Ultrasounds and Sonograms Save Babies’ Lives—A Call to Support Pregnancy Care Clinics
According to a recent newsletter by the Pregnancy Care Clinic (PCC) in San Diego, “Providing free ultrasounds is an essential service that we offer …” No surprise therefore that California has sought to stop any physicians practicing as sole proprietorships from being allowed to perform ultrasounds with its AB1720 amendment petition.[9] The Devil knows what he’s doing as a lying murderer. Ultrasounds save children’s lives.
Editor’s Note: Pregnancy care clinics in San Diego County—the author’s residence, have recently been under serious attack to be shut down. Please see the footnote below about today’s December 5 meeting with San Diego County Supervisors and how to influence them.[1]
My wife and I had determined we fully filled my quiver this January with the delivery of our daughter. So, I was quite surprised this June when she hinted that another little reward was likely awaiting us in her womb! I responded, “That’s impossible!”—not out of desperation, but confusion about how it could have happened during the identified month of conception.
Yet, indeed, next March we are expecting our eighth covenant child.[2] We learned through an early blood test that he will be our fifth son, and we are now praying for him by his name, Gaius Ezekiel Van Leuven.[3] Naturally, we ask of the Lord that our “Little Guy” makes it to full term healthy and strong. How frightful that such prayer cover proved important for him just to survive my wife’s first gynecology visit!
Right at the start, the lady doctor asked if we had planned the pregnancy. When my wife sheepishly admitted that through natural family planning we had tried for her not to become pregnant,[4] the doctor cavalierly responded, “Do you want to be? You don’t have to be. This is California.”
Thus, she lectured my wife while our then eight-month-old daughter, grinning her fresh cut choppers, giggled and bounced upon my knee—whom the doctor had already googled over upon entering the other end of the cramped patient’s room where we were tucked into a tight corner behind the door waiting with Mamma awaiting her checkup on the examination chair. My wife and I were flabbergasted; but she quickly reacted resolutely confirming that we would gladly receive our gift from God.
The doctor, a mother of one young daughter who was filling in for my wife’s normally assigned and supportive gynecologist, shockingly defaulted to this sly rhetorical implication and pressure: “No, you don’t, do you? You have too many children already. You’re forty years old and you just cut your last child’s umbilical cord only a few months ago—her belly button has surely barely healed over. Let’s end this now. You don’t need this. You don’t want it.”[5]
But after seeing that her preliminary temptation was a lost cause, the doctor conceded to the second selection column of her mental checklist and wheeled over the ultrasound machine, flicking on its hum and beeps and blinks. As she guided its scanning wand over my wife’s gel-lathered tummy, we watched in wonderment while our son kept kicking with his Mamma’s long legs and his strong heartbeat pulsed and scratched across the screen in real time! It is always amazing.
I couldn’t believe how this medical professional who would have taken the Hippocratic Oath could now hypocritically look at our baby and enjoy him with us on the monitor just minutes after first offering to kill him; and frankly, robustly suggesting we take her up on that offer.
But what really struck me later as we strolled toward the hospital elevators and paused outside its entryway—repeatedly smiling over the sonogram strip of baby pics, was this: the doctor did NOT propose turning to the ultrasound machine in the room so we could see our living baby until AFTER we had affirmed we would keep him alive.[6] And that timing it seems to me was strategic.
Had we expressed uncertainty and been led toward aborting our baby, very likely we would never have been presented with the choice to look at him moving on the monitor before the deed was done and he was dead—nor have to face his little face in the aftermath. How could we see his heart beating and then have the heart to crush it? Of course, the doctor didn’t provide the pregnancy scan possibility during her initial inquisition!
But how many uninformed others hear no mention of the ultrasound machine before naively leaving it unplugged in the corner and then silencing a baby’s voice forever? —because of the powerfully persuasive and prejudiced push of a snide doctor’s urging?
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How to Get Up When You’d Rather Not
Anyone walking through a season of suffering, particularly mental affliction, will benefit from this book. Noble puts into words what many of us already know but desperately need to be reminded of. The book is both a comfort in trials and an encouragement to choose to go on living.
Alan Noble describes an experience many of us have but don’t want to talk about: the struggle to go on living life amid deep suffering. Some of us experience quiet anguish simply from the demands of continuing to exist.
That’s not to say all of us, each and every day, have to drag ourselves out of bed to keep moving forward. But we all go through seasons of what Noble calls “mental affliction”: the deep, powerful weight that calls into question life itself and dampens the drive to keep on living.
Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He has previously written on ways modernity distorts our understanding of the world. On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living draws from his own experience with depression and anxiety to help readers find a way to continue to be faithful despite their struggles.
As Noble points out, we often assume when we see a smiling face or a productive adult that all must be right with his or her life. I’d venture that many of us could say of ourselves: on the outside everything looks fine, but inside it’s a different story.
For some, the struggle is due to an underlying illness or inexplicable chronic pain. For others, it’s more generally due to the ups and downs of life in a broken world. But no struggle is simple.We aren’t always honest about how difficult normal human life is.
In this deeply personal essay, Alan Noble considers the unique burden of everyday life in the modern world. Sometimes, he writes, the choice to carry on amid great suffering—to simply get out of bed—is itself a powerful witness to the goodness of life, and of God.Choices in Mental Suffering
At the beginning of the book, Noble reveals he used to believe anyone who struggled with mental affliction, in its many forms, did something to bring it about. They made choices and were reaping consequences. Before I entered my own season of suffering several years back, I operated out of the same framework. I may not have articulated it in that way, but, even as a counselor, that was my view of suffering.
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‘Being Gay Was No Longer Who I Was’: The Supernatural Moment This Hollywood Designer Met Jesus Christ
“Finally I just turned around and I said, ‘Are you guys Christians?’ And they just – they laid it out for me. They told me what they believe. They told me the gospel. ‘So what does your church in Hollywood believe about homosexuality?’ And they were just like, ‘Well, you know, we believe it’s a sin.’ And what’s interesting about that is, number one, I appreciated how kind of frank they were and honest.”
“After college. I ended up moving to LA to pursue acting and writing and kind of a creative – more of a creative field. I just came out to everyone. That’s when I fully embraced homosexuality as my identity.”
“After each relationship with a guy, and after it would end, I had total amnesia that it – how it all ended. And I would think, oh, the next guy is going to be perfect and the next guy is going to be amazing. And of course like two years later, (MAKES SOUND) it’s over, you know. There’s cheating, infidelity, and it’s over.”
“At this point in my life, I was very successful in my career as a set designer, production designer. I mean, I was doing covers for Vogue and for Harper’s Bazaar. I worked with a lot of pop stars like Katy Perry and Paris Hilton and Oprah. Like, everyone you can imagine – I worked with them. And I also started my own men’s fashion line that was successful. Our clothes were in, you know, L.A., New York, Paris.
“I went to all the shows. I went to all the after-parties. I was at this one after-party in Paris, and I remember, just everyone was there from the fashion world. I think Kanye was there that year, and I was kind of looking out over the crowd, it just struck me so profoundly. I was like, is that all there is to life? Just going to parties for the rest of my life, is this what it’s all about? And I really started to panic that night. I was overwhelmed with a sense of emptiness.”
“I got back to LA and got busy with work for about six months. I was at a coffee shop in Silver Lake with my best friend. And he was gay too. And we noticed, shockingly, that there was a table next to us with Bibles on the table. This was the first time I’d seen a Bible in public in Los Angeles ever. And by that point in my life, I was – I was a practical atheist.”
“Finally I just turned around and I said, ‘Are you guys Christians?’ And they just – they laid it out for me. They told me what they believe. They told me the gospel. ‘So what does your church in Hollywood believe about homosexuality?’ And they were just like, ‘Well, you know, we believe it’s a sin.’ And what’s interesting about that is, number one, I appreciated how kind of frank they were and honest.”
“They invited me to church the following Sunday. And I-I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to go to your church, but I’ll think about it.’ And then the following Sunday, I wake up and I’m like, ‘I guess I’m just going to go to this church today.’”
“The pastor comes out and he starts preaching on Romans chapter seven and something strange started happening. Everything he was saying, every word he was saying, every sentence he was saying started to resonate this truth in my mind, in my heart, and I didn’t know why. I was on the edge of my seat, literally on the edge of my seat.”
“It was the first time I had really heard the gospel and understood it… And before he left, he invited people to get prayed with on the side of the church.”
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Professor Declares June “Fidelity Month” in Support of God and Family
The new month is a positive development coming from a professor and supported by other academics….Instead of posting rainbow flags and boasting about their support for the LGBT agenda, schools should embrace Fidelity Month and fight for the restoration of traditional values.
June is officially “Fidelity Month,” according to Princeton University Professor Robert George.
The outspoken Catholic and social conservative announced that June would be “Fidelity Month,” in opposition to Pride Month.
“As my Facebook friends know, by the authority vested in me by absolutely no one, I have declared June to be ‘Fidelity Month’—a month dedicated to the importance of fidelity to God, spouses and families, our country, and our communities,” Professor George wrote on his Facebook in early May.
He encouraged people to “make and fly a Fidelity Month flag,” change their Facebook profile or banner to the logo and organize events in support of the month.
There is also a webinar slated for this Thursday for anyone who wants to learn more about the endeavor. Speakers include pro-life leader Lila Rose, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Professor Andrew Walker and James Wilson, a poet and professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.
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