Satan in the Mailbox

The Advent and Christmas seasons bring a multitude of mail solicitations from all kinds of charities and non-profit organizations. And while it can be annoying collecting all the mail solicitations on a daily basis, I understand the worthy purposes for most. It makes sense to use the “gifting” mentality of the Christmas season for fundraising.

Some of the solicitations we receive are from foundations that we support on a regular basis. They are from a wide variety of worthy faith-based, environmental, youth, pro-life, and educational causes. But this year, for the first time, we received solicitations from Planned Parenthood and Compassion and Choices, an assisted suicide advocate group.

It seemed kind of strange that their solicitations arrived right after we finished up our local 40 Days for Life campaign and after the recent elections.  But there they were.

I have no idea how we got on their mailing lists but rather than just chucking their mail in the trash, I read what they had to say. The messaging they used may help to explain why the pro-life position lost in recent state elections.

Planned Parenthood solicitation message

Planned Parenthood (PP) presents abortion as just an abstract element of broader civil rights.  PP sets itself up as the defender of essential health services to confront the Supreme Court Dobbs decision which, in their terms, created a public health crisis. PP also says it is the protector of reproductive freedom, body autonomy, and women’s rights.

Planned Parenthood denounces anti-abortion laws.  The organization says these laws limit access to affirming care and health equity.  These laws also suppress health care not only in women of reproductive age but transgender and non-binary people as well. They further claim that those anti-abortion laws are deeply out of step with science, medical standards and public opinion.

PP requests donations to stand up for the freedom to control our bodies and our future. This freedom message permeates the entire solicitation. The PP donation appeal uses the language of the values of personal freedom and civil rights to justify their cause. It ‘sanitizes’ abortion.

Jesus in John 8:44 calls Satan “the father of lies,” and PP messaging certainly appears under his influence in that it is a pack of lies. PP’s carefully crafted message ignores the truth of abortion. The reality is that someone dies – a baby.

Compassion and Choices solicitation message

While abortion is the focus of this essay, the material sent by Compassion and Choices (CC), an organization that advocates for making assisted suicide legal in all states, is another example of the same type of propaganda.  It uses language similar to Planned Parenthood’s language.

CC maintains that the most important human rights issue of our time is having the freedom of choice for end-of-life decisions. They want laws to empower people to take personal charge of end-of-life issues. CC implies it is standing up for personal liberty.

CC presents an abstract view in that never mentions assisted suicide, euthanasia or medical aid to the dying. As with PP, the CC message sanitizes the end-of-life issue.  Their position can be seen to be a lead-in to an expansion in suicides (both medically assisted and self- induced) as is starting to be seen in Canada.

Confronting the pro-abortion message

A major thing that strikes me from those solicitations is that the message they project must resonate with a lot of people or they wouldn’t use such narratives. I suggest that the arguments used in their requests for donations are probably the same used in political campaigns to convince voters to vote for abortion friendly laws. The election in Ohio, which codified abortion rights in the state’s Constitution passed by an overwhelming majority.  It is reflective of previous election results in other states in 2022.

I also submit that many folks who voted for the abortion position do not really know about the true nature of abortion and the implications from it. The appeal to freedom of choice and access to health care masks what really happens in abortion.

PP artfully crafts its message.  It says that a vote for abortion access is a vote for good old American values. But Democracy is at stake.

For those of us in the Pro-life movement such messaging poses a challenge of education and counter-messaging. The pro-choice arguments presented by PP and by CC have some logic to them, especially in terms of a women’s rights to control her own body.

Countering the Message

PP says women should not have to give birth to a child that may be subject to abuse, poverty or illness.  Women should also not have to carry a child conceived by incest or rape.  And these are rather convincing rationales.

All of these arguments, however, only make sense if the embryo is not human. But what if most people understood that an embryo is a human being? If they did, I believe the majority in our culture would not condone its murder. For then the logic shifts to the fact that killing an embryo at one day isn’t any different that killing a child at 2 or 12 years of age.

We need to confront the false narrative with the message that science acknowledges that human life begins at conception.  A human embryo is not part of the mother’s body but a separate human entity that meets all the criteria for human life. It is not just a clump of irrelevant cells.

Biology texts, such as Miller and Levin’s Biology, define eight characteristics that all living things share and that can be objectively verified:

• All living things are made up of cells;
• Every living thing has a universal genetic code;
• Living things obtain and use materials and energy;
• All living things grow and develop;
• Living things have the ability to reproduce;
• Every living thing responds to its environment;
• Living things maintain homeostasis;
• All living things change over time.

The Pro-Life Position

Christian apologist Greg Koukl concisely summarizes a pro-life rationale based on the above criteria for life.

If the unborn child is not a human person, no justification for abortion is necessary. However, if the unborn is a human person, no justification for abortion is adequate.

There are many issues surrounding abortion so the truth must always anchor our messaging. We must proclaim, as a priority, the pro-life message that life is sacred from conception to natural death. The embryo or the fetus – no matter the stage of development – is a living human being. To abort is to kill that human person.

In that sense we need to keep witnessing for this in our prayer vigils, marches, etc. And our priests need to continually convey this message from the pulpit.

Likewise, conveying the message that there is a whole support system to aid mothers is a necessity.  There are over 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers in the United States ready, able, and willing to support pregnant women.

The unborn child meets the criteria of a living human being.  This is a message that can be an aid to save lives.

Murder is appalling to most folks – especially the murder of innocents.  The realization that an unborn, living child is a murder victim can change many hearts and minds.  This realization will help defend the sacredness of life.

As a result of such changes, the lying messages left in our mail boxes by organizations such as Planned Parenthood will then be summarily discarded for the trash they are.

St Michael pray for us.