Super Bowl champion and retired NFL center Matt Birk is helping women by bravely speaking the truth.
Birk won the Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens earlier this year and six-time Pro Bowl honoree. Birk is also a former Minnesota Viking and St. Paul, Minnesota, native so he is close to my heart. As a Super Bowl champion, Birk had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join his team at the White House. Birk declined the invitation because he disagrees with President Obama’s recent statements to Planned Parenthood:
“I love you!” an audience member shouted out on April 26 as Obama prepared to speak to the national Planned Parenthood conference.
“I love you back. Thank you,” Obama responded to roaring applause.
Obama went on to tell Planned Parenthood that they were: “providing quality healthcare to women all across America.” He said the core principle guiding Planned Parenthood was: “that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health.” He ended his speech by saying: “Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.”
Birk went on Fox’s News Channel’s Hannity last Thursday to explain his decision:“…I think when you evoke the name of God when you’re the president and you’re the first president to address Planned Parenthood, you can’t acknowledge God and say ‘God bless Planned Parenthood.’ It’s a contradiction. 330,000 lives ended last year at Planned Parenthood … being pro-choice is one thing but bringing God into it?”
Hannity asked: “How did your teammates react to this?”
Birk answered:
“Everybody’s great with it. The Ravens Team is a spiritually deep team and a lot of guys congratulated me. They were glad that I did what I did. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I just declined the invitation. … I just wanted to tell the truth.”
President Obama left the word “abortion” out of his speech. He only mentioned contraception. But the truth is that Obama unconstitutionally uses federal taxpayer dollars to promote a culture of disdain for human life in two ways.
First, Obama supports fungible federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which performs in-clinic abortions. Secondly, his U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate circumvents the First Amendment and requires religious organizations to offer contraceptives, sterilization methods and abortion-generating prescriptions in their private insurance plans.
I agree with the president in that, as women, we have the right to make our own health decisions. However the right to look after our own health is totally different from our right to kill, which is only a “right” if we kill in self-defense. Save for the extraordinarily rare cases where carrying or delivering a baby naturally will result in the mother’s death, there is no argument for killing an innocent baby out of self-defense.
I am sure it must be very distressing and frightening to face an unplanned pregnancy. For the young woman, I can see how she would feel like she should have the right to choose to end her baby’s life so that she does not need to deal with the expected inconvenience. But how can we compare inconvenience to life? It seems like they cannot be weighed against each other.
Using this logic, a single father could take his teenage daughter’s life if she became a “burden” to him. If life itself is worth less than maneuverability, then life is not worth much at all — including the woman’s own life.
I think our president should tell women the truth: Not all free choices are beneficial. Abortion by and large harms a woman psychologically, emotionally and physically because an abortion is not a natural or healthy way to deliver a baby. Not only is the procedure unnatural, it also results in death instead of life.
If a young woman carries her unplanned baby to term, has a natural delivery and then gives her baby up for adoption to a family that will love and care for her child, it will be a choice that she never regrets.
Birk told Hannity:
“I’ve been involved in the pro-life movement for a few years and I’ve met … maybe 1,000 women who have had abortions and regret it and those women are my heroes for their courage and their strength to join the pro-life movement and try to stop future women from making the same mistake. I have yet to meet a woman that has given birth to their child and said: ‘Boy, I wish I had had an abortion.’”
None of us can judge women who have abortions; we can only do a better job of telling women the truth about how abortion will impact them. And Planned Parenthood should not receive any federal funding let alone a presidential blessing.
If God is looking down on Earth, I bet he’s saying: “Thank you, Matt Birk. God bless you.”
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