According to a recent news article, New York’s Governor proposed legislation that will enable parents to kill their children after 24 weeks of life (keep reading … that’s not the common sense part).

The common sense comes where author, Anne Savarese Brasino, explains why abortion is … not such a good idea after all:

“[A]bortion at any stage is dangerous to the woman’s physical health and harms her mental health.

“Every woman knows it is unnatural to destroy a life at any stage. The lasting memory of the destruction of one’s own unique human creation with its own unique DNA, created once and never to be recreated, is a loss forever to the mother, in some cases to a family, and society. We will never know what great inspiration that person was created to be.

“Destroying this unique person in utero is a crime against humanity and natural law, and there is no consolation for the mother after the fact.

“The appropriate alternative is promoting adoption as an option, whereby the birth does not harm the birth mother and gives another a chance to be a mother to love that special child; special because it was wanted and saved from an unnatural death.”

Thanks, Anne Savarese Brasino, for your article, Skip Abortion and Promote Adoption.  You make us Southerners believe that there is intelligent life above the Mason-Dixon line.  Maybe you should run for Governor!

Good news Alabamians!

On Wednesday, April 24th, 2013, Gov. Bentley is scheduled to sign into law a bill that could revolutionize foster care and adoption in Alabama.

In a recent post, Improving Foster Care and Adoption, we chronicled the efforts of Speaker Hubbard’s Office to diagnose and treat Alabama’s ailing foster care and adoption system.

We found that in the years between 2006 and 2012, Alabama’s foster care system dropped from 6th in the nation to 33rd.  In addition, we found that 1,770 children a year die from abuse and neglect in America – and if you’re counting, that almost 5 children per day.

Our research led us to conclude that one of the biggest areas for improvement in Alabama was the time that it takes for a judge to make a decision on a petition to terminate the parental rights of biological parents that have been found to be unfit.

The culmination of this collaborative effort is a House Bill 115 / SB 307 known as “Best Interest of the Child” Act. In summary, the “Best Interest of the Child” Act would:

1. Require DHR to file a petition to terminate parental rights of a parent(s) of a child who has been in foster care for 12 of the last 22 months instead of the current 15 out of 22 months in statute.
2. Give judges a maximum of 90 days to hear TPR cases once service of process has been perfected and 30 days after to issue the court’s order. Alabama is one of only 17 states that do not currently have time guidelines in statute that judges must abide by to hear and issue orders in TPR cases. Currently, it takes an average of almost three years to move a child placed into foster care into a permanent adoptive home. Alabama is in the bottom ten states in this statistic.

We believe this legislation will have two main positive impacts: 1) move children out of foster care or other temporary homes sooner, and 2) move children into permanent adoptive homes sooner, thus increasing the adoption rate.

So, Alabamians … an immediate way to have an impact on foster care and adoption in Alabama is to get the word out about this excellent legislation.  This is exactly the kind of laws that we want our elected officials to fight for.  Let’s thank our legislatures for making Alabama a safer place for its children.

A few weeks ago I published a blog called, The Best Orphan Care Sermon, highlighting a messaged delivered by David Prince.  So, I felt a little stumped after I listened to the first few minutes of a message by John Piper from James 1:27, Visiting Orphans in a World of Aids and Abortion.

Visiting was one of the most encouraging sermons I have heard in a long time.  It hit me  at a low point and raised my spirits.

Here’s an excerpt on the connection between orphan care and abortion to whet your appetite:

What does abortion have to do with orphans? The connection I see is this: God wants us to be concerned about orphans because they are helpless without mother and father, and we should feel compassion for the helpless who depend utterly on others for life. Picture a three-year-old child riding in his safety seat on the back seat of a car with his mommy and daddy riding in the front. There is a terrible crash and both mommy and daddy are killed. The child has minor injuries, but is okay. The hospital officials check and discover there are no grandparents and no other family members known. This is a heartbreaking situation. And God says to the church, step in there and take care of that child.

So orphans are children whose parents have died and left them at the mercy of others to take care of, lest they die. How does abortion relate to that? Well, abortion puts the child in a worse situation. The parents are not dead, but they have turned on the child and choose to have the child dead. This is worse than being an orphan. To have Mommy and Daddy choose to have you dead is worse than Mommy and Daddy being dead.

So it seems to me that if God wants us to care about the orphan whose life is endangered because his parents are dead, he would want all the more that we care about the child whose life is endangered because his parents choose to make him dead.

And another on AIDS:

[C]onsider the greater tragedy of AIDS, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and its impact on children. Worldwide more than 30 million people are HIV positive or have AIDS. 16,000 are being infected with HIV virus every day. Estimates are that there will be 5.8 million new infections each year, which would bring the total number of HIV/AIDS cases to 40 million by 2000. 2.3 million people died of AIDS in 1997, a 50% increase over 1996, 460,000 of these under 15. In sub-Saharan Africa, one in thirteen sexually active adults is HIV positive, and in certain countries, such as Botswana, it is 30% of the adult population. One of the staggering effects of this is that 8.4 million children have been orphaned by AIDS (StarTribune, Nov. 27, 1997, pp. A1,15).

If your hungry, then consider listening to this one on your lunch break!

Piper – Visiting Orphans in a World of Aids and Abortion

If your wondering how all this fits into adoption, then I encourage you to read our blog, Getting to Christian Adoption.

Photo by Tiago Celestino.