Your life is the deliberate choice of God. That’s my belief. It is probably yours too.

It is written into our humanity to believe that we were planned by God, and are not just a cosmic accident. If your life matters to God, it also matters to me. This truth binds us together into a community that cares for each other.

Get rid of a common creator, and you are left without any logical reason to care for anyone but yourself. But, if we are all children of the same creator, every human life, from the greatest to the least, deserves the protection of everyone else.

From the beginning of our lives, we are literally bound to each other. Babies gestate in their mother’s womb. Mothers are physically tied to their babies. That’s what makes Mother’s Day so special.

Like you, your mother is vulnerable and flawed, but also infinitely precious to the same One who created you. You and she both are planned by God, even if she didn’t plan you. People have accidents, but God never does.

If God cared enough to plan both mother and child, he also planned a way to love every pregnant woman, while also loving her child. These two loves are in deep harmony and not in conflict. Our job is to find that harmony.

Dr. David Reardon, Director of the Elliot Institute, articulates it well, “only the mother can nurture her unborn child. All that the rest of us can do is to nurture and protect the mother.” That is true care. It is the foundational building block of all community.

Sadly, some believe otherwise. Those who assume that their life is an unplanned accident, tend to think of others as competitors. They are “mouths to feed,” “drains on my time and energy,” and “competition for limited resources.”

That’s the worldview of Planned Parenthood. They act as though women are best cared for by pitting them against their children. They lead more than 320,000 American women to abortion every year, and make millions.

When a woman finds out that she is pregnant, she is filled with powerful emotions, some delightful and some scary. Often it is a mixture of both. If the woman is nurtured and cared for, the joy will usually win out over the fear.

Surveys of post-abortion regret vary widely, but even the most conservative estimates find that 30% of women report regret their abortion, some as high as 90%. On the other hand, at least one survey of women who carried the child to term found zero regret (Reardon, Makimaa, and Sobie, Victims and Victors).

A 1989 L.A. Times poll found that 74% of post-abortive women believed that abortion was morally wrong, but had one anyway. Why? Fears and anxiety which are not addressed but fed by authority figures like parents, partners, or counselors.

Even the Guttmacher Institute, a Planned Parenthood spinoff, reports that 89% of post-abortive women would have kept the baby if only their fears were laid to rest. Imagine if a pregnant woman was shown the full array of services available, from WIC to food stamps, childcare to church groups.

They should also be empowered by medical information. They need to know the risks of infection and sterility, the facts about breast cancer, the increased risk of PTSD, substance abuse, and suicide. It’s a good start now that Wyoming provides them an opportunity to see an ultrasound.

But Planned Parenthood doesn’t want to give any of this information. Their Guttmacher Institute downplays these risks, but has never conducted a large-scale double-blind, study of them. Worse, they have not produced even one study showing either medical or mental health benefits from abortion. Their entire business model is based on unproven assumptions. That is shameful.

Thankfully, Planned Parenthood is only a small slice of America’s care for pregnant women. Compared to 665 Planned Parenthood clinics, there are around 2,200 pregnancy resource centers, including ten in Wyoming, that operate according to the belief that both lives are precious. These are not funded by tax dollars, but by the donations of people who care about women and children.

Planned Parenthood pretends to have a monopoly on caring for women, but they don’t. It is high time for the federal government to break this monopoly. No one should be forced either to fund, or support a business actively opposed to their fundamental beliefs.

Any organization that cannot acknowledge the humanity of half the people who enter its doors, should not be called a humanitarian organization. The US House of Representatives was right to pass an amendment which would free 390 million dollars from the Planned Parenthood monopoly and give others a chance to compete for these funds on a merit basis.

Caring for the women and children who find themselves in difficult times is the business of all of us. As children of the same God, we are all in this together. That is the basis of our common humanity, our common government, and our Wyoming neighborliness.

Jonathan Lange is an LCMS pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. He can be reached at JLange64@allwest.net. Follow his blog at OnlyHuman-JL.blogspot.com.