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As a man I sit here. Well Im a Vet. I have seen much. As a grown man I cry to see my country killing its future. Its a pain in my heart. PRO-LIFE

I believe that all human life is sacred from fertilization throughout adulthood. I reject the idea that some lives are not worthy of living and believe that we should protect all human life that God gives.

I believe that the life of a baby begins at the moment of conception in a mother's uterus, and if the baby's life is not interrupted, he or she will someday become an adult man or woman. I believe that each human being, from the time of fertilization to natural death, has immeasurable dignity and an unalienable right to life. An embryo is a distinct human life and deserves to be granted the same moral status, respect and dignity granted to an infant, child or adult. When the challenge of a baby arises, I trust alternative solutions to abortion, such as adoption and family parenting. I believe in the protection of all innocent human beings before and after birth.

Finally, I believe that abortion ends a human life. p>"For You have formed my inward parts;

the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them." -- Psalm 139:13,16 (NKJV)

Proverbs 24:11, 12

Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death; don't stand back and let them die. Don't try to disclaim responsibility by saying you didn't know about it. For God, who knows all hearts, knows yours, and He knows you knew! And He will reward everyone according to his deeds.

Eight years ago, when I was sixteen, I became pregnant by my best friend's brother. I wasn't even thinking about abortion, but on the "advice" of friends ("It'll ruin your life!") and pressures of family and my doctor, I caved in, feeling there was no other way out of my situation.

I had the abortion at 17 weeks at an Atlanta clinic. It was terrible and traumatic. It was the darkest day of my life. No one had told me I would feel this way: guilty, sad, full of despair. Abortion had always been described as a simple, empowering, "liberating" experience by pro-choice feminists; a proper and respectable thing to do.

I didn't feel any of those things. I had let strangers tear out a part of me for money. I felt like garbage. The thing is, I was never counseled on the procedure, risks, or any other options available to me. No one asked me if abortion was what I wanted. To this day, I don't even know the doctor's name who performed the abortion!

This is the extent of the ignorance I was kept in. I have often wondered why people who supposedly cared about me kept me as ignorant as possible. I was sixteen, scared and vulnerable, and they took full advantage of my naivete.

"Pro-choice" implies there is more than one option, but the only option pro-choicers defend is abortion. Because abortion is often portrayed as the preferred choice, society pressures a girl or woman into a decision that is more theirs than hers. This is the heartache - a great majority of the time the "choice" isn't hers.

Thank you, Feminists for Life, for helping women see that pro-life is pro-choice, in that giving life is giving choices. There is no choice in the destruction of life.

1.Immediately upon fertilization, cellular development begins. Before implantation the sex of the new life can be determined.

2.At implantation, the new life is composed of hundreds of cells and has developed a protective hormone to prevent the mother's body from rejecting it as a foreign tissue.

3.At 17 days, the new life has developed its own blood cells; the placenta is a part of the new life and not of the mother.

8.At 28 days, 40 pairs of muscles are developed along the trunk of the new life; arms and legs forming.

9.At 30 days, regular blood flow within the vascular system; the ears and nasal development have begun.

10.At 40 days, the heart energy output is reported to be almost 20% of an adult.

12.At 43 days, electrical brain wave patterns can be recorded. This is usually ample evidence that "thinking" is taking place in the brain. The new life may be thought of as a thinking person. 14.NAME CHANGED FROM EMBRYO TO FETUS. At 56 days all organs functioning - stomach, liver, kidney, brain - all systems intact. Lines in palms. All future development of new life is simply that of refinement and increase in size until maturity at approximately age 23 years. This is approximately two months before "quickening" yet there is a new life with all of its parts needing only nourishment. The mother will usually not feel the child's movements until four months after conception.

16.11th & 12th week, arms & legs move, sucks thumb, inhales and exhales amniotic fluid, nails appearing.

17.16 weeks (four months), genital organs clearly differentiated, grasps with hands, swims, kicks and turns somersaults (still not felt by mother).

19.20 weeks, hair appears on head; weight - one pound; height - 12 inches. A fetus (little one, child, baby) is essentially no different at fertilization, ten weeks, twenty weeks or thirty weeks. A person is a person, no matter how small.

American Life League, Inc. P.O. Box 1350 Stafford, VA 22555 (540) 659-4171 (540) 659-2586 Fax

Joe, not his real name, is 41 years old, Catholic, and the father of four children. After 20 years of marriage, Joe was divorced from his wife, Sandy, which is not her real name.

Their first child, John Peter, was aborted to save a new marriage. Joe has much guilt and shame over the loss of this first child. He wrote a letter of apology to his son asking for forgiveness. This letter is a part of his healing process.

When individuals come to me for help to deal with the death of a child through a stillbirth, miscarriage, or an abortion, I take them through a brief healing service. Having the parent(s) name the child and then write a letter to their deceased child often bring about healing on a deep level. I suggested to Joe that he write a letter to their aborted son, John Peter.

Joe asked me to share this letter with others so that other parents can be spared the pain and suffering he has endured these past many years. Joe wants others to know that there is healing for parents following an abortion.

This past weekend I did something I should have done a very long time ago. I confessed to your death by abortion. John, you would today be a young man of twenty, vibrant and alive. By allowing your abortion I sinned against you and against God. Forgive me John, for I did it for all the wrong reasons.

The main reason, John, was that I was afraid, afraid that the stress you would have added to your Mother's life might ruin our new marriage. Yet, John, I know now how much you would have added to and enriched my life and very likely the life of your Mother. John, I tried to justify your death to convince myself that you were only a package of tissue cells, no more perhaps than an egg is a full grown chicken. I tried to convince myself that what had happened was right, that in destroying this tissue, I had saved my marriage. After all, I thought, we can always have more children later. John, from that night onward I always had a "knot'' in my stomach. Try as I might, I could not get you out of my mind completely. Perhaps that is the worst kind of sin, my son, the kind that bothers a person so deeply. Sometimes, when you come to mind, I would figure out how old you'd have been, what you might be doing at that age. James, your brother, reminded me sometimes of you as did the girls.

John, you had so much potential. Did you know John you could have been anything'? Tears come again John, as they did Saturday night. I am swept by pain, John, and tears do little to wash the pain away. And yet, little one, it is I who am saved by you and the mercy of God through the intercession of Jesus. You see, Little One, it is because of you that I finally sought reconciliation, not the usual kind the kind where I'd go to confession, do my penance, and leave without any sort of contrition. Little One, it is your death and my guilt which finally led to my confession of this sin. Yes, I had confessed before, but I had done so to "play the odds,'' to "be on the safe side'' just in case what I learned was true. On Saturday as I confessed I was crying: I felt a sense of remorse and guilt so deeply that I almost wish I could have died. John, if my dying now would give the world you I would offer my life. As you know, John, your Mother and I are now divorced. Your Mother may not ever have confessed to this sin. John Peter, if you would do me a favor, I would ask that you through Jesus work the same miracle on Sandy that you have worked on me. Your Mom was young too, John. To her at the time you represented this awesome threat to her chosen career. Please forgive her as well, John Peter. Please, my Little One, intercede for both of us through Jesus.

I find it searingly ironic, Little One, that it is I who ask such favors of one whom I killed or rather, allowed to be killed. And yet I ask, Little One, for I have grown to love you in a way that is at once both deep and pure.

In the fall, John, when the leaves fall from the trees I shall think of you, for you too fell from life. In the cold of winter, John, the snow shall remind me of you: for like the snow you were and are white and pure. In the spring, John, I shall think of you: for the birth of spring shall remind me that you, too should have been born into this world. John, I shall think of you in the summer: I shall imagine your laughter. I shall see you as you might have been, a little boy running and playing, scraping your knees from a fall. I shall miss, John, all that I might have gained from your life.

My Little One, John Peter, I can only now ask you to forgive me as Jesus and God have done.

This year's March for Life in which 45,000 abortion opponents picketed the Supreme Court, didn't have the emotional impact on me that these events often do. I was on my way out of town on business, and scarcely noticed.

Looking at reports later it seemed that everyone had been on his or her best behavior. The abortion opponents were making it plain that they oppose the use of violence to close clinics. And counter-demonstrations by abortion rights advocates as we're careful to call them were rare.

I like prayer. It's all I have left. And pain. For some instinctual reason, or just imaginatively, I've come to believe that it was a boy, a son whom I wanted killed because, at the time his existence would have inconvenienced me. I'd had my fun. He didn't fit into my plans.

My feelings of responsibility and guilt are undiminished by the fact that the woman had full legal authority to make the decision on her own, either way, without consulting me or even informing me. In fact, she consulted in an open fashion, reflecting our shared responsibility and I could have made a strong case for having the child. Instead, I urged her along the path of death.

It's not a lot of help, either-emotionally or spiritually-that the high priests of the American judiciary have put their A-OK on this particular form of what I personally have come to regard as the slaughter of innocents. After all, it's the task of government to decide whom we may or must kill, and not necessarily to provide therapeutic services afterward. In the Army I remember being trained at public expense in the "spirit of the bayonet," which is, simply put, "to kill." The spirit of abortion is the same in my view, though the enemy isn't shooting back.

I feel like a murderer, which isn't to say that I blame anyone else, or think anyone else is a murderer.

It's just the way I feel and all the rationalizations in the world haven't changed this. I still grieve for little Thomas. It is an ocean of grief. From somewhere in the distant past I remember the phrase from Shakespeare, the multitudinous seas, "incarnadine."

When I go up to the river on vacation this summer, he won't be going boating with me on the lovely old wooden runabout that I can't really afford to put in the water but can't bring myself to discard, either.

He won't be lying on the grass by the tent at night looking at the starry sky and saying, "What's that one called, Dad?"

The latest numbers show abortions in America have been running at about 1.5 million annually. That's a lot of pain.

"These men feel raped," says Mel Feit of the National Center for Men. "They lose everything they worked for all their lives. In many cases they had an agreement with the woman not to have a baby and when she changes her mind they call me up and say, "How can she do this to me? How can she get away with it?" Feit plans to bring suit in federal court.

I'm more interested in the traumatic pain that many men, as well as women often feel after an abortion. A healing process of recognition, grieving and ultimately forgiveness is needed.

"There's a lot of ambivalence for men when they get in touch with their pain," says Eileen C. Marx, formerly communications director for Cardinal James A. Hickey of Washington and now a columnist for Catholic publications. "They didn't have the physical pregnancy, so often they feel they're not entitled to the feelings of sadness and anger and guilt and loss that women often feel."

She tells of one man, a friend, whose wife had an abortion. "He pleaded with her not to have it. He said his parents would raise the child, or they could put it up for adoption. The marriage broke up as a result of the abortion and other issues. He was really devastated by the experience."

Marx has recently written about a post-abortion healing ministry called Project Rachel in which more men are becoming involved-husbands, boyfriends and even grandfathers. There are 100 Project Rachel branches, including one in Washington.

I found it helpful just talking with Marx, a caring person, on the phone: though it was a little tough when she mentioned being pregnant and hearing the heartbeat and feeling "this wonderful celebration of the life inside you."

She said not to be too hard on myself, that healing is about forgiveness and God forgives me.

How to be saved? The bible said if you believe on Jesus and ask him to forgive your sin with all your heart and he will.