Nobel Peace Prize
 
        They’ve announced the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize is going to Kailash Satyarthi of India and Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan. They come from two countries that both have nuclear weapons and are in constant conflict with each other, so the joint prize is intended to help foster peace in a crucial part of the world. But the topic that unites them is strong, brave, and effective advocacy for children’s rights, especially the right to education and the right to avoid labor under slavery conditions, and especially for the rights of females.
        The Christian Science Monitor reported: “Satyarthi has spent decades, since he was in his 20s, battling for the rights of child laborers, and also against the practice of ‘female feticide’ also known as selective abortions of females in India.” Whether this translates to full opposition to selectively killing unborn babies for any other reason, the media doesn’t say, but in India this is a problem so major as to cause gender imbalance in the population. We have commented before on Malala meeting with President Obama and using the occasion to explain the damage that weaponized drones were doing.
        Previous Nobel Peace Prize winners who have endorsed the Consistent Life Mission Statement are Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Corrigan Maguire.
 

 

Helpful Websites for Facts and Figures
 
Cost of War
 
Death Penalty Information Center

Number of Remaining Abortion Clinics in the Unites States

Video of Nuclear Detonations, 1945-1998
 
Euthanasia Statistics, Charts and Graphs; see also Euthanasia Definitions

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The “Pro-Choice” Label Doesn’t Seem to be Working
 
        We’ve commented before that advocates of abortion availability are tweaking their euphemism for child killing; a recent New York Times article discusses this trend. The reasoning is that the term doesn’t resonate with young people, and abortion defenders want to expand to more issues than abortion (as when the president of Planned Parenthood talked of the “reproductive justice” applying to not having born children killed).
        The problem is that other issues into which they expand, such as economic policies that help women, are commonly advocated by pro-lifers as well. And these are issues that absolutely need to avoid being dragged down by being positively associated with baby-killing. For years, abortion advocacy has had a negative effect on the real needs of women (see, for example, our comments on “preglimony” or the interference with New York’s Women’s Equality Act)
        The label has always had the problem that they never meant “choice.” The baby of course is not consulted. Additionally, many want to compel doctors and nurses to be involved, taxpayers and employers to fund it, willing and eager fathers to be ignored. And they don’t normally take an interest in both sides of “choice” by protecting those women who choose not to have abortions but are being pressured by others.
 

 
Quotation of the Week
Harriet Bicksler
“Pursuing Peace”
in Focusing Our Faith: Brethren in Christ Core Values
edited by Terry L. Brensinger, pp. 133-134
 
        The “all” word is the challenge. Do we really mean all human life – the murderer on death row; the ruthless dictator who massacres his own citizens while amassing great personal wealth; the unborn baby conceived by a rape; the homeless alcoholic who won’t accept help; the nasty coworker who is always criticizing? Surely there are limits! We haven’t allowed ourselves any escape clauses, however.