 2009-09-12
God has been very good to me. But the hard lessons always come. When I came to Christ, I had much to work through. And He has done a deep work in me. But I had been on this journey for two years before He set this on my heart. I believe He knew I had to learn to trust Him enough not to run from it. That's why the timing was so important. I had buried the memory of this baby in a grave so deep that I don't even know if I ever brought the nightmare of it to the forefront of my thinking. How could I? It would have killed me. It has been 15 years since it happened.
Date posted: 2009-06-21
Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves 'the creative action of God', and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can, in any circumstance, claim for himself the right to destroy directly an innocent human being.
Date posted: 2009-06-05
Today, rather than clarity and pride in all things Catholic, there is dilution of what it means to be Catholic and an obvious hesitation on the part of those who lead the Church to throw down the gauntlet and demand of Catholics adherence to Church teaching. On the subject of Obama and the "honorary degree" from Notre Dame, one would have hoped that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops would have come down hard on the administration of Notre Dame. The USCCB should make it clear that either Notre Dame rescind the invitation, or remove the word "Catholic" from any description of this football bastion that might have actually been genuinely Catholic at some point. But no, the USCCB has been eerily silent. Strange, isn't it....
Date posted: 2009-04-01
Star Parker has been a favorite of mine for years; in fact, she spoke at one of American Life League's events in Florida ten years ago and wowed the audience with her insights. She has just had that effect on me again. Her commentary on the valiant Walter Hoye, an African American pastor who was sentenced to 30 days in jail for standing outside an inner city abortion mill holding a sign that said "Jesus Loves You and Your Baby, Let us Help You," hit the nail on the head.
Date posted: 2009-03-31
We realize that there are literally millions of young people who have either never thought about the fact that a child dies during an abortion, or have grown up accepting as fact that abortion is part of health care. Anyone younger than 50 could be oblivious to the importance of protecting the rights of all persons, including those not yet born.
Date posted: 2009-03-16
Today I surrender any comments I might make to the profound words contained in this homily, delivered by Father William Kuchinsky on January 25, 2009 at his parish, Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church in Romney, West Virginia.
Date posted: 2009-02-27
Of all the now familiar terms we have seen and heard applied to preborn children, perhaps the most heartless is "Embryos on ice." While the term was coined by a Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer reporter covering fertility clinics, the idea reappeared just a few days ago in a New York Times article entitled "Parents Torn Over Fate of Frozen Embryos." The underlying idea in both articles is that parents are faced with a dilemma involving "extra" embryos that were not needed for the in vitro fertilization procedure they underwent in order to have a child. These parents - loving and well meaning, I am sure - have unwittingly contributed to the ongoing growth of the culture of death by agreeing with the hypothesis that there are embryonic children who are somehow less human than those who were implanted in their mom and brought to term. It is as if there are some embryonic children who are really children and others who are not.
Date posted: 2009-01-03
I have always been fascinated by the manner in which our opponents couch their arguments. This is particularly true in the "field" of reproductive health, which is a fairly new area of medical specialty and is fully supported and encouraged by every anti-life scientist known to man.
Date posted: 2008-11-14
When you cannot count on Catholic healthcare facilities to be Catholic, when you witness grand juries pandering to abortionists over the fine print in all those documents they had to review, when you witness politicians playing footsy with the gay rights lobby and stretching the truth regarding how AIDS is spread so as not to offend any special interest group and when you see clinical research focused on killing people because they are less than perfect in the eyes of man, it does not take much to realize that the culture of death is alive and well in America.
Date posted: 2008-11-07
The news I bring to your attention today is not, to my mind, just another of those heart-wrenching accounts of the ways in which Down syndrome children are annihilated before birth. For some reason, it struck a chord in my heart that cried out for release.
Date posted: 2008-10-22
Realizing that the pro-population control forces have the ear of our current public policy makers, it occurs to me that the only way to remedy this one-sided presentation is to begin challenging the Science Olympiad status quo. We should feel an obligation to let those in charge know that we cannot understand their bias.
Date posted: 2008-09-13
The preeminent ethical requirement for organ transplantation is the "dead donor rule," which is that patients must be declared dead before they may be stripped of their vital organs. An article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, this month (Vol. 359:674-675, 8/14/08),†suggests that the "dead donor rule" should be discarded. Why? Because, the article's authors are not convinced that donors are really dead.
Date posted: 2008-09-12
The politician's song has been sung so often for so long that it sounds quite logical - and even many fervent pro-lifers believe it. "I'm absolutely against abortion," they insist, "except, of course, in cases of rape and incest." They argue that is it somehow "compassionate" to offer the woman who is the victim of criminal activity the opportunity to eliminate the results of an immoral attack. The ultimate question, however, is "What about the baby?"
Date posted: 2008-08-20
Near the beginning of his prolific encyclical Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II explains, "Even in the midst of difficulties and uncertainties, every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognize in the natural law written in the heart (cf. Romans 2:14-15) the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree."
Date posted: 2008-08-19
It is not often that I can begin a week with a celebratory blog, but that is precisely what I am about to do. It is all thanks to the recent statement issued by Colorado Right to Life. In a public statement acknowledging the need to correct the Colorado personhood amendment's language, CRTL states the following: Dr. Dianne N. Irving, a bioethicist and professor at Georgetown University, has criticized the personhood amendment, which we support, which appears on Colorado's November 2008 ballot. Dr. Irving's moral and scientific arguments are not only valid, they are foundational to the long-term success of the personhood movement. Colorado RTL will join Dr. Irving in educating pro-lifers, the public and politicians about the sexual and asexual origins of human life that must be recognized in law for it to protect all persons. Dr. Irving's criticism illustrates Solomon's words, "Faithful are the wounds of a friend" (Proverbs 27:6).
Date posted: 2008-07-22
Since my first days in the pro-life movement, more than 35 years ago, I have learned a great deal about rhetoric and how it can deceive even the most well meaning of people. I have also learned that there are people, especially on the pro-death side of the debate, who will go to great lengths to use words in specific ways in order to mislead the listener.
Date posted: 2008-06-27
My impression from the various news reports that I read was that adults were not concerned about the driving force that would create a desire among more than 15 girls to get pregnant. Rather, it provoked discussion about whether or not it was time to start providing birth control pills on the school grounds! Now pardon me for being ignorant, but isn't there something more profoundly problematic in this situation than whether or not the pill is available? Has pregnancy become such a meaningless word that those who are older and should know better are not even concerned about the underlying causes of this crisis? What about the parents of these girls and their responsibilities?
Date posted: 2008-06-20
A pharmacist's deliberate refusal to dispense a drug on religious, moral, or ethical grounds, i.e., pharmacist conscientious objection, has been most often associated with Plan B, the emergency contraceptive, and has received considerable attention in both the lay media and in medical journal commentaries. Of all of the reasons why a pharmacist might not dispense a legally valid prescription, conscientious objection is the only one that places a pharmacist's personal views in potential conflict with the best interests of the patient.
Date posted: 2008-06-17
We move along in the pro-life movement at a snail's pace in so many areas, or so it seems. There are so many attacks on the sanctity of life that it is as though torrential rains of evil are falling on the human race as we rush from place to place in an effort to stem the horror, with nothing more than a small pail to assist in catching the fallout.
Date posted: 2008-06-09
Headlines can make us nuts sometimes; the particular headline I noticed today was nearly impossible to comprehend. Let me explain why before I tell you a bit about what I have subsequently learned.
Date posted: 2008-05-14
Pharmaceutical companies make billions on birth control chemicals and hormone replacement therapy, so why sound alarms when it is so easy to ignore these studies and keep the results from the public? While some would say that the health and wellbeing of the nation's human beings should be the number one priority of the government, the media and big business, it has become painfully clear over the years that this is simply not the case when dealing with matters of sexual relations that involve birth control and abortion.
Date posted: 2008-04-21
Brian Bundy is a Michigan pharmacist who has refused to dispense the abortive "morning after pill." In fact he has taken his refusal so seriously that when Target fired him he chose to sue them because he believes that Target knew that his Christian faith would not permit him to dispense abortive medicines. In fact he says they knew this when they hired him.
Date posted: 2008-02-05
My job is to tell the truth; but I'm continually thwarted by those in the medical community and the government who make false claims that utterly disregard the dignity of the human person. Here's just the latest example. Pharmaceutical interests are pressing the Food and Drug Administration to permit the provision of certain morning-after pill concoctions over the counter, and the entire effort is based on perhaps the biggest lie ever told in the past 40 years.
Date posted: 2006-08-12
We live in a world that is upside down, yet far too few people seem to care. And that troubles me. We go along, doing what we do, never stopping to question the media reports that suggest this topsy-turvy reality is the proper direction for culture, our nation and our very lives.
Date posted: 2005-07-24
Every single day in the U.S., thousands of God's children die. They are destroyed by in vitro fertilization labs. They are extinguished during their first days of life by the birth control pill, the I.U.D., the morning-after pill, Depo-Provera, Norplant and other chemicals. They are ripped apart by various types of surgical abortion.
Date posted: 2002-04-13
The more that you learn about each other, how you function and what it means to anticipate the possibility of procreating another human being, the better you will understand each other, respect each other, and share in the true meaning of the body as nature intended.
Date posted: 2001-12-31
A married couple sincerely seeking the will of God makes a genuine commitment to always include His will in their marital relations. During this process their love for each other grows. The reason is clear: marriage and conjugal love are, by their very nature, ordained to procreation.
Date posted: 2001-12-30