Vice Admiral C. Everett Koop, USPHS
Surgeon General of the United States
Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop put together this wonderful film series “Whatever happened to the human race?” and my senior class teacher Mark Brink taught us a semester long course on it in 1979. I was so impacted by it that I returned the following two years to sit in and watch the series again even though I had graduated and was in college. I knew the impact this film series would have on the pro-life movement and I wanted to soak it all in.
We got to hear about Hunter and Wilson’s trip to California to help our friend Rev Sherwood Haisty and his street preaching ministry. They got to see a group of diverse people and they had the opportunity to interact with them concerning the gospel. I hope to put up some of the video clips soon.
Max, you are right to say that the economy is a very important issue. However, the sanctity of life is a big issue too. I just got finished reading about the life of Dr. Bernard Nathanson and his transformation from being a founder of NARAL to putting together the film “The Silent Scream.” Ronald Reagan rightly said that all Representatives and Senators should see this film and then it would be easy to pass pro-life laws. Want to know more then check outhttp://haltingarkansasliberalswithtruth.co…
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood and daughter of Anne Richards, former governor of Texas and Mollie Ivins cohort, is on C-Span Newsmakers talking about the consequences of defunding Planned Parenthood. The care women (and men since there is nothing like a case of the clap and no insurance to send one scurrying to their door) are receiving is essential. One in five women in America have used their services for birth control and health screening. Life saving screening for both women and men won’t be available through PP. And they are very cost effective compared to ERs. All these Republican a**holes and some cowardly dems would hie their daughters off to wherever for an abortion if it so happened that the father was not a suitable boy. Poor women get to go the coat hangar route, or die in back alleys.Posted by the outlier on March 27, 2011 at 10:49 AM | Report this comment_________________________________________
I think this post by “the outlier” overlooks the basic issue of the personhood of the unborn baby and Dr. Nathanson was forced by scientific advances to admit that the unborn baby is a person. “Poor women get to go the coat hanger route or die in back alleys” is the concern of “the outlier” but what about the unborn baby? Is there any consideration of the mass murder of these unborn babies?
I wanted to pass along a portion of the excellent article “Bernard Nathanson: A Life Transformed by the Truth about Abortion.” (Feb 11, 2011)
LifeNews.com Note: Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. This article previously appeared in Public Discourse:
Within a year after Roe v. Wade, however, Nathanson began to have moral doubts about the cause to which he had been so single-mindedly devoted. In a widely noticed 1974 essay in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, he revealed his growing doubts about the “pro-choice” dogma that abortion was merely the removal of an “undifferentiated mass of cells,” and not the killing of a developing human being. Referring to abortions that he had supervised or performed, he confessed to an “increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.”
Still, he was not ready to abandon support for legal abortion. It was, he continued to insist, necessary to prevent the bad consequences of illegal abortions. But he was moving from viewing abortion itself as a legitimate solution to a woman’s personal problem, to seeing it as an evil that should be discouraged, even if for practical reasons it had to be tolerated. Over the next several years, while continuing to perform abortions for what he regarded as legitimate “health” reasons, Nathanson would be moved still further toward the pro-life position by the emergence of new technologies, especially fetoscopy and ultrasound, that made it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, to deny that abortion is the deliberate killing of a unique human being–a child in the womb.
By 1980, the weight of evidence in favor of the pro-life position had overwhelmed Nathanson and driven him out of the practice of abortion. He had come to regard the procedure as unjustified homicide and refused to perform it. Soon he was dedicating himself to the fight against abortion and revealing to the world the lies he and his abortion movement colleagues had told to break down public opposition.
In 1985, Nathanson employed the new fetal imaging technology to produce a documentary film, “The Silent Scream,” which energized the pro-life movement and threw the pro-choice side onto the defensive by showing in graphic detail the killing of a twelve-week-old fetus in a suction abortion. Nathanson used the footage to describe the facts of fetal development and to make the case for the humanity and dignity of the child in the womb. At one point, viewers see the child draw back from the surgical instrument and open his mouth: “This,” Nathanson says in the narration, “is the silent scream of a child threatened imminently with extinction.”
Publicity for “The Silent Scream” was provided by no less a figure than President Ronald Reagan, who showed the film in the White House and touted it in speeches. Like Nathanson, Reagan, who had signed one of the first abortion-legalization bills when he was Governor of California, was a zealous convert to the pro-life cause. During his term as president, Reagan wrote and published a powerful pro-life book entitled Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation–a book that Nathanson praised for telling the truth about the life of the child in the womb and the injustice of abortion
The Silent Scream part 3
The Daily Hatch 