Election 2008 Draws Near!

It seems hard to believe but Election 2008 is finally almost over. And who can say that it hasn't been an exciting time in the history of this country?

For the first time ever, we have an African/American running for president and a woman running for vice-president. One of the political parties will most definitely be making history.

But as Catholics, we all need to sit down and think a little bit on how we are going to vote this year. And as South Dakota Catholics, we have a little more at stake than just the presidential race.

Once again South Dakota has a measure on the ballot to try and limit the number of abortions that are performed here in this state. Statistics show that around 800 unborn children lose their lives every year at the hands of the abortion Dr. Mengeles of our time.

Dr. Joseph Mengele was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. He gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, and for performing human experiments on camp inmates. He was also known as the Angel of Death. Some of the horrors documented included numerous acts of cruelty - the dissection of live infants; the castration of boys and men without the use of an anesthetic; and the administering of high-voltage electric shocks to women inmates under the auspices of testing their endurance. He attempted to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs and other brutal surgeries. And sad as it is, some of this is nothing different than what the abortion doctors do at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls. (Wikipedia.org).

What baffles me is why our country allows cruelty to be performed on unborn infants, while their mothers sit back and do nothing to stop it. And how any doctor could suck the brains out of a living human being, is hard to understand.

Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls, where all of the state's abortions are performed, told us in 2006 that if South Dakota included three exceptions to the law, they would be all for ending abortion. But, how soon they forget. Planned Parenthood is not for the end of abortion because to do so will mean thousands of dollars of lost revenue by which they run their clinic. Their clinic is not interested in providing free health care to women. Their clinic is only interested in providing abortions and raking in those big bucks to pay the Dr. Mengeles of today's world.

Bishop Paul Swain has told the people of our diocese that it is ok to vote for this law because it is the first step in the process of ending all abortions. I guess I can live with that. After all, there aren't all that many women who get pregnant after a rape and really, having an abortion after being raped is only going to cause more trauma on the woman and forever end the life of another living being inside her womb. And there aren't that many people who get pregnant from incest, thank God. As for the health of the mother. How many women do we know who have lost their life giving birth or from being pregnant? Every hospital in this country has the capabilities to save not only the mother, but the baby as well. And whatever happened to death by natural causes? Why have we let the doctors become gods over us choosing who will live and who will die, when the main purpose of their job is to save lives?

In the beginning, abortion proponents began the campaign to take away the humanity of the unborn child. And through deceitful practices, they have convinced women that an abortion is getting rid of a glob of cells rather than butchering a living, human being, who did nothing but become created by God. And when I say butcher, that is exactly what is done, everything from suctioning the brain out, collapsing the baby's skull, to tearing off limbs, to injecting burning solutions - all intended to kill this child. What did this child ever do to us? And tell me how this is different by what Dr. Mengele did in Nazi Germany? It's not different at all.

With prayer abortion can be defeated. But it is going to take Catholics around the world praying for the end of this atrocity and it can be done. But first all Catholics need to come to the understanding about what abortion really does - and that is, it destroys the life of a living human being and make the mother, the mother of an eternal dead child.

If people want to continue on saying this is all about choice - fine. But there are other choices. There is abstinence, number one. There is adoption. There are many other choices that don't include murder.

God's commandment of Thou Shalt Not Kill should be the first clue that something is wrong with abortion.