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/

Feminists' Deep Misunderstanding of The Church

The feminist challenge to the Catholic faith is based upon a deep misunderstanding. Feminists accuse Catholicism of being thoroughly patriarchal. They claim that women have been oppressed since the Church's inception by a male power structure. In the Catholic Church, they charge, men and men alone are the rulers in a hierarchically- based system of pope, bishops, priests, and deacons.

This feminist ecclesiological perspective employs three false premises.
First, it is commonly believed, even among those who are not feminist, that power and authority is something intrinsically tied solely to formal public office.
Second, in order for women to have religious power and authority they somehow must be identified with divinity. It seems that men have more status because God is called "Father" and not "Mother."
Third, it is believed, again even among those who are not feminist, that authentic authority is a legal-juridical category. Here authority is confused with power-essentially the power to set policies and order other people around.

Authority in the Catholic Church cannot be confused with raw juridical power. If ecclesial authority is the power to set policies and rule over others then it is true that women, generally, have had little of this power. But authority is not simply power. Authority, if it is authentic, is first based in the power to give life. The word "authority" comes from the Latin which means the author, originator, source, maker of, or creator of something. Authority is essentially life-giving, thus, God possesses authority . Not only is authority the power to give life, but it is also the moral right of the life-giver to see that his created work is brought to its fulfillment.

The covenant between Christ and his Church, the means of this fulfillment, is intrinsically maritally ordered. This may sound strange to some, but Christ is not effecting salvation alone. It must be said that salvation in the world is effected by Christ with his Church. The foundation of feminine authority rests upon this principle. Christ is a bridegroom, and exists with his bride, the Church, according to the pattern of a one in flesh unity (Eph. 5:32). The sexual differentiation of authority is explicitly denoted by this marital covenant.

Though men and women are both necessary to bestow life, they do not give life in the same way. A most urgent theological task, given the feminist attack on the faith, is to articulate the nature of feminine authority in the Church, that is, the way that Catholic women give life. While their authority is not that of an ordained priest, it is nonetheless an authority equally constitutive of salvation in Christ.

The 1976 Vatican document reiterated for several reasons that women cannot be ordained to the priesthood. First, there is the argument from tradition, namely, that Christ's action in not calling women to be apostles is permanently indicative of the attitude of Christ toward ordaining women. The Church, if she is to remain true to her Lord, is not free to deviate from the norm Christ established. Second, the document points to the practice of the apostles and the early Church in not ordaining women. The next argument has to do with the person of Christ himself and the significance of masculine sexual symbolism in creating a "natural resemblance" between Christ and the eucharistic minister. As the document says, "Christ was and remains a man." Indeed, the male sex of Christ "cannot be disassociated from the economy of salvation."

Most often overlooked is the argument in that in the Old Testament the covenant of salvation took the "privileged form of a nuptial mystery." Many commentators, especially those in favor of women priests, tend to ignore this teaching of the document. Instead they focus on the argument from tradition and complain that it is not sufficiently compelling. However, the nuptial dimension of the covenant of salvation is not only enormously important in establishing why women cannot be priests, but it provides the basis of an authentic feminine ecclesial authority.

In an article published by (Fall 1994), Dennis Michael Ferrara stated that the primary argument of was the argument from tradition: that the "teaching against the ordination of women is the constant and universal tradition of the Church." He thinks the Magisterium has offered little theological support for this position in a "factual tradition." This, of course, can be refuted. However, Ferrara makes a very important statement at the end of his article that the Church's rationale for excluding women from the priesthood "will have to address the central theological issue: the alleged link between the sexual difference and the nature of the priesthood."

The primary life-giving act of Christ, the incarnate Lord, by which his authority is most definitively expressed is that he gave himself up on the Cross. Indeed as the letter to the Ephesians states, "He gave himself up for her" (5:25). He gave himself up for the Church "to make her holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the word to present to himself a glorious church, holy and immaculate, without stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort" (5: 26). Christ and the Church exist in a head-body relation. Christ is not head simply because of raw power, because he dominates, or suppresses, or restricts what he is related to. The word "head" in Greek () can be understood as "overlord" but it also means in the sense of being the source or beginning of something. There are numerous passages in scripture that speak of Christ as the source or vivifying principle of the Church.

Christ is head of the Church, because he is the source of her life. This is the essence of Christ's authoritative headship. The head of the Church exists covenantally in union with the body. A differentiation and unity exists between head and body. The prime symbols of this reality are sexual. Indeed the sacrifice of Christ is the sacrifice of a masculine person. His sacrifice is his unique gift as such. The gift cannot exist apart from the concrete historical person who offers it. He offers it to another, different from himself. This is a covenantally-structured giving and receiving which can only be effectively communicated by symbols that honor its meaning, namely, the nuptial symbols of man and woman.

The nuptial structure of redemption wrought by Christ determines what authority is within the Catholic Church. Authority, because it is life-giving, is fundamentally service. Rooted in the marital structure of the New Covenant, authority entails responsibility for the faith. It is important to understand the nature of this responsibility. As we stated, male and female sexuality, from the very beginning, are the symbols of the covenant. The covenant is dependent upon these symbols and would have no concrete expression without them. From the very beginning of creation man and woman are imbued with salvific meaning-they are sacramental signs. Responsibility for the faith is differentiated according to the sexual symbols of the covenant. The responsibility of ordained men, for instance, exists over and against the feminine Church whose femininity is expressed in the very lives of Christian women.

To the extent that this differentiated responsibility becomes blurred, Christianity itself, as rooted in the meaning of sexuality, ceases to be effectively communicated to the world. To undo the meaning of sexual symbols is to undo the Christian faith. This is why it is doctrinally and theologically wrong to refer to God as a female. The covenant itself exists according to differentiation. God as the creator of nature cannot be confused with his creation and neither can creation be confused with God. Yet God and the world exist in a covenantal relation. Sexual symbols reveal this truth. God is male toward his creation which in turn is feminine in relation to him. Male and female sexuality speak a truth about this transcendent relation. It is not an arbitrary choice of words or simply a matter of historical conditioning from a patriarchal culture that God is referred to with masculine pronouns and called "Father." Masculine symbols speak a truth about the way God gives life. Similarly, nature, or creation, is truly feminine. It is within the feminine essence of nature and the Church that female authority exists. Liturgically and sacramentally women speak the full voice of creation to God.

The feminization of God strikes a blow at the covenantal structure of the Judeo-Christian tradition and takes from women their authentic role. Feminists believe it is necessary to turn God into a woman seeking thereby to imbue women with power that they would not otherwise have. This mistake is based on a non-Christian understanding of reality and authority. Feminists do not understand, or at least do not accept, that authority is shared in a covenantal fashion. Their monistic view of reality collapses all existence into the singular, isolated entity, where everything must be the same, because everything must be made to seem equal. This feminist equalization means that all that exists, and in particular women, must be on the side of divinity in order to be real. If women are considered only on the side of nature they are left disempowered as if their own creative actions are insignificant.

St. Paul provides the formula for understanding this covenantal authority with the words: "In the Lord, woman is not independent of man nor man independent of woman. In the same way that woman was made from man, so man is born of woman; and all is from God" (I Cor. 11: 11-12). This statement is a key to understanding male and female authority. It is important to note that the passage indicates the dependency of men upon women for life. The passage accounts for the differentiation-not simply between men and women-but between male and female authority.

Men are the images of the first Adam-who is the source of the woman. The first Adam is a prophecy of Christ who, in fulfillment of the first Adam, is the source and head of the Church. Women are not heads in this way. They do not stand sacramentally in the place of Christ, the New Adam, as males do, yet they are a true source of life! They are a true source of life that completes the true meaning of male authority, since male authority exists only within, and never apart from, the unity of the one flesh.

Christ is the initiating source of the Church as bridegroom to bride. The Church is the body of Christ, fulfilling him (Eph. 2:23) and completing him, and thus she is his covenantal partner in redemption. Male and female authority is a matter of being entrusted with a responsibility for redemption according to the marital order of this covenant. The sacramental priesthood represents Christ as source of the Church. But this male authority does not exhaust the essence of ecclesial authority. Christ is a man, but he is only fully male through the womanly essence of the Church. Women, and not men, are the effective expression of the Church's feminine authority in the world.

Feminine responsibility for the faith cannot be taken over by a man if the covenantal truth about Christ and the Church is to be made real in the world. This is the truth spoken in the world and to the world in eucharistic worship. Only men can be priests if the truth about Christ's sacrificial headship is to be authentically spoken. However, in eucharistic worship it is the woman, as the center of everything good about creation, who provides the necessary sacramental response by which the one flesh unity of Christ and the Church is historically made present. If the symbols of human sexuality by which the Church worships are altered, the religion itself collapses because its covenantal truth is not effectively communicated.

Authority is about giving life and it is differentiated between men and women. Some may still ask in exasperation, "Well, who do women get to boss around?" Posing the question this way is still to understand authority as the power to control, above and outside of a free covenantal order.

The prime example of feminine authority is Mary, the Mother of God. Her life-giving "yes" began a new creation and by it, she is rendered Queen of Heaven, Queen of Saints, Queen of Apostles. Feminine authority also can be seen residing in one like St. Monica, who exercised authority in calling her son, St. Augustine, to truth and holiness. It is found in early Church martyrs like Ss. Perpetua and Agatha who are actually the protagonists in a contest of wills against their oppressors.

It is seen in the life of St. Margaret Clitherow, who, exemplifying the magistra>, preached the Catholic faith to her husband and defied civil authority by hiding priests in her own home. It is found in the life of St. Teresa of Avila, who, as a sign of the teaching and nourishing Church, reformed a corrupted religious order. It is found in St. Catherine of Siena, who, as a true voice of the , called an exiled pope to courage and guided his return to Rome. Feminine ecclesial authority is seen in the lives of Dorothy Day, Joan Andrews Bell, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It is seen in the countless lives of Christian women who speak and live their feminine responsibility for the faith and who thus call all people, including husbands, priests, and bishops, to live a deeper life in Christ.

There is a lot of work that still needs to be done on the subject of feminine authority. But at least we can begin by realizing that it is a reality in the Church that cannot be confused with the authority of the Catholic priesthood or male ecclesial authority in general. To do so is to kill any notion of an authentic feminine contribution to salvation. The feminists think authority is essentially quantitative power. However, even male authority is not this. As we see, Christ, the Lord, revealed the fullness of his authority in dying on the Cross.

Woman's Authority in the Church - by Monica Migliorino Miller (directly quoted)
Also by Monica Migliorino Miller, Sexuality and Authority in the Catholic Church
H/T to Micaela Swift