A debate is raging regarding the hidden-camera videos released revealing information about Planned Parenthood’s practice of selling fetal tissue for medical research. A political firestorm has resulted.
What’s Your Response to the Planned Parenthood Videos?
Have you shared the videos on Facebook and other social media, with a call to your friends and family members to be concerned and take action?
Have you stood by Planned Parenthood and considered this a right-wing agenda to end legalized abortion?
Are you ignoring the issue all together?
Have you or someone you love had an abortion in the past, and what others consider a political debate you feel as a part of your personal life story?
Unless You Live Under a Rock…
I’ve read articles like this one from Buzzfeed about the lack of response from Scientists (due to fears of retaliation) and this one, 11 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Planned Parenthood that start off saying, “Unless you live under a rock, you have surely heard about this scandal.”
You could say I’ve been living under a rock for the last few months. Except for seeing the comments on Facebook, I knew there was a debate but I didn’t know details. I had not watched any of the videos.
I’m a rather a-political person. It’s not that I don’t care about these issues. I do care. I vote. But that’s the extent of it. Am I lacking in patriotic duty? Perhaps.
There is a reason I’ve been living my sheltered life these last months. My husband and I were foster parents for 6 years, caring for 35 children abused and neglected children during that time. Over the course of that time, we took in two medically fragile babies who became our forever children when we adopted them. One was born at just 25 weeks of life, 15 weeks premature, so these videos hit eerily close to home.
These sons of mine are now 6 and 11 years old, and they live every single day with the effects of a difficult start to life. This summer has been a highly challenging one. We’ve made the tough choice to circle the family wagons and do what we need to do to care for our sons and ourselves. Because of what they need in order to regulate, we don’t go out much. They need my constant attention and supervision.
Each of their birth mothers could have made a different choice, yet they made the choice for life. For that I thank them. It’s easy to chastise the wrong choices made by my son’s birth families, but let’s remember they made one ultimate very right one.
Challenging Your Response
Tonight I snuck away to the library for a few moments of uninterrupted quiet, serene workspace, and excellent wi-fi connection. This has been my first chance to watch these videos and read some of the commentary I’ve seen scrolling across my Facebook feed these last weeks.
This is my honest response to the Planned Parent hidden videos and the ongoing commentary surrounding them, when I quickly catch my Facebook or Twitter moments.
My life right now is knee-deep in a getting-my-hands dirty life of raising two boys who could have easily not been here. Yet thankfully, they very much are here, alive and kicking, creating monstrous Lego messes on my family room floor.
Our life is very, very hard. We fight and struggle every day to make it happen, and by God, and only by God and his grace, we will heal these children.
Now I challenge you — what are you doing to help families like ours?
When you have done something in the here and now moment to reach out a hand to help a single mom who chose for life, brought a meal to a foster family, or volunteered at a women’s shelter, then the sharing of your opinion carries weight.
Until then, it’s just another forward into a vast echo of social noise.
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?Micah 6:8
What’s Worth the Fight
For this child I prayed, and the Lord has granted me my petition that I made to him.
1 Samuel 1:27
What has been your response to the undercover Planned Parenthood videos?
We really do need to be called out and convicted as Christians if we are not acting to care for the families who step up to care for beautiful children who deserve love and support. I am so grateful to your family for being such a loving home for those children. What a blessing! I pray that I can teach my children compassion and lead by example. Thank you for this and sharing such a moving call to action!
This is a very real and personal issue for me. Not because of a family member or one of my children, but because I was the one who was almost aborted. My mother was using an IUD as a form of birth control when she became pregnant with me. The doctors were convinced that my brain would grow around the device as I developed and I would be a vegetable from birth.
The doctors spent the rest of the pregnancy trying to convince my parents to have an abortion because I could never be “normal”. My parents refused. My dad told me later that he had never really thought about abortion until that happened. Now he attends fund raisers for right-to-life groups. My mother is also very pro-life.
I was lucky that I had amazing, loving parents who believed God would take care of me. I was not only perfectly healthy when I was born, but I went on to graduate in the top 10% of my class in high school, was a member of the National Honors Society and was given a job in the United States Air Force in Intelligence.