Posted on 08/20/2011 1:53:21 PM PDT by wagglebee
I can’t count the amount of times I’ve been asked what my stance is on contraception. It’s not breaking news that many oral contraceptives and some invasive barrier methods (IUD) have been proven to cause abortion, including the highly controversial ella and Plan B drugs, and I stand firmly against the use of anything that destroys a life created at conception. But what about contraception that prevents conception from taking place?
I’m not the only one who has gotten this question; people want to know how the pro-life movement as a whole feels about this.
In fact, the medical students we reach out to face this question on a daily basis.
This question is a hard one to answer, which is why many avoid it: What is the pro-life movement’s stance on contraception, including methods that prevent conception?
As a physician, what is the right decision to make when a woman asks for birth control? What if she is living below the poverty line, has 3 or 4 children, hasn’t obtained a high-school diploma, and is co-habiting with a man who needs to support her financially? Presumably, she’s aware of the possibility of pregnancy and could be afraid of how she will feed and clothe another child.
What do you say? What’s the pragmatic response here?
Here’s how I think that conversation should be started:
1) Birth Control, no matter what form, doesn’t prevent abortions. In fact, it provides a false sense of security.
The Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s own research arm, released study showing that condoms fail 14% of the time. That’s enough to provide some concern, especially when coupled with the Guttmacher’s own numbers showing that over half of all abortions are on women who were using some method of birth control. This is a cry in the face of pro-abortion propaganda claiming that if women had better access to birth control, abortions would become unnecessary.
Well, clearly not.
Contraception gives women a false sense of security, and condoms and birth control clearly can’t be relied on as a fail-proof method of stopping a pregnancy from occurring.
2) Birth control comes with it’s own complications and risks. It some cases, it’s deadly for both the child and mother.
Aside from condoms, oral and invasive methods of birth control come with their own complications. In addition to blood clots and strokes, chemical contraceptives have been proven to end the life of a preborn human mere hours or days after conception by thinning the uterine lining and making implantation more difficult for the developing person. Invasive methods that are implanted into your upper arm or uterus come with the same set of risks to both the mother and child. The most common form of hormonal contraception, the pill, has been categorized by the World Health Organization as a Group I carcinogen. That’s the highest possible ranking; cigarettes are also Group I.
One only has to read the inserts that come with chemical contraception, listen to commercials for hormonal birth control that spew out a long list of side effects, or glance at Facebook ads calling for women who took Yaz birth control pills to contact a law firm to join the lawsuit (google Yaz and lawsuit!) to grasp the unbelievable amount of life-altering consequences of imbibing hormonal birth control.
3) Condoms and birth control are everywhere. You can obtain them for free, yet the abortion and STD rate hasn’t fallen.
Planned Parenthood and county health departments have been giving out free condoms and birth control for years. Yet, the unplanned pregnancy, abortion, and STD rate in America has failed to fall and, in the case of STDs, has significantly increased. Despite this evidence, the Obama Administration just issued a new ruling forcing all health insurance plans to cover birth control with no deductible.
What’s even more scary is that Planned Parenthood knows this. They actually rely on the failure of the contraception they provide to increase their abortion profits.
4) Finally, and most importantly, birth control – in any form – is a Band-Aid.
It seems like the best way to answer the question regarding the pro-life stance on contraception is to emphasize helping women as a whole instead of handing out a temporary “fix”.
Dolling out free condoms isn’t social justice. Handing over a pack of pills to an uneducated mother living in poverty with a man who doesn’t respect her enough to marry her isn’t restoring proper relationships in her life. At the end of the day, what have you accomplished? You’ve just acknowledged her tragic situation by implying, “I don’t know how to help you”, or, “I don’t have time to help you, but here, use these and hope for the best.”
Protecting women from the scarring trauma of abortion and repairing broken relationships in her life seem to be the best way the pro-life movement can restore true social justice – Christian justice – to this woman’s life.
These are my thoughts on how we can make a real impact, but the pro-life movement needs to come together and agree on one answer to this question. Unity will only help us protect more women and the pre-born from the injustice of abortion.
ok - well, again, I’m not sure what to say.
Internet forums get heated.
I’ve never equated internet debate with the “real world”.
I’ve never heard anyone say to me, “well...I was going to vote one way until I saw a buch of nincompoops fighting online, now I’ve changed my vote.”
I think what happens is - people get mad, get their feelings hurt, and they want to lash out.
This is jimrob’s forum. If people don’t like what is going on here - if they think there needs to be a certain set of criteria to be a “conservative”, I guess he’s the one to talk to.
Other than that - people can keep hammering away at each other - or not!
I am surprised that you have no knowledge of the field of Christian Anthropology. It is not something I just made up out of whole cloth. A good example of a work that is centered on Christian Anthropology is John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body.” I am not familiar with a Reformed work on the subject but I do know the principles of Christian Anthropology are not unknown to many of them.
Since it is unfamiliar to you I suppose an apologetic advancing the Trinitarian nature of marriage would be wasted on you.
Your claim that abstinence is not natural and inconducive to a stable marriage would certainly surprise Orthodox Jews. True they do not abstain by religious decree because of family planning but they to abstain because of other reasons. Yet there is nothing to suggest this causes unstable marriages.
You are so lacking in actual knowledge of Catholic teaching and what was Christian teaching till 1930 it is at best laughable. Show me where in any official Church teaching that conception at every possible moment is advocated. True we are to be open to life. So talk to God about how He made sex our method of procreation. But we are not required to have sex the minute our basal body temperatures hit that old YE IS FERTILE line. That would objectify the women and insult the marriage as much as the use of artificial birth control does.
The same mentality that looks on a child as something to be prevented at all costs is the same mentatlity that advocates abortion as a way of taking care of accidents that should have been prevented. Why else are the majority of abortions performed on women who were using a method of birth control. It has also lead to the mentality that a child is some sort of high grade accessory that you can have done up to your liking. So sex selection abortion is o.k. IVF is o.k. Surrogacy is o.k. Fertility treatments which may lead to selective abortions are o.k. Not saying Christians or you believe these are o.k. But that society has embraced these matters as being legitimate.
All of the above deny the basic dignity of the parents and the child. Which is also part of the Christian Anthropology you scoff at.
Not sure what your point is about the welfare system?
As to this “You state ‘It is not a given that a husband will always abandon his family after they have more than a certain number of children. So you yourself recognize the strain on a marriage of more children than you have the resources (financial, emotional, etc.) to raise. But you think that it is ok to call for measures that will destroy marriages through popping out all the children that God intended them to have, or destroy marriage by abstaining from sex because it “is not a given that this will always occur.” Your ill-chosen conditional demonstrate that you are all too aware that this actually occurs all to frequent.”
Learn to comprehend and not jump to conclusions. I have no idea what may or may not cause stress in a paticular marriage. The number of children may whether it is two children or 8 children. The miles a husband has to commute to work may also be stressful to a marriage. So if you told me that the husband driving 75 miles to work each day caused enough stress in the marriage that it ended in divorce I would point out that not all marriages where the husband commuted long distances ended in divorce. It no more means most of them do than your assertion that yes some marriages may experience stress due to the number of children means most of them do. Admitting to a possibility is not admitting to whether that is always or even the majority of the case.
I do agree that if a woman has a large number of children because her husband did think he had to jack rabbit her every time she was fertile and did not respect that the spacing of children was allowed for grave reasons than yes the strain would probably be very great and yes in such a situtation would most likely lead to a breakdown of the marriage. But that is not Catholic teaching. It is not Catholic teaching because it disregards the dignity of the wife by viewing her only as a means to produce children. That is an example of objectification.
Why in the world do you claim I or anyone who raises the Catholic argument against artificial birth control wishes to intefere in a stable marriage? Hyperbole is not attractive. We are pointing out how the use of contraceptives has not lead to a decrease in the abortion rate but rather contributes to that practice. We are speaking of society at large. You know that hook up, STD carrying, gay rights, serial marrying, aborting, fornicating, exploiting of children, and usurping of parental rights society. The one that all Christians are supposed to hold themselves apart from. The one that all Christians are supposed to offer an better vision to.
But our failure to admit that the pill and the sexual revolution it contributed to is a failure to proclaim the Gospel. The use of the pill in a Christian marriage does not lead to any of the above things. I would never say that. But its use within a Christian marriage is a denial of the full self giving love of the spouses to one another as modeled after the Trinity. It is also a distorted reflection of Christ’s love for His bride the Church. It is also a disobedience against the call for wives and husbands to submit to one another fully.
Your failure to understand that is not so unusual. But to claim I am a moral midget because I do grasp that is rather laughable.
I am a sinner who is in need of a Savior. That Savior is Jesus Christ through whom all things were made. Does that make me an amoral human being? I guess to you it must. But it is by Grace alone I am given Salvation. You are not the dispenser of that Grace or any other graces. So I have no heed of your natterings and your claim to superiority. I stand with the Truth. Which is defended and taught by the One, Holy and Apostolic Church.
‘
From the failure of science.
I will keep this simple for you. If you wish to understand Christian Anthropology you must begin with
Imago Dei.
Indeed, while you try to invoke the views of Orthodox Judaism on this subject, from everything I see, their view is rather different. As an example here is an excellent article regarding The Jewish tradition of ambiguity toward premarital sex
You talk about the ills of our society, with which I agree, but then try to pin the cause on the existence of contraceptives, which is a rather broad over-generalization. It also ignores all the other things that lead to these ills. If bankers get paid their bonuses out of federal reserve furnished moola after losing a cool trillion or so, also made up out of federal reserve furnished moola, you can't talk about any personal responsibility in our society at all. Everything pales in comparison with the magnitude of that kind of dysfunction. Saving means nothing in such a society. Productive work means nothing in such a society. No wonder family and sexual responsibility mean nothing. Your only choice is to borrow and hope that it is the bank that has the problem because you owe them a cool hundred million rather than a measly thousand.
Your admission that we are all sinners (except for Vlad here) is a good start. Once we have finally gotten past that little issue we can start to work on the only practical question, which is what we should be doing. Hopefully there is enough of a program of work on which conservatives can agree that theological points on which we disagree are irrelevant. But when you start the debate from a theology that few understand and fewer will agree with, you are headed nowhere.
I don't have any claim to superiority. I merely claim that those here who declare they know an absolute moral truth without investigation of particular circumstances are likely mistaken. It is like the old misunderstood fallacy that the means do not justify the ends. But mostly the end is what determines whether the means are allowable or not allowable. A licensed dentist can extract a tooth because it produce dental health. A drunken thug in a bar cannot do the same. We disdain abortion because it results in a dead foetus. Much of it comes down to the "do unto others..." bit. Now what about when two different ends conflict. Well, we can invoke Menken's law - "if A injures B on behalf of X then A is a scoundrel."
But instead of debating specifics many simple want a formula and then to proclaim that those who don't follow the formula are sinners. Well yeah, as you said, we all are. Now what?
That is not it either. It is the "moral majority" label that got stuck on conservatives. There is a general perception of what that means and it is a perception that really hurts the conservative cause, unless that particular point of view is your cause, above and beyond all others.
Were it about fiscal conservatism and realizing the government is not a fit moral arbiter of much of anything there would be very broad support. But when some claim that they have unique insight into "God's will" and would like to impose that will on others, like the God-given right to strip search teenagers for Advil, the sale will fall through and it will take years to fix the perception.
I live in DC. I have these discussion all of the time. I don't know how to fix it. But if it isn't, then we are going to have a constantly swinging pendulum depending upon which side is perceived as the most offensive at the moment. Right now a certain party is winning that debate, but the balance of revulsion can easily be restored.
I apologize for misunderstanding your intentions. I do not claim that I personally know an absolute moral truth. But I do believe that the Church has such because of the charism granted to Her by Jesus Christ. It is that moral truth that I defend.
There are valid arguments against using artificial birth control within Christian marriage and we will not come to an agreement on that.
The article though was mostly focused on how the use of birth control in society as a whole does not lead to a decrease in abortions.
I realize that the reasons a Christian couple may have for using birth control are most likely in keeping with their faith’s theology. As such they are not going to be the same as those who have what is referred to as a “contraceptive mentality”. They will not see an unplanned child as a mistake to be aborted. They will not put their material wealth above the value of their family. They see children as a blessing.
More and more the world sees children as a burden and it is that thought set that all Christians must counter with the message of Hope in Jesus Christ.
I don’t think you can fix it. There will always be those who claim they have a direct line to God.
The Tea Pary is supposed to be about fiscal conservatism - and the press is still trying to attach the “religious racist whacko” label onto that.
No matter what conservatives do - the msm will apply that label.
It’s just what they do.
That is interesting,that you do not believe that I used to be a Catholic. I remember my classmates amd I giving the nuns a hard time , and having the priest come in to our class and yell at us- on Sun ( although it could have been Sat- I was a kid). I just remember hating it, and not wanting to go.
I also remember kneeling before the Bishop at confirmation, and getting my Catholic name of Rosalina.
I also remember a kid barfing during the first Communion ceremony.It was a smelly ceremony.
I also remember in the old days, women had to wear a little round veil on the head, as you could not enter the Church without one. Men were exempt from that rule.
I remember going into the confessional and saying- “Bless me father, for I have sinned , it has been... since my last confession .” Then I would recite my sins. The priest would tell me how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys I would have to say. I would say it so fast, I was out of there in a couple of minutes.
I remember the stand up, sit, kneel down during Mass.
I even remember , in the old days, the Priest would directly put the Sacrament in your mouth, until they changed it and put it in your hand. I do not know what they are doing lately on that issue.
I also hated the part where I had to shake my neighbors hand during Mass, I was a germaphobe back then ,and still am.
Unless I experienced a complete hallucination, I was very much Catholic from an Italian family.
Also, you stated this:
“Obviously, you have grave doubts about your ability to be a parent if you believe there is a real likelihood that your child would grow up to be like Ted Bundy.
That is what I mean by finding out that I would not like my child as a person, if said child was a creep.
I’m guessing it’s far more likely a child would think you were a creep”
Actually no. My friend’s children ( the good kids) think my husband and I are great. I get along great with my nieces and nephews.
Most of my friends , 3/4 of them, have good kids.Great kids! The other 1/4 of my friends have real problem children. I would never want them as my children, and there was nothing in their upbringing that should have made them turn into the Devil Spawn. But they are devils. I am glad they are not mine.
Abstinence is a great thing to promote, but very hard for most people to do. Were you a virgin before marriage? Have you had sex outside marriage? Humans have weakness. It is part of the human condition.
I am done with this conversation.I want to come home from work and relax. You see, wagglebee, someone has to work and pay for your Social Security, disability, or whatever government income you are on. You seem to have a lot of time on these threads, and quite frankly, I have to earn a living to pay for the 50% of people who do not pay taxes, but get supported by the government. It is just too tiring to deal with those people on these threads after work. It appears to me that the working people come, make a few comments, and leave. The non working people live here. I would rather have a glass of wine, and take a spin on my boat in the water outside my house after work than to deal with this.
Bye, bye.
Yes, these "remembrances" of Catholic upbringing can be found all over the internet.
However, you still fail to address the fact that Catholics have NEVER had Sunday school.
I am curious, when do you first remember being repulsed about shaking hands with the other congregants?
Nevertheless, NONE of this matters because this thread isn't about the Catholic Church or the Church's teachings on contraception, it is about the fact that contraception doesn't decrease abortion. This is a topic which you have yet to address, which is not surprising given your willingness to see infants murdered.
Actually no. My friend’s children ( the good kids) think my husband and I are great. I get along great with my nieces and nephews.
Most of my friends , 3/4 of them, have good kids.Great kids! The other 1/4 of my friends have real problem children. I would never want them as my children, and there was nothing in their upbringing that should have made them turn into the Devil Spawn. But they are devils. I am glad they are not mine.
So, you believe that a quarter of your friends have evil children?
I am done with this conversation.I want to come home from work and relax. You see, wagglebee, someone has to work and pay for your Social Security, disability, or whatever government income you are on. You seem to have a lot of time on these threads, and quite frankly, I have to earn a living to pay for the 50% of people who do not pay taxes, but get supported by the government.
You puerile troll. I am not on any type of government income. I have a very good job as does my wife, I probably pay more in taxes than you make. In addition to this, my family is very wealthy. Nevertheless, if this is your way of bowing out, I can understand why you would want to.
Is personally insulting someone with whom you disagree your idea of a convincing argument?
Bwaaahhaaahaaahaa! You’re on the government dole. Oh, that is priceless! Ahahahahaha! What a much needed laugh that was this morning. I’ll be giggling over that all day. Wagglebee, taking government handouts, waiting in line for his piece of the pie or should I say cheesecake? *snicker* That’s funny stuff!! :0)
I suppose it is so ridiculous as to be laughable. :)
“Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide. No escape from reality”
Intelligent,logical minds say yes.
Fool, de check don’t no more come on the 1st. Where you been boy? The check come on the 5th you must be high to be forgeetin’ that.
Hell, I don't care, I'm just waiting on the hurricane so I can start looting. I've got a couple bottles of Wild Irish Rose and a can of Spam!
Got to have them cigs too. Just don’t light up around the meth lab.
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