Your life matters. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Photo credit: Joonyeop Baek on Unsplash

Your life matters. It matters to me. It matters to God. It matters to your family. It matters because your individual, unique life gives joy and meaning to countless others. This is the most basic fact of life. Always remember it. 

In bouts of depression and despair, remembering that you are wanted by others will always bring you through. Not only is this a source of abiding joy, it’s the best suicide prevention there is. Those, especially, who feel unwanted and purposeless need to know that they are loved. Tell them that their life matters to you. Tell them why it matters. Remind them that it matters to others as well. 

Photo credit: Dan Meyers on Unsplash

When you remind people that their lives matter, you are not speaking empty words only to make them feel better. You are expressing the truth in its deepest and most universal sense. We know it instinctively. We know it by reason. And we know it by God’s revelation. It is one of the last abiding and unifying truths that we can all agree on.

For this reason, those who care about suicide prevention must recoil at the claim that life is meaningless. We should oppose this false idea wherever we encounter it. It’s not enough to whisper it in private conversations. It should also be embedded in medicine, taught in the academy, and framed in our laws. This is nothing less than our duty of love.

Every word or act that says otherwise—that some lives do not matter—is not only a lie, it is an evil word that deprives people of hope and drives them toward suicide. The cheapening of one human life cheapens every human life. It screams meaninglessness to the very people who are most in need of hearing that they matter. 

Against this backdrop of suicide prevention, I was chilled to learn that a new corporation, dedicated to aborting Wyoming children, has adopted the same name as Wyoming’s suicide prevention charity. Wyoming Circle of Hope is a chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. It exists to encourage people with the message that their lives matter. 

But if you Google that name in Wyoming, one of the first sites to pop up is an abortion corporation that exists for the express purpose of bringing surgical abortion to the Cowboy State. Scroll to the bottom of the page and it provides a corporate address: Circle of Hope, 712 H Street NE, Suite 1825, Washington, D.C. That piqued my curiosity. Who in Washington is so interested in aborting Wyoming children? Who wants to say that some lives don’t matter?

Circle of Hope corporate headquarters

The address does not help answer that question. Rather, it is only a run-down, non-descript storefront that serves as an anonymous mail-collection service. It has no office and no staff. But the website does list three “founding members,” who are “highly skilled in abortion delivery services.” 

Julie Burkhart is listed as the Founder. Her sister, Christie Burkhart, and Molly Oakley, are listed as “Founding Board Members.” None of these people is a doctor, none a nurse. Nor do they appear to have any medical or mental health training. Their main qualification is abortion activism. They have worked together for years to bring abortion to towns that were not asking for it.

Sisters Christie and Julie Burkhart

Julie Burkhart boasts of working for seven years with Dr. George Tiller, the notorious late-term abortionist from Kansas. He hired her, first, as a spokeswoman and, later, to run his pro-abortion political action committee. After his 2009 murder, she reopened his abortuary under a new name. Since then, she has opened two others, in Oklahoma City and Seattle. 

If none of the founders has medical qualifications, who will be doing the abortions? There’s no clear answer to that question. But, according to a 2019 article in the Guardian, Burkhart’s Kansas and Oklahoma enterprises have been unable to hire any local doctors. So, doctors are flown in from other states. Chances appear to be good that this pattern will be repeated in Casper.

Out-of-state abortion activists setting up an abortion mill, where out-of-state, anonymous doctors perform assembly-line abortions, do not do much to convey the warmth and meaningfulness of community. Presumably, that’s why Burkhart announced the existence of a 15-member “community advisory board.”

The leader of Casper’s Unitarian Universalists, Leslie Kee, has identified herself as one board member. But the names of the other 14 could not be found. Here, again, like the anonymous mailbox in Washington and the unnamed flying doctor, anonymity is the order of the day.

It is disturbing that a largely anonymous corporation is undermining Wyoming’s suicide prevention efforts by acting as if some lives don’t matter. For the record: you should know without a doubt that your life does in fact matter—now, and even before you were born.