Finding the will to resist Islamist terror in Timbuktu

Transcription

Finding the will to resist Islamist terror in Timbuktu
J A NU A R Y 24 , 2 0 1 5
R O E V. WA D E A N N I V E R S A R Y I S S U E
HOPE
Nourishing children in an age of abortion and neglect
MS_HCReformFamily_World10.14.indd 1
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8/25/14 6:22:59 PM
12/29/14 4:58 PM
JAN2415
/ VOLUME 30 / NUMBER 2
COVER STORY
Survival of the
despised
34
America at its best follows the philosophy of Emma
Lazarus over that of Margaret Sanger
36 Vital parts of the body
God created persons with
cognitive disabilities for a
reason, and special needs
ministries are showing how
much they can enrich a church
23
42 Special deliveries
Baby boxes and safe-haven laws
save thousands of babies
worldwide, but they stir
controversy in South Korea
59
46 Pro-abortion and
proud of it
Social and media campaigns
promote abortion without
regrets, but sometimes a more
complicated message slips out
50 Elderly island
With fewer young marriages
and abortion numbers sky high,
Taiwan faces a severe birth
dearth
72
54 Depression-era
dishonesty
The drive for abortion began not
in the 1960s but in the 1930s
57 State-by-state progress
More than a dozen states last
year made it easier to protect life
DEPARTMENTS
3
Joel Belz
5
DISPATCHES
News
Human Race
Quotables
Quick Takes
20 Janie B. Cheaney
23 CULTURE
Movies & TV
Books
Q&A
Music
32 Mindy Belz
59 NOTEBOOK
Sports
Technology
Science
Money
67 Mailbag
71 Andrée Seu
Peterson
72 Marvin Olasky
ON THE COVER 10-week-old Harang Cho, born June 28, 2012, in South Korea.
Photo by Seong Joon Cho/Genesis
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1/7/15 12:02 PM
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Joel Belz
Unmappable threats
Americans have nobody but ourselves to
blame for three destrucTive forces
One thing you have to say for this fellow
Kim Jong Un. He doesn’t pretend that he’s
your friend only to double-cross you. He tells
you right up front that you’re the enemy of
North Korea, and that he wants nothing more
than to destroy you.
Sort of like Iran and its stance toward Israel.
“We will annihilate you,” Iran’s leaders have
threatened repeatedly through the years. And
then just six weeks ago, Iran’s Ayatollah
Khamenei went out of his way to offer a very
specific nine-point outline of reasons why Iran
will wipe out Israel. No need to read between
the lines or to guess about intentions.
But dangerous as they are, Kim Jong Un and
Khamenei are perhaps no longer the forces in
the world most to be feared. More typically
these days, our enemies in a terribly complex
setting are far more ambiguous, far more confusing, far more subtle, and far more obscure.
And because of all that, they also tend to be far
more dangerous.
The playing field itself is today so very
different—so terrifyingly multidimensional. A
key component of my earliest geopolitical
education was the detailed daily map in The Des
Moines Register highlighting the battle for the
Korean Peninsula in the early 1950s. The dayto-day changes in the jagged battle lines offered
a regular summary of the advances and retreats
of American forces—a graphic charting, as it
were, of our national well-being. I was about
10, and I learned to interpret those maps about
the same time I learned to read the major
league baseball standings. It all seemed such a
simple and helpful graphic display of everything that was important in life. It was good to
know, in such simple terms, who was winning
and who was losing.
How could I know then—indeed, how could
a nation know—that America’s next war would
defy the daily newspaper’s mapmakers? In
Piotr Krześl ak/ISTOCK
R
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2 JOEL.indd 3
A society that
doesn’t know
itself and its
own character
can’t possibly
know who its
enemies are.
Vietnam, the enemy wasn’t simply “over there,”
behind those lines that used to be so easy to
chart. Instead, the enemy was more and more
perceived to be within, around, above, beneath,
and everywhere. At home, the nation itself
seemed just as subdivided.
So while we cowered in our fortresses
worrying about some physical attack by Kim or
Khamenei, the society we thought we were
defending was quietly disintegrating from
within. I suggest three examples worth our
serious concern.
The concept of traditional marriage
comes first—if only because it was the
first of all relationships ordered by God
following His creational acts. And if we
suppose that gay marriage is the most
withering challenge to God’s plan, we
demonstrate how very quiet the real
attack has been. Probably no assault on
real marriage has been more destructive than the wave of no-fault divorce
that swept our society just a generation
ago, and has splintered us ever since.
Closely related to the marriage issue
is the concept of family. When more
than half the children of any subgroup
of a society are missing a traditional relationship with a father or mother figure, it’s appropriate to question whether that society has any
right to expect future solidarity—behaviorally,
economically, or on any other front.
A third example of internal destruction is our
grand societal commitment to various doctrines
of pluralism—by which we keep affirming to
each other that all ultimate values in life are of
equal worth and consideration. It’s one thing to
defend each other’s rights to express all kinds of
opinions. It’s quite something else to pretend
that all such expressions are equally true.
My main point here is that none of these
destructive forces came as though imposed on
us by some outside marauder. Neither Kim nor
Khamenei has yet threatened us, holding the
trigger of a nuclear weapon, either to adopt such
ultimately radical changes or to find our cities
and countryside being powderized. All this
malarkey is something we taught to ourselves.
A society that doesn’t know itself and its
own character can’t possibly know who its
enemies are. They slip regularly and easily in
and out of the places we live in not because
we’re badly guarded at the border—but because
definable borders simply no longer exist.
How do you put all that on a map? A
J A NU A RY 2 4 , 2 0 1 5 W ORLD 3
1/6/15 4:01 PM
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DISPATCHES
NEWS / HUMAN RACE / QUOTABLES / QUICK TAKES
JAN. 7
PARIS ATTACKED
At least three masked gunmen stormed
the off ices of a satirical newspaper in
Paris, shouting “Allahu akbar!” and killing
at least 12 people, including the paper’s
editor and a cartoonist. Early reports
indicated two police off icers also died in
the attack, which President François
Hollande called “a terrorist attack without
a doubt.” The noon rampage at the weekly
publication Charlie Hebdo was France’s
deadliest terror attack in at least 20 years.
Assailants firebombed the paper’s off ices
over its caricatures of Muhammad in 2011.
Editor Stéphane Charbonnier, who was
killed in the Jan. 7 attack, was undaunted:
“I live under French law,” he said in 2012.
“I don’t live under Quranic law.”
JANUARY 24, 2015 WORLD
5
1/7/15 12:19 PM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
jan. 4
Boston justice
Jan. 1
Cuomo ERA
Former New York Gov. Mario
Cuomo died on New Year’s Day
at age 82. The three-term
governor and lifelong Catholic
became a liberal icon, famously
arguing for legal abortion during a speech at the University
of Notre Dame. Cuomo’s son,
Andrew, became governor of
New York in 2010, and began
his second term in office hours
before his father died.
6 WORLD J A N U A R Y 2 4 , 2 0 1 5
boston: Andrew Burton/Get t y Images • cuomos: David K arp/Bloomberg via Get t y Images • stampede: ZHOU MIAOCHEN/EPA/L ANDOV
Nearly two years after a
terrorist attack at the Boston
Marathon killed three people
and injured more than 260
others, the trial began for
accused bomber Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev. At least 1,200
potential jurors began filling out
questionnaires for a jury pool
attorneys will whittle down to
12. Authorities say Tsarnaev
and his brother, Tamerlan,
planted two homemade bombs
at the finish line of the Boston
race on April 15, 2013. They say
the pair also killed an MIT
campus police officer during the
manhunt for the suspects.
Tamerlan died in a firefight with
police. Judge George A. O’Toole
told potential jurors at a federal
courthouse in Boston they
didn’t need special training to
serve: “What you do need is a
commitment to justice.”
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1/7/15
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11:44 AM
BOSTON: ANDREW BURTON/GET T Y IMAGES • CUOMOS: DAVID K ARP/BLOOMBERG VIA GET T Y IMAGES • STAMPEDE: ZHOU MIAOCHEN/EPA/L ANDOV
DEC. 31
SHANGHAI
STAMPEDE
A New Year’s Eve
celebration turned
deadly in Shanghai, as
36 people died in a
stampede along the
Chinese city’s popular
waterfront. The chaos
erupted shortly before
midnight, as a crowd of
revelers reportedly
panicked on a stairway
leading to a viewing
platform. Chinese state
media reported only 700
Shanghai police off icers
were patrolling the
crowds of as many as
300,000 people.
1/7/15 11:44 AM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
Dec. 27
Fallen servants
CREDIT
8 W ORLD J ANUARY 2 4 , 2 0 1 5
Copy goes here
1/7/15 11:45 AM
police: Craig Rut tle/ap • indonesia: Dita Al angk ara/ap • movie: Marcus Ingram/Get t y Images
Thousands of police officers from across the United States attended the funerals of murdered
New York City police officers Rafael Ramos on Dec. 27 and Wenjian Liu on Jan. 4. The partners died
on Dec. 20 when assailant Ismaaiyl Brinsley executed them as they sat in their patrol car in
Brooklyn. (The gunman later committed suicide.) Liu, 32, was a seven-year veteran of the force.
Ramos, 40, was an active member of Christ Tabernacle in Queens. Jose Ortiz, the church’s head of
security, described Ramos as a devoted Christian: “He gave everything to Christ.”
dec. 28
Sorrowful
search
CREDIT
police: Craig Rut tle/ap • indonesia: Dita Al angk ara/ap • movie: Marcus Ingram/Get t y Images
Rescue workers began
recovering bodies
from the Java Sea
after AirAsia Flight
8501 crashed with 162
people on board. The
plane’s demise on its
route from Indonesia
to Singapore capped a
tragic year for air
travel in southeast
Asia: Three disasters
in 2014 produced 699
fatalities. Pastor Philip
Mantofa of Mawar
Sharon Church said
his Indonesian
congregation lost 46
members from 14
families: “My heart
burns.”
Dec. 25
Dramatic
release
After security threats and an
allegedly North Korea–linked
cyberattack prompted Sony
Pictures to scrap the release of
The Interview, studio executives
backtracked and released the
lowbrow comedy on Christmas
Day. Some critics said the
release of the movie (lampooning
North Korean dictator Kim Jong
Un with raunchy humor and an
assassination scene) marked a
victory for free speech but a
defeat for good taste.
2 NEWS-PHOTOS.indd
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JANUARY 24, 2015 WORLD 9
1/7/15 11:45 AM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
Around the globe
MORE NEWS OF THE WORLD IS ON OUR WEBSITE: WNG.ORG
GERMANY Lights went out at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate
as city off icials tried to quench demonstrations launched
by Pegida, a group opposed to growing numbers of
Islamic immigrants. But the protests have swept the
country, with 18,000 turning out in Dresden Jan. 5.
PAKISTAN Airstrikes destroyed four hideouts and a suicide bomber training center,
killing more than 40, as Pakistan and the
United States re-upped an off ensive
against the Taliban. The eff ort followed a
December Taliban attack on a military-run
school in Peshawar that killed at least 141
people, including 132 children.
TURKEY Off icials gave the go-ahead to
build a church in the tiny Syriac community
of Yesilkoy on the Sea of Marmara—the
first new church approved since the
founding of modern Turkey in 1923.
GUINEA After a lengthy investigation,
scientists report fruit bats, dispersed
when a tree in the Guinea forest burned
over a year ago, may have transmitted the
Ebola virus that infected Emile Ouamouno,
the young child who was its first victim.
CHINA With daytime temps that rarely
top 10°F, Harbin’s snow and ice festival
opened Jan. 5 and is the largest in the
world. Massive sculptures include the
Pyramids in ice, plus an ice maze.
NIGERIA Boko Haram seized a key army
outpost Jan. 3, and the Nigerian army
appears largely ineff ective against the
militants, just ahead of Feb. 14 elections.
OPEC The world’s largest overseas oil consortium
refused to cut production despite plunging oil prices.
Analysts say OPEC is using the price collapse—to
$49 a barrel at year’s end—to punish and undo the
fracking industry based in North America.
10
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
2 NEWS GLOBE+LA.indd 10
SAURABH DAS/AP
INDIA Prime Minister Narendra Modi proposed a “Good Governance Day” on Dec. 25 to
replace traditional Christmas celebrations, as members of Parliament pressed his Hindu
nationalist agenda. Parliamentary Aff airs Minister Venkaiah Naidu also called for a ban on
all religious conversions after religious minorities protested “reconversion” events—
including one intended to reconvert 4,000 Christians and 1,000 Muslims to Hinduism.
Leaders of the prime minister’s BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, have said they want to see
India “cleansed” of Christianity and Islam by 2021. Not surprisingly, physical assaults are
one result of the campaign: The Evangelical Fellowship of India recorded more than 31
assaults on Christians throughout the month of December.
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1/7/15
11:53 AM
TAXES: CABANIA/ISTOCK • BOEHNER: ALEX WONG/GET T Y IMAGES • GREECE: THANASSIS STAVRAKIS/AP • CLOCK: HANDOUT • PASSION: BOBBY RUSSELL/PASSION CONFERENCE 2014
RUSSIA Authorities detained Alexia Navalny, a
leading foe of President Vladimir Putin, as thousands took to the streets of Moscow Dec. 30 to
demonstrate against the hard-line government.
Looking ahead
JAN. 20
SAURABH DAS/AP
TAXES: CABANIA/ISTOCK • BOEHNER: ALEX WONG/GET T Y IMAGES • GREECE: THANASSIS STAVRAKIS/AP • CLOCK: HANDOUT • PASSION: BOBBY RUSSELL/PASSION CONFERENCE 2014
The nation’s
Internal Revenue Service begins
accepting paper and electronic
tax returns today, marking the
official beginning of the 2015
filing season. The Jan. 20 date is
10 days earlier than the IRS’
original projection of Jan. 30—
meaning eligible taxpayers will be
getting refunds sooner.
JAN. 20
JAN. 25
President
Barack Obama will address a
joint session of the U.S.
Congress tonight for his
annual State of the
Union Address. In a
sign of just how far
Obama and the
Congress had drifted
apart, earlier this year
some conservatives
reportedly suggested to
House Speaker John
Boehner that he not invite
the president to deliver the
State of the Union
message in person but
rather simply deliver a letter.
Instead, Boehner issued the
formal invitation on Dec. 19.
Greeks will head
to the polls today in a snap
election to select a new
Parliament. The dissolution
of Greece’s Parliament
occurred on Dec. 29 when the
legislative body failed to elect
a new president on its third try.
Ahead of the elections, Socialist
former Prime Minister Georges
Papandreou on Jan. 2 left the
Pasok party to form a new
left-wing group.
JAN. 26
A clock dubbed the largest garden
clock, and the third-largest clock, in the world
should begin ticking once again today. Located in
a municipal garden in Surat, India, the 80-footwide clock face broke down years ago. In October
the city paid a local company nearly $12,000 to
begin repairing the clock’s massive gears.
FEB. 1
Viewers of the 49th Super Bowl
will see commercials for web design
company Wix and Loctite Super Glue in
addition to ads for better-known
products such as Snickers, CocaCola, Pepsi, and Doritos. Carnival
Cruise Lines is holding an online vote
for which commercial that company
will present during the football
championship extravaganza.
2 NEWS GLOBE+LA.indd 11
1/7/15 12:36 PM
DISPATCHES
NEWS
House rules
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER SURVIVES A COUP—AGAIN—
AND DISCIPLINES KEY REBELS by J.C. Derrick in Washington
12
WORLD
2 NEWS 1-pager.indd 12
JANUARY 24, 2015
honored” by his colleagues’ support.
He previously told me he would
consider an opportunity to run for
speaker, but only if he could explain
his vision: “I’d love to have one day—or
two or three—to just use the rules,” he
said. “If you have this pyramid of
power, you can’t do anything based on
principle, because it’s all about maintaining power.”
Even though Webster didn’t actively
run for speaker, Boehner made him
pay the price: Within hours of the vote,
GOP leadership yanked Webster and
one of the members who voted for
him, Rep. Rich Nugent, R-Fla., from the
influential Rules Committee. Lawmaker
Yoho called the retribution “a sad day
for American politics,” according to
Roll Call: “Welcome to the new USSR,”
he told fellow members.
Boehner (center) arrives on the House
floor on Capitol Hill after he was reelected
to his leadership post.
J. SCOT T APPLEWHITE/AP
Republicans reelected John
Boehner, R-Ohio, to a third term
as Speaker of the House on Jan. 6, but
only after some conservatives demonstrated their displeasure with his
leadership. Twenty-five GOP members
voted for someone else or “present”—
more than double the number who
opposed Boehner two years ago and
the most against an incumbent
speaker in at least 100 years.
Boehner’s first-ballot reelection
ensures a form of party continuity in
the 114th Congress, but it also highlights the divide with conservatives
who say he hasn’t fought hard enough
for conservative causes and against
President Barack Obama. Reps. Louie
Gohmert, R-Texas, and Ted Yoho,
R-Fla.—two of the 12 members who
voted against Boehner in 2013—
launched an open rebellion before the
new Congress assembled, publicly
announcing their candidacies for the
speaker’s gavel. They garnered only
five combined votes, including their
own.
Boehner has been a strong
speaker in two ways: He’s helped the
party build its largest majority since
1930, and he’s kept power concentrated in GOP leadership. The latter,
illustrated in December when leaders
jammed a massive spending bill
through Congress on short notice, is
one of the biggest complaints against
Boehner. It’s also a reason 12 members voted for Florida Rep. Daniel
Webster, a former state speaker who
achieved bipartisan praise after
decentralizing power in the Florida
House of Representatives.
Webster, whom WORLD profiled
last fall (see “Legislative guardian,”
Oct. 4), declined to comment publicly
about the effort to draft him, other
than a brief social media post in which
he said he was “humbled and
R
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., the thirdlongest-serving House Republican,
told me he voted against the controversial December spending bill, but
that wasn’t a reason not to support
Boehner—who is pro-life, favors limited
government, and has worked hard to
pass conservative legislation. Smith
said he is optimistic the next year will
be productive, pointing to bipartisan
measures such as the Vietnam Human
Rights Act and reauthorization for the
U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom that now may get a
vote. “The frustration is better focused
on how the Democrat party on the
Senate side abused their power,” Smith
said. “Nobody crushed good legislation
like [former Senate Majority Leader]
Harry Reid did.”
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., echoed
Smith. Franks, whom Heritage Action
ranks as the most conservative
member of the House, has made a
habit of bucking leadership, but he
told me Boehner deserves the opportunity to lead with Republicans
controlling the Senate: “This speaker,
whether anybody realizes it or not, has
never had the ability to do what he
wanted to do. … The next two years will
tell the story.” A
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1/7/15 11:48 AM
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12/5/14 6:40 AM
HUMAN RACE
cleared
Russian Orthodox priest Gleb Yakunin,
a longstanding advocate for religious
freedom and democracy in the Soviet
Union, died Christmas Day. Yakunin,
80, was defrocked in 1966 for his criticism of the church and its collusion
with Communist authorities. Ten years
later he founded the Christian
Committee for the Defense of the Rights
of Believers in the USSR, which collected over 400 documents confirming
human rights abuses by the KGB. He
worked with Alexander Solzhenitsyn
and other dissidents and was arrested
in 1980. He served five years in the
Soviets’ dread gulag prison Perm 35,
then was exiled to Siberia. Under
Mikhail Gorbachev’s peristroika he was
released and went on to author a law on
“freedom of all denominations” used to
open churches and monasteries in
Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
But Yakunin remained a critic of the
Orthodox Church, saying it refused to
break with the past and citing state
preferential treatment in the Putin era.
In 1997 Orthodox leaders excommunicated him for “antichurch activities.”
“A lie can travel halfway
around the world while
the truth is putting on its
shoes,” said Mark Twain.
Rep. Steve Scalise, the
third-ranking House
Republican, endured
weeks of vilification following reports he spoke
at a white supremacist
gathering in 2002. But
longtime David Duke
political adviser Kenny
Knight, who organized
the gathering, told the
New Orleans TimesPicayune on Dec. 31
Scalise did not speak at a
meeting of the EuropeanAmerican Unity and Rights
conference. Scalise spoke
at a meeting of the
Jefferson Heights Civic
Association held at the
same hotel 2½ hours prior
to the event, according to
Knight and others. Scalise,
who was not at the time a
member of Congress and
had only one staff person,
said initially he did not
recall speaking to the
group but apologized anyway after a bevy of news
pundits and some members of his own party said
he should step down.
died
Bess Myerson,
New York
television
personality
and political
activist, died
in California at
90. Crowned
Miss America
in 1945 just
days after
Japan’s
surrender
marked the
end of World
War II, she
was the first—
and only—
Jew to date to
win the beauty
contest.
14 WORLD J ANUARY 2 4 , 2 0 1 5
2 HUMAN RACE.indd 14
TREATED
Pauline Cafferkey, a nurse
diagnosed with Ebola after
working in Sierra Leone,
was in stable but critical
condition in a London
hospital. The 39-year-old
volunteer received plasma
treatment from Ebola survivors, as experimental
drugs used to treat other
Western medical professionals have run out.
Yakunin: SAVERKIN ALEXANDER/ITAR-TASS /L andov • Myerson: associated press
DIED
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1/7/15
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12:15 PM
Stegall : Thad Allton/The Topek a Capital Journal/ap • McDonnell : Steve Helber/ap • Bridwell : Charles Sykes/ap • Scot t: Icon SMI/Newscom
DISPATCHES
By the
numbers
Naresh Patel, 62, after
authorities arrested him
in December for scamming women at the
Outpatient Services for
Women in Warr Acres.
Patel allegedly billed three
undercover investigators
for abortion-inducing
drugs—even though none
of the women were actually pregnant.
died
PROMOTED
Yakunin: SAVERKIN ALEXANDER/ITAR-TASS /L andov • Myerson: associated press
Stegall : Thad Allton/The Topek a Capital Journal/ap • McDonnell : Steve Helber/ap • Bridwell : Charles Sykes/ap • Scot t: Icon SMI/Newscom
Caleb Stegall, 43, took the
oath of office in December
and assumed his new seat
on the Kansas Supreme
Court (“The revival of
localism,” March 12, 2011).
Gov. Sam Brownback
appointed Stegall, his
former chief counsel and
member of the Kansas
Court of Appeals, to
replace Justice Nancy
Moritz after she accepted a
position with the U.S. 10th
Circuit Court of Appeals.
Stegall, his wife Ann, and
their five sons attend
Grace Evangelical
Presbyterian Church
in Lawrence, Kan.,
where he is a ruling
elder.
STRUCK
Maryland Episcopal Bishop
Heather Cook, 58, fatally
struck a cyclist with her
car and then initially fled
the scene Dec. 27 as
41-year-old Thomas
Palermo, a married father
of two, lay dying. She
returned 20 minutes later
after other cyclists
reportedly tracked her
down. The Diocese of
Maryland placed her on
leave, and the Baltimore
Police Department said it
planned to bring charges.
In 2010, Cook faced
charges for driving under
the influence.
SENTENCED
A federal judge sentenced
former Virginia Gov. Bob
McDonnell to two years in
prison for corruption
involving
$165,000 in
loans and
gifts. “I
am a
fallen
human
being,”
McDonnell
said, but he disagreed with the verdict
and planned to appeal to
the U.S. 4th Circuit Court
of Appeals.
revoked
Oklahoma’s Medical
Licensure Board revoked
the license of abortionist
2 HUMAN RACE.indd 15
Norman Bridwell, 86,
c reator of the “Clifford the
Big Red Dog” children’s
books—with nearly 130
million copies in 13
languages in print—died
Dec. 12.
3-1
The cash
advantage for
Democrats over
Republicans from
donations by the 183
groups that gave
more than $100,000 in
2014 midterm elections, according to an
Associated Press
analysis. The study
found that Democrats
also received more
from top individual
donors.
700
The number
of Protestant
churches expected to
close over the next
four years in the
Netherlands. Roman
Catholic leaders in the
country expect to
close more than 1,000
churches in the next
10 years.
-48° The temperature, on Dec. 31,
in Daniel, Wyo., the
lowest temperature
recorded in the contiguous United States
during 2014. In the
early morning on that
day, 80 percent of the
U.S. land area was
below freezing.
DIED
ESPN anchor Stuart Scott,
49, died after a seven-year
battle with a rare form
of cancer. The
SportsCenter
mainstay spent
21 years with
ESPN. In July
2014 at ESPN’s
ESPY Awards, he
said: “When you
die, that does not mean
that you lose to cancer. You
beat cancer by how you
live, why you live,
and the manner in
which you live.”
(See
“Departures,”
Jan. 10, and
online at wng.
org for 2014
deaths.)
J ANUARY 2 4 , 2 0 1 5 WORLD 15
1/7/15 12:16 PM
DISPATCHES
QUOTABLES
‘He
sometimes
calls me
“bro.”’
British Prime Minister
DAVID CAMERON on his
close relationship
with U.S. President
Barack Obama.
‘Common Core
is a big factor.’
BETH HERBERT, founder of
Lighthouse Christian
Homeschool Association in
Wake County, N.C., on the
reason for the explosive
growth in homeschooling in
North Carolina. The Raleigh
News & Observer reports
that the state now has
98,172 homeschool students,
up from 60,950 last year, and
that homeschool students
outnumber private school
students in the state.
Former New York City Mayor
RUDOLPH GIULIANI to current Mayor
Bill de Blasio, saying that the mayor
poisoned relations with the city’s
police by creating “an impression
with the police that he was on the
side of the [anti-police]
protesters.”
‘Non-human
person.’
An ARGENTINE COURT’s description of a
29-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Buenos
Aires zoo. The court said the zoo was depriving
the ape of its liberty and should transfer it to a
sanctuary. Lawyer Paul Buompadre said the
ruling sets a precedent “for other sentient
beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily
deprived of their liberty in zoos,
circuses, water parks and
scientific laboratories.”
16
WORLD
2 QUOTABLES.indd 16
JANUARY 24, 2015
‘When I was told
I would have to
die to enter
paradise, that I
would have to
explode a bomb
and die, I said I
cannot do it.’
A 13-YEAR-OLD GIRL sent
on a suicide mission in
December by Boko Haram.
She refused to detonate
her vest at the last moment.
She said her father gave her
to the militants.
CAMERON & OBAMA: JON SUPER/AP • GIULIANI: MACIE J KULCZYNSKI/EPA/L ANDOV • ORANGUTAN: NATACHA PISARENKO/AP • GIRL : ASSOCIATED PRESS
‘Say you’re
sorry.’
1/7/15
11:34 AM
Cameron & obama: Jon Super/ap • GIULIANI: MACIE J KULCZYNSKI/EPA/L ANDOV • orangutan: Natacha Pisarenko/ap • girl : associated press
1/6/15 4:22 PM
2 QUOTABLES.indd 17
DISPATCHES
QUICK TAKES
Airborne drop
Angry and alone
Police in Lowell, Mass., are warning citizens: If you
see a stray goat, do not approach it. The goat
escaped from an owner in a nearby town on Dec.
26 and made its way into Lowell. Police describe
the 200-pound animal as both elusive and
angry—not to mention possessing impressive
horns. “Although goats are normally docile animals, in stressful situations, such as being loose
in unfamiliar territory, he possibly can become
scared and resort to attacking in a survival mode,”
a Lowell police spokesman said in a statement.
Hedgerow fund
A man walking his dog on Dec. 23 in
Lincolnshire, England, stumbled upon
an $18,000 diamond—and he can keep
it in good conscience. In an August
promotion, London-based diamond
retailer 77 Diamonds launched a 1.14carat diamond into the atmosphere
attached to a weather balloon (see
“Diamond drop,” Sept. 6, 2014). The
company said whoever found the gem
could keep it. But as the balloon
veered off course, the tracking GPS
system attached to the diamond’s
package faltered. And after months
of concerted searching in the presumed landing area, many considered
the promotion a flop. But months
later—and 10 miles from the original
search site—Allan Bell’s springer
spaniel, Rosie, pulled the package
from under a hedgerow. Bell says he
plans to sell the diamond and use the
proceeds to take his wife on a cruise
for their 25th wedding anniversary.
To save a pig
Michelle Miller says she was trying to do the right thing. When she found a lost pig wandering the
streets near her St. Cloud, Fla., home, Miller captured the 350-pound porker, put it in her backyard, and called animal control. Authorities at the Osceola County Animal Services said they
wouldn’t take the pig unless it was damaging property. That was months ago. “I put signs up at
the feed store,” she said. “I put signs up at the corner.” But no one claimed the pig. So Miller
named the pig Eva and adopted the animal. But in late December the pig got out of the yard and
was spotted by a neighbor who called animal control. The county then gave Miller a $105 citation
and a choice: Surrender the pig to be euthanized and have the fine waved, or pay the fine, keep
the pig, and risk further citations. Miller told WFTV she wouldn’t surrender the pig to be killed.
18
WORLD
2 QUICK TAKES.indd 18
ALL AN BELL & ROSIE: JANE HARRISON • THE INTERVIEW: AHN YOUNG-JOON/AP • PL AYSTATION: KMGH-T V/ABC • GOAT: GET T Y IMAGES • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE
North Korea might not like Sony Pictures’ movie
The Interview, but a South Korean activist
wants his neighbors to the north to watch it
anyway. South Korean Park Sang-hak said he
intends to drop over 100,000 DVD copies of the
Sony film using balloons. The film, which
depicts the assassination of North Korean
leader Kim Jong Un, was met by a furious North
Korean response. The Obama administration
has blamed North Korea for hacking Sony.
Park, who defected from North Korea in 1999,
is a democracy activist in the south.
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/6/15
4:52 PM
PENGUINS: NAOKI HARANAK A/THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN/AP • L AMPIT T: JESSE BOGAN/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH/AP • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • WILLIAMS: SEVEN NEWS AUSTRALIA
Box of rocks
It’s a good thing Igor Baksht bothered to
look inside the box before wrapping up
his niece’s Christmas gift. Baksht purchased a PlayStation 4 from a Walmart
in Stapleton, Colo., on Dec. 19. That night
wrapping gifts, Baksht decided to check
inside the box to make sure all the
components were present. Instead, he
found the gaming consul missing and
two bags filled with small rocks in its
place. The package Baksht originally
purchased had been previously opened
and returned. Initially Walmart refused
Baksht’s request to return the
PlayStation because managers said
they couldn’t verify his story.
However on Christmas Eve, a manager
with the retailer relented and gave
Baksht a full refund.
Crash from the past
ALL AN BELL & ROSIE: JANE HARRISON • THE INTERVIEW: AHN YOUNG-JOON/AP • PL AYSTATION: KMGH-T V/ABC • GOAT: GET T Y IMAGES • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE
PENGUINS: NAOKI HARANAK A/THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN/AP • L AMPIT T: JESSE BOGAN/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH/AP • ILLUSTRATION: KRIEG BARRIE • WILLIAMS: SEVEN NEWS AUSTRALIA
For 51 years Arthur Lampitt carried around a souvenir from the 1963
car crash that nearly took his life. Earlier in December, Lampitt was
moving concrete blocks at his Granite City, Ill., home when he noticed
pain in his left arm and a protuberance under his skin. A series of X-rays
revealed a 7-inch metal object lodged in his left arm. The revelation
made Lampitt think back to his 1963 automobile accident in which a
truck struck his new Thunderbird in a head-on collision. Lampitt, now
75, speculated that doctors then ignored his arm injuries while treating
his severely broken hip. His guess was confirmed on Dec. 31 when a
surgeon removed a ’63 T-Bird turn signal from his arm. Doctors expect
Lampitt to make a full recovery.
March of the penguins
Danger zone
The whale carcass floating off of Australia’s western coast attracted
26-year-old Harrison Williams. Unbeknownst to him, it also attracted
hungry sharks. On Nov. 1, Williams leapt from a boat near Rottnest
Island and swam until he could climb on top of the carcass of a massive
humpback whale. Meanwhile, a news helicopter filming the carcass had
spotted sharks circling the food source—including one an estimated
20 feet long. After posing for photographs, Williams delicately climbed
back into his boat. Later he confessed that both his mother and father
were disappointed in him for the reckless swim.
2 QUICK TAKES.indd 19
After a few months of gorging on fish, the penguins at
the Asahiyama Zoo on the northern island of Hokkaido
have been prescribed exercise. Zookeepers there
organized a 30-minute waddle session twice a day to
help the portly penguins stave off obesity during winter
months when they typically are less active. Zoo off icials
say the penguins, who began exercising in December, will
continue until March. Patrons of Asahiyama have flocked
to the zoo to see the birds’ daily march.
Legal supervision
Dale Garcia of Okeechobee, Fla., wasn’t
happy when he returned from a
shopping trip on Dec. 29 to
learn that his two 12-year-old
daughters had been arguing.
And when he learned that one
had locked herself in a bedroom
and the other had used a knife to pick
the lock, he decided to call the police.
But Garcia didn’t want cops to intervene—just supervise his
spanking of his knife-wielding daughter. “It happens,”
Okeechobee County Sheriff ’s Off ice Maj. Noel Stephen said,
referring to the practice of parents calling deputies to supervise corporal punishment. “And has happened several times in
the past.” According to the dispatched deputy, Garcia spanked
his daughter four times without breaking the law once.
19
1/6/15 4:53 PM
JANIE B. CHEANEY
What’s a baby
worth to you?
SOCIETY PRICES CHILDREN HIGHER NOWADAYS
BUT VALUES THEM LESS
20
WORLD
2 CHEANEY.indd 20
JANUARY 24, 2015
How did childbearing and
raising get so
complicated?
Partly for the
same reason
marriage is so
complicated:
We’ve made it
all about us.
KRIEG BARRIE
Here’s a startling fact: Since 2009,
adult diapers have outsold baby
diapers, by as much as 28 percent.
Longevity is outpacing fertility, now
at a record low at about 62.9 births
per 1,000 women of childbearing
age. The bare numbers only tell us
how many women had babies and
how many did not; we don’t know
who couldn’t and who wouldn’t.
But both demographics are rising:
more women embracing the supposed joys of childlessness and more
couples who would like to have a baby
but can’t.
Last July a story in The Washington Post
profiled a St. Louis couple who married in
2008, immediately lost their jobs, and waited a
year to get back on their feet before trying to
conceive—only to discover conception wouldn’t
be easy. Both are approaching their mid-30s,
struggling with whether they can afford the
$15,000 or so it would take for medical intervention. Meanwhile she dreams of a blond,
blue-eyed girl and boy who look a lot like her.
The economy has taken blame for low birthrates, especially when infertile couples need
expensive help to conceive. But even a child
naturally born doesn’t come cheap—or so they
say. “Average estimates” of raising a child to
the age of 18 range from $200,000 to $241,000
(not including college), depending on where
you live and what your expectations are. While
couples watch their paychecks and calculate on
the backs of envelopes whether they can afford
a kid, the months slip by, little by little nibbling
away their chances.
Others have the money but not the biology,
and desperation takes them to extremes.
R
Theresa Erickson, a pricey San Diego lawyer,
went to jail for a scam that involved sending
surrogates to Ukraine to be implanted with
embryos likely to fit the high-demand blondand-blue-eyed stereotype. She and her partners
would then find adoptive parents willing to pay
up to $150,000 for the babies, on the pretense
that they were benefiting from a previous
surrogacy agreement gone bad. After her sentencing, a tearful Erickson told reporters that
the surrogacy industry was the “Wild Wild
West,” desperately in need of regulation.
It’s an ironic age, in so many ways, but
strikingly in this: The higher we price children,
the less we value them. Value them as themselves, that is. They may have high value to the
parents—the sum total of music lessons, ballet
costumes, personal trainers, exclusive schools,
tutoring, sports camps, and the pride taken in
achievement. Or they may have wildly fluctuating value to a single mom who feels a
confused affection toward her toddler but
can’t get out of herself enough to understand
what the little one really needs from her.
How did childbearing and raising get so
complicated? Partly for the same reason
marriage is so complicated: We’ve made it
all about us. Certainly, parents devalued
their children before Roe v. Wade. The real
damage from that decision was making
subjective value official.
Children need very little, materially. If I
estimated what it cost to raise our girl and boy
to the age of eighteen, it would be well below
the national average. They ate what we ate,
lived where we lived, made do with a single
income and a single running vehicle as we did.
When they were old enough for outside activities, we limited them to one each. My husband’s
decision, long before they were born, never to
allow a TV in the house probably helped,
because they weren’t exposed to purposeful
consumerism and didn’t ask for a lot of stuff.
We were not exceptional or praiseworthy in
this—many of our friends followed a similar
path, and the kids generally turned out OK.
By contrast, millions of unborn babies are
discarded because somebody wasn’t “ready.”
The lack of readiness doesn’t cancel the worth
of a human life. Besides, who is fully ready?
The kids we get are not the ones we dreamed
of or wished for: God’s way of showing that
they are not our extensions or justifications.
He owns our children—and, if it comes to that,
our childlessness. A
 [email protected]  @jbcheaney
1/2/15 3:48 PM
krieg barrie
2 CHEANEY.indd 21
1/5/15 10:01 AM
e
v
Foster ing a Lo ered g
t
in
for Chr ist-Cen ar n
Le
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1/5/15 10:03 AM
CULTURE
MOVIES & TV / BOOKS / Q& A / MUSIC
MOVIE
Mundane
militants
TIMBUKTU OFFERS A WARNING ABOUT
LIFE UNDER ISLAMISTS by Emily Belz
News articles have
chronicled the
horrors of Islamist rule in
detail, so the extremes will
be familiar in the film
Timbuktu: stonings, forced
marriages, laws forbidding
music and requiring
women to cover themselves
head to toe. Timbuktu, in
limited release Jan. 28, is
not a documentary but
retells the 2012 Islamic
militant takeover of the
fabled city in Mali.
Neighboring Mauritania
chose this film as its submission for the Oscar for
COHEN MEDIA GROUP
R
Best Foreign Language
Film, the first time it has
made an Academy Awards
submission. The film, which
is not rated, deserves at
least a nomination.
The story is very near for
director Abderrahmane
Sissako, who was born in
Mauritania but grew up in
Mali. Sissako is recounting
the rule of al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in
his home country, but he
doesn’t shy from the comparisons to the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria. “I
wanted to warn people,”
 [email protected]  @emlybelz
Sissako said in New York
after his film’s premiere,
speaking in French through
a translator. “If Nazism
triumphed for a time, it’s
because people didn’t want
to see it. Consciously or
unconsciously people let it
grow.”
For such a heavy subject
the film has comedic
moments and is full of
painterly beauty. It doesn’t
shock and awe its audience
with horrors. That, after all,
is what the Islamic State
has been doing with its
beheading videos. Sissako
shows a stoning for a split
second, and the camera
quickly turns to a new
scene. A young girl is forced
into marriage with a jihadist;
all we see is a few seconds
of her crying on a bed.
What makes Sissako’s
film so devastating is that
he doesn’t dwell in the
extremes and he doesn’t
caricature. We see the
mundane
life of
militants,
militants
who argue about whether
Lionel Messi or Zinedine
Zidane is a better soccer
player. Later those same
militants haul a soccerplaying man before a Sharia
court. In another scene an
older jihadist tries to
counsel a young jihadist, a
former rapper in France,
on how to make a jihad
video. “There’s no, ‘Yo
man,’” the older commander tells him. “We’re
into religion now.” The
jihadists ignore the more
peaceable local imams
and oppress even devout
Muslims.
But the real story is
about the locals who must
stay and live under Islamist
rule, a story often missing
in news coverage. As the
film opens, we see a short
scene of a Western hostage,
Kettly Noël
plays Zabou
in Timbuktu.
23
1/7/15 9:42 AM
MOVIES & TV
who despite his predicament is
well taken care of. The jihadists
have all of his medications in a
plastic bag. Conditions are worse
for the locals in and around
Timbuktu.
Underneath the film is the idea
of a Muslim resistance, almost as a
hope more than perhaps reality.
French troops eventually intervened in Mali and ousted al-Qaeda
from power in 2013. In his comments in New
York, Sissako said
he believes
women under
Islamist rule are
the ones who will
rise up because
they have more of
a capacity for
resistance. Under
Islamist rule,
women also have
more to lose.
Sissako illusTELEVISION
trates this in the
film: In one scene, the jihadists tell
a man to roll up his pants because
they are too long. The man ends up
No one could deny that there are still
taking his pants off entirely, and
plenty of soapy conventions like secret
walking away in his shorts.
love aff airs, improbable crimes, and private
Meanwhile a woman selling fish in
conversations that happen to be overheard
the marketplace refuses to wear
by exactly the wrong person on TV’s reigning
period drama, Downton Abbey. But as the
the required gloves and yells at a
show enters its fifth season, the historical
jihadist to go ahead and cut her
context and witty dialogue that made it
hands off.
appointment-viewing when it first debuted
“The Western press speaks a lot
again take center stage.
about the hostages that have been
As in previous seasons, sinful behavior is
taken because the hostages are
mostly hinted at rather than reveled in, and
Western themwith the rise of Stalin we
selves,” said
see the consequences of
Sissako. “They
both socialism and an
BOX
OFFICE
TOP
10
don’t talk about
unmerited ruling class.
FOR THE WEEKEND OF JANUARY 2-4
the woman in
according to Box Off ice Mojo
However, the moral arc
the marketplace
of certain Downton
CAUTIONS: Quantity of sexual (S), violent
who is forced to
inhabitants—particularly
(V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10
ladies’ maid Baxter (Raquel
scale, with 10 high, from kids-in-mind.com
wear the gloves
Cassidy)—as well as
but resists. They
S V L
unexpectedly tender rela1̀ The Hobbit: The Battle
don’t talk about
tionships give this season
of the Five Armies* PG-13 ........ 1 6 2
the boys playing
more heart and smarts
2̀
Into
the
Woods*
PG
......................... 3 4 2
soccer. We
than just about any other
3̀
Unbroken*
PG-13
..................................
3
6
5
speak more
series on television. The
4̀
The
Woman
in
Black
2:
about armies
tension between characAngel of Death PG-13 ...................... 1 5 1
and drones, but
ters who champion the
5̀ Night at the Museum:
people who
values of a fading age and
Secret of the Tomb PG................. 2 5 3
struggle and
those who want to break
6̀ Annie PG........................................................... 2 3 3
battle it on a
down ever more social and
7̀ The Imitation Game* PG-13 ... 2 4 4
daily basis
ethical barriers continues
8̀ The Hunger Games:
aren’t talked
to feel particularly apt
Mockingjay, Part 1* PG-13 ....... 2 6 1
today. —by MEGAN BASHAM
about.” A
9̀ The Gambler R ........................................ 6 4 10
Downton Abbey
R
A scene from
Timbuktu
(above);
Sissako
(right)
24
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
DOWNTON ABBEY: NICK BRIGGS/CARNIVAL FILMS • TIMBUK TU: COHEN MEDIA GROUP • SISSAKO: ANDY KROPA/INVISION/AP
10 Big Hero 6* PG ......................................... 1
`
4 1
*Reviewed by WORLD
1/7/15 9:43 AM
A MOST VIOLENT YEAR: A24 • JUSTIFIED: KURT ISWARIENKO/FX NET WORKS
CULTURE
MOVIE
DOWNTON ABBEY: NICK BRIGGS/CARNIVAL FILMS • TIMBUK TU: COHEN MEDIA GROUP • SISSAKO: ANDY KROPA/INVISION/AP
A MOST VIOLENT YEAR: A24 • JUSTIFIED: KURT ISWARIENKO/FX NET WORKS
A Most Violent Year
R
Despite its title, A Most Violent
Year is surprisingly nonviolent,
with just one death and few brutal
scenes. Not that things don’t ever get
intense (rated R for language and some
violence). In one scene, tension rises so
hot that you can almost hear a sizzle—
and all that was needed was a straightening of cuff s and a soft, firm command:
“Stop.” But that’s what makes this film
so captivating and terrific: It doesn’t
need to resort to fists or guns to
heighten drama.
Written and directed by J.C. Chandor
(the son of an investment banker, his
previous films such as Margin Call have
recurring themes on capitalism), A Most
Violent Year is set in New York during the
winter of 1981, statistically one of the
city’s most violent years with the highest
rates of reported robberies and murders.
The film portrays a city dripping in social
and physical decay: Subway trains
screech by flashing graff iti, harsh lights
reflect off dusty snow, and shadows
flicker under wary eyes.
A self-made magnate of a swiftexpanding heating oil company, Abel
Morales (Oscar Isaac) is a stubbornly
upright man struggling to keep afloat in a
world not unlike the tribal wars in The
Godfather series. He hates guns, detests
sleazy business practices, and never
ever raises his voice or fist—but it’s
getting increasingly impossible to stay
clean in this corrupt industry.
Abel’s business
is leaking in all directions: Mysterious
armed thugs keep
hijacking his trucks,
stealing thousands
of dollars’ worth of
product to sell to
Abel’s competitors.
One of Abel’s truck drivers, Julian (Elyes
Gabel), ends up in the hospital with a
broken jaw and limp. Meanwhile, an
overzealous assistant defense attorney
(David Oyelowo) is preparing charges of
corruption and fraud that are damaging
his reputation.
Every attack dares Abel to retaliate,
and a lot is at stake: Abel has just moved
his family into a swanky suburban mansion. He’s also handed a hefty deposit to
buy coveted real estate from a lawskirting family of Hasidic Jews, and he’s
scrambling for a bank loan to finalize the
contract. If all goes according to plan, he
will gain formidable economic and
political power. But he could also lose
everything—his wealth, his status, his
family—in an instant.
It’s diff icult to keep your eyes away
from Abel, whom Isaac plays with pristine
and brilliant gravity. There’s something
about the way he carries himself and positions his facial muscles that makes him
mesmerizing. This is a man who knows
that image is power, and everything about
him—from his tightly coiff ed wavy hair
and soft-spoken polite
manners, to his exquisite
camel hair coat and gold cuff
links—suggests self-assurance and class.
In bright contrast, his wife Anna
(Jessica Chastain) is the sharp-nailed
daughter of a gangster who sold Abel his
company. Anna doesn’t mind playing with
fire, and she snorts and sneers when Abel
insists on taking the high road. Next to her
brooding husband, Anna appears to be the
more masculine and ruthless half of the
couple—but in reality, it’s Abel who’s the
silently dominant figure. Sure he’s no gangster, but he doesn’t seem to mind associating with sleazy people. Underneath that
strict honor code is a cold-calculating,
hard-nosed businessman who doesn’t
tolerate human weakness and mediocrity.
He may share the same name as the
biblical Abel, mankind’s first martyr, but
this Abel is no innocent victim. A Most
Violent Year presents a hero who ostentatiously chooses “the path that is most
right,” but that doesn’t make him any less
violent—much like human morality without God. —by SOPHIA LEE
Isaac and
Chastain
TELEVISION
Justified; The Americans
R
Justified, the critically acclaimed FX series, starts its sixth season on Jan. 20. Set in rural Kentucky’s drug culture,
it has depths of characterization and setting unusual for television. Christians will see the main characters’ desperate need for Christ, but will also differ on whether the violence and sexual content make it unacceptable for their viewing.
I can’t recommend another FX series that has attracted a lot of buzz, The Americans, which begins its third
season on Jan. 28. It’s set in 1980s Washington and depicts the war between deep-undercover Soviet spies
and American spy-catchers. It has fascinating touches: The teenage daughter of the Marx-believing spies
professes faith in Christ, and her evangelical pastor is neither a hypocrite nor a seducer (so far).
The problem, though, is that The Americans had in its first two seasons some graphic sexual scenes.
Part of a spy’s job in this fallen world is to entice the vulnerable by using lust, but spydom’s sexual lure
Timothy Olyphant as
is also Satan’s. If we think we are invulnerable, we’re probably lying to ourselves. —by MARVIN OLASKY
Raylan Givens in Justified
See all our movie reviews at wng.org/movies
25
1/7/15 10:06 AM
BOOKS
Life and death
AN EXCELLENT GUIDE FOR BATTLING
SUICIDE by Marvin Olasky
Karen Mason’s
Preventing Suicide: A
Handbook for Pastors,
Chaplains and Pastoral
Counselors (IVP, 2014) is
exactly what it claims, which
means church offices or
libraries without a copy
should get one. Mason, a
psychologist and counseling
professor at Gordon-Conwell
Theological Seminary, starts
by showing that in some
worldviews suicide is destiny or duty, and in others a
matter of honor, a rational
choice, or an opportunity for
R
political protest. She
also tells us that in
recent years, according to the World
Health Organization,
five times as many persons
have died by suicide than by
warfare. (More men than
women commit suicide,
although more women try,
and the suicide percentage
is higher among whites than
among African-Americans
or Asian-Americans.)
Mason writes well—
“Some psychologists pluck
blackberries without seeing
SHORT STOPS
26
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2 BOOKS.indd 26
Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis
Brandeis, and Benjamin
Cardozo, and justices of
the past six decades: Earl
Warren, William Brennan,
Arthur Goldberg, Byron
White, Thurgood Marshall,
Harry Blackmun, Lewis
Powell Jr., William Rehnquist, and
Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sadly, many of the
accounts are adulatory and throw more
light on hobbies—Hugo Black wanted
clerks who would play tennis with him—
than worldviews.
actor Robin Williams’ suicide)
the deceased is now at peace.
Mason suggests pastoral
caregivers discuss theology
and grapple with suffering:
She does not point specifically
to “prosperity gospel” talk,
but notes that the “primary
issues suicidal people discuss
with their pastor are their lack
of Christian joy. … Christians
often seem puzzled by their
suffering.”
If we understood that suffering is part of the Christian
life, we wouldn’t be surprised
and sometimes stunned by
adversity. And if we understood the Bible’s teaching
that we often need suffering
to advance spiritually, we’d
welcome difficulty as part of
God’s grace. As Abraham
Kuyper put it, if a Christian
“must go through a period
when God puts him in the
smelting furnace, or makes
finer cuttings on the diamond
of his soul, then, though tears
make his eyes glisten, he will
nobly bear up in the exaltation of faith; for then it is
certain that he is in need of
this, that it can not be otherwise, and that if it did go
otherwise, his life would be
a failure forever.”
Those who want to understand
how Blackmun wrote an opinion so
poorly researched and argued that
even pro-abortion lawyers disparage
it, will be better off getting Clarke
Forsythe’s Abuse of Discretion: The
Inside Story of Roe v. Wade
(Encounter, 2013), which shows how
clerks for Justice Harry Blackmun, with
little knowledge of abortion history but a
high ideological quotient, influenced the
opinion that condemned millions of
unborn children. (See “Arrogant power,”
Jan. 25, 2014.) —M.O.
IG0RZH/ISTOCK , PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY WORLD
Brian Fisher’s Abortion: The Ultimate
Exploitation of Women (Morgan James,
2014) off ers useful facts and perspective, along with a true subtitle—
Men Started It. Men Oppress With It. Men
Can End It —that has feminist appeal.
In Chambers: Stories of Supreme
Court Law Clerks and Their Justices,
edited by Todd Peppers and Artemus
Ward (University of Virginia Press, 2012),
includes essays by former clerks and
academic court-watchers. The book
includes stories about giants like Oliver
God”—and shatters numerous suicide myths, such as
“real Christians do not experience suicidal thoughts …
people who are suicidal are
just trying to get attention …
depressed people should just
‘buck up’ … people who are
suicidal don’t tell anyone … if
someone wants to kill himself, there’s nothing I can do.”
Most persons who jump from
the Golden Gate Bridge die,
so we don’t know what their
last thoughts were, but one
who survived, Ken
Baldwin, later said
that as soon as he
jumped, “I instantly
realized that everything in my life that
I’d thought was
unfixable was totally
fixable—except for
having just jumped.”
Mason offers good specifics on how to help someone
in a suicide crisis and help
those who survive suicide
attempts. She notes that
those in media can “prevent
contagion and suicide clusters” by avoiding detailed
descriptions of the suicide
method, oversimplification of
suicide causes, or any suggestion (as was frequent after
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/2/15 4:03 PM
HANDOUT
CULTURE
Notable books
FOUR BOOKS ABOUT MODERN MEDICINE
reviewed by Susan Olasky
BEING MORTAL Atul Gawande
America spends a big percentage of its healthcare dollars
caring for people in the last months of their lives, yet the
treatment requires many of the elderly to be hooked up to
machines and trapped in impersonal hospitals. Doctors are
quick to off er one more intervention even though it is unlikely
to prolong life, and patients hope that the next intervention will
be the one that makes them better. In this thoughtful and wellwritten book, Atul Gawande understands that many Americans
would like to spend their last days among loved ones. He writes
about his patients and his father to examine the way modern medicine deals with
death and terminal illness.
DOCTORED: THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF AN
AMERICAN PHYSICIAN Sandeep Jauhar
Also written by an Indian-American, Doctored discusses some
of the same issues as Being Mortal—but Jauhar, a hospital
cardiologist on Long Island, focuses on the perverse incentives built into our system. Those incentives reward doctors
financially when they prescribe procedures, not when they
help patients get well. Jauhar weaves his own story into his
reporting: He shows himself turning into the kind of doctor he
swore he’d never be, and he shows the callousness with which
many doctors treat their patients. The book ends on a more positive note, but most of
the way off ers a depressing picture of the state of modern medical care.
INTERNAL MEDICINE: A DOCTOR’S STORIES
Terrence Holt
Holt draws from his experiences as a doctor to tell
“parables” about modern medicine. He uses mash-ups of
patients and doctors he’s known. The result: a collection of
moving stories about a young doctor and the patients he
confronts as he moves through diff erent rotations. Perhaps
it’s due to the Southern setting (in contrast to Boston and
Long Island), but Holt’s patients and some of the other
doctors think a lot about God and what He’s doing through
illness. You get a fine sense of the limits of man’s knowledge and the mysteries
that surround life and death.
SPOTLIGHT
What’s the connection between
religion and physical health?
Harold Koenig’s Medicine,
Religion, and Health (Templeton
Press, 2008) cites numerous
studies showing
that religious belief
and observance
lead to better
health in many
categories. For
example, those who
consider religion
unimportant are
three times more
likely to binge drink
than those who consider religion
very important; all other things
being equal, those who attend
religious services at least once a
week, and pray or study the Bible
at least once a day, are 40 percent
less likely to have hypertension.
Other studies: Weekly religious service attenders in 1965
were 36 percent less likely to be
dead in 1994 than those who
went less frequently. Among
21,000 adults, those who never
attended religious services were
72 percent more likely to die
during an 8-year period than
those who attended more than
once per week. (The researchers
took into account education,
income, activity limitations,
health at the start, and days
spent in bed.) —Marvin Olasky
HANDOUT
IG0RZH/ISTOCK , PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY WORLD
WELLNESS FOR THE GLORY OF GOD John Dunlop
Dunlop addresses ways we can improve our well-being as we
age and avoid some of the problems described in the books
above. He off ers chapters showing how older people can
increase their physical, mental, social, financial, spiritual, and
emotional wellness: It’s all basic, but many do not want to
think about the basics of growing old. Dunlop gives good
advice about weight management, recommends brisk
walking or similar exercise, and proposes that we go easy on
medications when lifestyle changes could do the job. He
reminds us to ask God to bless medicines to our body as we ask Him to bless food.
To see more book news and reviews, go to wng.org/books
2 BOOKS.indd 27
27
1/2/15 4:04 PM
CULTURE
Q&A
KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR
Hannah and
her brothers
A CHRISTIAN POET’S BATTLE AGAINST SLAVERY
HAS LESSONS FOR TODAY by Marvin Olasky
PHOTO BY SAM DEAN/GENESIS
Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor at
Liberty University, is the author of the newly
published Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of
Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist.
Who was Hannah More? Hannah More was a
contemporary of British anti-slavery leader William
Wilberforce. She was born in 1745, he in 1759, and
they both died in 1833. They were lifelong friends: He
worked in Parliament while she wrote poetry, tracts,
and songs to appeal to British hearts. She, Wilberforce,
and their evangelical friends ended the slave trade,
also brought reform to high society, and improved
the lives of the poor.
What were her Christian beliefs? Hannah More was
born into the Church of England. She always
demonstrated a pious character and a high
moral bent, but when she read John Newton’s
Cardiphonia, a series of “Letters of the Heart,”
she started showing in her correspondence an
evangelical faith.
R
Tell us about the Zong Massacre of 1781,
which moved her toward fierce convictions.
Many slaves on the ship were dying, and the slave
traders were going to lose money on this particular
journey, so they threw slaves overboard to collect the
insurance money. When courts ruled they had the
right to collect it, many people started to see the horrors
of the trade.
You write, “The industry was steeped in brutality at
every level of execution. Slave ship captains were
cruel, not only to the slaves, but to the sailors. Many of
them, as in John Newton’s case, were taken into service
by force and beaten, abused, abandoned, and sometimes sold into slavery.” Does any industry in our own
time have a pervasive cruelty similar to that? Abortion
has become so much part of our culture, not just in
28
2 Q&A.indd 28
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/1/15 12:20 PM
complexity and the humanity of a situation in a very
life-affirming way.
terms of individual lives and choices, but even in our
whole economy, which has shifted and changed
because of the lives aborted rather than born. Many
people acknowledge how horrible abortion is, but
they find it hard to imagine our society functioning
without it: a necessary evil.
You’ve written that your “opposition to abortion
under any circumstances, except those rare times
when it is necessary to save the life of a mother, is
rooted in social justice, not Christian belief.” How so?
My opposition to abortion is based on accepting
the simple fact that an individual life begins at
conception. I don’t believe I need to be a Christian
to believe in the protection of human life. Now
my Christian faith compels me to respond to that
injustice in a certain way and to confront it.
What was Hannah More’s strategy in fighting
slavery? More published her poem, “Slavery,” on the
same day that Wilberforce introduced anti-slavery
legislation in Parliament. She wanted to move hearts
and imaginations.
Please read us some of it. Whene’er to Afric’s
shores I turn my eyes, / Horrors of deepest, deadliest guilt arise; / I see, by more than Fancy’s mirror
shewn, / The burning village, and the blazing town: /
See the dire victim torn from social life, / The
shrieking babe, the agonizing wife! / She, wretch
forlorn! is dragg’d by hostile hands, / To distant
tyrants sold in distant lands! / Transmitted miseries,
and successive chains, / The sole sad heritage her
child obtains!
I guess that was the thinking behind Wedgwood
and its famous picture of a kneeling slave in chains
asking, “Am I not a brother?” The goal was to help
people recognize that human lives were at stake. It
was a very powerful figure, because the visual arts
were very important. There weren’t a lot of slaves in
England and people didn’t even know what a slave
ship looked like, so Hannah More would carry
around in her pocket a print of a cargo hold. She
would pull it out at dinner parties and show people.
The poem closes with an address to God. Could you
read that part? And Thou! great source of Nature and
She never married, but wasn’t she engaged for
six years, and three times the prospective groom
backed out? More was born to a poor schoolmaster
of Grace, / Who of one blood didst form the human
race, / Look down in mercy in thy chosen time, /
With equal eye on Afric’s suffering clime: /
Disperse her shades of intellectual night, /
Repeat thy high behest—Let there be light! /
Bring each benighted soul, great God, to Thee, /
And with thy wide Salvation make them free!
and teaching at a school when she met this wealthy
landowner who kept having cold feet. At the time a
woman who had experienced a broken engagement
was somewhat considered damaged goods, and it
was common for the gentleman to give the woman
an annuity of some sort as compensation. Hannah
did not seek this herself, but her family and friends
insisted that financial compensation be made. Her
fiancé gladly agreed. They made her accept it.
That insistence was providential. The money
allowed her to quit her job teaching, pursue her life as
a writer, make her way to London, and be welcomed
by the London literati and some of the most powerful
people in England. She never would have been able to
accomplish what she had if she had married and then
most likely had children. God had a different call on
her life, and this is what He had her do.
She taps into ideas of individual liberty and
equality. And contextualizes them in a strong
moral foundation. The poem appeals to family
ties, patriotism, love of God, love of truth, love of
freedom.
In 1792 More wrote a satiric poem to support
boycotting West Indian sugar produced through
slave labor. Here it is from a British newspaper
of the time: I am shocked at this purchase of
slaves / and fear those who buy and sell
them are knaves. / What I hear of their
hardships, their tortures and groans, /
is almost enough to draw pity from
stones. / I pity them greatly but I must
be mum, / for how could we do
without sugar and rum, / especially
sugar, so needful we see. / What?
give up our desserts, our coffee
and tea.
That speaks to the way slavery
was so ingrained in the British economy,
as abortion is today. What in our popular culture
is the equivalent of More’s poetry? There is the film
Juno. I don’t know what the producers of that film
were trying to do, but it was good art: It showed the
 [email protected]  @MarvinOlasky
2 Q&A.indd 29
She wrote to John Newton about her desire to see
“the removal of the great gulf which has divided rich
and poor.” What was her anti-poverty work like?
A VIDEO OF THIS
INTERVIEW
IN ITS ENTIRETY
CAN BE FOUND
AT WNG.ORG
AND IN THE
IPAD EDITION OF
THIS ISSUE
More was an early founder of Sunday schools. They
were not what we think of now, an hour learning
Bible lessons. On Sunday, when the poor children
were not working, More hired teachers to teach the
students to read. That was controversial: Many
feared that if the poor could read, they could organize and start a revolution like one that had been
started in France and earlier in America. But More
believed people needed to be able to read the Bible
for themselves. A
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1/1/15 12:22 PM
CULTURE
MUSIC
Goodbye, Joe
A SURPRISINGLY PRODUCTIVE CAREER
AND LIFE COME TO AN END by Arsenio Orteza
have surprised his early fans.
As an alcoholic who more
than once during the 1970s
actually vomited on stage,
Cocker appeared to be
headed for an early rock-star
grave even while scoring
some of the decade’s biggest
hits (“You Are So Beautiful,”
“The Letter”).
By 1980, however, he had
sobered up, inspiring Will
Jennings and Joe Sample to
compose the gospel-sounding
survivor anthem “I’m So Glad
I’m Standing Here Today”
just for him. Cocker’s recording of the song with The
Crusaders earned him the
first of his half-dozen
Grammy nominations in
1981. Two years later, he
won a “Best Pop Performance
by a Duo or Group with
Vocal” Grammy for “Up
Where We Belong,” his charttopping duet with Jennifer
Warnes. In between he
recorded Sheffield Steel, one
of the strongest and most
consistent albums of his
career thanks in large part to
Cocker
the rhythm-section muscle
provided by Sly Dunbar and
Robbie Shakespeare.
In 1984, Cocker turned 40
and released the tellingly titled
Civilized Man. From that point
on, he settled into a workmanlike routine that found
him recording and touring to
generally indifferent North
American audiences but
increasingly enthusiastic
Back to the Future Islands
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2 MUSIC.indd 30
JANUARY 24, 2015
The similarities haven’t always been
apparent. Not until the band’s second album,
In Evening Air, did Herring get in touch with his
inner growler and then only tentatively. One
listen, however, to such Singles
tracks as “In the Tall Grass” and
“Spirit” reveals Herring’s
growing affinity for the sort of
blue-eyed soulfulness that might
someday find him receiving
invitations to sing “You Are So
Beautiful” at Cocker tribute
shows. —A.O.
JEROME BRUNET/ZUMA PRESS/NEWSCOM
Cocker’s posthumous discography notwithstanding, his influence doesn’t seem to be in
danger of abating—that is, not if the popularity
of the indie synth-pop band Future Islands is
any indication.
Singles (4AD), the group’s
latest and most accomplished
album, has appeared on many critics’ best-of-2014 lists. And, like
Future Islands’ previous releases,
it features the singing of Samuel
T. Herring, a vocalist in the Cocker
tradition if ever there was one.
European ones. At the time of
his death, he hadn’t hit the
U.S. Top 40 for a quarter
century (“When the Night
Comes”), but his most recent
studio efforts, Hard Knocks
(2010) and Fire It Up (2012),
had gone platinum in
Germany.
His knack for inventive
rearrangements receded, but
the impassioned, heartbroken
quality of his singing did not,
giving him continued emotional access to generically
inspirational material. His
2007 album Hymn for My Soul
even made Billboard’s
Christian-music chart.
Cocker’s continuous productivity made each of his
periodically issued compilations feel incomplete. Alas,
now that his 45-year career
has finally come to an end,
the sad task of assembling
the definitive package can
finally begin.
 [email protected]  @ArsenioOrteza
1/7/15 9:27 AM
HANDOUT
With the Dec. 22 death
of Joe Cocker at age 70,
the music world lost one of
its most singular and durable
talents.
A native of Sheffield,
England, Cocker first
achieved fame in 1969 when
his 11-song Woodstock set
took the hippie generation by
storm and established his
modus operandi: Play fast
and/or loose with the time
signatures, instrumentation,
and tempi of material made
famous by other performers,
and then sing it with a gravelthroated soulfulness that at
its most intense could terrify
the faint of heart.
Two of Cocker’s
Woodstock songs, Traffic’s
“Feelin’ Alright” and The
Beatles’ “With a Little Help
from My Friends,” remained
staples of his performances.
That those performances
continued for over 40 years
(and that they would, as
demonstrated by his 2013
concert DVD Fire It Up: Live,
still sell out coliseums) might
R
Notable CDs
NOTEWORTHY ALBUMS OF 2014 reviewed by Arsenio Orteza
SALAD DAYS Mac DeMarco
Don’t let what you read about the silly, extramusical antics of this reluctantly maturing
Canadian put you off the genuine charms of his
songs. You’ll especially like them if you’re a fan
of Donovan (whose flower-power preciosity
gilds DeMarco’s lily-like enunciation), Sugar
Ray’s “Fly” (the guitar riff of which wends its
way throughout the album in various permutations), and lyrics that bypass profanity
altogether. And, given that “Let Her Go” follows
“Brother” (which goes “Let it go now, brother”),
being a Frozen fan might help too. ENGLISH OCEANS Drive-By Truckers
Should Neil Young or The Rolling Stones want to
record classic-sounding new music again, they
could do worse than to rehearse themselves
into shape with these 13 songs. The lead cut
evokes Exile on Main Street , “When He’s Gone”
Rust Never Sleeps , and “Pauline Hawkins” and
“Hearing Jimmy Loud” could go either way. What
the Stones and Young might find daunting:
“Primer Coat,” “When Walter Went Crazy,” and
“First Air of Autumn,” which suggest alternatives to burning out and fading away undreamt
of in either’s philosophy.
50 ST. CATHERINE’S DRIVE Robin Gibb
Hooks and baroque-pop filigrees abound, making
it possible to ignore the clichés for which Gibb
was a sucker and pointless to resist the sheer
aural juiciness of “I Am the World” (a redone Bee
Gees oldie) and “Alan Freeman Days” (a tribute to
the Casey Kasem of Australia). Had this posthumous testament been trimmed to its 10 best
tracks instead of padded out to a quality-diluting
16, it would’ve been the best Brothers Gibb album
in 20 if not 30 years. SPOTLIGHT
Like the other projects that
William A. Thompson IV has
released as “WATIV” since 2006
(Baghdad Musical Journal,
Syntaxis), the New Orleans–
based jazz pianist and Iraq War
veteran’s latest sound collage,
DD214, seeks to illuminate the
mysterious and harrowing emotional landscapes unique to soldiers, blending interview
snippets with dreamlike
stretches of melody and “found”
sound.
The resulting 27 minutes,
which sometimes feel like Glenn
Gould’s Solitude Trilogy as
remixed by This Mortal Coil (and
can be downloaded for free at
soundcloud.com/wativ), never
devolve into agitprop—in part
because Thompson considers his
combat experience to have been
both the “best” and the “worst
thing that ever happened” and in
part because, as a Christian, he
knows that joy and sorrow often
go hand in hand. “As an artist, I
must draw from my experiences,”
he said. “And I’ve found that the
wider my spectrum of perceived
darkness is opened, the spectrum
of light expands equally.” ARE WE THERE Sharon Van Etten
HANDOUT
JEROME BRUNET/ZUMA PRESS/NEWSCOM
Of what might the prominence of this relentlessly downbeat if relatively euphonious album
in critics’ best-of-2014 polls be indicative? That
2014—after decades in which such as Karen
Dalton, Nico, and Judee Sill, were deemed too
depressive—was finally the Year of the Lovelorn
Woman? That two songs featuring the “s-word”
equal the shattering of a glass ceiling? The
playful studio chatter at the end lightens the
mood a little. A cover of “Walking on Sunshine” or
“I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” would’ve lightened it more. To see more music news and reviews, go to wng.org/music
2 MUSIC.indd 31
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MINDY BELZ
Suffer the children
Islamic terrorism is decimating a generation
32 WORLD J AN U AR Y 2 4 , 2 0 1 5
2 MINDY.indd 32
‘ISIS
prioritizes
children as …
a cadre
of devoted
fighters
that will see
violence as a
way of life.’
ISIS news media
Sending children to war is as old as war
itself. The fictional Johnny Tremain at age
14 was no anomaly in the American Revolution.
But recent investigations highlight the grisly,
barbaric use of youth—including boys as young
as 8—by Islamic State (or ISIS) and others in
Iraq and Syria.
“It was like learning to chop an onion,”
reported 17-year-old Jomah after sitting in on a
lesson by ISIS in beheading. “You grab him by
the forehead and then slowly slice across the
neck.”
The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 26 reported on
the underage training session, where teachers
brought in three captured Syrian soldiers, asked
for volunteers, and even recruits under age 10,
aided and desensitized by watching beheading
videos, practiced their skills on the frightened
men. “Afterward, the teachers ordered the
students to pass around the severed heads,”
Jomah, who has since defected, told the paper.
The Journal rightly noted the enrollment of
hundreds of such youth in militant training
camps “could trouble the Middle East for years
to come.”
The same day The New York Times relayed
the story of Usaid Barho, a 14-year-old ISIS
recruit. He spent over a month learning to fight
and became so desperate to defect that, given
the choice to be a fighter or a suicide bomber,
he strapped on a vest of explosives. At the gate
of a Baghdad mosque for Shiites where he was
supposed to blow himself up, he surrendered to
guards instead, saying the Islamic State
“seduced us to join the caliphate.”
Defectors like Usaid and Jomah are teaching
authorities a lot—about how ISIS moves young
recruits from Syria to Iraq and elsewhere; about
the ideology and tactics used to indoctrinate
them; and about ISIS strategy, including its use
of captured schools, mosques, and churches for
religious and military training under the guise
of “free schooling.”
R
But perhaps the lessons come too late.
Human Rights Watch and other groups report
hundreds, if not thousands, of boys and teenagers recruited to fight infidels who include
Shiite Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, and others.
Further complicating the picture, they have
documented efforts to abuse children not only
by Islamic State and its affiliates but by the Free
Syrian Army, one of the rebel groups the United
States has supported in Syria.
ISIS and its related militants, in effect, are
deploying a generation the
authorities in Iraq and Syria—
along with the United States
and other Western and Arab
allies—have been willing to
ignore. Plus, the ability of ISIS
to control territory about the
size of New England leaves
families to choose between a
radical Islamist education that
includes target practice (and
head chopping) or no schooling at all.
School-age youth are used
in other ways too, kidnapped for ransom payments, tortured, and in some cases raped into
submission to serve the militants. One video
from a camp near Mosul in Iraq calls the
inductees “cubs of the caliphate.”
“ISIS prioritizes children as a vehicle for
ensuring long-term loyalty, adherence to their
ideology and a cadre of devoted fighters that
will see violence as a way of life,” reads a
November UN report on “living under ISIS.”
You have only to look to Somalia, Sudan, and
Congo to see the devastating effect of decimating
a generation. Once prominent, stable countries
like Iraq and Syria in a season can be reduced
to failed states for lifetimes to come. The United
States plays a complicit role for its involvement in Iraq and its support for Arab Spring
uprisings.
In that vein, foreign policy elites are having
an agitated debate about whether a “broken
windows” policy to restore global order is
needed. Even Georgetown’s Jeffrey Gedmin
argues in favor of U.S. policing: Too much of the
world “is starting to look a lot like the crimeridden New York of the 1970s” because “the
Obama administration and our European allies
have woefully neglected the small things.”
Besides looking to areas in chaos, we should
look to the future, and the children forever
changed by it. A
 [email protected]  @mcbelz
1/7/15 9:01 AM
. . .LESTYE
CREDIT
© 2015 BJU Press. All rights reserved.
BE
WEARY
Discover the true source of a Christian’s strength in Run the Race,
Steve Pettit’s newest Lifetouch Bible study for church groups or
individuals. Preview a sample chapter at journeyforth.com.
Order today at journeyforth.com I 800.845.5731
2 MINDY.indd 33
1/5/15 10:34 AM
2 ROE ARTICLES.indd 34
1/6/15 2:38 PM
YEAR
OF ROE V. WADE
SURVIVAL OF THE DESPISED
America at its best follows the philosophy of Emma Lazarus over that
of Margaret Sanger // BY MARVIN OLASKY PHOTO BY SEONG JOON CHO/GENESIS
I
n the new novel Lila by Marilynne Robinson, the protagonist is reading chapter 16 of Ezekiel, which describes
the birth of an unwanted baby: “On the day you were
born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with
water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped
in swaddling cloths. No eye pitied you, to do any of these things
to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the
open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born.”
That passage continues with a declaration of God’s mercy:
“When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I
said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ I said to you in your blood,
‘Live!’ I made you flourish like a plant of the field. … I made my
vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the
Lord God, and you became mine.”
Survival of the despised, not survival of the fittest. That’s a
theme throughout the Bible. In Robinson’s novel, the Ezekiel
passage reminds Lila of her own story, of how a woman named
Doll rescued her and took her in: “She mothered her as if she
were a child someone could want.” Lila was about to die,
because it seemed that no one wanted her—but Doll did.
Who would want a child with disabilities? The National
Council for Adoption points out that many do, and our lead
story profiles the growing number of special needs ministries
at churches. Who would take care of a child placed by a panicked mom in a church’s “baby box”? Our second story reports
that Texas enacted the first U.S. safe-haven law in 1999, and
now all 50 states have one, as does Korea.
Perhaps because of its Christian
heritage, the United States has been—
not always, but often—a haven for the
WORLD cover baby
despised. No other country has a
Harang Cho
welcome like the Statue of Liberty offers: “Give me your tired,
your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the
wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden
door!”
Emma Lazarus wrote those words in 1883 as New Yorkers
were raising money to construct the pedestal for the statue.
Her poem, “The New Colossus,” arose in reaction to Jewish
immigrants fleeing from anti-Semitic violence in Russia and
arriving in America destitute but willing to work hard: The welcome mat was out. Others in future decades would react differently. Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned
Parenthood, preferred to kill off what she called in 1919 “the
growing stream of the unfit.”
Those two women reacted to the tired, poor, huddled
masses in diametrically opposed ways. Today we are seeing a
parallel divide. Some who had abortions or promoted the
practice are repentant. Others adamantly defend what they did
or espoused. Our third article shows how some articulate
Americans who favored abortion rights in a theoretical way
now proclaim that the bloody practice of abortion is right: They
have moved from pro-choice to pro-abortion. Our fourth article
shows how Taiwan now has more abortions than births, not by
government decree but by individual choice. The consequences
are severe, not only for babies but for an entire society.
We report on how Christian ministries are learning to invite
the disabled into the church, and are providing safe havens for
abandoned babies. We also look back to the 1930s and show
how in that decade pro-abortionists planted the seeds that
grew into the noxious plants of the 1970s. And we report on
new pro-life state-level laws. A
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1/6/15 2:38 PM
YEAR
OF ROE V. WADE
VITAL PARTS OF THE BODY
God created persons with cognitive disabilities
for a reason, and special needs ministries are
showing how much they can enrich a church
BY SOPHIA LEE
s the somber-looking young
man stood before me, his eyes
carefully avoiding mine, I kept
a polite smile on my face.
Meanwhile, my brain frantically leafed through a mental manual for
the proper way to greet a guy with autism:
Can I shake his hand? Look him in the
eye? Pat his shoulder?
For an awkward second, I felt like an
ill-prepared tourist in a foreign country.
Then he held out his hand first and said in
a clear, high-pitched voice, “Hi, I’m
Arthur.” Relieved, I grabbed his hand and
introduced myself. I smiled, he didn’t.
He shook my hand briefly, gently, then
withdrew it and gazed with curious
concentration at his fingers.
I was at the main campus of evangelical McLean Bible Church (MBC) in
Vienna, Va., to visit Access Ministry, its
special needs ministry for people with
disabilities. That day, I was visiting the
two-week summer day camp for
Friendship Club, MBC’s community for
older teenagers and adults with various
developmental disabilities. Arthur is in
the “highest functioning” group—a vague
term that can mean anything from being
verbal to a higher IQ.
My nervousness before Arthur’s greeting is a common reaction toward individuals with intellectual, developmental, and
other disabilities who may not follow
proper manners or keep unwritten protocols. Add to it fear, ignorance, and logistical
concern, and it’s easy to understand why
so many churches exclude people with
36
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PHOTO BY CATHERINE ROGERS
disabilities from church life: Everything
from programs to building layouts—can
create barriers.
Yet people like Arthur are not rare.
Disabilities affect people across race,
ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender,
and age. According to a recent American
Community Survey, about 5 percent of
Americans—14.3 million persons—have a
cognitive disability. The National Institute
of Mental Health says one out of five children between ages 8 and 15 has or had a
“seriously debilitating” mental disorder,
such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and anxiety disorder. The
rate of diagnosed autism is increasing
each year: Today, autism affects one in 68
children, and one in 42 for boys.
In recent months I visited several ministries and churches committed to making
the gospel accessible to people and families dealing with disabilities. My questions
focused not only on physical and social
accommodation but spiritual inclusion:
How does a Christian ministry invite the
whole person—body, soul, and spirit—
into the church? It’s one thing to offer a
friendly hello to a person who drools or
dislikes human touch. It’s quite another to
be lifelong spiritual brothers and sisters
with that individual, to share and grow in
the gospel together as the body of Christ.
Jackie Mills-Fernald, director of Access
Ministry, says when churches call her
with requests for advice and training, she
Ross (right) and a volunteer at MBC’s
Beautiful Blessings Sunday school class.
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/5/15 4:02 PM
37
1/5/15 2:32 PM
coaches them on safety and liability
issues and other technical skills, but
always emphasizes, “Don’t do a program.
Do a person! You don’t have to be an
expert in Down syndrome or autism.
You just have to be an expert in that
person, and love that person.”
So I tried to get to know the individuals I met. Arthur Aicken is an apricotcheeked 20-year-old with cropped blond
hair and wire-rim glasses. He has
Asperger syndrome (a mild form of
autism), OCD (obsessive compulsive
disorder), ADHD, and an eye prosthesis
due to microphthalmia, a birth condition
in which the eyeball is abnormally small.
He’s also exceptionally intelligent.
blessing his parents. Before
Arthur, the world pampered his
parents with the sweet life: a nice
house, a good job, a happy marriage. Then, said Gary Aicken,
“God gave us something that was
beyond our control.” For days after
Arthur’s birth with his defective
eye, his mother held him and
cried, “devastated” and “heartbroken.” She wasn’t a believer then,
and her husband had strayed
away from his faith, but Arthur’s
grandmother and a pastor called the
Aickens often to pray for them. At first,
Arthur’s mother rolled her eyes, thinking, “Well, what’s prayer going to do?”
‘Don’t do a program. Do a person! You don’t
have to be an expert in Down syndrome or
autism. You just have to be an expert in that
person, and love that person.’ —JACKIE MILLS-FERNALD
38
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Eventually, the Aickens drew back to
church and started growing in faith.
Then at age 5, Arthur was diagnosed
with autism. Once again, his mother
Virginia crumbled into grief. She
Arthur Aicken (left) does some Bible
workbook after the Friendship Club service.
remembers raging at God, “I know you
allow things for a purpose, but nothing
could be worth this. Here we go again
into the deepest pit in the world!” She
said she went through denial, anger,
bargaining, depression, and acceptance,
but is now rejoicing. She now invites
grieving mothers to Coffee & Connect, a
monthly outreach group where she listens to, prays with, and counsels them.
Through her group, many mothers—
once nonbelievers or distanced
Christians—have professed Christ and
connected to the church.
I often heard parents use the word
“God-orchestrated” to describe their
child’s disability. Tige Nishimoto, a
small-group leader and regular
ARTHUR: CATHERINE ROGERS • ALL OTHER PHOTOS: SOPHIA LEE
As we sat across from each other,
waiting for class to start, Arthur unblinkingly rattled off nicknames for kangaroos
and steam engines, ending each sentence
with “does” and “pretty interesting, huh?”
Then he moved on to the solar system:
“Saturn has 62 moons, does. Jupiter has
67 moons, does. Pretty interesting, huh?”
It’s hard to imagine Arthur as an
8-year-old boy shrieking, flailing, and
thumping on the floor during his first
two years at Access. The Sunday school
teachers often were forced to call his
parents, Gary and Virginia Aicken, to
help manage his frequent tantrums. At
times, his mother rolled on the floor,
wrestling with Arthur as he kicked and
bit at her. But the Arthur I met is a selfaware, generous young man who loves
chatting with people, loves sharing the
gospel with classmates and teachers in
school. His prayers today include missionaries and the young girl in
Guatemala he sponsors through World
Vision. His transformation is yet
another case Mills-Fernald uses to
encourage other parents: “What we see
now is not where somebody will arrive.
We’re all a work in progress.”
It’s the same for the parents. From the
moment he was born, Arthur has been
Tige Nishimoto tries to stir up conversation
with a boy with autism at the Breakaway
respite care program at MBC Prince William.
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/5/15 2:38 PM
volunteer at Access Ministry, said he
was once a “reckless and foolish” nonChristian until he became a single
father of a boy with autism: “Having
Josh, he saved my life. God orchestrated
and shaped areas in my life through
him.” It was through his son, and
through ministering to other children
like him, that Nishimoto discovered
“God’s pure love and purpose in these
children to change lives.”
ARTHUR: CATHERINE ROGERS • ALL OTHER PHOTOS: SOPHIA LEE
T
his doctrine—the bold, almost
offensive, faith that God not only
allowed but intentionally orchestrated the disability—is the lifeblood of
a solid special needs ministry. It’s the
powerful distinction between a
Christian ministry and a secular program. It directs the church’s mission
into developing an all-inclusive disability ministry that is rooted in the hope
and faith that people with disabilities
can, should, and will serve and bless the
church. Ministry becomes a God-driven,
two-way street, so that it doesn’t
Allie (left) attends the Adults with
Disabilities Day Program with a caregiver.
exhaust itself from compassion and
love.
Such a perspective also levels the
playing field, said Joni Eareckson Tada,
founder of Joni and Friends, an international organization that provides
awareness and resources for disability
ministries: “No more is there this teaching from a position of power or influence.
… No, we enter this ministry from a
point of grace. We’re all weak in God’s
eyes. And we need to treat these people
with dignity and respect.”
But a leveled playing field also means
that people with disabilities are sinners
too who need to hear and receive the
gospel. It produces some hard questions
for parents who worry about their children’s spiritual state: How do I know if
my kid with severe cognitive disabilities
is saved? How do I know she understands, when she cannot communicate
her thoughts? How can my boy mature
spiritually, when he melts down and
disrupts service, when he cannot join a
fellowship because he gets panic
attacks? Such concerns illuminate the
uniqueness of special needs ministry.
Churches then require some creativity,
research, and training to break down the
multiple physical, social, and learning
barriers between the person’s disability
and the church body.
At McLean Bible Church’s Adults
with Disabilities Day Program (ADDP),
an 11-months-a-year day care for adults
with significant developmental delays,
most of the 18 regular students have
Down syndrome. Two are in wheelchairs, one’s blind, another is hearing
impaired, and at least one has a cracking
sense of humor. Former public-school
teacher Kathleen Rose taught the first
chapter of Genesis using visuals, buzzers, and quizzes to engage her students.
Allie, a woman with cerebral palsy, used
her communication device’s synthetic
voice to announce, “When I think of
God, I think of Him as a magical artist.”
39
1/5/15 2:39 PM
Each time she got a question right, she
rocked back into her wheelchair like a
little victory dance. The next day, they
reviewed the days of creation again, this
time with sign language and a video clip
of The Muppets.
Like children and adults without disabilities, people with intellectual and
developmental disabilities need consistent repetition and real-life applications
of the gospel. To make a concept stick,
they might need colorful props, skits, and
activities. Since not every person is able
to interact the way the ADDP students
can, MBC divides some groups into
smaller classrooms and makes special
adjustments to the curriculum. For
every new family, ministry leaders will
discuss with the parents or caretaker
the best way to include the individual
and family into church services.
For example, at MBC’s Beautiful
Blessings, a Sunday school class for
children 2 to 15 with disabilities, every
student gets one-to-one attention. Here,
the physical setup is more playroom
than classroom, the curriculum more
flexible. The volunteers always display
certain toys and gadgets on the table.
Twelve-year-old Ross, for example,
has fierce attachment to a green interactive storybook. The moment he
enters, he grabs his storybook and plays
the chirpy nursery songs over and over.
Because Ross is sensitive to auditory
surroundings, he used to wince and
cover his ears during worship. Now he
knows the songs and sometimes sings
along. He’ll dutifully put his storybook
aside so that a volunteer can teach a
Bible story using cutout paper figures,
stickers, and coloring activities.
Some kids at Beautiful Blessings sit
with their eyes wandering while the
Blessings and has over 30 years
of experience with special education, said it’s sometimes impossible to know how much these kids
are absorbing from the class:
“You just have to trust in the Holy
Spirit to do His part.”
Because many individuals will
never show visible comprehension of the gospel, it’s too easy to
resign and think they’ll never
“get it.” But Joni Eareckson Tada
said Christians tend to have a
“knowledge fixation” and forget
what is truly important: It’s not
about reciting Bible verses, but
about “the experience of the
body of Christ.” Even if worship
is complete cacophony, even if
someone mistakes communion
for snack and grabs a fistful of
unleavened wafers, “what they
will grasp is that this place is all
about Jesus, all about love. And
that’s life-changing.”
A ministry can be something
low-key and organic like the
Sunday Brunch Fellowship for
adults with disabilities at Calvary
Community Church in Westlake
Village, Calif. It started with one
couple offering a man with brain
damage a ride to church every
Sunday. That man, John, invited
his sister Debbie, who also has
brain damage, and his mother
Arlene, who wasn’t a Christian.
The group grew to a hodgepodge
family of about 15, sitting together near
the front every Sunday service and then
communing over an open-to-all brunch
of home-cooked pulled pork and brownies. Grant, a once-reticent man with
brain injury, told me his favorite thing
Pumpkin Party by Valley Church in West
Des Moines, Iowa, where about 800
families of all ethnicities and religions—
Catholics, Hindus, Muslims—came
bringing their kids with special needs.
Ruth Stieff, whose son has autism and
volunteers try to engage them. Some
can do little more than grunt and point.
Others run havoc, like the vivacious girl
who dashed around smacking everyone
on the head, or the cheeky boy who
writhed on the carpeted floor while his
volunteer patiently kneeled beside him.
Beverly Mattson, who leads Beautiful
40
WORLD
about church is volunteering as the
greeter, stage assistant manager, and
parking attendant. Calvary now has a
full-time pastor leading a growing
special needs ministry that includes a
medical team.
Ministry can also take shape as a
huge social outreach like the Great
whose husband is lead pastor, said she
believes the special needs ministry
allows the church to “plant seeds” in
unreached communities hungering for
relief and support: “We’re using special
needs, because nobody except
Christians do special needs ministry.
Other religions hide that stuff.”
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/5/15 2:45 PM
SOPHIA LEE
‘What they will grasp is that this place is all about Jesus,
all about love. And that’s life-changing.’ —JONI EARECKSON TADA
SOPHIA LEE
O
ne of the most creative classes I
observed was at EvFree Fullerton
Church in Fullerton, Calif.,
whose special needs ministry evolved
from ushering every person with a disability into one room, to a well-facilitated
community with options tailored to age
and abilities. Connie Hutchinson, the
special needs ministry director at EvFree
Fullerton, started the ministry in 1992 in
part because she wanted her now 39year-old daughter Julie, who has Down
syndrome, to be spiritually fed and
included into the church. The ministry
has grown to more than 80 regular
families, some who drive more than an
hour to church, some who have been
asked to leave by previous churches.
The Sunday I visited EvFree Fullerton,
Kathy Vincent, a spunky redhead also
 [email protected]  @SophiaLeeHyan
A volunteer works with a child at EvFree
Fullerton’s Rainbow Express VBS.
known as The Scripture Lady, stood
before a circle of about 30 adult students
and reviewed the fruits of the Spirit.
Somehow, using an animated slide show,
a “lemon bopper,” a paddle ball, and a
hair dryer, Vincent demonstrated the difference between “happiness” dependent
on circumstances and “joy” rooted in the
Holy Spirit. She turned Bible verses into
simple, jaunty songs and got her audience
to hop and bop along.
Most students interacted eagerly,
gasping and laughing along, raising
hands to answer questions. But I spotted
one young man sitting with a glum
expression and refusing to participate.
Later during one of the songs, a volunteer
walked over and took his hand. “Come
on, Matt,” the volunteer said cheerily,
swaying Matt’s hands in the air. Matt got
up reluctantly, but by the end of the song,
a smile had spread across his face.
Besides the staff, one of the most
important facets of a special needs ministry is committed volunteers. Because
some members need acute care, many
churches like MBC, Calvary, and EvFree
Fullerton will assign a “buddy” for oneon-one companionship. But a child who
can transition into regular service will
do so, either with a buddy or family
member.
It was a moving sight to see the swarm
of young volunteers at EvFree Fullerton’s
Rainbow Express, a weeklong VBS for kids
with disabilities from ages 5 to 12. Each
participant was matched to a “buddy” of
similar age and an older teenage counselor. Many volunteers were rising 8thgraders participating in a junior-high–
level discipleship program—and many
more were returning volunteers.
As I watched kids and teenagers in
bright yellow shirts hug and high-five
each other, I couldn’t differentiate volunteer from participant. Amidst occasional
chaos, I saw a 9-year-old volunteer help
her giggling buddy say hello to a boy on
whom she seemed to have a crush, and a
nonverbal 5-year-old boy entertaining
an audience of junior-high-school-age
volunteers by tapping a joke through his
communication device. And in my mind
I saw golden crowns of eternal inheritance on top of each individual’s head
and thought, This must be how Christ
views his church: lovable and glorifying
in all its curves and edges.
The disability ministry is messy and
tough because it deals with blatant
physical, emotional, and financial suffering and all its hard questions. But
even in the crescendo of grief and pain,
God keeps His promises to work in all
things for the good of those who love
Him.
“God’s putting everything together
like a puzzle, to have everybody unite as
the body of the church,” said Hutchinson’s
daughter Julie, who was also volunteering
at Rainbow Express. She called it “awesome” to see how much her church’s
ministry has grown over the decades.
“And all because I was born with this
disability called Down syndrome.” A
41
1/5/15 4:00 PM
1/5/15 3:19 PM
YEAR
OF ROE V. WADE
SPECIAL DELIVERIES
Baby boxes and safe-haven laws save thousands of babies worldwide, but
they stir controversy in South Korea // BY SOPHIA LEE PHOTOS BY KIM HONG-JI/REUTERS/LANDOV
J
usarang Community Church is a
timeworn building burrowed
deep within twisting alleys up a
hilly working-class district in
Seoul. If not for the pastel
rainbows and meadows painted on its
walls, the church would blend inconspicuously into the residential neighborhood. Over the last several years,
however, the church has become
famous—and infamous—as home to
Korea’s first “Baby Box.” It’s where
desperate women from all over the
country come to drop off their newborn babies.
South Korea isn’t the only developed nation with foundlings. The
archaic baby box concept has been
spreading in other postmodern
nations like Germany, Austria, Poland,
Switzerland, Czech Republic, and
Canada through independent entities,
many existing in legal limbo. Even in
the United States, babies are still
abandoned unsafely, and in extreme
cases tossed down chutes, into toilets,
out windows.
Tim Jaccard wept over many such
lifeless tiny bodies while working as a
paramedic for the Nassau County
Police Department in Long Island, N.Y.
To give these babies proper burials, he
founded the AMT—short for Ambulance Medical Technicians—Children
of Hope Foundation in 1998. His
mission has since evolved: pushing for
Pastor Lee Jong-rak holds an abandoned
baby boy as he prays at Jusarang
Community Church in Seoul.
state laws allowing parents to give up
a newborn child legally and anonymously to state-designated “safe haven”
locations such as police stations and
hospitals—no questions asked, no
legal repercussions.
These “safe-haven” laws provide a
streamlined process for babies to be
safely relinquished. So long as the
baby is unharmed and within a certain
age (which varies by state from 72
hours to a year), the parent is free to
leave immediately. Some parents
linger to provide medical history, but
that’s optional. Most state laws allow
parents to recover the child within a
specified period of time.
A safe-haven baby receives medical
care within 24 hours with full
Medicaid coverage. The state’s child
welfare system then takes custody. It
verifies that the baby is eligible for
adoption by searching for matches in
kidnapping cases and allowing fathers
to claim custody. On average, the
process between relinquishment to
permanent placement into foster care
or adoption takes six months.
Texas enacted the first U.S. safehaven law in 1999. Today, all 50 states
and the District of Columbia have
versions of the law. In the past 15
years, about 2,900 babies have been
relinquished to safe-haven locations.
Though no official record of
abandoned babies exists, Jaccard’s
organization documented 720 cases
of illegal abandonments nationwide
from 2003 to 2014—a “dramatic
decrease” from previous years, he
said.
B
ack in Korea, the Jusarang
Community Church’s Baby Box
survives by slipping through a
legal crack: Seoul has no outright ban
against the operation, nor does it
provide any financial support.
Jusarang pastor Lee Jong-rak
created the Baby Box in late 2009 after
rescuing his third abandoned baby.
The mother had tucked her baby into a
cardboard seafood box and left it by
the church gate on a cold autumn
night. By the time Lee picked up the
baby, the body was stone-cold and
reeking of fish. From the corner of his
eye, he spotted a cat slinking around. A
chill ran down his spine. He thought,
“What if the cat had attacked the baby?
What if the baby had frozen to death?
We need to build a safe place.”
So Lee built into the wall of his
church a hatch that opens a tiny incubated, blanket-lined box. He rigged it
so that a bell rings inside the church
whenever someone opens and closes
the door. Then he waited.
In March 2010, the Baby Box bell
rang for the first time. Though he knew
what to expect, Lee was still shaken to
discover a pink-faced boy wrapped in a
mangy towel. Staff members burst into
tears as he carried the child into the
church. They named the boy Moses.
In South Korea, babies like Moses
create a tangle of social and political
issues for policymakers. Baby dumping is punishable by law, but many
mothers risk it because unwed and
single mothers face a lifetime of
shame and rejection, and receive
meager government support (about
43
1/5/15 3:19 PM
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$48 per month). The Baby Box seems
like the only way to escape a lifetime of
discrimination and poverty.
In August 2012, though, the South
Korean government revised the Special
Adoption Law (SAL) to ban the adoption
of unregistered babies. The move was
an attempt to make international adoptions more transparent and reduce the
possibility of fraud. The changes require
birth mothers to keep their newborns
for at least seven days before placing
them for adoption. It also mandates they
register their babies in their documents
until they are adopted.
Mothers who fear family and social
repercussions do not want to risk keeping their babies for seven days—nor are
the children ever likely to be adopted.
That’s one key difference between South
Korea and America: Nearly every baby
relinquished through the American
safe-haven laws gets adopted, including
those with significant disabilities,
whereas most of Korea’s Baby Box
infants end up in children’s homes.
Domestic adoption is culturally
unpopular in Korea. For babies with
44
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
Pastor Lee plays with Lee On-u, 6, a
disabled child who was abandoned.
disabilities, the possibility of domestic
adoption is even bleaker. Previously,
when people did adopt, they almost
always lied about the baby’s origins,
registering the child as biological. The
new SAL also outlaws that. Domestic
adoption dropped 39 percent between
2012 and 2013.
Almost immediately after the law
went into effect, Lee and his staff saw an
increase in baby abandonments. They
had been accustomed to hearing the
bell ring each month, but when the bell
began ringing up to 25 times monthly,
sometimes several times a day, Lee and
his staff became overwhelmed, anxious,
and angry. Their small-scale, familyowned operation can barely keep up
with the number of babies who require
24/7 care.
The numbers tell the story: In 2010,
Jusarang Baby Box received four babies.
The number increased to 37 in 2011,
then 79 in 2012 as the operation drew
nationwide media attention. But after
the SAL revision in late 2012, the number
of Baby Box babies swelled to 252 in
2013. Almost half the mothers left letters
specifically blaming the new law as the
main reason they turned to the Baby Box.
According to government data, the number of abandoned infants nationwide
more than doubled from 2012 to 2013.
The Baby Box is not the end of the
Jusarang story. The church provides
outreach for birth parents, albeit informally. After depositing her baby, a
mother sometimes loiters long enough
for Lee to invite her in, offer comfort,
and explain the gospel. Lee encourages
the mother to come back for her baby,
and 120 birth mothers have reclaimed
their babies. Jusarang currently sends
material support to 18 such mothers.
Touched by Lee’s work, many volunteers
have also professed Christ.
Baby boxes and safe-haven laws have
their critics who contend that anonymous
relinquishments only encourage parents
to discard their newborns without
consequence. UN officials say safe-haven
laws violate a child’s right to know his
identity.
Critics also point out that safe-haven
laws or baby boxes don’t solve all the
underlying, everyday brokenness—
poverty, substance abuse, domestic
abuse, irresponsible sex, mental illness,
and lack of support services—that can
spiral into the bizarre act of baby
dumping.
As the debate continues, Lee battles
to keep the Baby Box open. He told me,
“I cannot stop this work. God gave me
this work to do. So I just need to stand
right before Him, and He will provide all
the things I need.” His ministry has
inspired several pastors in other cities
to start their own Baby Box—but at least
one church in Busan has caved in to
fierce opposition from the neighborhood
and city authorities.
Lee, however, refuses to buckle,
getting by each month through the help
of private donations and volunteers. He
reasons: “Why should I sit behind a
desk, squabbling about consequences,
when human lives are drowning?” Then
he shook his head and sighed: “What a
strange period we live in, where trying
to save and protect lives is getting more
difficult.” A
 [email protected]  @SophiaLeeHyan
1/5/15 3:20 PM
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1/5/15 10:33 AM
YEAR
OF ROE V. WADE
PRO-ABORTION AND PROUD OF IT
M
46
WORLD
R Last May, Emily Letts, 26, posted a
short, peppy video of her abortion that
quickly went viral. In the
video, the New Jersey abortion counselor smiles and
holds hands with nurses
during the procedure.
Afterward she says, “I
don’t feel sad. I feel in awe
of the fact that I can make a
baby. I can make a life.” And snuff it out.
R In August, Leyla Josephine shared
a now-viral video of her slam poem “I
Think She Was a She.” She
imagines her aborted child
“would’ve looked exactly
like me,” with full cheeks,
hazel eyes, and thick
brown hair. And yet, she
defends the killing: “I
would have died for that right
like she died for mine. I’m sorry, but
you came at the wrong time. I am not
ashamed. … When I become a mother, it
will be when I choose.”
R In October, Hanna Rosin, 44, wrote
“Abortion Is Great” for Slate.
In it she writes of aborting
women who had already
borne children, as she
had: “I never felt like I
had done something
awful. The truth is, I hardly
thought about it after I did it.” Hollywood has done its part to normalize abortion. Recent prime-time
shows such as Friday Night Lights,
Parenthood, and Grey’s Anatomy have all
had abortion plotlines. Grey’s character
Dr. Cristina Yang went through with an
abortion despite her husband’s
reluctance. She told a friend, “I don’t
want a kid. I don’t want to make jam. I
don’t want to carpool. I really, really,
really don’t want to be a mother.”
Last year’s movie Obvious Child
depicted a happily-ever-after
abortion story: A 20-something
comedian finds herself jobless and
pregnant after a drunken one-night
stand but gets an abortion and a guy on
Valentine’s Day.
Meanwhile, newly launched social
campaigns like “1 in 3,” “The Abortion
Diary Podcast,” and “Not Alone” are
eliciting unregretful abortion stories
from the general public. They feature
variations of titles like “It’s actually
very normal” and “Almost every
woman I know has had an abortion.”
Feminist writer Katha Pollitt captures this new mood in her book Pro:
Reclaiming Abortion Rights, which lauds
abortion as a social good rather than a
necessary evil. In it she blames America’s
pro-life movement for abortion’s
“awfulization” and the subsequent
growing number of state-level restrictions. She laments, “Why can’t a
woman just say, This wasn’t the
right time for me?”
D
espite the push to force
abortion guilt and pain into
the closet, the reality continues to burst out even in testimonials
meant to normalize abortion.
April D. from Vancouver told her abortion story on the pro-abortion website
Not Alone—run by abortion counselor
Emily Letts. April wrote three weeks after
her abortion: “A part of me died,” she
POLLIT T: EL AINE THOMPSON/AP • OTHERS: HANDOUT PHOTOS
ichelle Shelfer’s parents encouraged her
at a young age to
explore her sexuality.
When the Berkeley,
Calif., native became pregnant at 24, she
thought little of her appointment at an
abortion business: “It was like getting a
filling in my teeth.” She breezed through
a brief meeting with a counselor.
But the procedure was unexpectedly
painful, and no one made eye contact
with her. A half hour later, a nurse led her
out a back entrance. Shelfer shuffled to
her car, surprised by a flood of tears and
the “shame and secrecy” she felt. In the
clinic’s parking lot she noticed a flattened
and rusted quarter-size metal object on
the ground. Shelfer pocketed a button
depicting a mother bird hovering over
her baby and read: “He careth for you.”
In the months following her abortion,
Shelfer expected relief and a happy goingforward. Instead, she felt she had made a
big mistake. Over the past decade some
abortion proponents have acknowledged
that aborting women should mourn the
choice they felt they had to make—but
in 2014 some women who have had
abortions decided that they should work
to toughen up women like Shelfer.
The result: In YouTube videos, fashion magazine pages, social media campaigns, and newly launched websites,
seemingly unfazed women are talking
unapologetically about their abortions—
and they are enlisting others to do the
same. They seek to reframe abortion
decisions from difficult, private, and
guilt-laden to normal, painless, morally
right, and socially good. Three examples:
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/5/15 3:45 PM
CREDIT
Social and media campaigns promote abortion without regrets, but sometimes
a more complicated message slips out // BY MARY JACKSON
CREDIT
POLLIT T: EL AINE THOMPSON/AP • OTHERS: HANDOUT PHOTOS
Katha Pollitt
promotes her
book in Seattle.
47
1/5/15 3:45 PM
said, describing vivid nightmares. “I see
this baby and it’s crying and it’s mine
and it needs to be … comforted.” Heather
J. from Florida wrote on the same website: “I have had a total of 5 now, and
sometimes I do wonder ‘what if .’”
I telephoned Hanna Rosin to ask
whether she truly was fine about her
abortion, and she expressed more ambivalence than she had in her Slate story: “I
had to take ownership of a shadow, an
existing spirit that stayed with me.”
Alex Ronan ran into that ambivalence
when she volunteered as an abortion
doula (a woman who supports another
woman during an abortion)—at a large
Manhattan hospital. Ronan, an ardent
supporter of legal abortion, wrote,
“Many pro-choice doulas, doctors, and
nonprofits are unwilling to acknowledge how difficult and painful many
women find abortion.”
Ronan documented her experiences
on The Cut website. On her first day as a
volunteer, she met a mother—whose
two children were bouncing in the
waiting room—undergoing the first part
of a two-day, late-term abortion. While
doctors were inserting laminaria, seaweed sticks that dilate the cervix, the
operation went wrong and the woman
WORLD
began losing blood. Doctors went into
emergency mode. They administered
anesthesia, and a resident yelled “pull”
as he tried to remove the baby.
Ronan wrote, “The body does not want
to let it go.” She saw “a doll-size arm, fist
curled” amid “bloody gunk” in the bucket
and wrote, “It feels like I shouldn’t look,
but I can’t turn away.” She left readers
with a sobering image: The mother lost
both her baby and her uterus.
T
he church should be the place for
women to come out of the closet
and admit their abortions, knowing that Christ’s salvation is big enough
Michelle Shelfer with her husband
and grandchildren.
to cover the guilt and shame. But too
often it is not.
Five months after Shelfer’s first
abortion, she was pregnant and sitting
in the waiting room of another abortion
clinic “because I couldn’t see any other
option.” As she waited for the doctor,
who was late, she thought about her
pregnancy, her boyfriend, her future,
the praying ladies she walked past outside, and the button she still carried. In
a moment, she called out to God, not
even sure who He was. Then she stood
up and left.
The baby Shelfer almost aborted was
a boy: He is now a Yale-educated lawyer,
husband, and father of three. Shelfer’s
boyfriend met God separately in his car
during her waiting room delay. He
proposed to her as they drove away
from the clinic. The Sebastopol, Calif.,
couple has been married for 32 years.
For years Shelfer, now 58, struggled
with an intense desire to conceal her
abortion from fellow Christians: “I was
not able to forgive myself. … It’s so much
easier to stuff it away, to not talk about
it, not think about it.” As Shelfer came to
know the forgiveness of Jesus, she felt
compelled to share her story, extend
friendship, and offer workshops to postabortive women.
One in three women will have had an
abortion by the age of 45, according to
the Guttmacher Institute. Ronan says,
“If you’re part of a church with 100 people and half are women, it’s very likely
that a number of those women have had
abortions.” Campaigns such as Silent No
More and the Catholic church’s Project
Rachel offer hotlines and help to postabortive women.
But when Shelfer speaks at different
congregations, the room nearly always
stiffens: “You get the feeling that nobody
really wants to hear. It touches too many
raw nerves.” She speculates that talking
about abortion stirs up feelings of guilt
and pain.
Shelfer counsels expectant mothers
at the Marin (Calif.) Pregnancy Center,
which receives few calls each week from
post-abortive women, and many of those
appointments turn into no-shows. When
a woman actually keeps an appointment,
the counseling “is a very delicate work,
done with fine needles and tweezers, not
sledge hammers and pickaxes.” A
HANDOUT
48
‘If you’re part of a
church with 100
people and half are
women, it’s very likely
that a number of
those women have
had abortions.’ —ALEX RONAN
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/5/15 3:46 PM
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YEAR
OF ROE V. WADE
ELDERLY ISLAND
With fewer young marriages and abortion numbers
sky high, Taiwan faces a severe birth dearth
BY ANGELA LU PHOTO BY DAVID CHANG/EPA/NEWSCOM
I
n the tree-lined Sanmin Park in
Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Indonesian
caretakers push wheelchairs
bearing the elderly—some
hooked to oxygen tanks—who
gather at the park for their daily breath
of fresh air.
Signs of graying in Taiwan are evident
everywhere: Whited-haired ah-mas (or
grandmothers) haggling at street markets
or dancing at the park far outnumber
mothers pushing baby strollers. Taiwan
has the third-lowest birthrate in the
world, a dismal 1.11 children per couple,
as fewer young people marry and
abortion rates skyrocket. The estimated
number of abortions per year eclipses
the number of births: In 2013, about
195,000 babies were born on the island
of 23 million, yet one doctor said the
number of abortions a year could be as
high as 500,000.
Government policy isn’t to blame
for the low birth numbers: The semiautonomous island doesn’t fall under
mainland China’s one-child policy. In
fact, President Ma Ying-jeou calls the
low birthrate an “issue of national security,” and the Taiwanese government
gives economic incentives to encourage
childbearing. In Taipei, parents receive
a $667 baby bonus, a $5,000 child care
allowance, and free tests to find fertility
problems. But amid rapid industrialization and changing culture, those efforts
have so far been unable to reverse the
trend. Meanwhile, Christians—who
make up fewer than 5 percent of the
population—have started opening crisis
50
WORLD
pregnancy centers and teaching churches
about the sanctity of life.
Families have historically played an
important role in Taiwan, but that began
to change when the country experienced
a period of explosive economic growth,
known as the “Taiwan Miracle,” from
the 1960s through the ’80s. Millions of
young men and women moved from the
countryside to work in urban areas. Cut
off from their communities and facing
endless opportunities to increase their
wealth, they abandoned traditional
views of marriage and childbearing and
pursued careers. They said raising kids
in the city cost too much and took too
much time.
Compounding the problem was a
change in Taiwan’s abortion law. In
1984, the government passed the
Eugenic Protection Law. It legalized
abortion up to six months into pregnancy in any case where the mother’s
mental health or family life would be
affected. It requires a woman to get the
consent of her husband if married or
parents if a minor. And with unwed
mothers ostracized in society and
parents eager to save face, consent isn’t
difficult to secure.
Taiwan has not released official
abortion statistics, but in 2011 National
Taiwan University College of Medicine
professor and pediatrician Lue Hungchi estimated the number to be between
300,000 and 500,000. Other doctors
have agreed with the figure, while the
Bureau of Health Promotion stated that
doctors in Taiwan perform at least
240,000 abortions a year. If the 500,000
number is accurate, Taiwan would have
one of the highest per-capita abortion
rates in the world.
L
ocated on the cluttered Zhongyi
Road, a three-story vertical sign
juts out from a storefront. Racks
of used T-shirts and jeans spill out the
front door, which opens into a thrift
store filled with more clothes, Christian
knickknacks, and household appliances.
This is Ray of Hope, a crisis pregnancy
center in the southern city of Tainan.
Up a narrow flight of stairs is a cozy
counseling room with blue couches and
images of developing preborn babies on
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/7/15 9:21 AM
A man looks at the artwork The Moment We
Meet displayed at the Taipei 101 Station in
Taipei, Taiwan. The display shows old
people’s faces to convey the message
“An elderly person is the future of my body,
a child is the future of my bloodline.”
the walls. Down the hall are offices for
the center’s “Worth Waiting For” abstinence program, which teaches at local
schools and churches. Jocelyn Zhou, a
cheerful young woman from a Christian
family, is the main counselor and social
worker at the clinic. She chats with
young women facing unplanned
pregnancies and works with a nearby
orphanage providing international
adoptions. (Adoption is not popular in
Taiwan, where many people reject the
idea of raising someone else’s child.
Recent changes in the adoption law
make international adoptions more
difficult, as well.)
Most of Zhou’s clients say they face
strong pressure from boyfriends or
parents to abort. So Ray of Hope also
provides a safe house for women who
decide to continue their pregnancies
and need to escape from upset boyfriends or can’t afford housing. With an
undisclosed location and tight security
on every floor, the safe house provides
lodging, Bible studies, job classes, and
live-in counselors.
Like many Taiwanese, Zhou said she
never really thought about the sanctity
of life. But then she heard about Ray of
Hope through her church. As she better
understood what an abortion entailed,
she was horrified by it, a view that puts
her outside the mainstream of her peers:
“I think young people talk about it as
something very normal. Teachers think
[abortion] is a way to solve the problem.”
I
ndividuals make the decisions not
to have children, but the cumulative
effects of all those individual decisions will have profound consequences
for Taiwan. An aging society means
fewer workers and more people
51
1/7/15 9:22 AM
Jocelyn Zhou at the Ray of Hope clinic.
needing government services. Yang
Wen-shan, a demographer at Academia
Sinica in Taipei, told The Guardian that
“right now, seven working people are
supporting one older person. By 2045,
1.45 people will be supporting one.” By
2060, Taiwan’s population will drop
from 23 million to 19 million, according
to projections from Taiwan’s Council for
Economic Planning and Development.
Low birth numbers also affect education. After the birth rate hit its lowest
point—0.91 in 2011—a survey by the
King Car Education Foundation found
that nearly 80 percent of teachers
worried the low birth rate would lead to
layoffs and affect their teaching career.
Minister of Education Wu Ching-ji predicted in 2009 that more than 30 percent
of universities would have to close in the
next decade if the birth rate worsens. The
government even worries it won’t have
enough soldiers in case of military attack,
a real concern as Taiwan maintains its
tense relationship with mainland China.
And the trend in Taiwan isn’t an
anomaly in the area. A look at the other
countries with the lowest birth rates
reveals a high concentration among
well-to-do East Asian countries—
Singapore, Macau (a Chinese territory),
Hong Kong, and South Korea.
That’s why Mark Li (name changed
for his protection) of China Life Alliance
doesn’t think politics can fix the bigger
problem in mainland China: “We are
praying that the one-child policy would
end but not just that, we are praying for
God to be on the move to heal the nation
and for churches to be a light.” A
‘CURIOUS ABOUT THE SOURCE OF OUR LOVE’
52
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
than they could at home, so
they send remittances back to
husbands and children they’ve
left behind. It’s taxing work,
living in a foreign country,
learning a new language, and
taking care of elderly patients
suffering from such conditions
as strokes or Alzheimer’s disease. Some families treat
caretakers poorly, requiring
them to work around the
clock, leaving the house only
to take out the trash or buy
something at the store.
The Taiwan Industrial
Evangelical Fellowship (TIEF)
in Taipei sees this as an opportunity to reach out to the foreigners. Indonesia has been
difficult to reach with the gospel, but now Muslim workers
are coming to Taiwan, learning Chinese, and sometimes
working in Christian homes.
TIEF encourages churches to
start language classes for
caretakers who are already
bringing the elderly to church.
Others open “Gospel Centers”
that hold classes on different
subjects such as Taiwanese
cooking, and create a gathering place for caretakers to
relax and talk with friends.
In Kaohsiung’s Sanmin Park,
Susan Yu and Wei-shin Tsay of
Holy Light Theological
Seminary show up every
Saturday to talk with the
elderly and their caretakers.
They also tried reaching out to
caretakers at train stations
and Indonesian grocery
stores, but found it difficult
because the foreign workers
don’t get much time off. But at
the park, they realized they
could befriend not only the
care takers, but the lonely
elderly people who often aren’t
visited by their own children.
The Indonesians are a
tight-knit community, so once
A foreign caregiver pushes an
elderly woman in Taipei.
Yu befriended a few women,
they introduced her to their
friends, and they’ve been able
to put together makeup tutorials, celebrate birthday parties, and hold games nights.
Says Yu, “We show them that
we love them, then they can
be curious about the source
of our love.” —A.L.
TOP: ANGEL A LU • BOT TOM: WALLY SANTANA/AP
Who will take care of elderly
parents? That’s a question
facing countries with declining birthrates. In Taiwan, the
eldest son takes care of his
parents, but with fewer kids,
including some who have
moved to America, many
children have outsourced
their duty to Indonesian caretakers. Almost half a million
foreign workers live in
Taiwan, with more than
210,000 working as domestic
helpers or caregivers.
Brokers sign young
Indonesian women to threeyear contracts with families
that agree to provide room,
board, and a salary in
exchange for 24/7 care of
elderly parents. Brokers take
a large portion of the salary to
cover the cost of bringing the
girls to Taiwan, plus interest.
Migrant workers earn
much more money in Taiwan
 [email protected]  @angela818
1/7/15 9:21 AM
Since 1975 . . .
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WM115
1/5/15 10:35 AM
YEAR
OF ROE V. WADE
DEPRESSION-ERA DISHONESTY
The drive for abortion began not in the 1960s but in
the 1930s // BY MARVIN OLASKY ILLUSTRATION BY KRIEG BARRIE
e on the pro-life side
sometimes fantasize
that the abortion horror
started with the sexual
revolution of the 1960s
and the advent of oral contraceptives. Our
hope: If ideological craziness and new technology created the problem, maybe theological sanity and ultrasound machines can
eliminate the killing. The problem, though,
is that the problem did not arise during the
1960s. The modern drive for abortion
started in the 1930s.
During that decade most U.S. political
and cultural leftists were in love with the
Soviet Union, which they saw as on the way
up while depressed America was heading
down. Pro-abortion radicals climbed aboard
by calling on Americans to emulate Soviet
pro-abortion practice: Speakers at a Sexual
Reform Congress praised Russians as “having attained high ideals in regard to sexual
rights.” Even the sedate American Journal of
Public Health proclaimed that “good specialists” were performing abortions in the
Soviet Union, and that “legalized abortion is
the only means for women’s emancipation
because there are not yet any contraceptives
that prevent pregnancy with certainty.”
A few pro-abortion Americans tried
a frontal assault on laws restricting
abortion. The leader of that pack,
Dr. William J. Robinson, began the
first chapter of his book, The Law
Against Abortion, with nonnegotiable demands: “I shall not
beat about the bush. I shall not shillyshally, I shall not equivocate. [I present] A
DEMAND FOR THE COMPLETE AND TOTAL
ABROGATION OF ANY LAW AGAINST
ABORTION.” He wrote, “People who put
54
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
abortion on the same level as burglary,
arson and murder … are people of such a
mental caliber that any discussion with
them would be futile.”
Robinson influenced some people but
won few friends: A gradualist approach
worked better. Speakers at an International
Birth Control Conference proposed that
abortion advocates hide their desire to make
all abortion legal, and instead campaign for
a broadening of medical indications: “One
must start with the attainable, if one is to
reach the unattainable.” Their goal was legalization of abortion to protect not just the life
but the “health” of the mother, for if the
latter could be extended to include “mental
health,” the door could be open wide.
Other pro-abortionists during the 1930s
proposed “socio-economic indications for
legalization”—abortions for the poor—as a
way to get out of the Depression. They also
argued that anti-abortion laws had not done
away with abortions but had driven them
into back alleys and increased their cost.
Even Robinson, with all his fervor for an
immediate abortion great leap forward,
acknowledged the usefulness of slower
public relations methods: “If complete
abrogation is impossible at this time, then
at least a very radical modification.”
The most effective pro-abortion
book of the 1930s, Dr. Frederick J.
Taussig’s Abortion, attacked the
“ridiculous, ofttimes incomprehensive [sic] and harsh statutes
on our books.” He recommended
that abortion be legal when “the
mother is physically depleted by childbearing and poverty” and “clearly irresponsible.”
Taussig also argued that the primary concern of doctors should not be the life of the
TAUSSIG: BERNARD BECKER MEDICAL LIBRARY
1/6/15 9:17 AM
1/6/15 9:16 AM
accepted the statistics he arrived at after
“careful figuring.” But many mothers did
die, because it would be another decade
before the arrival of antibiotics allowed
doctors to stop infections.
Time, which was famous for snide
attacks on individuals its editors did not
like, simply described Taussig as “a
handsome man” with a “great” family
and an emphasis on “strict and meticulous” clinical work. Time also amplified
Taussig’s encouragement of abortions
when there were “eugenic reasons,”
“suicidal tendencies,” and “economic
reasons in women of high fertility.”
While boosting Taussig, Time showed
no concern for the unborn child.
Time also left out ethical questions in
its report in 1935 of an “amazingly
widespread and efficient chain of Pacific
Coast abortaria,” with offices in Seattle,
Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, San
Jose, Los Angeles, Hollywood, Long
Beach, and San Diego, all under the
authority of “a skilled operator, Dr.
George Eliot Watts of Los Angeles, graduate of the University of Oregon Medical
‘If there are those who choose to destroy
an unformed protoplasm jeopardizing the
welfare of the already living … how can
we then condemn them?’ —LOUIS KELLEY in 1938
of a New York City birth control clinic,
Taussig decided that one abortion took
place for every 2.5 confinements in
urban areas. (He did not note that visits
to still-controversial birth control clinics were hardly typical jaunts.) Taussig
also postulated a rural total of one
abortion for every five confinements
throughout the United States. (His evidence for that were estimates by some
physicians in “the rural districts of
Iowa.”)
That dubious methodology suggested
403,200 abortions committed annually
in urban areas and 278,400 in rural
areas, for a nationwide annual total of
681,600. That figure seems high, as
does his estimate of 8,179 maternal
abortion deaths annually, even though a
full-page review in Time magazine pronounced his book “authoritative” and
56
WORLD
School … noted for his competency in
performing abortions.”
Time seemed most interested in the
efficiency of this “great businesslike
abortaria chain, [which has] a Medical
Acceptance Corporation to finance
installment payments for abortion in
precisely the way other finance companies finance the purchase of motor
cars, automatic refrigerators, vacuum
cleaners.” Fees for abortion were $35
for a pregnancy of six weeks or less up
to $300 for a seven-month affair. Time
described the problem of this chain not
as abortion itself but a greedy manager
who allegedly bribed a state medical
examiner to pressure other abortionists
either to join the abortaria cartel or get
out of business.
Press sympathy for abortion also
appeared in 1938 during the trial of a
prominent British physician, Alec
Bourne. Bourne wanted to change interpretation of Britain’s abortion law so it
would allow abortion to preserve not
just the life but the physical and mental
health of pregnant women. He found the
perfect test case when he performed an
abortion on a 15-year-old girl who had
become pregnant as the result of rape.
The London Times reported both
sides of the argument, but American
press coverage was pro-Bourne. An
Associated Press report of the trial did
not mention the British attorney general’s insistence that sympathy for the girl
should not lead to ignoring the “fundamental difference between preserving
life and preserving health.” Nor did the
AP story explain how killing on top of
rape would strengthen the mental
health of the material victim. Instead, it
played up a pro-abortion judge’s comment that Bourne had performed “an
act of charity,” and emphasized reaction
from Bourne’s friends when he went
free: “Cheers from the crowd, including
leaders of the British medical profession
and socialites, greeted the verdict.”
Some articles in smaller magazines,
such as one by A.J. Rougy in the
American Mercury, even began arguing
for legalization of abortion in all cases;
Rougy said it would take too much effort
to enforce anti-abortion laws that, in
any case, were the result of “religious
taboos.” Other writers began to justify
abortion by reverting to the early 19thcentury argument that the unborn child
is not human. Louis Kelley, in a 1938
Forum article, asked, “If there are those
who choose to destroy an unformed
protoplasm jeopardizing the welfare of
the already living … how can we then
condemn them?” Abortion, Kelley wrote,
is the “lesser of two wrongs.”
By the late 1930s, buoyed by their
advances in publishing and press
coverage, abortionists in New York City
were circulating handbills advertising
their services. With arrest unlikely and
conviction rare, abortionists were
scheduling appointments in advance at
their own offices, confident that police
would not intervene. Laws still prohibited abortion, but social attitudes were
changing in a way that limited prosecution and the willingness of juries to
convict. A
JANUARY 24, 2015
1/6/15 9:17 AM
ICONS: KRIEG BARRIE
unborn child along with the life of the
mother. Instead, Taussig suggested a
“freedom from religious bias” that
would lead to “consideration for the
health of the mother,” including mental
health, and concern for the welfare of
the family as a whole.
Socioeconomic and mental health
rationales for abortion were radical
steps that, when taken, could open wide
the doors of abortion businesses.
Taussig embedded such proposals in a
suggestion that the number of abortions,
legal or not, would always be high, so
the only way to reduce the number of
non-doctors performing illegal abortions
was to allow more legal ones. He also
argued that when the poor did not have
as much access to abortion as the rich,
society was at fault; the poor should
receive abortion subsidies, or at least
have obstacles to their use of “good”
abortionists removed.
To buttress those positions, Taussig
emphasized his medical professionalism and provided a mass of statistics.
Basing his calculations on the records
YEAR
OF ROE V. WADE
STATE-BY-STATE PROGRESS
More than a dozen states last year made it easier to protect life // BY KRISTIN CHAPMAN
ICONS: KRIEG BARRIE
L
ast year 12 states gained 20
life-affirming laws, while voters in another state handed
their legislature greater
power to enact pro-life laws.
The new laws address issues from
strengthening informed consent regulations and extending waiting periods to
protecting unborn victims of violence
and banning sex-selection abortion.
Alabama increased abortion waiting
periods from 24 to 48 hours after women
receive information on issues such as
adoption services and the father’s obligations. The state also strengthened parental consent requirements and tightened
the process for minors petitioning to have
an abortion without parental consent.
Alaskan parents can now file civil
suits for the unlawful or negligent death
of an unborn child. The state also redefined what constitutes a “medically
necessary” abortion under Medicaid
coverage, but state-funded abortions are
still allowable if the pregnancies result
from rape or incest, or if the health of
the mother is at risk.
Arizona’s Department of Health
Services can now conduct surprise
inspections of abortion clinics without
first obtaining a warrant. Helping a
minor to circumvent parental consent
laws is a misdemeanor, and abortion
facilities must report live births and
resuscitation efforts.
Colorado gave greater protection to
women who become pregnant following
rape. A victim will be able to file a petition seeking termination of the rapist’s
parental rights if there is clear and
convincing evidence a rape occurred—
even if the rapist was not convicted.
Florida outlawed abortions if a doctor
determines the preborn baby could
survive outside the womb, with an
exception for situations involving risk
to the mother’s life. An Unborn Victims
2014 pro-life legislative victories
` Waiting period
` Informed and
parental consent
` Abortion funding
and healthcare
coverage
` Wrongful death and
victim’s rights
` Late-term abortion
and sex-selection
abortion
restrictions
` Admitting privileges
for abortionists
` Miscellaneous
of Violence Act makes it a separate
offense to injure or kill a preborn baby
at any stage of development.
Georgia barred the state employee
health insurance plan from covering
abortions except when the mother’s life
is at stake. The law does not include an
exception for rape or incest.
Indiana prohibited elective abortion
coverage in standard healthcare insurance plans. Also, abortion businesses
will now have to submit to the State
Department of Health a document
showing their abortionists’ admitting
privileges at hospitals.
Kansas expanded the “safe havens”
where a parent can surrender custody
of an infant. Parents can have anonymity when they relinquish a child.
Louisiana now requires abortionists
to have admitting privileges at a hospital
within 30 miles of the abortion facility.
(Three Louisiana abortion facilities at
risk of closing under the bill have since
filed suit to block enforcement of the bill.)
Abortionists cannot provide instruction
at public and charter schools or distribute
information on issues like sex education.
Women must receive information on
coerced abortions and human trafficking
prior to undergoing an abortion.
The Missouri legislature twice overrode Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon’s vetoes
of life-affirming bills. One new law
extends the state’s waiting period from
24 to 72 hours, and another increases
tax credit caps available to pregnancy
resource centers.
Oklahoma abortionists must have
admitting privileges at a hospital within
30 miles of the abortion facility. Women
in Oklahoma must receive information
about prenatal hospice services if they
are carrying a baby with a fetal anomaly
incompatible with life.
South Dakota is now the nation’s
eighth state to ban sex-selection abortion. Arizona, Illinois, Kansas, North
Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and
Pennsylvania already have similar laws.
Tennessee voters approved
Amendment 1, which says abortion
rights are not protected by the state’s
constitution. Lawmakers now have
greater power to enact abortion regulations and restrictions. A
57
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2 SPORTS and TECH.indd 58
1/5/15 1:57 PM
NOTEBOOK
SPORTS / TECHNOLOGY / SCIENCE / MONEY
Farm team
ROBERT WILLET T/RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER/MCT/L ANDOV
SPORTS
JASON BROWN’S RADICAL LIFE CHANGE
IS TOUCHING MORE LIVES THAN HE
COULD HAVE PREDICTED by Andrew Branch
The way to a man’s
heart is through his
stomach. God is proving it,
says one former NFL player.
“It really is true,”
Jason Brown told me
R
from his Louisburg, N.C.,
farm, complete with
100-year-old farmhouse,
dairy barn, and 1,000
acres of uninterrupted
green.
If Brown sounds familiar, he recently gained
national fanfare for leaving
the NFL to be a farmer and
give away what he grows.
The former St. Louis Ram
spent autumn harvesting
and delivering 10,000
pounds of cucumbers,
100,000 pounds of sweet
potatoes, and one of his
own children, who came
faster than the midwife.
Many who hear the
story, though, are puzzled
even as they praise Brown,
football’s highest paid
Former NFL player Jason
Brown supervises the
harvest of sweet potatoes
for the needy.
center until the Rams cut
him in early 2012. Brown
baffled more than his agent
by turning down his own
top three teams to move
home to North Carolina.
Yet Brown told me leaving football was a long time
coming. In late 2011,
despite two children and a
mansion with two fully
stocked bars, he and wife
59
1/6/15 12:12 PM
NOTEBOOK
SPORTS
Tay were “dying inside,”
likely headed for divorce.
Then a professed Christian,
he admits Jesus was his
ticket to forgiveness and
little else until he symbolically released his grip on
money and football. “Like,
literally, I poured thousands
of dollars of unopened
liquor down the drain that
evening,” he told me.
After putting their home
up for sale before they
really knew what they were
supposed to be looking for,
years of thinking about
farming after football took
on new meaning. A farm
north of Raleigh became
available, he learned some
farming basics from
YouTube, and most of the
rest has been donated, from
plants to planters to 600
volunteer reapers.
The result, First Fruits
Farm, is an extension of
Wisdom for Life, the
Browns’ organization that
seeks through community
and service to boost Bible
literacy.
Some point out Brown
could have bought more
food playing football, but
it’s not the same, he says.
The “way to a man’s heart”
is by meeting his needs.
Personally. Showing radical
love can start a conversation
that he can point back to
Jesus’ radical love. Little did
he know that virtually every
form of U.S. media would
beat a path to his door to
get in on that conversation.
Brown wants to diversify
and expand crops for the
coming year to utilize more
acres, involving area
churches in the process. But
despite his new “Farmer
Brown” reputation, he told
me, “I literally still know
nothing about farming.”
His business plan?
“Obedience.” A
Four’s company
Making for a memorable Christmas Eve,
defending Masters champion Bubba Watson
and his wife announced their second adoption. “Caleb has a brand new baby sister,
Dakota. Watson Family is now 4 and we are so
blessed!” tweeted the outspoken Christian.
Watson’s success as an athlete gives a
high profile to his adoptions, beginning with
Watson’s tearful Masters win just weeks after
adopting Caleb in 2012. Watson won a
second green jacket in April—with a wobbly,
wavy-haired toddler on the green to greet him.
The Watsons said they’ll release more information once their latest adoption is final. —A.B.
60
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
HARVEST: HANDOUT • WATSON: BUBBA WATSON/INSTAGRAM • CROSBY: ICON SPORTSWIRE VIA AP IMAGES
The National Hockey League’s mumps problem grew worse over the
holidays, with two more Pittsburgh Penguins diagnosed Christmas
weekend. New cases have been surfacing regularly since mid-October,
aff ecting at least 15 players on five teams and two referees. One case
resulted in hospitalization. It’s not uncommon for viruses like the flu to
spread in a locker room, but the swollen cheeks of league star Sidney
Crosby last month caused quite a stir. Many teams have scrambled to
vaccinate their players. —A.B.
1/6/15
12:03 PM
HANDOUT
Mumps the word
TECHNOLOGY
NOTEBOOK
Photographic evidence
Search and
rescue
Perhaps no other
technology has had
more of a direct impact
on the abortion debate
than ultrasound. In a
recently published book
titled Imaging and
Imagining the Fetus: The
Development of Obstetric
Ultrasound (The Johns
Hopkins University Press,
2013), authors Malcolm
Nicolson, a professor of
the history of medicine at
the University of Glasgow,
Scotland, and engineer
John Fleming explore the
history of clinical ultrasound and its monumental
effects on how society
views the unborn.
R
Nicolson and Fleming
write that ultrasound
imaging was initially
developed to detect
industrial flaws in ships,
but was adapted and used
for clinical purposes in
Scotland in 1956. By the
1970s, British hospitals
routinely used ultrasound, but doctors didn’t
bring it into widespread
use in the United States
until the mid-1970s. Over
the years since then,
ultrasound technology
has advanced dramatically: Machines were
once the size of refrigerators and produced a flat,
black-and-white image.
Now they are so portable
that many units can fit
into a doctor’s coat pocket
and can render detailed,
4D ultrasound video.
This portability has
revolutionized the way
pro-life activists can
reach women considering
abortion. Save the Storks
is an organization that
equips specially designed
Mercedes vans with the
latest in sonogram technology, allowing the organization to do outreach
directly from abortion
center sidewalks.
But the images themselves are what make
ultrasound such a significant pro-life technology.
“Overwhelmingly,
pregnant women expect
to be scanned, and are
moved and excited by seeing the fetus,” Nicolson
said in an interview with
Live Science. In fact,
Nicolson said, some
women report not feeling
pregnant until they’ve seen
the ultrasound image.
Incubators on the go
handout
harvest: handout • watson: bubba watson/instagram • Crosby: Icon Sportswire via AP Images
Although you get literally millions
of hits from a Google search,
you’ll probably find what you
want from the top 10 to 20
results. Those top “hits” are
often there as the result of
something called Search Engine
Optimization (SEO), where specialized technology companies
will—for a fee—structure a
website to help it reach the top
of the stack of search results.
Now, this SEO technology is
helping to connect abortionminded parents with pregnancy
resources they might not have
been aware of. Online for Life
(OFL) is one such organization.
“OFL consists of business
people who left the for-profit
world to rescue babies and
families from abortion full
time,” said OFL’s Brian Fisher in
an interview with Live Action
News. “Several of us have some
background in Internet marketing and technology, so we apply
the same sort of tools we used
in our for-profit days to rescue
babies.”
When someone searches for
abortion information in her area,
OFL will pop up as an option. OFL
then connects these individuals
with crisis pregnancy centers or
mobile sonogram buses. —M.C.
Amazing advances in ultrasound technology make
the pro-life case one mother at a time by Michael Cochrane
Life-saving technology isn’t always complicated or expensive. James Roberts, a British industrial
design graduate student, has won the $45,000 James Dyson prize by developing a simple, low-cost
way for developing countries to care for prematurely born infants: a portable, inflatable incubator.
Roberts’ manually inflatable prototype expands to about one meter in length but can be
deflated and shipped as a flat pack. A ceramic heating element controlled by a small computer
keeps both temperature and humidity stable. The entire unit can run for more than a day on just a
car battery if electricity is unavailable.
Roberts estimates his prototype could be manufactured for $400 and offer performance
similar to units costing almost 100 times as much. —M.C.
J ANUA R Y 2 4 , 2 0 1 5 W O R L D 61
1/6/15 12:36 PM
PLANT PROBLEMS SEND COFFEE
PRODUCTION PLUNGING by Julie Borg
That morning jolt of
java may soon be a
jolt on the pocketbook. A
plant fungus, coffee rust,
is devastating coffee plantations throughout Mexico
and Central America while
leaf scorch is attacking
Brazilian plants.
Coffee, an important
economic commodity
in tropical countries, is
one of the most traded
products in the world,
providing support for millions of small farmers.
Officials have declared
national emergencies in
Guatemala, Honduras,
and Costa Rica. Coffee
production could drop by
40 percent in Guatemala
alone.
Coffee rust first gained
notice near Lake Victoria,
in Africa, over 40 years
ago and spread quickly.
“It became so devastating
in Sri Lanka, southern
India and Java that coffee
agriculture had to be
abandoned,” Ivette
Perfecto, ecologist at the
University of Michigan,
told the National Science
Foundation.
Experts believe the
spread of coffee rust
may be related to two
changes in coffee-growing techniques. Farmers,
attempting to increase
production, have removed
or thinned tree canopies
that provided shade for
the plants. Direct sunlight
kills another fungus, white
halo, which keeps coffee
rust in check. Farmers
have also increased use
of pesticides that kill the
Azteca ant. The ants are
drawn to the honeydew
produced by the green
coffee scale insect. The
ants protect the scale
which, in turn, is a favorite food for white halo.
To make matters
worse for the coffee
industry, a bacterium
that causes leaf scorch is
attacking coffee plantations in Brazil, a country
that produces 40 percent
of the world’s coffee. The
bacterium clogs the
plant’s vessels and prevents transport of water
and nutrients, eventually
killing the plant.
Researchers fear the
disease could hopscotch
into citrus groves as well.
The United States Agency
for International
Development announced
the preliminary results of
their “Grand Challenges”
contest designed to
encourage new and innovative ideas to assist
workers fighting Ebola in
West Africa.
The agency received
1,500 submissions. Major
contenders for first place
include protective gear
that zips off like a wet
suit, spray-on lotions that
kill or repel the virus, and
icy cold underwear to
make the sweltering
temperatures inside
protective clothing more
bearable. Workers wearing protective gear in the
tropical midday heat are
often near collapse
within 45 minutes, Wendy
Taylor, director
of the agency’s
Center for
Accelerating
Innovation and
Impact, told
The New York
Times.
The
agency will
spend about
$1.7 million
testing the most
promising
possibilities.
—J.B.
Gear developed by
Johns Hopkins
Hunger games
Scientists at Imperial College, London, and the University of Glasgow have developed an appetitesuppressing food additive which contains propionate, a substance produced naturally in the gut when
microbes ferment dietary fiber. Propionate stimulates the gut to release hormones that reduce hunger, but
it would take huge amounts of fiber to produce the eff ect. The new food additive, inulin-propionate ester
(IPE), provides a more efficient way to introduce propionate into the gut.
Overweight volunteers participated in a 24-week study in which half of the 60 volunteers added IPE
powder to their food, the other half added inulin. Only one out of 25 in the IPE group gained more than
3 percent of their body weight, compared to six out of 24 in the inulin group. At the end of 24 weeks
the IPE group had less abdominal and liver fat.
Imperial Innovations, a technology commercialization company, is working on marketing IPE. —J.B.
62
WORLD
JANUARY 24, 2015
2 SCIENCE and MONEY.indd 62
COFFEE: ORL ANDO SIERRA/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES ORL ANDO SIERRA/AFP/GET T Y IMAGES • EBOL A GEAR: JOHNS HOPKINS CENTER FOR BIOENGINEERING INNOVATION & DESIGN • FOOD: TAGSTOCK1/ISTOCK
Coffee crisis
R
Ice break
SCIENCE
1/6/15
1:54 PM
TONY DE JAK/AP
NOTEBOOK
MONEY
NOTEBOOK
Those falling oil prices
Cheap gasoline is likely a Christmas gift that
won’t keep on giving by David Skeel
I couldn’t help smiling when gas
prices dropped below $3 per
gallon for the first time in years here in
the high-tax Northeast where I live. As
with many men, gas is the one price I
follow intensely; I don’t shop for anything else. Watching the numbers slip
below $3 was like counting the days
until Christmas as a kid. Did I mention
that it has already snowed twice in
Philadelphia, and my family and I heat
our house with oil?
The stock market hasn’t been quite
so ecstatic. After one recent drop in
the price of crude, the Dow Jones average tumbled several hundred points.
What in the world did that mean? Does
the market hate Christmas?
Actually not. Lower oil prices have
been a godsend for many families’ budgets, and they are giving a much-needed
jolt to the economy. But the stock market reaction seems to reflect a pair of
worrisome reasons for oil price decline.
R
Tony De jak/AP
coffee: ORL ANDO SIERRA/AFP/Get t y Images ORL ANDO SIERRA/AFP/Get t y Images • ebola gear: Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design • food: TAGSTOCK1/istock
Cleveland, Ohio
The first is decreasing demand for
oil from many countries in Europe and
Asia. These countries don’t need as
much oil as they did a year or two ago
because their economies are stagnant.
Europe has been in a funk since the
Great Recession of 2008, and Japan
may be sliding back into recession. This
could be bad news for U.S. exports, and
the stock market has been taking note.
A long period of low prices also
could spell trouble for the U.S. energy
industry. Many of the most remarkable
innovations in U.S. energy technology
in recent years have been spurred by
years of high oil prices. Falling oil prices
will squeeze some American energy
companies, and the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries knows
it. Rather than propping oil prices up,
as it usually does, OPEC has let them
fall, hoping to cripple the resurgent
American energy industry. It’s one
thing when businesses struggle
because they aren’t as efficient as their
competitors. That’s how markets work.
But it’s quite another thing when a
monopolist is manipulating the markets. We have other names for that.
I doubt that the Obama administration will treat this as an opportune
time to remove unnecessary costs
from American energy production. But
it should. If the Keystone Pipeline is
cheaper and safer than alternatives
such as rail and trucks that are being
used in its absence, as seems to be the
case, now is the time to let the pipeline
go forward.
Making oil as cheap as possible
isn’t always the best goal. I think the
argument for a “carbon tax”—a tax to
cover environmental harm caused by
oil or coal—is quite compelling. But
this doesn’t justify imposing unnecessary costs (or the unrelated taxes that
push up prices in many states) on the
price of oil.
The price of oil definitely is a lot
more complicated than it looks. I think
I better keep studying those gas station
signs closely. And when the price of oil
starts rising again, as it surely will, I
plan to remember the nice little
Christmas present we got this year. A
JAN U ARY 2 4 , 2 0 1 5 WORL D 63
1/6/15 1:04 PM
the world market
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MINISTRY OPPORTUNITIES
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2 MAILBAG.indd 66
1/5/15 2:06 PM
MAILBAG
SEND LETTERS AND PHOTOS TO [email protected]
DECEMBER 13
‘The light of the sun
in a dark basement’
, Your Daniel of the Year choices and
articles are both convicting and inspiring,
and I really enjoyed reading about what some
of the former Daniels are doing now.
NITA HICKAM / BIDDEFORD, MAINE
, Thanks for the wonderful issue.
Christians urgently need to engage
themselves in helping the needy world
around us. At 65 I’m thinking of how I
may use my remaining years to serve the
Lord. The annual Daniel awards offer
many ways we can consider serving.
GREGORY E. REYNOLDS / MANCHESTER, N.H.
 Terrific story about a great man.
JOHN PUMMELL ON FACEBOOK
my obsessive need to be tuned in to
make sure nothing terrible is
happening.
LINDA WRIGHT / PHOENIX, ARIZ.
‘That infamous day’
, Thank you for telling Dad’s story. I
appreciate the effort that went into the
article and the accuracy of J.C. Derrick’s
reporting. It should not surprise me that
Dad still suffers flashbacks from that
‘I kissed Fox goodbye’
, Reliance on a single source of
news, even WORLD, seems to
me shortsighted and narrow.
I also use Fox and The Weekly
Standard because thoughtful
and accurate secular news
can add depth to my worldview.
Dorobo tribe, Kenya
submitted by
Judy Martinsen
day, but he had not shared that with us.
GARY CORNELISON / VIRGINIA BEACH, VA.
, Great reporting. Thanks for tracking
down these four survivors of the attack
on Pearl Harbor and preserving their
heroic and noteworthy stories.
LISA POLEYNARD / SENECA, S.C.
g My father, who would be 95 today,
served two tours in the Pacific theater
during World War II. He was aboard a
troop ship that was torpedoed off the
coast of New Hebrides and floated in
the ocean for several hours before
being picked up. He fought against the
Japanese yet had great respect for them.
REDEEMED SINNER ON WNG.ORG
‘Back to the future
of bad ideas’
, Janie B. Cheaney’s column on Isaiah
Berlin and the dangers of seeking an
earthly paradise is wonderful and profound. I loved her insight that tolerance
cannot be absolute because it requires
an external reference point. Rationality
is just the same. Reason can only proceed from premises to conclusions, and
so requires a deposit of truth from
DONALD A. SEEKS / REEDLEY, CALIF.
, News can easily consume our time.
I will “kiss Fox goodbye”—well, not
completely—but how will I use this
extra hour or two per day for something with eternal consequences?
BOB OSTRICH / APACHE JUNCTION, ARIZ.
, Thank you! The hourly regurgitation
drives me bonkers, but until reading
this column I did not feel convicted of
, Mail/email g Website
2 MAILBAG.indd 67
 Facebook  Twitter
67
1/6/15 10:31 AM
MAILBAG
which to reason. Only God is the source
of truth more basic than reason.
BILL HENSLEY / SUGAR L AND, TEXAS
g Apologists for communism used to
trot out the cliché, “To make an omelette
you’ve got to break a few eggs.” Eugene
Lyons, who chronicled the suffering of
ordinary Russians under their communist masters, had the perfect response:
“Fine. Show me the omelette.”
SAWGUNNER ON WNG.ORG
‘Obama he stands’
g One newspaper awarded the president an “upside-down” Pinocchio for
doing a flip-flop on his ability to take
action on immigration, and another
gave him a “half-truth” rating for
claiming he was in line with the
actions of preceding presidents. If I
could pretend to be detached, I would
marvel at his ability to tweak the noses
of Republicans, and be equally astonished at their poor ability to respond.
NORTH AFRICAN MAN ON WNG.ORG
g Is Nancy Pelosi insulting the intelligence of the public or counting on
general ignorance about what the
Emancipation Proclamation did and
didn’t do?
NARISSARA ON WNG.ORG
‘From betrayal to
compassion’
, I applaud you for this series on the
Balkans. It is fantastic journalism in
my opinion.
DOUG WRIGHT / RENTON, WASH.
‘Repetitive history’
g This good article illustrates a
centuries-old reality about Islam that
so many people want to hope is not
true, despite mountains of evidence.

STEVE SOCAL ON WNG.ORG
g Islamic slaughter is much more
than the horror of beheadings. About
100 years ago the Islamic Ottoman
Turks systematically slaughtered
about 1.5 million Christian Armenians
by very cruel methods.
RICHARD H ON WNG.ORG
2 MAILBAG.indd 68
Dispatches
, My heavens. You quote the jihadis
in Jerusalem saying, “God is great!” as
they attacked. But they actually said,
“Allah is great!” and that most certainly
is not the same thing.
MELVIN LEE / DOVER, PA.
, Who invited Muslim imams to lead
an Islamic prayer service at the
Washington National Cathedral? Will
the Muslim imams reciprocate and
invite Christian pastors to lead a
Christian prayer service at a prominent Islamic mosque? If Muslims kill
people accused of burning a page of
their holy book, what will they do if
Christians hold a prayer meeting in a
mosque?
JIM CRAIG / RICHL AND CENTER, WIS.
‘Forgotten survivors’
g Some men live to die for the glory
of murdering enemies while others
live to die for the privilege of serving
others. The great contrast is invisible
to the spiritually blind.
NEIL EVANS ON WNG.ORG
‘Temporary housing’
g Thank you to Andrée Seu Peterson.
Having lost my parents in a short time
frame, and now going through the
process of selling the family home, I
cling to the promise that “this world is
not our home.”
DIANE L ON WNG.ORG
‘In layman’s terms’
, I enjoyed reading Marvin Olasky’s
interview with my high-school speech
and debate teacher, Randy Singer. He
is indeed a good storyteller. I can still
remember details, including voice
inflection and gestures, of the sample
impromptu speech he gave on rats. It
was both fascinating and horrifying,
and to this day I am terrified of them.
AMY BRAUTIGAM / HOUGHTON, N.Y.
‘Remote control’
g Does anyone find this experiment—
remotely transferring knowledge
between brains—alarming? It’s easy to
imagine this being used for
1/6/15 10:32 AM
Lana’s story:
Heel injury
brainwashing. It could be another
excellent example of technology far
outstripping ethics.
Member for fourteen years
Echocardiogram
Go to: mysamaritanstory.org
CHERIEVON ON WNG.ORG
‘Anger: a lot like sex’
 I read so many articles that have
me shaking my head and literally
weeping for humanity. It’s refreshing
to read one written with real thought.
KIRK DUHON ON FACEBOOK
NOVEMBER 29
‘Interpretive dance’
, I found your article about the
BioLogos Foundation quite interesting. If Christians fervently believe
that God will bring them literally from
“the dust of the ground” to glory,
why do some wrestle with the reality
that He did it that way the first time?
BOB HARRELSON / EDNEYVILLE, N.C.
, The tragedy of the BioLogos story
is that believers, forgetting the
warning of Colossians 2:8, are being
taken captive by the hollow and
deceptive philosophy of the world.
Will those who don’t believe the literal creation of Adam and Eve next
deny the resurrection of Christ?
Lana
“We’re going to give up on this concept of
insurance and trust God and His people?!
Yeah, of course! That’s a no-brainer!”
STEFAN A.D. BUCEK / SAN JOSE, CALIF.
NOVEMBER 1
‘Fire and Fury’
, I was excited to see the movie
after reading your review as I’m a
serious tank fanatic. What a disappointment. I served my country for
32 years, and this movie does not
represent the men and women of
honor with whom I served.
WES LOFFERT / CHARLOT TESVILLE, VA.
LETTERS & PHOTOS
, Email: [email protected]
, Mail: WORLD Mailbag, PO Box 20002,
For more than twenty years, Samaritan Ministries’ members
have been sharing one another’s medical needs, without using
health insurance, through a Biblical model of community
among believers. Samaritan members share directly with
each other and do not share in abortions and other unbiblical
practices.
• More than 39,000 families (over 130,000 individuals)*
• Sharing over $10 million* in medical needs each month
• The monthly share has never exceeded $405 for a family of
any size*
Asheville, NC 28802-9998
g Website: wng.org
 Facebook: facebook.com/
WORLD.magazine
 Twitter: @WORLD_mag
Come see what our members are saying and start your
Samaritan story today at: mysamaritanstory.org
Please include full name and address. Letters
may be edited to yield brevity and clarity.
Biblical community
applied to health care
samaritanministries.org 888.268.4377
facebook.com/samaritanministries
twitter.com/samaritanmin
* As of December 2014
2 MAILBAG.indd 69
1/5/15 10:11 AM
kireg barrie
2 SEU PETERSON.indd 70
1/6/15 10:35 AM
Andrée seu peterson
A decade of change
A brave New lexicon for a disintegrating
civilization
Melanie is a single missionary, home on
furlough from 12 years in Hungary. Over
lunch she commented to me that the United
States has changed a lot over the decade. I
asked for elaboration. “Political correctness,”
she replied immediately. “Weren’t we PC
before 2002?” I said. Melanie assured me (in
instinctively hushed tones, for the walls have
ears) that that was nothing compared to now.
In my seat I took instant stock of how I have
changed since Melanie boarded a plane to
Budapest: I lower my voice in restaurants when
praying and avoid generalities about people
groups (oh, how I sorely miss generalities!) at
holiday meals. I am defensive when disagreeing
with others that men should copulate with
men, or that my taxes should subsidize fetal
extermination. I have nearly internalized the
self-image of a Hater: One begins to believe what
one is repeatedly told one is. After dining with
Melanie, I made a mental note to say at the next
testy public interaction: “No, I am not a Hater, I
simply disagree with your view. Good day, sir.”
I took a notion to check out the website of the
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
In my own school days I had been apprised that
there are 29 grammar rules governing the use of
the article “the.” (It is best to be born an English
speaker, where such arcane distinctions come by
osmosis.) But this is child’s play compared to the
rules of speaking that teachers must now inculcate in their precious charges. The teaching of
English today is a mandate to get rid of language
that hurts people’s sensibilities. At the University
of California in Santa Barbara, course syllabi
are required to come with “trigger warnings”
alerting students to content that may hurt their
feelings. Like that contemptible Huck Finn book.
The NCTE guidelines bristle with examples
to “provide inclusionary alternatives to specific
exclusionary wording.” “Exclusionary” forms,
those to be flushed out of the culture, include:
kireg barrie
R
 [email protected]
2 SEU PETERSON.indd 71
We will do
away with
chairman,
businessman,
congressman,
salesman,
policeman,
fireman, and
mailman, and
encourage
the ‘person’
suffix.
man, mankind, man’s achievements, the best
man for the job, man the controls, man the
ticket booth.
They will be replaced, respectively, by:
humanity, human achievements, the best person
for the job, take charge of, staff the ticket booth.
We will do away with chairman, businessman,
congressman, salesman, policeman, fireman,
and mailman, and encourage the “person” suffix. The word “freshman,” a definite sensitivity
“trigger,” shall be henceforth “first-year student.”
Though I disagree with the above substitutions (being a Hater), I was actually tracking
with the internal logic of them—until I came
across “author.” NCTE decrees that “authoress”
must be banished from the realm and replaced
with “author.” Um, wouldn’t “author” be the
sexist term in the room, as it allows within its
structure no indication that a writer of books
may be a female? I would have bet a week’s pay
that Betty Friedan coined the term “authoress”
while throwing darts at her Washington
Redskins dartboard.
The teachers council is happy to oblige with
sample sentences. “Maria is a career woman” is
retired for “Maria is a professional.” “You guys
go ahead” is more properly “You students/
class/third graders go ahead.” “Dear Mothers,
please bake cookies for your class party”
becomes in this brave new world “Dear Families,
please bake cookies for your class party.”
Here is a sampler of NCTE’s vision for the
teaching of literature: “(1) A balance of literature by and about both women and men should
be included whenever possible. (2) Materials
should be chosen to emphasize gender equity. …
(3) Noninclusive [sic] texts and classic pieces
can provide a focus for discussion of gender
roles and gender equity. (4) Trade books … and
other media should be chosen to show females
and males actively participating in a variety of
situations. … (5) In organizing lists of educational
materials and activities, avoid separation by
gender. … (6) Present gender-equitable examples
by alternating male and female names. … Praise,
encourage, and respond to contributions of
females and males equally.”
Would I be a Hater to point out that in
most cases above where the two genders are
referenced by NCTE, “female” is listed before
“male”? Or to call our attention to the sexist
idea that there are “male and female names”?
And what will we do if one fine Wednesday half
the fifth-grade class who are biologically boys
are identifying as girls? A
J A N U A R Y 2 4 , 2 0 1 5 WORLD 71
1/6/15 10:43 AM
MARVIN OLASKY
The last shall
be dead?
DARWINISM TURNS GOD’S PATTERN AND
PROMISES UPSIDE DOWN
72
WORLD
2 OLASKY.indd 72
JANUARY 24, 2015
God chooses
the weak and
despised, not
the great.
PRAISAENG/ISTOCK
When we think about defining the “kingdom of God,” do we spend too much time
thinking about “kingdom” and not enough
about God?
“Kingdom” suggests castles and soldiers,
ruffles and flourishes—but those impressive
things are drops in the ocean of time. Jesus taught
often that the last shall be first and the least shall
be greatest. He made that teaching graphic by
washing Peter’s feet. In many kingdoms, only
the fittest survive. For His kingdom, God
chooses the weak and despised, not the great.
Mary the mother of Jesus sang of God, “He
has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their
hearts; he has brought down the mighty from
their thrones and exalted those of humble estate.
He has filled the hungry with good things, and
the rich he sent away empty.”
In the kingdoms we create, we are like
reception attendees scanning the crowd so as
to snag moments with those who can aid our
ascent. In the kingdom of GOD, we go to talk
with the person showing his unfitness by staring at a wall. In our kingdoms we yearn to meet
the powerful. In God’s kingdom we look for
teenage moms surprised by pregnancy.
Emphasizing the most important part of the
phrase—kingdom of GOD—provides one more
indication of why evolution is a dogma utterly
opposed to Christianity. All of us who hope in
Christ are unworthy, but while we were yet sinners He saved us by grace. The story of evolution,
though, is graceless: It is a prosperity-gospel
survival of the fittest, with the strong winning out.
If we believe God cheers for the strong and
kills off the weak, we turn the biblical story upside
down. That’s why “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creation” are oxymorons. The plain reading of the Bible’s prose is clear, and so is the logic:
R
Why would God create the world using one story,
survival of the fittest, and redeem it by another,
survival of those who realize they are unfit?
In the kingdom of GOD, we are all unfit: We
enter by Christ’s sacrifice and slowly learn to
sacrifice ourselves for others. Do we have a
schizophrenic god, or at least a hypocritical one
who says “live by sacrificing yourself” but sets
up rules that say “die if you sacrifice yourself”?
Do we have a god, as the Religious Coalition for
Abortion Rights believes, who knits us together
in our mothers’ wombs but smiles as those
wombs become killing fields?
Robert Ingersoll, the most popular American
orator of the late 19th century, said Darwin’s
“doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his
doctrine of the origin of species, has
removed in every thinking mind the last
vestige of orthodox Christianity.” Darwin
showed “that the Garden of Eden is an
ignorant myth; that the doctrine of original sin has no foundation in fact; that the
atonement is an absurdity; that the
serpent did not tempt, and that man did
not ‘fall.’ Charles Darwin destroyed the
foundation of orthodox Christianity.”
Over time Darwinist thought also
undercut the 19th-century U.S. pro-life
movement. In 1871 Darwin published The
Descent of Man and The New York Times published
its classic attack on abortion, “The Evil of the
Age.” Darwin found it harmful that “the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind.” The Times, still influenced by Christian
founder Henry Raymond, demanded protection
for unborn children, as do those today who
stand outside abortion businesses and plead
with women making a rendezvous with death.
In 1973, as the Supreme Court embraced
abortion, true believers in survival of the fittest
occupied key positions in the Nixon administration. For example, Reimert Ravenholt, director of
the USAID Office of Population, printed business
cards on condoms, said one-fourth of women
should be sterilized, applauded China’s
abortions, and said it was “harmful to African
societies” to offer immunizations and antibiotics
“when the deaths prevented thereby are not
balanced by prevention of a roughly equal
number of births.”
Other Nixon appointees were also proabortion, but that’s a story for another day. The
question we need to answer is: Do you believe
the last shall be first, or do you believe the first
shall be first and the last will be dead? A
 [email protected]  @MarvinOlasky
1/5/15 7:35 PM
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