Live Fire with Chuck Holton

“Every child should be a wanted child.” That’s one of the arguments one often hears from pro-abortion advocates, including our current president. The implication here, which I find untenable and illogical, is that certain death is better for the baby than potential suffering. Having been concieved out of wedlock by a teen mother himself, Mr. Obama somehow can’t grasp the irony of this stand.

I was recently in Goma, Congo, touring a refugee camp with more than a quarter million people crowded into it. The camp is a muddy and miserable place, situated at the foot of a smoke-belching volcano and surrounded by many tens of thousands more people who haven’t been fortunate enough yet to be accepted in the camp.

The thing that struck me, however, is that the population of the camp was mostly children. Indeed, due to war and the rampant AIDS epidemic, many of these little ones were left fending for themselves. In the photo above, the three pygmy children you see live in that small plastic shelter all alone. It’s like a cross between a daycare center and a nazi prison camp.

Nobody wants these children. And to say they are suffering is the height of understatement. If one follows the pro-abortion philosophy (which the UN actively supports) to its logical conclusion, the world body should not be expending millions to help these children survive, but instead should be working to swiftly destroy as many of these unwanted children as possible.

But they aren’t. Nobody’s calling for these precious children to be killed to alleviate their suffering. That’s because it is self-evident that life – even a life like this – can be made better, and deep down we know that we and our fellow human beings have a duty to at least TRY to do so. These beautiful children, no matter how poor, how dirty, are worth just as much as those blessed with health and wealth. The fact that they aren’t in America is irrelevent – their location does not affect their worth.

How, then, can anyone hold that a developing HUMAN fetus is any less valuable than its mother simply because of its location or state of development? Yet that’s exactly what the UN advocates when it comes to what they call “reproductive freedom” – a euphemism for assisting women the world over in ending their pregnancies at will.

We should not support this. Even a child can understand that.

This is my latest video on CBNNews. With 17,000 troops being sent over to Afghanistan this spring, it’s possible I might be back there this year for a follow up…

On my recently-completed trip to Africa, the Obama-mania in Ethiopia may have exceeded the excitement over our new president seen in the states.  This sign was in the airport at Bahir Dar – a local cafe renamed itself to honor the new American president.  The name and likeness of him also adorned everything from taxis to t-shirts around the country, and wherever we went, people would ask “Are you Americans?”  and when we answered in the affirmative, they would invariably shout “Obama!”

All this goodwill is great, but what was most interesting was when I asked people WHY they liked Obama so much, they were very frank.  “Because he’s one of us.”  Meaning, dark-skinned.

Okay, fine.  But on the few instances when people asked me if *I* voted for him, I told them why I did not:  Obama is strongly pro-abortion.

The Ethiopians’ reaction was very interesting.  At first, disbelief.  “What?  You mean he thinks it is okay to kill babies?”

“That’s what I mean.”

Then, without fail, they would change their minds.

“I don’t like him anymore, then.”

One man even growled something to the effect:  “A man who thinks that way should be killed himself.”

And that gave me a chance to explain why we don’t resort to violence to solve our problems in the US – Our country provides a way to change things without it – voting our conscience.  But I found it interesting that Ethiopians have no doubt that an unborn child deserves to live – even in a place where life is often nothing but privation and misery.  We could take a lesson from that.  If the fetus is a developing human being, then it deserves to live, no matter if it might possibly grow up in less-than-ideal circumstances.  In fact, Barack Obama himself might not have been allowed to live if we truly believed that certain death is better than potential suffering, which is the essence of the pro-abortion argument.

I found this video to be quite thought-provoking.  Also, this article, while not about abortion, speaks powerfully to the positive influence Christianity has on any society, but especially those in Africa.

A woman in an IDP camp in Congo

I returned intact from my three weeks in Africa – apologies for not blogging more, but the internet service there is partying like it’s 1994.

The scale of human misery one experiences in Africa is beyond gut-wrenching…in fact, it’s enough to make even the most jaded world traveler (me) broken hearted for the stories lived out in places like Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Congo I interviewed a woman who had been brutally gang-raped by Hutu Soldiers, so violently that her insides were essentially scrambled.  She stared at the ground with a hollow look as she quietly recounted the story, somehow beyond emotion.  My skin felt electric as I listened, wanting to somehow make it better – but there was nothing physical I could do besides share her pain with the world.  There was one thing better I could do, though.  Together with the pastor of her church, I put my hands on her and prayed that God would heal her body and her spirit.

Several days later in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, I interviewed a beggar woman with three children who manages to feed the four of them on twenty cents a day.  The fact that she sleeps on the sidewalk wasn’t the saddest part – it was that she would love to go home to her husband, but doesn’t dare for fear she’ll get pregnant again.

My last night in Addis, I was approached by a teenaged prostitute who offered her “services.”  Seeing my own daughter in her face, my heart broke for her.  As a young, pretty girl fairly new to the game, she said she made up to thirty dollars a night.  A friend working to help prostitutes escape that life later told me that by the age of twenty five or so, most working girls in Addis can only get about ten cents per trick – if they haven’t died of AIDS yet.

The sum total of such desperate lives weighs heavy on me – as I think it should.  I know God is heartbroken by these tragedies, and I should be, too.  But what to do about it?  I can pray with the violated, give to the hungry, and tell the Prostitute the good news of God’s plan for her life.  But these are only three of millions.  It’s overwhelming.  So, I help those I can, and pray for them all.  I hope you will, too.