Anne Lastman
Occasionally, through my mail comes a writing which shocks even me and that’s a bit hard to do having heard almost everything over the past 30 years. However, an email arrived which set me pondering over what is happening to the young and teenagers which then leads them to becoming almost compassionless, callous, hard hearted.
We regularly look at evening or even morning news and see very young men or is it boys, or very young women or is it girls, behaving in manner which leaves the viewer, like me, afraid and just shaking my head and feeling what is going to happen to them. In those protests, violence even in words, features, actions leads one to think “where does this come from. Where have the parents been? Where have these young ones learned this behaviour?”
As I read the email sent to me, I wondered if this is, what James said, big part of the problem
Please read and see how you feel and maybe something to come from this young person’s surprise.
Dear Mrs Lastman,
My name is James I am 16 years old and I go to a Catholic Secondary College and currently am in year 11 and after my studies and university I hope to become an accountant. I love numbers and figures; they seem to have a mystery about them. My mother told me that she was a supporter of your work before you retired, though from what she says it sounds in retirement you’re working harder.
Anyway, as mum was tidying up her office she came across some of your old newsletters and gave me a couple to read (I did begrudgingly), I didn’t want to and wasn’t interested though I agreed to do this I thought I would just scan through them assuring her I did read them and keep mum happy or my next pasta Bolognese would be in the distant future rather than weekly. She further threatened not to be my chauffeur anymore unless I read them and at my age (not driving yet) a chauffeur is important.
I did start to read the newsletter thinking I would be bored because it was all about prolife and abortion, and women who suffered. Mum had asked me to read it and think about the topic and if I wanted to, I could talk about my thoughts from a teenager’s perspective and how other kids my age view the topic and how little we know about the topic So here it goes, I’ll tell you about some experiences that I have had when the word abortion has come up as the topic of conversation.
First of all, I have to explain that at my school, although it’s a Catholic one, only about 20% of students are actually practicing Catholics. So really being prolife is hard though it should not be and someone who is pro-life has to be quite silent about it. I want to be an open pro-lifer but while at school its probably better to refrain from being so. I remember some years back I wore a “precious feet” badge on my school uniform blazer and was made to feel like I was a………. I couldn’t do it more than once. Doing this simple thing I came across so many of those I thought were my friends were not. Friends who do not even know what an abortion really is, were most abusive. I have to admit that I didn’t know much either, though my Mum was and is very prolife. But I really never took much notice. It wasn’t my thing before and especially after the experience with the other kids.
An example of this lack of knowledge, including my own, happened after I wore those feet even for one day. My best friend asked me what the feet meant, and I told him the meaning and reason for the “feet” and what it meant to wear them. After explaining this, he asked me, “but what’s wrong with an abortion? I thought it was just when a girl gets pregnant, they takes a pill, and the baby which is not a baby yet, comes out of the ……… (colourful language). However, over the many years of being chauffeured to and from school by Mum and having to listen to the stories about prolife and what seemed to me like sermons, I now had a chance to actually use some of what I heard.
After explaining to my mate what really happens during an abortion and showing him a picture which I had taken on my mobile from one of mum’s books of the baby in the womb and then after it was aborted, he was absolutely shocked at the brutal nature of this practice and wanted to know how this was allowed. Since that day, my friend has been prolife but he couldn’t talk about it, the images he saw upset him so much. I have included this example to show just how much, teenagers especially, are unaware of what is actually happening during an abortion. We are meant to study ethics but we have never really been explained or seen images. I think with Google we could look it up ourselves but I think mostly we are not interested and we sometimes look at protesters saying that they should not be forced to have to have a baby if they don’t one.
Abortion is a topic that none of us want to visit because we’ll be ostracised and talking about it is a battle as most teenagers do not know or want to know the truth of what really happens and the cruelty involved during the procedure. To this day, I have not forgotten the images which I saw aborted . We had to come up with our own thoughts on abortion and how we came to this conclusion, the last line of my assignment was “As you can see, abortion is wrong no matter what the situation as it is the killing of an innocent baby”
handouts on developmental stages not permitted or even any interest in them, and pictures of the various ways of abortion of babies are not permitted because they’re graphic, but more than this there isn’t much interest by many kids some who are having sex with their girlfriends/boyfriends. Mine is a boys school but we mix with a girl’s school and we know when a couple get in trouble and its quietly taken care of. It only needs money not even parents need to know.
On another note, I have noticed the sermons that priests at Mass aren’t really talking about issues like abortion, promiscuity, euthanasia, gender, etc. Silence on these topics. Going to Mass at our parish and including school masses it has become obvious that a possible reason why people don’t know about these topics and the cruelty in abortion and the fact that now babies can be killed up to the time that they could be born and even adopted if the mother couldn’t look after it. I hear priests during homilies talking about sports, and old stories, and sometimes saints, all of which are fine, but rarely hear about the church’s teaching on the harder to listen topics. It seems as if some priests are almost too scared that parishioners will leave if this truth is spoken about.
The truth is that they give happy sermons which will please the parishioners. I grew up in catholic home and grew up with Mass, prayers, Rosary, night blessing by Dad, before going to bed, and really notice that each week the parish priest’s sermon is pleasant and tries to be all things to everyone. So, I have to ask the question “why?” “Why are priests so afraid to talk about these issues?” If people do not hear and understand what is happening in front of them, abortion, euthanasia, transgender issue, drugs, sex trade, how can they understand the importance of these. If people of my generation (teenagers now)are to know about these things, their parents must teach them first, and then have this reinforced by teachers and priest, if we don’t start to learn about these things as young as we are then in the future there won’t be anyone to teach us about God, life, marriage, babies. Somehow it seems to me that we are being cheated. We probably wont take it in but the words have been heard and at some time they can be remembered, if heard.
I’m now starting to sound like my mother so I will end my piece here. Thanks, Mrs Lastman, for your work. I do personally know 2 girls who have had an abortion without their parents knowing and they suffer. One in particular cries a lot its affected her lessons. Some days she’s OK but mostly she’s sad but no one says anything. I’m sure her friends know but there’s nothing they can do.
James R………
My Comment:
When a very young girl is forced or taken or counselled to abort her child for her “wellbeing” and of course she concedes because of her youth, the future becomes clouded. As she herself still a child aborting a child, the possible psychological damage is enormous. She has encrypted into her being the knowledge that she has contributed to the death of a baby, her baby. At some time in the future this knowledge can become deadly because with more maturity the exact nature of the event becomes clearer and her own sense of blame is exacerbated to the nth degree. The young are very idealistic and cannot bear to believe that they are responsible for the wounds, pains, death of another especially a baby.
This is a concern for me because younger and younger girls are having abortions. and these girls and their “boyfriends” are the wounded citizens of the future. Please pray for the young, they deserve better. Though the better which they deserve cannot happen because abortion has now become a normalised issue. It’s thought more important issues need attention, such as how to advance the transgender issue the legalisation of such an issue. The “right” of the individual to do anything with their body. I remember many years ago the mantra “It’s my body, its my choice” and realise we haven’t learned anything. Transgender, “it’s my body and if I want to change my gender its my right to do so.” Abortion, its my body its my choice and right to do so.
With “rights” “choice.” “legalisation” government involvement in life matters and the vote getting ability, and strength of going with the popular belief of voters, together with loss of belief in the beauty of life and the human body, we have developed a society grieving from all death dealing wars, abortions, euthanasia, transgender, abuse, IVF loss, loss of IVF embryos, one might even say that trafficking is death dealing and others still being developed and to be announced and then marketed, it seems that death has insinuated itself into the very nucleus of humanity’s consciousness .
Can this be reversed? I hope it can because otherwise I don’t know. The warnings we are now seeing through many wars where thousands upon thousands of human beings are killed ad nauseum, and all the tortures of war and this in 21st century. A time when humanity has learned to reach other planets can then turn and be beastly towards their” nearest kinsman” Those of us who have lost family in concentration camps and millions of Jews murdered including infants and teenagers and elderly, priests, religious, beautiful Rabbis, philosophers, are seeing the repetition.
Wars simply murder and no one wins. Starvation, murders. Rejection, murders. Abortion murders in the millions. All these intentional murders and this we start from the tiniest of infants graduating to the elderly and all ages in between.
Only the next generation can, if they decide, begin to change the panorama from one of death to one of renewal. Life. As James the writer above clearly said the “cool” teens don’t know and don’t really care, neither the male nor female. But then why should they? Their life, their birthright as a child of the divine has been traded in for ”a mess of potage” (Gen 24:29-34).The humans birthright sold. A mess of pottage, a glass of wine and travel on into the unknown, more of the same. Birthright of joy, bliss, love, sold for a stew of lentils with added choice, rights, laws.
