A few bloggers I follow always have a “That’s what she said” series and I LOVE them. It’s always a great place to find new articles that often resonate with me. More often than not I want to share them but they are kind of random so they never have a real place to fit in on my blog.

Thus, I’m creating my own “That’s what she said” series.

“How I lost Faith in the ‘Pro-Life’ Movement.” As someone who once considered herself pro-life this spoke to me in so many ways. In order to truly be pro life it means WAY more than anti-abortion.

Obamacare stands to cut abortion rates by 75%. And yet, the pro-life movement has been leveraged in opposition to Obamacare, and most especially in opposition to the birth control mandate. They don’t believe women should be guaranteed access to free contraception even though this access is the number one proven best way to decrease the number of abortions. That access would, to use the rhetoric of the pro-life movement, prevent the murders of 900,000 unborn babies every year.

Heather’s guest post on Momastery. I loved what she had to say, especially the excerpt below. Can’t wait to read her book.

The greatest shock of my life was to discover that the exposure of the very secret that I thought would kill me brought me the greatest relief. It turns out that when you give up on looking good, no one can make you feel bad.

Adoption. Ethics in adoption. It’s all Big Business. The more I know the less I wish I knew (not really, but-yikes). I have been following the discussion for as long as I can remember. Oh how I wish my eyes had been opened before I started. If you are starting out on adoption, or if you have friends/family who are you owe it to them and their possible future children to send them to some of the below links. The conversation has to be had. We can no longer bury our collective heads in the sand.

Jen Hatmaker is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers. After this, she shot to the top of my girl crush list (right after Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, obviously).

What would happen if we reallocated a percentage of the millions we spend on adoption toward community development? What if we prioritized first families and supported initiatives that train, empower, and equip them to parent? This would absolutely be Orphan Prevention, not to mention grief prevention, loss prevention, abandonment prevention, trauma prevention, broken family prevention. What if we asked important questions about supply and demand here, and broadened our definition of orphan care to include prevention and First Family empowerment?

My friend Amanda (she’s my real-life friend y’all, I’ve met her. I’ve talked with her. She’s amazing. Zach makes me distinguish between blogger friends-ones I’ve only “met” online and real-life ones. I have pictures with her, it’s legit.) is brave, strong, beautiful and amazing. You know those moments when you feel like you’re in the presence of greatness? I get that feeling from her right now. Read this. Read about her adoption. Read about the painful choices her family has made to ensure they’ve done everything they can to look their precious son in the eyes and know they did the right thing. She needs our help. Let’s rally around her.

We hope that, after reading our story, you will support us for this simple reason: we will not sign a gag order to protect our former adoption “agency” and their facilitator in return for the easy release of our documents.

Tara Livesay is a blogger you have to follow. I won’t take no as an answer to this. Go to her blog and follow her now. She has written about missions (more on that later) and adoption. She is intimately aware of both. One of my favorite posts she’s done has been this one.

It occurs to me that our western culture of capitalistim, materialism, and consumerism all play a large role in our attitude toward and approach to international adoption. Due to our wealth and ability to provide, sometimes without even realizing it we begin to believe that our material wealth makes us better suited to parent the child of a poor mother. What began as noble and pure and loving can farily easily begin to look a lot more like ethnocentrism and entitlement. 

I have family in missions, I have friends who have went on short term mission trips. I have never went on one because I just felt, for lack of better term, “icky” about them. Jamie has done an awesome job (as has Tara Livesay above) with the issues that can come from missions-both long and short term.

I’m telling you all of this because there is blatant fraud going on in the world of missions and in the name of Jesus. And that bothers me. If you support a missionary, if you’re a church that supports missionaries, if you’re interested in becoming a missionary, you should be pushing for clarity and transparency from the Missions world. Most missionaries will be able to answer your questions without resorting to evasive language and obscure ideas. But if they can’t? That should be a serious red flag and you should feel emboldened to push back until you clearly understand what they’re doing with their time.

Any other links you guys have loved lately?