- Newsletters -

Dear Friends of the Unborn,

Please Pray! for Steven and Jane and their fourth child, due early September, who has been diagnosed with structural/congenital heart defect, major heart disease and moderate heart failure. I am printing a suggested prayer over the page.

I sent this request by email and had a response from a mother whom I did not know – the email had been forwarded to her – saying that she had been through a similar distressing experience four years previously. Her story had a happy ending in that the child for whom little hope was held out, and whom the mother had been encouraged to dispose of, was now the joy of her life. It turned out that there was nothing wrong with her but a repairable hair-lip, which is now little more than a tiny almost imperceptible scar.

Was this a miracle, the result of answer to prayer? Or was it a wrong diagnosis? How can we know? What we do know is that nowadays mothers are under fearsome pressure to undergo non-therapeutic, even risky, testing, to ensure they produce a perfect child, and pity help the poor parents who are not strong enough to stand up to the pressures that are laid upon them. It seems to me, that doctors tend to overstate the problems in order to safeguard themselves from the possibility of litigation. It is a sad, sad world, is it not?

When I was having my children, I had never even heard of a blessing for the pregnant mother, but Michele Marychurch tells me that each time she was pregnant she went to the priest for a special blessing. How beautiful!

Why can’t we encourage the blessing of mothers (and fathers) as an aid to see them safely through their pregnancies and to emphasise the importance of the great work they are doing for God and for the Church in raising up citizens, not just for this passing world, but for eternal life in Heaven?

For those of you who have been praying, Jane has written to express her appreciation saying, “I am drawing strength and hope from all these prayers”.

Divine Jesus, You have said, "Ask and you shall receive; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you." Behold me kneeling at Your feet, filled with a lively faith and confidence in the promises dictated by Your Sacred Heart to Saint Margaret Mary. I come to ask this favor: (Mention your request).

To whom can I turn if not to You, Whose Heart is the source of all graces and merits? Where should I seek if not in the treasure which contains all the riches of Your kindness and mercy? Where should I knock if not at the door through which God gives Himself to us and through which we go to God? I have recourse to You, Heart of Jesus. In You I find consolation when afflicted, protection when persecuted, strength when burdened with trials, and light in doubt and darkness.

Dear Jesus, I firmly believe that You can grant the grace I implore, even though it should require a miracle. You have only to will it and my prayer will be granted. I am most unworthy of Your favors, but this is not a reason for me to be discouraged. You are the God of mercy, and You will not refuse a contrite heart. Cast upon me a look of mercy, I beg of You, and Your kind Heart will find in my miseries and weakness a reason for granting my prayer.

Sacred Heart, whatever may be Your decision with regard to my request, I will never stop adoring, loving, praising, and serving You. My Jesus, be pleased to accept my act of perfect resignation to the decrees of Your adorable Heart, which I sincerely desire may be fulfilled in and by me and all Your creatures forever.

Grant me the grace for which I humbly implore You, through the Immaculate Heart of Your most sorrowful Mother. You entrusted me to her as her child, and her prayers are all-powerful with You. Amen.

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Discrimination Against Traditional Mothers

By Joseph A. D'Agostino

PRI Weekly Briefing, 6 April 2006, Vol. 8 / No. 14

Thus the logic of feminism: A prominent female member of the Dutch parliament has proposed fining college-educated Dutch women who choose to be homemakers rather than work. Sharon Dijksma, deputy chairwoman (chairperson?) of the Dutch Labor Party, provides yet more evidence that feminism was never about giving women choices but about destroying the family in order to enhance the power of the state.

"A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work—that is destruction of capital," Dijksma said, according to the English-language Brussels Journal on March 31. "If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society's expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished." In the Netherlands, the state pays for college tuition. Thus, too, the logic of socialism: The people are taxed heavily, then provided with "free" services, and then, because the government has deigned to return some of the people's tax money back to them, politicians and bureaucrats get to run the people's lives……

Dijksma wants to extract some of the cost of their college education from the women who love their children more than paid work, and who are fortunate enough to have husbands who can enable them to stay home…despite the continued rise of women's labor force participation in the Netherlands. "Between 2001 and 2005, the number of Dutch women aged between 15 and 65 who were out on the labour market rose from 55.9 to 58.7%," reported the Journal. And this despite the cataclysmic drop in Dutch birthrates.

You would think Dutch leaders would want to encourage child-rearing, and homemakers are far more likely to have more than one child than full-time career women. Currently, Dutch women average 1.7 children over their lives, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. ….. Yet Dijksma wants to promote a policy that will drive down the native Dutch population's birthrate even further.

She might consider that having a relatively small proportion of prolific homemakers could raise the Dutch birthrate. If 20% of Dutch women had four children each and the rest averaged 1.5, the Netherlands would be almost at replacement rate fertility. If the Dutch government made it easier, rather than harder, for women to stay home and have more children but only a little more than 1/5 of women took advantage of it, the Netherlands could be saved from the nation's suicidal birthrate.

Our own country (U.S.) has many forms of discrimination against traditional mothers. Institutionalized discrimination against men ("affirmative action for women") harms not only men, but those homemaking women married to them and their children, who suffer because the husband and father of the family loses a job or a promotion because of a quota. It also harms those many women, and their children, who work part-time and depend on their husbands' careers for their future security. The federal tax code grants breaks for day care but none for homemakers. Those who home-school must pay full taxes for public schools anyway. It's not as if American women didn't want to be homemakers: 77% of working mothers say they'd rather be home. Yet feminists, so enamored of choice when it comes to abortion and homosexuality, aren't trying to help these 3/4 of working mothers achieve their desires. Quite the opposite.

Don't think that Dijksma's plan comes from a marginal Dutch political faction. "The PvdA is generally expected to win the general elections next year, when the 35-year-old Dijksma, who has been an MP since she was 23 and is a leading figure in the party, might become a government minister." The Dutch Labor Party's website carries a favorable treatment of her proposal. "If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished," Dijksma says, according to Expatica News.

Needless to say, having an educated women with her children all day is not a waste of anything.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Adopt a Turnaround

by Marg

Reprinted from Thanksgiving Newsletter of the Helper’s of God’s Precious Infants April 2006

Deb hurried up to me. Excitedly she told me “We had a turnaround this morning.” After filling me in with the details, she hurried away a big smile lighting up her face. Strangely I did not feel her excitement. Instead, I felt a sense of loneliness, with a tinge of sadness. Why? As Deb told me of the mornings events, I had a mental picture of a young woman walking away from the clinic, feeling alone with her decision to keep her baby. I wondered to myself:

What will she be going home to?

Will she have support and encouragement for her decision?

Or will she have a lonely battle against family and friends?

Will the struggle we too much for her in the end?

I asked myself, “What can we do for those women who do not seek our help? I know that we pray for them all, but this did not seem sufficient.” Then the idea came to me. We need a team of dedicated pray-ers, people who will adopt one particular “turnaround” mother and her baby, and pray for them every day for nine months; people who every day without fail will surround their adopted mother with a phalanx of prayer, so that she may receive the graces necessary to bring her baby to birth.

If you would like to be part of this group of people, and can promise you will pray every day for nine months for a mother and baby, please fill in the required information:

I would like to adopt a turnaround mother and her baby, and I promise to pray for them for nine months.

Name:

Address:

Phone Number:

Email:

Signature:

and send it to the Helpers, PO Box 4075, Patterson, Vic, Australia 3204

Or email helpers@dodo.com.au

When there is turn-around you will be contacted, given a name (not the real name unless we know it) and the finishing date until which you will need to pray daily.

Part I "Brain Death" is Not Death! was published in the last edition Easter 2006 http://www.chninternational.com/brain_death_is_not_death_byrne_paul_md.html

Part II The Signs of Death

Conclusions reached after examination of Brain-Related Criteria for death, at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences meeting, 3-4 Feb 2005

1. On the one hand the Church recognizes, consistent with her tradition, that the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural end must absolutely be respected and upheld. On the other hand, a secular society tends to place greater emphasis on the quality of living.

2. The Catholic Church has always opposed the destruction of human life before being born through abortion and she equally condemns the premature ending of the life of an innocent donor in order to extend the life of another through unpaired vital organ transplantation. "It is morally inadmissible directly to bring about the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even in order to delay the death of other persons." “It is never licit to kill one human being in order to save another."

3. "Nor can we remain silent in the face of other more furtive, but no less serious and real forms of euthanasia. These could occur for example when, in order to increase the availability of organs for transplants, organs are removed without respecting objective and adequate criteria which verify the death of the donor."

4. "The death of the person is a single event, consisting in the total disintegration of that unitary and integrated whole that is the personal self. It results from the separation of the life-principle (or soul) from the corporal reality of the person." Pope Pius XII declared this same truth when he stated that human life continues when its vital functions manifest themselves even with the help of artificial processes.

5. "Acknowledgement of the unique dignity of the human person has a further underlying consequence: vital organs which occur singly in the body can be removed only after death--that is, from the body of someone who is certainly dead. This requirement is self-evident, since to act otherwise would mean intentionally to cause the death of the donor in disposing of his organs.” Natural moral law precludes removal for transplantation of unpaired vital organs from a person who is not certainly dead. The declaration of "brain death" is not sufficient to arrive at the conclusion that the patient is certainly dead. It is not even sufficient to arrive at moral certitude.

6. Many in the medical and scientific community maintain that brain-related criteria for death are sufficient to generate moral certitude of death itself. Ongoing medical and scientific evidence contradicts this assumption. Neurological criteria alone are not sufficient to generate moral certitude of death itself, and are absolutely incapable of generating physical certainty that death has occurred.

7. It is now patently evident that there is no single so-called neurological criterion commonly held by the international scientific community to determine certain death. Rather, many different sets of neurological criteria are used without global consensus.

8. Neurological criteria are not sufficient for declaration of death when an intact cardio-respiratory system is functioning. These neurological criteria test for the absence of some specific brain reflexes. Functions of the brain not considered are temperature control, blood pressure, cardiac rate and salt and water balance. When a patient on a ventilation machine is declared “brain dead," these functions not only are present but also are frequently active.

9. The apnea test--the removal of respiratory support--is mandated as a part of the neurological diagnosis and it is paradoxically applied to ensure irreversibility. This significantly impairs outcome, or even causes death, in patients with severe brain injury.

10. There is overwhelming medical and scientific evidence that the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem) is not proof of death. The complete cessation of brain activity cannot be adequately assessed. Irreversibility is a prognosis, not a medically observable fact. We now successfully treat many patients who in the recent past were considered hopeless.

11. A diagnosis of death by neurological criteria alone is theory, not scientific fact. It is not sufficient to overcome the presumption of life.

12. No law whatsoever ought to attempt to make licit an act that is intrinsically evil. "I repeat once more that a law which violates an innocent person's natural right to life is unjust and, as such, is not valid as a law. For this reason I urgently appeal once more to all political leaders not to pass laws which, by disregarding the dignity of the person, undermine the very fabric of society."

13. The termination of one innocent life in pursuit of saving another, as in the case of the transplantation of unpaired vital organs, does not mitigate the evil of taking an innocent human life. Evil may not be done that good might come of it.

Signatories:

J.A. Armour, physician, University of Montreal Hospital of the Sacred Heart, Montreal, Quebec.

Fabian Bruskewitz, Bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska

Paul A. Byrne, past president, Catholic Medical Association, US.

Pilar Mercado Calva, professor, School of Medicine, Anahuac University, Mexico.

Cicero G. Coimbra, professor of Clinical Neurology, Federal University of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

William F. Colliton, retired professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology George Washington University Medical School, Virginia.

Joseph C. Evers, clinical associate professor of Pediatrics, Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC.

David Hill, emeritus consultant anesthetist, at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and associate lecturer, Cambridge University, England.

Ruth Oliver, psychiatrist, Kingston, Ontario.

Michael Potts, head of Religion and Philosophy Department, Methodist College, Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Josef Seifert, professor of Philosophy at the International Academy of Philosophy, Vaduz, Liechtenstein; honorary member of the Medical Faculty of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, Chile.

Robert Spaemann, professor emeritus of Philosophy, University of Munich, Germany.

Robert F. Vasa, Bishop of the Diocese of Baker, Oregon.

Yoshio Watanabe, consultant cardiologist, Nagoya Tokushukai General Hospital, Japan.

Mercedes Arzú Wilson, president, Family of the Americas Foundation and World Organization for the Family.

Prayers Kids Pray!                                             Dear God

Dear God,

Please put another holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now.

Amanda

Dear Mr. God,

I wish you would not make it so easy for people to come apart. I had to have 3 stitches and a shot.

Janet

Dear God,

Thank you for the baby brother but what I asked for was a puppy. But thank you anyway. I’m getting to like him more and more.

Joyce

Dear God,

I read the bible. What does beget mean? Nobody will tell me.

Love Alison

Dear God,

how did you know you were God? Who told you?

Charlene

Dear God,

In bible times, did they really talk that fancy?

Jennifer

Dear God,

I bet it's very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it.

Nancy

Dear God,

I like the story about Noah the best of all of them. I like walking on water, too.

Glenn

Dear God,

my Grandpa says you were around when he was a little boy. How far back do you go? Love, Dennis

Dear God,

Do you draw the lines around the countries? If you don't, who does?

Nathan

Dear God,

Did you mean for platypuses to look like that or was it an accident?

Norma

Dear God,

maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they each had their own rooms. It works out OK with me and my brother.

Larry

Dear God,

I keep waiting for spring, but it never did come yet. What's up? Don't forget.

Mark

Dear God,

my brother told me about how you are born but it just doesn't sound right. What do you say?

Marcia

Dear God,

if you watch in Church on Sunday I will show you my new shoes.

Barbara

Dear God,

I do not think anybody could be a better God than you. Well, I just want you to know that. I am not just saying that because you are already God.

Charles

Dear God,

It is great the way you always get the stars in the right place.

Why can't you do that with the moon?   

Love Jeff

Dear God,

I am doing the best I can. Really !!!!

Frank

Dear God,

I didn't think orange went with purple until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday night. That was really cool.

Thomas

amartello@apostlesforlifesite.org