Jesus Wept

The murder capital of the world.

What comes to mind when you hear that?

Baghdad? Kabul? Mumbai?

What if I told you that it's New York City?

Read today that 41% of all New York City pregnancies end in an abortion.

The new city numbers, from 2009, show 87,273 abortions in New York City two years ago — numbers that are higher than the abortion figures of every state except California. If miscarriages are taken out of the equation, 48 percent of pregnancies of women in the Bronx end in abortion, 38 percent of Manhattan women opt for an abortion, as do 32 percent of women living on Staten Island.

I keep reading that article and rereading it. The enormity of this just breaks my heart. This is not happening in a third world country without access to contraception and medical care. New York, like so many communities, has a law that allows parents to drop off children at a firehouse or police house without penalty. The city and the state offer (at great cost to the taxpayer) a web of welfare help.

And yet, 87,273 babies were not allowed to be born.

"Safe, legal, and rare" was the trite phrase those who were for "abortion rights" used to attempt to claw up to some semblance of moral high ground.

Can we agree that having the city of New York be the scene of 87,273 abortions is a national tragedy?

Jesus is weeping.

So am I.

Choose Life

One of the real reasons I cast my vote for the person I did in the recent election was because of my convictions about life. I remain convinced that we are commanded to value life as a gift from God, not a choice or an option to be exercised at our whims. Dr. Bob is a doctor and a blogger who lives out his faith in Jesus and regularly makes connections that others might miss. Today was no exception. Here's an excerpt from a post you need to read and reflect on.

It is late, nearly 9 P.M., seeing a final consult at the end of a punishing call day, in the ICU. The patient, chronologically young yet physiologically Methuselan, lies in his bed, oxygen mask affixed to his face by heavy straps, bleeding, as he has for months, from a tumor in his kidney. He would not survive surgery, nor even radiological intervention to stem the hemorrhage by strangling its arterial lifeline. He is, furthermore, in the parlance of modern medicine, “non-compliant”: refusing treatments and diagnostic studies; rude and abusive to nurses and physicians alike; demanding to go home though unlikely to survive there for any significant length of time.

The nurse — young, competent, smart, hard-working, the very best of the modern nursing profession — apprises me of his situation, closing with this knockout punch: “You know, we just passed that initiative — you know, the suicide one. He’d be an excellent candidate.”

She wasn’t joking.

Taken a bit off guard, I responded that it is most unwise to give physicians the power to kill you, for we will become very good at it, and impossible to stop once we are

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