2 Presidents, 6,852 priests, and 24 million women

This issue of HLI's e-newsletter Spirit & Life has the astonising tale of "who's missing" from society, including a statistical breakdown of just who the 1/3 of Americans who have been aborted since 1973 might have been now doing for the betterment of our nation and of our world - if they'd lived. Remember, only a tiny fraction of abortions are done on infants that are "terminal" and can't live on their own outside the womb...meaning, like in society, the majority of these people would have indeed grown up, gone to school, got a job, got married, had kids of their own, etc. (Now THERE'S something to think about - on top of the numbers of actual abortions, how do you even begin to factor in the number of descendents that were snuffed out at the same time? Let's not even go there...)

Speaking as a statistic myself, it's scary to think of who I should be dealing with at the grocery store, or who should be sitting next to me at church, or who should be graduating with me this spring... but can't, because they weren't allowed to live and I was.

THIS reality is why my generation, the post-1973 generation, looks at life a little differently from the rest of you. The rest of you don't wonder about whether or not you never met your best friend because they were aborted. Or will never get married because your life's partner was deemed to be not worth the inconvenience. So many what ifs... is it any wonder why my generation is now making movies like "Bella" or the new indie "Juno" that Barb Nicolosi blogged about.

One of Barb's comments on Juno caught my eye with regards to the Spirit & Life article I've linked to above:

Juno is also pro-life, in the way that just about every Gen-X movie about pregnancy is pro-life, and more so. (I would say Juno is a cultural message movie without being a political one. Certainly, that will be an inscrutable nuance in contemporary Christendom in which almost everything is politics. What I think is interesting is that Gen Xers and Millenials are pro-life without necessarily being Culture of Life. They don't put together all the pieces in the puzzle....not yet anyway.) The movie is also anti-divorce in the way that just about every Gen-X movie about family is anti-divorce.

Yes, that's about right. I can say with confidence that my generation is very different from previous ones, and is more conscious of human life as a valued gift. But Barb's right, unconsciously we are as a generation far more "pro-life", while consciously we are not getting the whole picture; we are not grasping the necessity for a Culture of Life that will support the need we feel to affirm life (perhaps sociologically and psychologically stemming from, as I said, the ever-present background reality that we could each have easily "not been"). Too many of my generation are living a hypocrisy - and being very judgmental to boot. You see, I hear it all the time (remember, I'm in classes with freshmen through seniors...), young adults decrying the selfishness of their elders, complaining about their parents (usually divorced one or two times over) and/or "the people in charge" who use people to get ahead etc. They rightly condemn this behavior, and say that they should be "nice" and think of other people too, not just themselves. Right. But then these same kids demand that they should be able to sleep with whatever guy they want with no consequences - to use other people for sex. And then they complain because OTHER people won't let THEM be selfish. And they don't see the disconnect! Our youth are so mixed up, they know that the extreme selfishness and "me" attitude of their parents is wrong, they see it, they see the consequences. They see the value of life that their elders have spent a lifetime trying to toss aside in favor of getting ahead. But at the same time, they've learned selfishness from those same elders, and they've also fallen to its allure. No wonder we're all so messed up - you see what we have to deal with that you haven't?

Sorry, a bit of a tangent on my part. In any case, you really should read the whole article, "How Many Heisman Winners Has Abortion Killed?"

It's a must-read story, especially during this Advent - H/T to Terry for the alert!