National Sanctity of Life Day

During a gathering of entrepreneurs in Las Vegas one of the speakers was a brand architect at Lego. During his presentation, he handed each attendee six Lego bricks. Then he asked them to estimate the number of unique combina¬tions that could be created with those six bricks. This sounded like a trick question, so one attendee aimed high and guessed several hundred combina¬tions. That left him several hundred million short of the actual answer!

Are you ready for this? The total number of possible permutations—six bricks with eight studs each—is 915,403,765. Nearly a billion possible permutations with six Lego bricks!

While the number of possible Lego combinations is mind-boggling, it pales in comparison to the sheer complexity and potential combinations found within DNA. Here's why:

Legos have a limited number of ways they can connect. DNA, on the other hand, uses four different "bases" (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) that can pair in specific ways. However, the sequence of these base pairs is what carries the genetic information, and this sequence can vary enormously.

A single strand of DNA can contain millions or even billions of these base pairs. A gene, which is a specific segment of DNA, might be hundreds or thousands of base pairs long. The number of possible sequences for a gene, let alone an entire DNA molecule, is astronomically huge.

To give you a sense of the scale, the human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs.
Even a relatively short gene of 1,000 base pairs has 4^1000 possible sequences (4 because there are 4 bases). That's a 4 followed by 1,000 zeros, a number far exceeding the number of atoms in the known universe!

Possible Preaching Angle:
The information encoded in DNA is incredibly vast and precisely organized, making the Lego analogy seem in comparison. It serves as a powerful reminder of the awe-inspiring power and intelligence behind creation and is a testimony to the purposeful Creator behind life.

The scientist Ali Binazir wrote a paper explaining the probability that you exist. It turns out that when taking into account the astonishing number of possibilities of parents meeting, grandparents meeting before them, and so on going back generations, and then adding the vast number of sperm and ova in possible combinations over decades of the marital act in all those generations, the odds of me existing just as I do are about 1 in 102,685,000. That’s a number so huge it hurts to think about it.

For example, the probability of your father meeting your mother is 1 in 20,000. The chances of them talking to one another is 1 in 10. The chances of that turning into another meeting is about 1 in 10. The chances of that turning into a long-term relationship is about 1 in 10. The chances of that lasting long enough to result in offspring is 1 in 2. So, the combined probability is already only about 1 in 40 million.

Now let’s get down to some of the biological details: each sperm and each egg is genetically unique because of the process of meiosis; you are the result of the fusion of one particular egg with one particular sperm. So, the probability of that one sperm with half your name on it fertilizing that one egg with the other half of your name on it is 1 in (100,000) (4 x 1012) = 1 in 4 x 1017, or 1 in 400 quadrillion.

Getting complicated! You bet! But the probability just keeps getting more unlikely. You are highly improbable!

But, according to the Bible, you are not here by chance. God created and knit you together in your mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13-16). You’re not just one in a million, you’re one in a 102,685,000.

A father's alcohol consumption has long been overshadowed by the focus on what a mother drinks. But that could be about to change following more research.

For more than 50 years, scientists have warned about the risks of drinking alcohol in pregnancy. Recent research has found that a mother's consumption of as little as one drink a week may affect a child's brain development, cognitive function and behavior, and facial shape. For decades, public health campaigns have repeatedly said that there's no safe amount of alcohol for moms to drink while pregnant.

But as the risks of maternal alcohol consumption have become better documented, another potential contributing factor to FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) has remained largely overlooked: how much the father drinks.

Researcher Michael Golding at Texas A&M University studies alcohol exposure and fetal development. He said, "For years now, we've been hearing stories from women who said, 'I never drank during pregnancy, but now I have an FAS kid – and my male partner was a chronic alcohol abuser." But such stories often were dismissed as mothers being forgetful, if not outright lying.

However, recent research raises an intriguing possibility: these mothers were right all along. The idea that a father's alcohol consumption before conception could have an impact on the offspring may seem far-fetched. But recent population studies have found that babies whose fathers drank are at a higher risk for various poor health outcomes.

Based on the research so far, how much alcohol is "safe" for a father to drink if he knows his partner may conceive? We don't have that data. Still, he says, "If it were my sons, I would tell them to stop drinking altogether."

While the exact impact of paternal drinking has yet to be teased out, researchers agree on one thing. “There's this enormous burden that's been placed on women. But male health is important to fetal development. There is a responsibility of both parties here to support and provide for the health of the baby.”

Pro-life advocates saw the 2022 Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a turning point in the fight against abortion in the United States. After the court overturned Roe v. Wade and removed federal protection for the procedure, some conservative states began introducing fetal personhood laws, granting the unborn the same rights as full-born children.

But Hannah Strege watched it all unfold with another vulnerable group in mind: frozen embryos. In this new era, would they have rights? If they did, would anyone respect them?

Strege, 24, was conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1996 and frozen for two years. In 1997, she and 19 of her siblings were adopted in embryo form by John and Marlene Strege. They were shipped by FedEx to a local fertility clinic. Hannah was the only embryo to survive thawing and to successfully implant in Marlene’s uterus. She was born in December 1998.

Since Hannah was born, the number of frozen embryos sitting in storage in the United States has risen from roughly 100,000 to an estimated 1.5 million. Many of these embryos remain from IVF treatments, indefinitely chilled in canisters of liquid nitrogen with no plans for their future.

Some clinics feel overwhelmed by the growing volume of embryos sitting in storage and doctors may create dozens of embryos per patient. One doctor told NBC News in 2019 that some patients have 40–60 eggs retrieved in a cycle, and “the embryologist gets the orders from her doctor to inseminate all of them—and the question isn’t asked if the patient even wants that many inseminated. … Nobody’s going to have 30 kids.”

One Florida reproductive endocrinologist said, “We were not prepared for any of this. Twenty-one percent of our embryos have been abandoned.”

Trinity Evangelical Divinty School professor Kevin Vanhoozer writes about caring for his aging mother in an issue of CT magazine:

For nine years now, I have been watching my mother’s identity slowly fade as memories and capacities switch off, one after another, like lights of a house shutting down for the night. Marriage may be a school of sanctification, as Luther said, but caring for aging parents is its grad school, especially when he or she lives with you and suffers from dementia.

It’s been said that as we become older, we become caricatures of ourselves. Dementia speeds the process. It’s easy to see why: With loss of executive cognitive functioning, we’re less prone to monitor what we say and do. We begin to fly on auto-pilot, re-tracing again and again well-trod paths.

What lies under … the social masks we have carefully constructed? What lies under my mother’s happy face? (“I’m fine,” she’d say, even after a fall). I recently discovered the answer.

Years into the dementia, she lost her last line of defense and began to voice her inmost thoughts aloud. “Father, don’t let me fall” accompanied her every shuffling step behind her walker. Initially I thought this terribly sad—clearly, she wasn’t fine but anxious—yet I eventually found it comforting. The Bible depicts life as a walk: Shouldn’t we all be praying to the Lord to help us avoid missteps? Though she had forgotten former friends and neighbors, and large swaths of her own life, she remembered the fatherhood of God.

49.6 million. According to the Global Slavery Index that's the latest estimate for the number of slaves in the world today. It could be just another number in a blur of facts that fly by our faces in a day, but this nearly 50 million number has a face. It includes women and men, boys and girls who are held in bondage as sex slaves, domestic servants, and child soldiers.

Of course, that is only an estimate since slavery thrives in darkness. But another news item gives this statistic an even more horrifying angle. A British paper shared a story about “Daniel” (not his real name) who was brought into the U.K. for what he had been told was a "life-changing opportunity.” He thought he was going to get a better job. Instead, it was then that he realized there was no job opportunity and he had been brought to the UK to give a kidney to a stranger.

"He was going to literally be cut up like a piece of meat, take what they wanted out of him and then stitch him back up," according to Cristina Huddleston, from the anti-modern slavery group Justice and Care.

Luckily for Daniel, the doctors had become suspicious that he didn't know what was going on and feared he was being coerced. So, they halted the process.

Daniel was not free of his traffickers though. Back in the flat where he was staying, two men came to examine him. It was then he overheard a conversation about sending him back to Nigeria to remove his kidney there.

He fled, and after two nights sleeping rough, he walked into a police station near Heathrow, triggering an investigation that would lead to the UK's first prosecution for human trafficking for organ removal.

Despite international and domestic efforts, about 10 percent of all transplants worldwide are believed to be illegal—approximately 12,000 organs per year. For example, according to the World Health Organization as many as 7,000 kidneys are illegally obtained by traffickers each year around the world. While there is a black market for organs such as hearts, lungs, and livers, kidneys are the most sought-after organs … The process involves a number of people including the recruiter who identifies the victim, the person who arranges their transport, the medical professionals who perform the operation, and the salesman who trades the organ.

After celebrating his national championship as the head football coach for the Michigan Wolverines, Jim Harbaugh made a surprise appearance at the March for Life in Washington D.C. Harbaugh truly lives out his pro-life convictions. In 2022, he told ESPN about encouraging his players to come to him if they ever dealt with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy with a partner. He said he wanted them to know that he’d be happy to raise the baby with his wife.

I’ve told (them) the same thing I tell my kids, boys, the girls, same thing I tell our players, our staff members. I encourage them — if they have a pregnancy that wasn’t planned, to go through with it, go through with it. Let that unborn child be born, and if at that time, you don’t feel like you can care for it, you don’t have the means or the wherewithal, then Sarah and I will take that baby. … We got a big house. We’ll raise that baby.

When asked by the media if it was appropriate for him to share his views on the issue, Harbaugh replied:

We need to talk about it. It’s too big an issue to not give real serious consideration to. What kind of person would you be if you didn’t stand up for what you believe in and didn’t fight tooth and nail for it? I believe in letting the unborn be born.

How many times have you heard expectant couples say, "Well, as long as our baby is healthy"? John Knight from Desiring God ministries cautions, "'Healthy' exists on a spectrum of possibilities just like disability. And that spectrum is becoming narrower with every passing year." He points to an article about University of Washington scientists who were able to identify the DNA sequence of a fetus with 98 percent accuracy, and with safer techniques.

The article noted, "The accomplishment heralds an era in which parents might find it easier to know the complete DNA blueprint of a child months before it is born. That would allow thousands of genetic diseases to be detected prenatally." That means that more children with disabilities will be aborted.

But Knight also argues that many people will be tempted to order up "designer babies"—all fueled by "an increasingly idolatrous mindset that says I have the right and the responsibility to determine what is best for me — including the physical and/or developmental makeup of my children, or somebody else's children."

People today may say that it shouldn’t matter what other people think about you. All that matters is what you think of you, that you live up to your standards and do what you think is right. I propose that that is utter nonsense. We are utterly dependent on others to name, bless, and affirm us.

Imagine a poet who says, “You know, I've been writing poetry for 10 years and I've let 3,000 people read my poems. Everyone has hated them. Everyone says, ‘This is stupid, this is terrible, this is bad. You must get another job.’” But the poet says, “It doesn't matter what they think. I know I'm a great poet.”

Would you say, “Well, there's a person with a great self-image?” Of course not. You’d probably say, “That’s a person on the verge of insanity. They are not functional.” And you know the reason why? Because we cannot bless ourselves. We cannot feel beautiful just because we keep saying I'm beautiful. You cannot bless yourself. You cannot name yourself. You cannot say I'm somebody. Somebody from outside has got to tell you you're beautiful. Somebody from the outside has got to tell you you're a good poet. Somebody from the outside has got to bless you. Somebody from the outside has got to name you. You can't do it yourself.

And that means you are completely dependent, or you will be completely dependent on somebody else, spiritually. Your whole being is going to rest on somebody, whether it's the critics, your parents, somebody you hope to marry, somebody you have married, or somebody else. Like sheep, we are dependent on others for our survival and flourishing.

Brookdale Senior Living is one of the industry's leading providers of senior adult care, with over 600 facilities across the United States. But employees have been complaining that the chain’s centralized computer system, which prioritizes efficiency, misses some of the nuance involving caring for seniors. As a result, they say, its staffing algorithms consistently understaff facilities, and the quality of care suffers.

Patricia McNeal spent six years overseeing facilities in Ohio and Florida, but was forced out after complaining to her superiors about the substandard staffing recommendations. She said, “Brookdale is handing you this thing that says, ‘This is what it says you need, hire for that.’ My eyes told me that we weren’t getting enough.”

And she’s not alone. At a facility in Florida, Brookdale recommended fewer employees than buildings on campus, making it impossible for staff to always monitor all residents. And at a facility in Texas, caregivers were given only 20 minutes to help residents undress, shower, and get dressed again, a standard they could not meet.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the problem stems from decades old research bankrolled by corporate executives looking to cut costs and maximize revenue. They timed a set of caregivers performing various tasks, then fed that data into their programming, erroneously assuming that all adults have the same needs and that those trends would never evolve over time. What resulted is a standard of low-skilled laborers performing rote tasks, treating human beings like widgets on an assembly line.

This labor model fails to account for the complexities of dealing with adults who may be facing cognitive decline. When any one task takes longer than anticipated, it subtracts time from the entire pool of available hours, which prevents some residents from receiving essential care.

In an email to her superiors, Brenda Jarmer, a director of operations in Florida, pleaded for intervention, “I cannot stress to you how bad it is … I am asking for help.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Being a wise steward of resources is important, but we should never be so concerned with efficiency and conformity that we fail to care for the weakest among us.

Former abortion doctor Patti Giebenk tells the following story about the woman who prayed her into a lifechanging encounter with Jesus:

During my lengthy conversion from pro-choice to pro-life, there was a person who prayed for me repeatedly. She was a prayer warrior I’d never met, but God heard her special prayer for me. It was the prayer of Sister Josita. Throughout her life, Sister Josita advocated for the poor, the refugee, and the vulnerable.

After Sister Josita heard that Dr. Giebink did abortions, she started praying for her—for over ten years. Then Dr. Giebink met Christ and stopped doing abortions. She joined a local church in South Dakota, and started treating poor women around the globe, but no longer doing abortions. After returning from one of her many trips to, she received the following letter:

Dear Doctor Giebink,

May your Christmas be blessed and the New Year filled with joy.

You don’t know me ... I want to thank you for your courage to speak out for life, and ... to bring an end to abortion. When I saw you on television, I was so proud of you to publicly state that you used to perform abortions for Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls and now you support life instead. When I first heard that you were performing abortions, I began lifting you up in prayer. I do not believe abortion is right, or a solution to an unwanted pregnancy. I have prayed for you, by name, that one day your heart would be touched, and you would discontinue performing abortions. I thank God for you, and I continue to pray for you.

Patti Giebink concludes this story with the following words:

Sister Josita still prays for me. We write regularly, and I’ve visited her twice. She turned ninety this year, and she’s still a vibrant and dynamic warrior. Her initial intervention for me—just a name and a face—moved celestial mountains, making way for my future legacy of life. May we all stay on our knees until the answer comes, just as Sister Josita did.

Every person starts as one fertilized egg, which by adulthood has turned into roughly 37 trillion cells. But those cells have a formidable challenge. These cells must copy 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA perfectly, about once every 24 hours. To speed up the process, cells start replication in multiple spots with people having tens of thousands of them throughout their genomes.

However, this poses its own challenge: How to know where to start and how to time everything. Without precision control, some DNA might get copied twice, causing cellular pandemonium. Bad things can happen if replication doesn’t start correctly. For DNA to be copied, the DNA double helix must open up, and the resulting single strands are vulnerable to breakage or the process can get stuck.

It takes a tightly coordinated dance involving dozens of proteins for the DNA-copying machinery to start replication at the right point in the cell’s life cycle. Keeping tight reins on the kickoff of DNA replication is particularly important to avoid that pandemonium.

Today, researchers are making steps toward a full understanding of the molecular checks and balances that have evolved in order to ensure that each origin initiates DNA copying once and only once, to produce precisely one complete new genome.

Possible Preaching Angle:

3,000 years ago, King David exclaimed, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Ps. 139:14). Scientific knowledge has increased exponentially since that time and we should be even more in awe of God’s creative genius on display.

His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic. In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.

During an interview in late 2012 he said, “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear. In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.

When asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Dr. Narita graphically described to a group of assembled students a scene from “Midsommar.” This is a 2019 horror film in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. Dr. Narita said, “Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer. So, if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”

At other times, he has broached the topic of euthanasia. He said in one interview, “The possibility of making it mandatory in the future … will come up in discussion.” Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context,” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics—to make room for younger generations. Nevertheless, with his comments on euthanasia and social security, which appear clear enough, he has pushed the hottest button in Japan.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is not a pleasant or positive illustration, but it does highlight the dangers of losing the biblical doctrine of the Imago Dei and the sanctity of every human life.

Conservatives are not alone in opposing the slippery slope that is the growing trend toward advocating for euthanasia. The liberal periodical The Nation, as well as liberal disability advocates, are raising the alarm as well. The reality is that the lives of Americans with disabilities are being devalued:

Disability is something people are taught to hate and fear. And people with disabilities are frequently not given the resources they need to live or the assistance they need to participate fully in society. The poverty rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people. Further, the unemployment rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people. The responsibility for care that is shirked by the state frequently falls on families, who are overwhelmed. Instead of being given the resources they need to thrive, many, if not most, people with disabilities are treated like expensive burdens.

Diane Coleman, the president of Not Dead Yet, has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair and a respirator. She says, “It is not the disabilities that ruin lives. It is the system and society that fails to support disabled people. It’s not religious, nor is it pro-life. It’s about going up against a ‘better dead than disabled mindset.’”

Coleman says medical professionals have devalued her life and others with disabilities. One member of her staff was told by his father that it would have been better if he’d died in the accident that made him a quadriplegic. Coleman said, “Those experiences are so well-known in the community.”

23-year-old Jules Good, assistant director of Not Dead Yet, said of her experience, shared by many others: “When I was 18, I got a pretty rough diagnosis. I was super depressed and attempted suicide. And when I went to my first counseling appointment with a new therapist, I explained my whole deal. And she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Yeah, I’d probably kill myself if I were you.’”

Cicero said, “The thing itself cannot be praised. Only its potential.” He was talking about young children. Such was the view in the Empire where Jesus arrived as an infant. Plutarch said, “The child, is more like a plant” than a human, or even than an animal.

But Jesus and his followers had a different view of the moral status of children. To follow him, Jesus said, you had to become like a child. Even babies, Christians said, are fully human and fully bear the image of God. As the African bishop Cyprian wrote, “God himself does not make such distinction of person or of age, since he offers himself as a Father to all.” And if that’s God’s view, then “Every sex and age should be held in honor among you.”

The church even extended that honor and protection to the unborn. The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents says, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”

Throughout the Roe regime, contemporary Christians have similarly demonstrated their “contempt of death,” their pursuit of justice for the unborn, and their love of children and pregnant women. The church has more than mere potential to better bear witness to life. It is the house of the Life himself.

Calls for a federal investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) are mounting after the latest discovery into the unjust death and burial of Dexter Wade of Jackson, Mississippi. Both attorney Ben Crump, representing the Wade family, as well as civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, have publicly called for an investigation into Wade’s death.

In March, Wade’s mother Bettersten Wade called police for help, anxious about the whereabouts of her son, who’d gone missing. After repeatedly asking for updates, Bettersten was eventually notified in August--more than six months later. She was told that Dexter had been killed by a police cruiser while attempting to cross the highway. By the time Bettersten was notified of Dexter’s death, he’d already been buried anonymously in a plot of land owned by the county.

Initially, Bettersten says local officials explained the time gap by saying that Dexter had been found with no identifying information. After his body was exhumed, however, an independent pathologist confirmed in an autopsy that Dexter had been carrying a wallet that included the local address that he shared with his mother. These findings suggest that authorities knew where Dexter lived. Yet they made no attempt to contact her about her son, despite the fact that she’d already filed a missing person report.

Their attorney said, “The fact that Dexter had a state identification card and several other identifying items shows us that there was a concerted effort to keep the truth and manner of his death from his family. There is no excuse, not even incompetence, for not notifying a next of kin of an identified man’s death.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Though it's important to differentiate between accidental death and murder, every human is made in the image of God, and therefore loss of life is inherently sacred and should not be minimized or concealed.

Betty Hodge knows what it’s like to have an unplanned pregnancy. And she knows what it’s like to have the father of the unborn child push for an abortion. She’s been there. But she didn’t seriously consider terminating her pregnancy, because she didn’t feel alone. Hodge said, “Thankfully I had a family that was supportive.” She now works at a pregnancy resource center in Jackson, Mississippi, so she can provide that same support for other mothers in need.

These days, she sees a lot of them. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (in 2022), allowing the state of Mississippi to pass a law banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest that have been reported to police. The clinic that gave its name to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case shut down in July. It was the state’s only abortion provider. So, while women may still travel to Florida, New York, or Illinois to terminate a pregnancy, abortion has effectively ended in the Magnolia State.

The state health office estimates this will result in an additional 5,000 babies being born in Mississippi in 2023. The pro-life movement there is eager to celebrate each of these precious lives, but they’re also aware of other upsetting statistics: Mississippi has the highest rate of preterm births—over 30 percent more than the national average. The state has the highest infant mortality rate in the US, with nearly nine of every 1,000 babies dying. And for the infants who live to be toddlers, 28 percent will live in poverty.

Hodge doesn’t shy away from these hard facts. For her, this is part of the work of being pro-life. ... And with the state expecting 5,000 more babies in 2023, she sees an opportunity to put pro-life beliefs into practice and show that Christians care. She said, “If we’re going to say we stand for life, then it’s pertinent for us to stand up and say we don’t just care about the unborn child. As a church, we have an opportunity to make a difference.”