As you may have seen around campus or in your email, a generous donor offered to pay for Lourdes College students who were interested in attending the Foundation for Life Charity Benefit Reception. I saw the flyers around campus and with a few friends decided to attend. The evening was very well attended and the room was full of people from all over the area.

According to their website, Foundation for Life is a Toledo-based non-denominational educational organization dedicated to promoting the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. The issues that this group focuses on are abortion, infanticide and euthanasia.

Jill Stanek was the keynote speaker for the evening and upon her arrival at the podium she instantly had the audience captivated by her story. Jill worked as a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in one of Chicago's suburbs. During her time there she came to realize that the doctors were abandoning born-alive aborted babies in rooms to die without any medical care. Her story was quite interesting as she gave examples of babies, who might have been given a diagnosis of some sort of debilitating disease, who were born-alive only to be left for dead. At times the diagnosis was wrong and the infant was completely healthy, not that it should really matter. The babies were often delivered early, usually in the second or third trimester, by inducing labor. Once the baby was born they received no medical treatment and at times were left in soiled linen rooms to die. When Jill realized this was happening she began to speak out and was eventually fired from her position at the hospital. Later she became a key witness in many national debates regarding the issue of born-alive abortions, including both the Born Alive Infant Protection Act and Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. The evening was heart wrenching to say the least, the speaker captivating and her message grabbed at my heart. I was completely overwhelmed by the number of people who attended, they expected over 500. There were many schools that were represented by their students and the amount of young people who attended was astonishing.

I would personally like to thank they donor who so generously offered us tickets and I can say I walked away from the evening with a new knowledge of what has happened in our world and what continues to happen to all those who are innocent.

Sunday, November 16, 2008 8:47:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)    Comments [1] |