In Defense of the Family

Since my trip to the UN to attend the Commission on the Status of Women, I have had a fair amount of people ask me about some of my experiences. I have many stories to share that are about amazing and beautiful people who are doing incredible things in their countries to stand for what is right despite huge pressures from the world. I plan to share some of those stories in the future in hopes of inspiring us to see that there is so much good that can be done by people like you and me. Today however I am going to write about some of the attacks on the family that are occurring besides the very obvious things such as escalating divorce rates, pornography and the legal battles before us on the definitions of marriage. After listening to the most recent conference talks on the importance of family and Sister Oscarson's call to defend the family in the general women's broadcast, I decided I needed to write this post. I have also read a few posts from members questioning what our leaders could be talking about in terms of attacks because they aren't personally seeing any.

I am going to start off by saying that I can assure you when a church leader talks about attacks, those attacks are very real. Something very important to remember as members of The Church of Jesus Chris of Latter Day Saints is that we are part of a worldwide church. When someone in a general auxiliary is speaking, they are addressing people from Nigeria to New Zealand and from Poland to Provo. What some members are facing in Japan, quite possibly could be different than a member in Great Falls, Montana. Do not discredit a talk given over the pulpit in the Conference Center just because it doesn’t seem to directly affect you.

I have walked the halls of the UN, sat in on countless discussions from panelists from all over the world as well as participated in meetings with Ambassadors from all over the world and their committee affairs members.  I am answering the current questions on what some of the attacks on the family could be and I do this as a mother, woman of the church and someone who has seen firsthand some very serious attacks on the family.

Families play a profound social role. Social science data proves two nearly incontestable conclusions and these are:

(1) Stable families, founded upon marriage, provide significant benefits for men, women and children.
(2) The breakdown of stable marital structures imposes substantial costs upon individuals and society at large.

It has been asked, who is doing the attacking and what is it? Well, the attacking is coming from the top and worldwide.  Here is a little UN 101. Simply put, leaders from all over the world come together to create documents that once signed, become worldwide guiding policy. Countries that don’t follow the rules determined in these documents can face government sanctions. Right now, a document called the “Post 2015 Agenda” is being negotiated and it will guide UN decisions when it comes to policy for the next 15 years. Currently, no mention of the word “family” has been included in the document. This is extremely dangerous to our rights as parents, families and religions. If the family is not protected in this document, our children and your role as a mother and father WILL be affected. This is a direct and real threat to the family.

Now to tell you about a situation that occurred while we were at the UN with a woman named Kate Gilmore who is the Deputy Executive Director of UNFPA. UNFPA is a very powerful group that has involvement with your children’s curriculum and healthcare.  While we were at the UN a mom in our group asked her a simple question on data collection in our schools in which she responded with this answer:
“….we discovered that for millions and millions of women that marriage is not much better than an arbitrary detention cell; that the kitchen is a torture chamber; that the bedroom is a site for the gravest of human rights violations.  As much as we wish to uphold the responsibility and the burden of parenting to sustain people in that and to preserve the privacy, I am afraid by performance alone, we can neither trust nor leave alone the care of the most vulnerable to anybody who has power over them, whether it be the state, whether it be the church, whether it be the mosque, or the synagogue or unfortunately the family or the marriage.”
 
From this response we can see what the views are on the family from an extremely powerful group within the UN. This was not a pro family/marriage response and these are the types of people who  have influence on what our children are learning.

There are many differing views on education and healthcare. After hearing panelists discus gender neutralization and eugenics, I am not okay with the thought of someone teaching my young and very impressionable child that it is okay to experiment with their bodies or to reverse their gender and have procedures that can permanently alter their biological makeup without the consent of an adult. Having a teenager make that sort of commitment without the counsel of the people who care and love them most is pretty scary.

What happens if one of our children end up pregnant in high school even though we did everything possible to teach her correct principles? Can you imagine her going to an abortion clinic and ending the life of her unborn baby, leaving her alone to deal with all that comes after an abortion emotionally and physically on her own? Do you know the statistics on abortions? The rate of depression and suicide sky rocket in women/girls who go through an abortion. An abortion also puts her future chances of conceiving at risk.  Your daughter can be faced with these issues and countless others without you being able to discuss these life altering things with her. This would happen because a group at the UN decided that the age of consent should be lowered and put a life changing decision in the hands of a child. There will be a time when a mother will have to have consent to attend a gynecological appointment with her daughter. There is a huge push on “Female reproductive rights” which will directly affect the ability for you to parent your young teenage daughters. An attack on the family? I think so.

One of the panels discussed the need to have complete gender neutrality.  The specifics of this is that the ultimate goal would be to completely eliminate gender distinctions. One of the examples given was the need for doctors to treat babies/children neutrally, not as a male or female. No mention would be made as to what sex the child is and it would be up to them to decide on their own as time goes by which they would like to be. It was mentioned that a child's life could be ruined if a healthcare provider mentioned anything that dealt with gender before it had been decided. The fact of the matter is females are generally born with ovaries and males with prostates. Males and females have different growth and developmental milestones and need to be treated as such. I for one want my pediatrician to treat my child according to their biological needs and not some universal gender system.

Another big issue is sterilization. There are women in countries that are dying at home because they refuse to go to a hospital to deliver their baby because they could be sterilized without consent due to government population control. No governmental organization should be allowed the power to take away a woman's right to conceive without their consent or knowledge. Another attack that sickens me is forced abortions. We were told a story about a woman in China who was 7 months pregnant (her story is not an isolated incident). She wasn’t supposed to have another child and because of government pressure on local officials who use terrible tactics on pregnant women, she was taken to the hospital against her will for her child to be forcefully aborted. As if the agony wasn’t enough of having a baby growing inside her inhumanely killed, when she could not pay for the disposal of her perfectly formed and viable baby, they left the baby in a clear bag on the side of her recovery bed for her to carry out on her own. I have never seen an image of a woman so broken in my entire life. Forced sterilization and unconsented abortions are an attack on the family.

When talking about the The Family: A Proclamation to the World, we cannot forget that our leaders are not just speaking to people in the United States. We are a worldwide church with brothers and sisters that NEED our support. The Proclamation was not just given to a certain group in a cultural location, it was given to the world.

The disintegration of the family has led to broken homes with youth growing up with absolutely no role models to strengthen them and help them learn what it means to be a good respectful man or woman. When you hear stories of the staggering statistics of rapes that are occurring in African and underdeveloped countries, do you realize that our sweet young women who are working on their personal progress are a part of those statistics? The family unit has been society’s method throughout the ages as the place boys learn to be brothers, sons, men and fathers and girls to be sisters, daughters, women and mothers. People throughout the world are needed to rise up and work alongside each other and do what they can to strengthen the future generation of the children they are rearing and that strength unquestionably comes from a natural family as described in the Proclamation to the World.

I am here to tell you that the attack on the family is very real. It is calculated and well-orchestrated. I witnessed the plans to destroy the very connection that our bodies have with our spirits. Satan knows that the process of attacking the very nature of our being, will bring about ultimate destruction. Attacking the family and our eternal connection to who we were before we came to this earth is Satan’s way of pulling people as far away from our Father in Heaven as possible. The fight between gender equality doesn’t have to destroy the beautiful roles that a man and woman can fulfill within a family. The power within a family unit is unmatched when both the husband and wife fulfill their roles in a complimentary way.

I am very well aware that not all family situations are ideal. There are mothers and fathers out there who are raising their children on their own due to things such as divorce, death or mental illness. Many out there are struggling with infertility and not able to have children of their own despite their desires to have a family of their own but all of us are sons and daughters, brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles and part of a family. We have the ability to strengthen the people around us!

This post is my way of saying I will stand and defend what I hold most dear and sacred, which is my family. I will not sit on the sidelines when I hear leaders who I know are called of God, call us to battle. Just like the women and children in the Book of Mormon who took up arms and fought alongside their men, I too will do all that I can to preserve the basic doctrine of the gospel because I have seen the armies coming and they are not hiding in the hills.