This blog was created for members of the Y-LIFE Youth Group to get the message out about events and projects the group is working on to further what Pope John Paul II called "The Culture of Life." We will also be using it to blog in our own words about what it's like to be young and pro-life in today's society.
Sorry we haven't posted in a while. Everyone is back to school and writing papers for teachers and professors. We hope to get some blog posts up soon.
Our Conference featuring Fr. Tad Pacholczyk is tomorrow, with registration beginning at 9:30 a.m. We are pleased to announce that our celebrant for Mass at 10 a.m. in the new Queen of Apostles Chapel is Fr. Dennis Kolinski, SJC.
If you would like to attend, shoot us an email to ylifeprovita@gmail.com and we will register you at the door.
Well, a bunch of our Y-Lifers have either gone back to school or headed off as freshmen and one of our supporters has entered religious life. In addition, Deacon John from Holy Apostles and a former member of the Holy Apostles Life League is now Father John Trambley of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and many other things have changed since our Conference last September. It's kind of sad to say goodbye to so many of our stalwarts, but there are some younger kids getting active in the group, we have a couple college students in the area and hopefully, the Conference will bring some new faces to Y-Life.
So ... a little quiz. Two of our members, Jeanne B. and Ella B. go to a university that has the graphic at left as part of their logo. We can inform you with absolute certainty that this graphic will not help you by just looking at it. But you can click here for the answer ... yet another active pro-life campus group at a state university ... young pro-lifers are EVERYWHERE.
Back to the Conference ... it's coming up fast - October 16th. Fr. Tad Pacholczyk is our speaker and he is really not to be missed. If you or your friends have ever been frustrated by proponents of abortion waving the wet towel of science around, it's time to snap a towel back. You will be fascinated by the truth, and taking truth away with you, you don't have to be frustrated anymore. Every form you need can be found on the left sidebar of this blog at the very top, but to make things super easy, here are the details about the Conference. Once you have read the preceding link, you will be so motivated to go that you'll need a registration form, which you will find here. And, seriously, if you are going to go, take friends from your parish, school or pro-life group with you. Check with your pastor or DRE and see if this Conference can also serve as a fulfillment of a requirement for your Confirmation. It is a retreat of sorts, but we covered that in the last post.
We are especially in need of ad sponsors, so if some of you out there would download the sponsor form and see if your parish or parish pro-life group would be interested in sponsoring an ad or sentiment, you can find all the detals here. And if any of our fantastic Twitter followers would like to either attend the Conference in Cromwell, CT at Holy Apostles OR send in an ad or sentiment, that would be great! Any any questions, concerns, comments ... whatever, do not hesitate to email us at: ylifeprovita@gmail.com. And God keep all you guys out there ... we miss you and will see you at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Keep the Truth about the babies alive so they can stay alive and see the light of day and so their parents, especially their mothers, will not have to go through life damaged by abortion.
(Check out all the info at the top of the blog sidebar.) Our Conference this year is also a fantastic retreat opportunity for Confirmation candidates. You may be thinking that pro-life work is all about the evil of abortion and we have even heard a priest say, "I would really like to see more pro-life groups focus on the death penalty and the injustice of war." A lot of folks think we ignore the more standard peace and justice ministries, and this is simply not the case.
Take Dr. Theresa Krankowski, founder of St. Gerard's Center for Life. In ministering to abortion-minded women, she, and the St. Gerard volunteers, often-times end up clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoner and visiting the sick. Ironically, when it is time to bury the dead of this terrible wholesale killing of the unborn, most of the time their little bodies cannot be found, so Dr. Theresa works in the spiritual realm and comforts the sorrowful mothers. She and her volunteers also instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, counsel the doubtful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive injuries and pray for the living and the dead. And Dr. Theresa is just one of many who work tirelessly in the pro-life movement to stand up to the culture of death with truth and love. Just so you know. Her ministry doesn't play well in, say, The Hartford Courant or People Magazine or The New York Times. The secular culture likes food drives, cure walkathons and vigils outside of prisons (all of which are good things). But there is also lots of sympathetic coverage for "the right to choose" when you will not find any kind of truthful coverage regarding the difficult work of helping abortion-minded women in any way imaginable. This help is still there even if the baby is aborted, because these mothers suffer the most. This is a fight against the death penalty and war at its most fundamental level, put most eloquently by Bl. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa):"The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between."
The sessions at the Conference that will be given by Fr. Tad Pacholczyk will be geared toward our attendees and will provide not just information, but truth regarding the buzz around stem cell research and reproductive technologies.. Truth is sadly lacking in the information the culture at large provides to young people, because the intrinsic dignity of the human person is denied due to legal shenanigans that have rendered the pre-born in this country an unprotected class of human being. If we can't go out armed with truth, how can we be a force for good or change or anything that God has put us here on earth to do. The Conference also includes Mass and a Holy Hour with an opportunity for confession, so as far as a retreat opportunity is concerned, you have the whole package ... Mass alone makes it a retreat par excellence.
Talk to your pastor or your DRE or the person in charge of your Confirmation class. We would love to have you attend the Conference, and there are opportunities for group rates and scholarships. It promises to be a day that will assist you in being the kind of Christian who can speak the truth in love. See you on October 16th!
Once again we are publishing our Conference Booklet and are looking for parishes, businesses, civic groups and the like to sponsor an ad or sentiment. We have choices for any budget, and your kind donations help to offset scholarships to the Conference. Plus, any money left over will go toward one of our many life-affirming projects. In the past, we've raised money for the St. Gerard Center Ultrasound Fund, the elderly and infirm Felician Sisters, disabled and elderly veterans in the community in need of groceries or small construction projects (wheelchair ramps and accessible bathrooms), and recently many Y-Lifers worked in conjunction with the St. Therese Respect Life Group of St. Therese Parish in Granby, CT to raise over $2000 for Northern Connecticut Catholic Prison Ministry run by Fr. Bruno.
Click on the form for donating. It's linked to this post, AND appears in the sidebar of this blog under Forms for 2010 Conference. Also, do not hesitate to email us at:
with any questions, concerns, glitches, comments or glowing praise. We would love to hear from you and if you can .... please sponsor an ad or sentiment! God will not be outdone in generosity and will bless you abundantly.
Remember ... the Conference is October 16, 2010. All the information you need is here (or you can click on Conference Flyer under Forms for 2010 Conference on the sidebar.
Thanks, Louis R., for getting all the forms up for us!
Throughout the years, many court decisions have held that the 14th Amendment contains a right to privacy by an individual over his or her actions, though it is disputed just how far this extends. In Roe versus Wade, the Supreme Court held that this right to privacy was broad enough to encompass a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy if she so chose. However, in all the cases the Court cited as evidence of this right, only a few came close to having anything to do with abortion and it becomes obvious, with only a little explanation, that they were a bad fit for the 1973 case. Most were cases completely unrelated to abortion and involved phone taps, the right of parents to direct the education of their children, minors selling goods, and other things that only established the existence of a right to privacy, but proved nothing about the right to the termination of a pregnancy being contained therein. However, while the Court failed to convincingly prove its position, there is definite evidence that an unborn child’s right to life had recognized preference over the right to privacy. In the Union Pacific Railway Company v. Botsford case (1891), the question at hand was whether a court could “order a woman suing a railway company for injuries she suffered to submit to a surgical examination”. The Court held that such an intrusion of privacy was forbidden, except “to ascertain whether a woman convicted of a capital crime was quick with child…in order to guard against the taking of the life of an unborn child for the crime of the mother”. In conclusion, the Court ignored the clear evidence of the right of a child to life, and was forced, because of lack of proof for its position, to present information that was not even related to the point it was trying to make.
Despite all the blunders of the Court legally and Constitutionally in Roe versus Wade, perhaps the worst was the complete lack of discussion in the critical area of natural law and what it says about abortion. Natural law is an essential basis when dealing with any issue of morality, for it is defined by the Catholic Encyclopedia as, “the rule of conduct which is prescribed to us by the Creator". In other words, every man’s soul has been endowed with an intrinsic knowledge of what is morally right and wrong according to the eternal laws of God, so one can intuitively know what is just. If the Court had looked at natural law, it would have understood that abortion and its decision were violating several important principles. To begin with, natural law teaches that one does not take the life of another living human being. Although the Court believed that life did not truly begin until birth, they were still toying, however, with the “potentiality” of life before birth and according to St. Thomas Aquinas, “if a man could be probably alive or probably dead, you can’t take the chance of burying him unless he is certainly dead. This meant that since it was questionable as to when life began, therefore the Court could not legalize the killing of the unborn because there was potential human life. In addition to this, natural law holds that one does not interrupt a normal function of life, pregnancy, except for an extremely serious reason. That an unborn child can be killed simply because it may not be wanted is obviously not a serious enough reason to make abortion in accord with the natural law.
Truly, it is highly evident that the Supreme Court was not legally correct or in accord with the intentions of the Constitution in its ruling of Roe versus Wade. Because the Court did not rule from a neutral position, but twisted facts out of context, was selective with the evidence, ignored key points of view, and knowingly evaded the clear truth, it rendered its judgment subject to intense criticism. Had the Court honestly, critically, and thoroughly examined all sides of the issue, its decision would have been much different than it was. Sadly, for some, the Supreme Court’s monumental decision on that fateful day in 1973 will be seen as the indisputable law of the land, but it is hoped that these articles (based on a paper I wrote for a class) have placed doubt in some minds as to the legality and fairness of the trial that the most vulnerable citizens of the United States of America received. ---- Timothy J.
FINALLY ... Installment 4 of Tim J.'s article on the infamous Roe v. Wade decision. If you have not read the earlier installments, here'sInstallment 1, here's Installment 2 and here is Installment 3. Prepare to be edified!
INSTALLMENT 4:
After blatantly skipping over the framers’ intent, the Supreme Court investigated the issue of whether the unborn were considered people according to the use of the word ‘person” in the Constitution, and ultimately decided that they were not. Because “the Constitution does not define “person” in so many words”, the Court was forced to piece together a definition based on the many uses of the word throughout the document, a process that was doomed to failure since the Court had not bothered to discover what the original intent of the framers was. In searching for the word “person”, the Court found most of the uses of the word in the qualifications for holding a public office, and concluded that since these uses applied only after birth, the unborn were not people according to the Constitution. Although these qualifications for public office would ban the unborn, they also would deny any born person who could not meet the requirements for age, residency, and citizenship. Surely, the Court would not withdraw the rights of personhood from any citizen simply for not meeting these qualifications, but yet this was exactly what the Supreme Court did in the case of the unborn. By holding that the unborn were not people under the Constitution, the Court went against what John Marshall, a previous Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, had ruled in Gibbons versus Ogden in 1824, which was that “the terms in the Constitution must be interpreted expansively, not restrictively”. Thus, it is only too clear that the Court’s laughable approach to the Constitutional issue of personhood was indicative of the fact that the Court had already made its decision regardless of the evidence.
When the Supreme Court examined the Constitution, it focused largely on the 14th Amendment, which has a clause that states, “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or happiness without the due process of law.” After little deliberation, the Court took the position that the 14th Amendment banned the unborn child from the rights enjoyed under this amendment by people already born. However, this stance was based only on a selective collection of previous court decisions and the Court’s own judgment, not on the all-important intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment. Around the time of the drafting of the amendment in 1868, there were several influential facts and court cases that suggest that the unborn was indeed intended to have rights. For instance, in the 1860’s, five U.S. territories enacted anti-abortion laws. Since these territories were not yet states, Congress needed to approve these laws, and so, in order for them to pass, many of the Congressmen who would eventually write the 14th Amendment must have voted in their favor. Also, in 1873, just five years after the enactment of the 14th Amendment, the District of Columbia recognized abortion as illegal. Again, one can see that Congress must have had a pro-life mentality, for it had full jurisdiction in the area of the District of Columbia’s criminal law. Thus, it is apparent that the Court was incorrect in their claim that the 14th Amendment barred the unborn from the basic human right to life, when the prevailing attitude of even the country’s political leaders in the 1860’s can be reasonably ascertained to have been for extending rights to a fetus.
We have the next installment to Tim's article on the injustice and wrongness of Roe versus Wade, which we will post this week, but we want to wish everyone a most glorious Eastertide! (Is it us, or did Lent seem kind of long this year ...) Oh well, Happy Easter and don't forget, Sunday is Divine Mercy Sunday. If anyone from St. Therese parish in Granby is reading this, don't forget to return your baby bottles from the baby bottle fundraiser for St. Gerard's Center this weekend.
Today is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Lord, and we have posted this beautiful painting by the artist John Collier. This day is the Feast Day for all pregnant mothers, newly conceived babies AND babies in the womb at any stage of development. Remember, after the Annunciation, Mary went to see her older cousin, Elizabeth, who was about six months pregnant, and St. John the Baptist "leapt" in Elizabeth's womb at the arrival of Mary, carrying the Savior of the World in-utero as the tiniest of pre-born babies.
Pray especially hard this day for abortion-minded women and their babies, who are at terrible risk And celebrate, too, because this is also the Feast of the Incarnation, when the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us ... as a child in the womb.
The Academy of the Holy Family’s Teens of Pro-Life Club (TOP-Life Club) and the Connecticut Right to Life Corporation are sponsoring the new and improved 2nd annual Youth 4 Life pro-life conference on Saturday, March 27, 2010, from 4-8 pm at the Academy of the Holy Family's St.MichaelCenter on School Hill Road in Baltic. In a new format, there will be live testimonies, breakout sessions, live band, film presentation, Mass and confession, music and pizza & …!
This morning we picketed in front of Hartford Gyn from 7 a.m. until 8:20 or so. It's always really sad, especially when the mother does not want to go while her boyfriend or mother or aunt or gym teacher or whatever has her by the elbow. Today we had what appeared the opposite ... the boyfriend wanted to stay and talk with the sidewalk counselor. We prayed (because that's the best way to witness while the sidewalk counselor does his or her thing.)
After, we went to Ashley's for breakfast and had a meeting, because a lot of members showed up to picket today. We'll be posting about upcoming events and projects when we get the notes sorted out ... more on the tag sale, the Conference and a possible celebration for St. Gerard's to celebrate the arrival of the ultrasound! And bake sales. Actually, the only baked stuff we have ever sold has been at tag sales and bazaars. The humble bake sale can make a lot of money for the effort.
It's really gorgeous here in Connecticut today ... really sad to think that some of those mothers will remember an early spring day as the day their baby died. Or maybe they'll be like some of the speakers we've had ... not really remembering at all, but sort of having this overwhelming sadness that no one ever talks about. And maybe some of them won't have an abortion today. Please God.
We stuck a Twitter button on the blog, so while we're waiting for Tim to continue his Roe v. Wade series, we want to let you know the Conference is a go Saturday, October 16th at Holy Apostles in Cromwell, CT and we have Fr. Tad! Mark your calendars. Nunc.
If you haven't read Installment No. 1, please clickhere
If you haven't read Installment No. 2, please click here
Please find below the third part of an article written by Timothy J. Once again, the stars stand for footnotes, which will be put into the series as Tim gets them sent to us. Read on:
As the Supreme Court was inaccurate and biased with its interpretation of English common law, it also did not obtain the correct view of early American law. According to the official case document, most restrictive abortion legislation began appearing after the Civil War and was only for the purpose of protecting the interests and health of the mother. For evidence of the first claim, the Court mentioned Eugene Quay, who had written an appendix of all the abortion legislation passed before 1960. Interestingly enough, the very proof that the Courts recommended for their position was the thing that disproved their assertion, as Quay had on record that thirty-one of the states had laws punishing abortive practices before the Civil War even started.* This was not the scarce minority of laws that the Court had claimed existed prior to 1860. With regard to the second claim, that the laws enacted were solely for the protection of the woman, this too is easily refuted by the fact that the evidence the Court cited works against such claims. For example, one of the cases the Court used was an 1858 New Jersey case, State v. Murphy, which has a passage that reads “the procuring of an abortion, or an attempt to procure an abortion, with the assent of the woman, was not an indictable offense, as it affected her, but only as it affected the life of the fetus”.* This passage clearly demonstrates that the protection of the mother was not the only legitimate interest at stake, but, yet, this was the case the Court cited as evidence that American law of the 18th century did not protect the interests of the unborn child. One must therefore conclude that the Court purposely flipped critical information on early American law and relied on a mass of legal language to keep the real truth from emerging.
By now, one should see how the Court knowingly went against the evidence of established historical and legal precedent, but it can also be ascertained that the Court went against the intentions of the United States Constitution as well. In its examination of the Constitution as a whole, the Court did not once touch upon the critical area of the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, thus making its judgment legally incorrect. If the Supreme Court had been looking to resolve Roe versus Wade in the most accurate manner possible, then it most definitely would have looked into the framers’ intent, for there is no better way of discerning how the Constitution should be interpreted. Accordingly, there were several indications about what abortion mentalities were accepted around the time of the drafting of the Constitution. First of all, two previously cited sources have held that Blackstone and his pro-life principles were well known and accepted by the American people, including the framers of the Constitution.* Also, by looking in a popular dictionary of the times, a fetus was described as a child, who was in turn described as a living person.* Finally, Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the leading politicians of his day, wrote a letter praising the man who had drafted a model penal code for Louisiana that included a prohibition of abortion. There was no record of Jefferson abstaining from expressing his approval of any part of the code and the fact that this statute became so popular was evidence that the majority of the informed public agreed with it.* Thus, at the time of the framing of the Constitution, it can be ascertained, with a high degree of certainty, that many Americans, including the original drafters, would not have had an abortion mentality.
If you haven't read Installment No. 1, please click here. Please find below the second part of an article written by Timothy J. Once again, the stars stand for footnotes, which will be put into the series as Tim gets them sent to us. Read on:
Installment No. 2:
In addition to this argument, the Court misinterpreted the words of Plato and Aristotle to mean that they supported abortion, when in reality they did not. While the Court cited several examples to prove their point, all of them are subject to a good degree of skepticism. In one of the most interesting ones, Plato spoke about ways to regulate the population and mentioned everything from encouraging temporary abstinence to sending out colonies. The court maintained that this was one of the proofs that Plato supported abortion, but the fact is that abortion was not mentioned even implicitly in this passage.* Clearly, the Court’s opinion of abortion in ancient Greece and Rome was unsound and ethically questionable. After such an obvious misrepresentation of the actual historical records in just the first section of its investigation, one begins to wonder if the Court was merely ignorant, or if there were ulterior motives.
In the area of common law, which can be explained as the collective decision and belief of previous judicial bodies, the Supreme Court concluded that it was “doubtful”* that the killing of a “quick” fetus was ever held as a crime. To support this position, the Supreme Court relied heavily on the testimony of Cyril Means*, a pro-abortion supporter from the 1950’s and 60’s. By placing so much confidence on an abortion advocate without balancing the opposite viewpoint, the Court violated the neutral position that it is supposed to assume in resolving any case. This would explain why the Court’s historical probe was so weak, for in an effort to support a position that it knew went against historical fact, it was selective with the evidence and distorted facts to make it appear that its arguments were supported.
As the common law principles of the United States came largely from England, it is essential to look at that country’s view of the issue as it pertains to the unborn. James F. Stephen has written a thorough account of English criminal law in which he notes that even before the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066, abortion was held as a crime.* In addition, there are written statements from four of the best English authorities on common law, Bracton, Fleta, Coke, and Blackstone, that abortion was a serious crime. Although the Court acknowledged the comments of Bracton and Fleta condemning abortion, it seemed to regard them as unimportant and continued to rely singularly on the work of Means. With Coke, who said that abortion was a “great misprision, but no murder”, the Court took the modern understanding of this phrase, which is that “misprision” can be translated to mean “misdemeanor”.* However, Blackstone, whose name was synonymous with law in the mid 18th century*, took a different approach and said that “misprision” could be translated to mean a grave offense that was not punishable by death, but was nonetheless very serious.* Furthermore, Blackstone also commented that, “One who is in the womb is already born, whenever a question arises for its benefit.”* This quote from such an influential person in common law history proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that English common law held that the unborn were persons and protected them accordingly.
Please find below the first part in an article written by Timothy J. You will find this timely, since many of us are all headed to D.C. for the March for Life on January 22. Here's your history lesson, so you can go armed with all the information you could possibly need to defend the pro-life position. The stars stand for footnotes, which will be put into the series as Tim gets them sent to us. Thanks, Tim! Fantastic job on this series. Without further ado ...
Installment No. 1:
Regardless of what side one takes on the issue of abortion, it is obvious that the decision made by the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973 in the case of Roe versus Wade, which legalized abortion during all three trimesters of pregnancy, was of historic proportions. As notable as this case was, it is now quite clear that Roe versus Wade was fatally flawed, being both legally incorrect* and unconstitutional in a myriad of ways. Although the justices who presided over the case were able to conceal their biased reasoning to the untrained eyes and ears of the general public, further research reveals gaping holes in their assertions and the proof they cited as evidence of these. Thus, the aim of this research report will be to expose the main areas of Roe versus Wade’s problems and ultimately provide reasons why this case was neither legally correct nor in accord with the Constitution of this great land.
The Supreme Court’s investigation into Roe versus Wade started by looking at the history of abortion in ancient times. After only a brief investigation, the Court concluded that “ancient religion did not bar abortion”*. However, the Supreme Court looked mostly at Greek and Roman history for evidence of the acceptance of this practice. Yet, abortion concerned more than just the Greeks and Romans and interestingly enough, the first legal evidence of abortion appeared much further back in history than these civilizations with a reference in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which appeared in about 1728 B.C. This reference spoke of the penalties pertaining to a person who “unintentionally but culpably caused a woman to miscarry”.* Thus, the first ever-recorded reference to abortion does not infer its approval, but rather the penalties for such an act. It must be further noted that substantial evidence exists that many other ancient civilizations, besides the Babylonians, clearly had an anti-abortion mentality, among which were the Assyrians, Egyptians, Hittites, who had “notoriously low” sexual standards, and particularly the Jews, from whom evolved Christianity and many of its established principles in the Constitution.* Given the legal scope the Court was looking for in history, this information would have been fairly easy to find, but yet there was no mention of any of it in the Court’s examination. From these facts, one can see that the Court’s research of abortion throughout history was glaringly incomplete and that its findings did not reflect the established standard in ancient times of many cultures.
With regard to the Greeks and Romans, the Supreme Court took the position that abortion in Greco-Roman times was “resorted to without scruple”.* However, abortion was not so commonplace that society was silent on the issue. Many of the most eminent and influential people in Greece and Rome made very clear statements against abortion, among whom were: Soranus, Seneca, Rufus, and Ovid, the poet, who wrote that “the first one who thought of detaching from her womb the fetus forming in it deserved to die by her own weapons”.* If some of the most famous people in Greece and Rome spoke out against abortion, it can be safely reasoned that abortion was not resorted to with as little scruple as the Court declared, for history continuously shows that the common people invariably follow the ideology of those who hold power and prestige.
Hi Everyone, We will be having a Y-LIFE meeting at 4:00 on Sunday, January 17th at Holy Apostles College and Seminary. We will be discussing the March for Life as well as our upcoming conference. Please let me know if you plan on attending the meeting. With love for life, Ella ylifeprovita@gmail.com
