Dear President Obama.

President Obama,

It is with great respect for the intensity of your job and the desire I believe that you have to do it with excellence that I write to address a few specific issues with you. While I pray the best for your time in office and hope to see you do many wonderful things on your campaign for 'change' there are a few issues with which I fail to understand your stance. Those are the issues I wish to address in this letter.

Your partnership with Planned Parenthood has brought many questions to my mind. I admit to being shocked and more than a bit outraged by your choice of the word 'punishment' to describe a child. As a young lady of faith I believe every child is a gift despite the circumstances that surround their conception. When challenged with the question of how you would handle one of your own daughters becoming pregnant at a young age you were given an opportunity to impart wisdom to parents in similar circumstances and to say you would not wish your own child to be punished with one was to me a grave disappointment. Your children's children as well as mine are our future as a nation, their lives should be protected. As you fight to protect the would-be mother's I am left wondering, who is protecting those children?

I wish to understand your stance on abortion. As an avid pro-lifer myself it is beyond me as to how you have come to seek a proactive role in furthering abortion. Can you explain this to me? Not only do you wish to continue to allow what I can only describe as the most horrific injustice in our nation to date, but your actions seem to imply that you wish there to be more abortions and with greater ease. Try as I might I cannot come to terms with how you have come to this place. Why do you wish for young girls to be enabled to endure such emotionally and physically damaging acts without so much as the consent of their parent? What good do you feel could come of this?

My own father would have fallen into this category, his birth mother being a mere 15 years of age when she gave birth to him. Would you say that she was punished with him? Does that description not fail to note her own role in her pregnancy? Had she chosen to abort him instead of selflessly giving him up for adoption not only would he not be here today but neither would I, or my two sisters. How many more families have been snuffed out by the offering of 'choice'?

A point of confusion for me is this: if having a child before you're 'ready' is a punishment than what is abortion to the baby? Those of us fortunate enough to understand the conception process and the development of children within the womb know that we are never merely a 'blob of tissues'. So it would seem to me that while you seek to 'protect' these young women (and then men who aided them in getting to this point) it is at the cost and expense of innocent lives.

This brings me to the next issue I seek your clarification on...sex. Even as you have sought to abolish abstinence education I cannot find a valid reason for this decision amongst any of your explanations. Would abstinence until marriage not be the most economic and emotionally healthy way to prevent unwanted pregnancies? If you wish my tax dollars to pay for the abortions of women in our nation and others than why are you fighting to keep those dollars from helping eliminate the need for such procedures?

It is my belief that it is easy to point fingers and say that because there are teens having sex in our nation abstinence education isn't working. But what if even on a small scale it is? What if it is saving the hearts and lives of even 20 kids per school in a year? I know first hand the numbers for my county are much higher than that. I've seen more than 20 kids in 1 classroom make the commitment to abstinence until marriage. But for the sake of argument lets say 20 per school, are not those 20 teens worth it? Was I not worth that?

The message of abstinence-only education was given to me as a teenager and it determined the decisions that I made not only in high school but in college as well. That decision has enabled me to accomplish a great many of my goals and I continue still to work towards more. This includes spending the last 14 months of my career teaching abstinence education in my county. I've seen thousands of teens be impacted by our program and if you continue to eliminate our funding then it will slow our progress, limiting the number of teens we can reach. I honestly believe if you understood the good these programs were doing and took the time to visit one of our classrooms for a week and come to care about the teens in our classrooms the way we do, you're perspective would change.

It is with the heart and desire to respect you as the leader chosen to run my country for the next four years that I seek to understand your decisions. Please, help me reach that goal. I believe that you wish the best for our country and that you will have more opportunities than almost anyone else in our nation to promote change. I only hope that you use that power in the best possible ways and I commit to continue to pray for that throughout your time as president. I do appreciate all your hard work and ackowledge that I would never wish to be in your shoes myself. Thank you for what you do and I hope this letter has challenged you to rethink your stance on life.

Sincerely,
Becca Christensen