Contraception - You Deserve to Know

Contraception and Fig Trees

"The root principle of birth-control is unsound. It is a glorification of the means and a contempt of the end; it says that the pleasure which is a means to the procreation of children is good, but the children themselves are no good. 

In other words, to be logical, the philosophy of birth-control would commit us to a world in which trees were always blooming but never giving fruit, a world full of sign-posts that were leading nowhere. In this cosmos every tree would be a barren fig-tree and for that reason would have upon it the curse of God." 

Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Cantaloupes and Other Killers

Jensen Farms cantaloupes have been responsible for sickness and even some deaths.  To date - at least 13 people have died and 72 have been sickened.

The Federal Food and Drug Administration reported in July that 14 U.S. women have died after taking RU-486 and a total of 2,207 reported adverse effects after using the drug.
That makes the abortion pill more dangerous than tainted cantaloupes.
The abortion pill has sickened over 30 times as many people as the melons.

People may ask for Jensen Farms cantaloupes at the grocery store, but no reputable grocer would supply them. There would be dire consequences for those that did.

It just goes to show that if a woman is getting an abortion, concerns for her health and safety go out the window.  Any attempt to protect women from the irresponsible distribution of abortion pills is met with the harshest criticism and opposition. Right now in our country, the lives of people who eat cantaloupes are considered of more value than those of pregnant women and their pre-born babies.

Shockingly even Communist China has more sense than this. Known as one of the greatest abusers of human rights in the world through their brutal one-child, forced-abortion policies, they have expressed concern and taken action to protect women from the dangers of RU-486.



SOURCE: Operation Rescue 
If you find this info compelling here is the full article:  What Killer Cantaloupes and Abortion Pills Say About the Value of Life:

By Cheryl Sullenger

Recently there has been a major food-borne illness outbreak in the United States. The Center for Disease Control has traced the outbreak of listeria, an often fatal bacterial contagion, to cantaloupes grown at Jensen Farms in Colorado. So far at least 13 people have died and 72 have been sickened from eating the tainted fruit.
Authorities have asked that grocery stores pull the Jensen Farms cantaloupes from the shelf. They warn people that if they are not sure where their cantaloupes came from, they should throw them away.

“Honestly, as a nurse, I would tell people don’t eat the cantaloupe until this thing resolves itself,” said Laura Anderko, a Georgetown University public health expert. “This stuff happens because our system is not as tight as it needs to be.”
Contrast the cantaloupe hysteria with the lack of concern over a similar number of deaths caused by the RU-486 abortion pill

The Federal Food and Drug Administration reported in July that 14 U.S. women have died after taking RU-486 and a total of 2,207 reported adverse effects after using the drug.
That makes the abortion pill more dangerous than tainted cantaloupes.

But the official response to these deaths has been to call the drug “safe” and promote it on the market. It seems that the deaths of over a dozen people are only a problem when abortion is not involved. When it is, then the deaths become an acceptable risk.
It seems to us that abortion pills should be treated with at least the same precautions to public health as listeria-laden melons. They should be pulled from the shelf. The public should be warned. The fatal pills should be traced back to the distributor, Danco Laboratories, and destroyed.

If they can do that for dangerous fruit, why not for the more dangerous abortion pill?
Instead, we get Jill June of Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, dispensing the deadly pills over Internet vending machines without even a physician present and spouting nonsense about the so-called “safety” of the scheme.

“It’s the way medical practice is taking place today,” June told the Lincoln Star in January. “The fact is we are providing a service women are asking us to provide. And it’s been proven to be safe and effective.”

In reality, Jensen Farms cantaloupes have been proven to be safer than the abortion pill. While they have killed a similar number of people, the abortion pill has sickened over 30 times as many people as the melons. People may ask for Jensen Farms cantaloupes at the grocery store, but no reputable grocer would supply them. There would be dire consequences for those that did.

It just goes to show that if a woman is getting an abortion, concerns for her health and safety go out the window. Maybe that is because “our system is not as tight as it needs to be.”

Yet, any attempt to protect women from the irresponsible distribution of abortion pills is met with the harshest criticism and opposition.

Shockingly even Communist China has more sense than this. Known as one of the greatest abusers of human rights in the world through their brutal one-child, forced-abortion policies, they have expressed concern and taken action to protect women from the dangers of RU-486.

“Press reports from Henan province and Chengdu relate cases where women narrowly escaped death when excessive bleeding occurred after taking RU-486 without a physician’s supervision,” according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. In 2001, China banned all pharmaceutical sales of RU-486 in order “to guarantee patients’ safety and protect their health.”

Right now in our country, the lives of people who eat cantaloupes are considered of more value than those of pregnant women and their pre-born babies. There cannot be such hypocritical and inequitable treatment of life under the same roof. If our nation is truly one where “all men are created equal” then all human life has value and deserves protection, or none of it does.

• Written by Operation Rescue
• September 30, 2011

1. What could it hurt? 2. How could we have known?

A lengthy article appeared recently in New York Magazine entitled “Waking Up from the Pill”. Of the various retrospectives on the birth control pill that have appeared in the mainstream media this year — the 50th anniversary of the Pill’s introduction in 1960 — this one, despite several shortcomings, is notable for its in-depth discussion of its often ignored negative side effects.

A Different Sort of Birthday Party

The writer, Vanessa Grigoriadis, begins with an almost mocking description of a 50th birthday party held this fall at a swanky Manhattan hotel, complete with an “enormous cake, with lettering that spells out ONE SMALL PILL. ONE GIANT LEAP FOR WOMANKIND. ONE MONUMENTAL MOMENT IN HISTORY.”

She quotes Kelli Conlin, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, who declares to her fellow partygoers, “Today, we operate on a simple premise—that every little girl should be able to grow up to be anything she wants, and she can only do so if she has the ability to chart her own reproductive destiny.”

Grigoriadis goes on to recount a story shared by the event’s M.C., Cybill Shepherd, about when she started to have sex as a teenager:

“One day, my mom took me to my family doctor. He wrote something on a prescription pad and said, ‘Take one of these every day, and all your periods will be regular.’ ” She laughs heartily. “What a thrill! He didn’t even tell me it was birth control.”

Is it just me, or is there something terribly wrong about a doctor writing a birth control prescription for a teenage girl without even telling her it was birth control?

From “Safe Sex” to “Safer Sex” to “Damage Control”

A few years ago I attended an abstinence speakers’ workshop and heard a talk by Dr. Meg Meeker, a pediatrician and author of Your Kids at Risk: How Teen Sex Threatens Our Sons and Daughters.

At one time, as a matter of course she had prescribed birth control to her teenage patients when they requested it.

But then when her patients came back several months later, she witnessed the effects (things like STDs, but even more so, depression and other emotional effects) on them once they became sexually active.

Dr. Meeker has noted how our culture (and with it, the medical profession) has gone from once talking about “safe sex”, to “safer sex”, and is now in “damage control” mode.

This is, of course, due to the tired old assumption that kids are “going to do it anyway”, and that there is exactly nothing parents (or other authority figures like teachers, clergymen, physicians, etc.) can do to stop them. Sure, they know that some of them will end up pregnant or get an STD, but the very best that can be hoped for is to minimize the risk. And so, like the doctor Cybill Shepherd went to as a teenager, many are content to shrug their shoulders and throw birth control at them.

Infertility: “The Pill’s Primary Side Effect”

Grigoriadis spends a great deal of time explaining the connection between the Pill and skyrocketing rates of infertility:

The fact is that the Pill, while giving women control of their bodies for the first time in history, allowed them to forget about the biological realities of being female until it was, in some cases, too late. It changed the narrative of women’s lives, so that it was much easier to put off having children until all the fun had been had (or financial pressures lessened).

Until the past couple of decades, even most die-hard feminists were still married at 25 and pregnant by 28, so they never had to deal with fertility problems, since a tiny percentage of women experience problems conceiving before the age of 28.

Now many New York women have shifted their attempts at conception back about ten years. And the experience of trying to get pregnant at that age amounts to a new stage in women’s lives, a kind of second adolescence. For many, this passage into childbearing—a Gail Sheehy–esque one, with its own secrets and rituals—is as fraught a time as the one before was carefree.

Suddenly, one anxiety—Am I pregnant?—is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? … The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary (physical) side effect.

This is, of course, an inconvenient truth that the major “pro-choice” organizations don’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole:

And ironically, this most basic of women’s issues is one that traditional feminism has a very hard time processing—the notion that this freedom might have a cost is thought to be so dangerous it shouldn’t be mentioned.

Earlier this decade, there was an outcry when the American Society for Reproductive Medicine commissioned an ad campaign on New York City buses featuring a baby bottle fashioned as an upside-down hourglass (around the same time, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist, made headlines with a suggestion that women would be better off having their kids in their twenties and entering the workforce a half-dozen or so years later).

The National Organization for Women called the city bus ads a “scare campaign.” NOW’s president even wrote an editorial claiming that “women are, once again, made to feel anxious about their bodies and guilty about their choices.”

The Pill and Population Control

Grigoriadis also notes in her article a dirty little secret about the Pill that’s all too often overlooked — especially by today’s biggest proponents thereof:

The whole point of the Pill from the beginning has been population control. Even though America was consuming more than 50 percent of the world’s resources in the late fifties (with 6 percent of the world’s population), eugenicist fears of the developing world’s excessive procreation ran rampant during the Cold War.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but call to mind these words on the subject of putative problem of “overpopulation” written by Malcolm Muggeridge:

To me, this is a fantasy. You see, when I was young, people used to say the poor had too many children. Or, at the time of the famine in Ireland, they would say that the Irish had too many children. We were taking the food from Ireland, and the Irish were starving, and we said they were starving because they had too many children.

Now, we who are sated, who have to adopt the most extravagant and ridiculous devices to consume what we produce, while watching whole, vast populations getting hungrier and hungrier, overcome our feelings of guilt by persuading ourselves that these others are too numerous, have too many children.

They ask for bread and we give them contraceptives! In future history books it will be said, and it will be a very ignoble entry, that just at the moment in our history when we, through our scientific and technical ingenuity, could produce virtually as much food as we wanted to, just when we were opening up and exploring the universe, we set up a great whimpering and wailing, and said there were too many people in the world.

It’s pitiful.

Quite so. And we have the Pill to thank for it.

What Does the Future Hold?

After pointing out the increasing number of babies born following IVF and cryogenic egg freezing, Grigoriadis offers a Brave New World-esque glimpse into what the future could hold:

That may be the world to which many are heading—even more medicalized and technologized, where all women freeze their eggs and submit to assisted reproductive technologies, and with it, more complicated choices and questions that bioethecists love to hash over.

Even Carl Djerassi, one of the inventors of the Pill (before he became a Stanford professor, playwright, and sci-fi novelist), has suggested that all forms of birth control will eventually become obsolete and the Pill “will end up in a museum.”

In his imaginings, girls and boys will deposit their eggs and sperm in a reproductive bank to be frozen at 20 or so and then get sterilized.

They’ll want to do this because genetic diagnoses of embryos will become increasingly sophisticated, and no one will want to risk having a child with birth defects, let alone a child of an unpreferred gender or one predisposed to a hairy back. When these people want to have children, either one or six, at 30 or 60 years old, they’ll make a withdrawal from the bank.

In light of this horrifying dystopian vision, recall the masthead that twice appeared in 1921 on Margaret Sanger’s magazine, Birth Control Review — Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.

As Catholic writer Mark Shea has often pointed out, there are Two Phases of History:

1. What could it hurt?
2. How could we have known?

Don’t you wish that years ago there was someone, somewhere, who could have predicted — contra what everyone else in the world seemed to be saying at the time — that widespread acceptance of the Pill (and other forms of birth control generally) would lead to such terrible consequences?

Oh, wait — there was.

SOURCE:

http://networkedblogs.com/byK60

LAGNIAPPE:

http://www.doctor-ian.org/pillvideos.htm
http://iwgazette.co.uk/index.php/2010/11/the-pill-or-not-the-pill-that-is-the-question/9674

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235186/Girls-Pill-demand-Now-teenagers-contraceptive-prescription.html

http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/magazine-promotes-sterilization-for-women-in-their-20%E2%80%99s/

Supermodels or Abortifacients?

Preventing and terminating pregnancies via modern science is soooo cool right now that I can hardly tell the difference between names of supermodels and abortifacients.

Ella? Yaz? Seasonique, Jolessa and Lybrel? I don't know if they need a reality show or a prescription? (Either way I'm sure they'd be difficult to swallow.) But it shows that birth control is not about science. It's public relations.

There's been a media kerfuffle over FDA's pending approval of Ella, a pill that promises to avoid pregnancy even five days after sex. In so many of the articles I've read pro-lifers point out that birth control pills like Ella cause abortions but the drug companies insist they do not. The media idiotically reports the he said/she said of it but rarely gets to the heart of the matter. The drug companies define pregnancy as beginning at implantation, not at conception. If you question who is right, ask them what it is that's being implanted in the uterine wall.

But the media seems to like having Christians argue with doctors because they think it makes the Christians look bad. It furthers the motif of Christians being anti-science. Some have actually raised the specter of the separation of Church and state but that has nothing to do with it. Pro-lifers are arguing science while Big Pharma and the FDA is talking semantics and putting supermodels in birth control commercials promising freedom from mood swings, acne, irritability if only they'll take birth control. Sadly, our culture is siding with the supermodels.


SOURCE:  http://www.creativeminorityreport.com/2010/06/supermodels-or-abortifacients.html 

No copyright infringement intended. All posts are fully cited for source and author. I have provided links back to the original source whenever possible. This information is for my personal, Faith Formation, Confirmation class, OCIC and homeschool referencing.
I am so very grateful to the authors, website and blog owners for sharing this information, commentary, and knowledge.

Contraception & the Language of the Body

What is the language expressed during sexual intercourse? It is the body that says: ‘I give myself to you completely, holding nothing back’ The complete gift of self is given in the most intimate of embraces. There is a sense of vulnerability and full acceptance of the other as two become one.

What does contraception do to that language? Protection is normally something you need against an enemy, not your most closely beloved spouse. Contraception brings the idea of holding something back, namely your fertility from the total gift of self. It treats fertility as some form of disease to be avoided at all costs. Instead, it hinders romance turning the act of love into a barren exploit.

In a word, contraception makes us think there is something deficient with the normal and natural functioning of our reproductive organs. We use the action and then purge out the effects, just like bulimia. If the purpose of sexual intercourse is babies and bonding, this twin purpose is divided and spat out. It is as if we are saying: “I will be the ultimate arbiter of how and when life begins, despite my actions.” In our quest to be permanently in control, we sterilize the most special moments when new life is being welcomed into the world. 

In a word, we lie with our bodies. With our bodies, we say, “I welcome new life into the world.” With our actions, what we really are thinking, “If you get pregnant, I want an abortion.” This leads to a division of the integrity of the act.

SOURCE: http://loveundefiled.blogspot.com/2009/11/contraception-and-language-of-body.html 

No copyright infringement intended. All posts are fully cited for source and author. I have provided links back to the original source whenever possible. This information is for my personal, Faith Formation, Confirmation class, OCIC and homeschool referencing.
I am so very grateful to the authors, website and blog owners for sharing this information, commentary, and knowledge.

What Does Scripture Tell us About Contraception

Bolding is my emphasis.

Prior to 1930, every single Christian denomination held contraception to be sin for married couples.

• The Anglican Church stated in that year that in certain circumstances it could be considered permissible. 

• The Fathers of the Protestant reformation held contraception to be a sin: 

• Calvin said that is should be condemned as monstrous, 
• Wesley held that it was very displeasing to God, while 
• Luther claimed it was worse than incest and adultery. 

In the book of Genesis, we read about Onan who was struck dead by God for his contraceptive act.
Contraception denies the very image of God in man. The one flesh union is unique to marriage. Jesus stated, “What God has put together, let no man separate.” God created us male and female and physically together we image God. God is a family in the trinity.

Contraception leads to radical sexual individualism. The opposite of love is not hate, but self love, individualism, the denial of being created in a relationship. The family is the basic unit of society. It places us towards love, forgiveness. It is the incubator of love. The communion of persons brings us out of ourselves and into the gift of self. Fertility is the challenge to love. It is a call to love. In a relationship we are open to being hurt. Those who sterilise cut out the challenge to love and to follow the invitation to “Be fruitful and multiply.” Contraception is a yes to one's own individualism.

The creation of the universe was a result of the fruitful love of God. God wants us to be fruitful. Married sex is designed to be a reflection of the trinity. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and son. The Holy Spirit is the actual love of father to the son. This love is so really that it is actually another person in the Holy Spirit. This is also reflected in us. Physical love sometimes has be named nine months later with the birth of a child. Spouses share in the image of the trinity. A man shall leave father and mother and cling to a wife and become one flesh.

As sexuality is meant to be unitative, sexual individualism brings hell to earth. Satan's desire for sex is for it to be fruitless. Satan wants things to be devastating and fruitless. Contraception is a key tool of the devil to distort relationships and take away men from God. There are good reasons to postpone babies as we are all called to responsible parenthood. But we cannot distort the icon of the trinity on earth and have good things derive from it. The result of  the mentality of “I can do what I want in my marriage” has brought a wealth of social problems. Since the introduction of the pill, divorces have tripled, cohabitation has soared along with abortion and adultery. Knowledge of sterility brings greater temptation towards adultery and divorce. One man said, “Suicide is worse than murder. When you kill yourself you kill the whole world. When you sterilise yourself, you sterilises the whole world.”

A marriage is not a marriage unless you consummate it. One cannot do this with a condom. When Adam rejoiced “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” he saw in him another person who he could share his life with intimately. In a one flesh union until death, contraceptive acts in marriage are like little divorces. Marriages that don't have children early in marriage, are more likely to have divorces. The divorce rate has paralleled with the rate of contraception. A condom separates the one flesh union. Jesus said that what God joins together, no man should separate.

The pill tells women that they are not complete. They are weak, deficient, diseased if they need a pill every single day. It denies the unique aspect of being a woman and trying to bring life into the world. Sex is meant to have a procreative aspect and share in the co-creative capacities of God.

Freud, a man who was certainly not a friend of Christianity, said that a characteristic common to all perversions was when reproduction is put to one side. This puts contraceptive gratification in this category.
Margaret Sanger knew what birth control would do to marriage, family and the Church. She looked forward to seeing society free from the tyranny of Christianity because she knew that birth control would undermine the authority of the Christian Churches. Hell is radical individualism. It is when everyone lives folded within himself. Everyone lives in profound solitude. When we choose this, we choose our own hell.

Overall, contraception does nothing positive to the sexual act. As a form of radical sexual individualism, it takes couples further away from each other and damages the unitative aspect of intercourse. It brings selfishness, the enemy of true love into a relationship and divides the purposes of sex: babies and bonding into two separate categories. But there is good news: natural fertility awareness is a positive alternative to the practice of contraception.

SOURCE: http://loveundefiled.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-does-scripture-tell-us-about.html 

No copyright infringement intended. All posts are fully cited for source and author. I have provided links back to the original source whenever possible. This information is for my personal, Faith Formation, Confirmation class, OCIC and homeschool referencing.
I am so very grateful to the authors, website and blog owners for sharing this information, commentary, and knowledge.