Monday, October 27, 2008

Under the Influence of Contraception

Family-Life Speaker Links It to Abortion and Divorce

 

ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, JULY 25, 2008 (Zenit.org).

 

Here is an excerpt of a talk titled "Why Contraception Matters: How It Keeps Us from Love and Life," given by Steve Patton, director of the Diocesan Center for Family Life in St. Augustine. The talk is being distributed by One More Soul.

* * *

It used to be, before the contraceptive revolution, that there was a pretty clear and firm connection between sex and marriage. Married people had sex, unmarried people didn’t, or if they did, they more or less knew that they weren’t supposed to. Most everybody knew this.

But over the course of the 20th century, as contraception became more socially accepted, more available, and more effective, all that began to change. By the time the sixties rolled around it was becoming clear, to married and unmarried people alike, that you didn’t have to be married to have sex. Contraceptive practice had made sex into a recreational activity that everyone has a right to.

What did this mean for the unmarried? Well, you probably heard the old saying, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” Widespread acceptance and availability of contraception has led to widespread fornication. Pre-marital sex is now not only socially acceptable, but socially respectable. It’s no different among Catholics. About 90% of engaged couples in the U.S. who come to the Catholic Church for marriage are already sexually active -- 90%. Yes, people do still get married, but in fewer numbers. Why? Well, one of the reasons a man and woman used to get married was to start having sex, and contraception basically removed that as a reason. 

What did the contraceptive revolution do to married people? There are three ways that it led to an increase in divorce rates.

First, it’s the flip side of what I just mentioned: If sex is no longer a reason to get married, then it’s also no longer a reason to stay married. Anyone can have it. It’s pretty much a commodity. But once sex is removed from the portrait of all those things that make marriage unique and valuable, then a married couple at risk will have one less reason to try to make it work. 

Second, widespread contraceptive practice in many cases removed another reason that has traditionally held together married couples, namely, children. There is something to be said for a couple trying to make their marriage work for the sake of the children. But what happens when there are no children? More contraception has led to fewer children, and in many cases to no children at all. Divorces naturally followed.

Third, widespread use of contraception by married couples also led to an increase of adultery. Once you take away one of the greatest fears of extra-marital sex -- which is pregnancy -- you’re going to see an increase of that activity. And when there is an increase in adultery there’s also going to be an increase in divorce.

In net effect, our culture of sterilized sex has made marriage on the whole a less attractive institution to enter into, and an easier institution to get out of. It’s contributed to the demise of millions of marriages, both those that actually took place and those that should have taken place, but never did. 

Death to life

How does widespread contraception lead to declining birth rates? Well if the life-giving potential of sex is pervasively removed from the picture, a cultural mindset is gradually fostered in which children themselves are pervasively removed from the picture. They tend to be viewed not as gifts but as liabilities, spoilers of a pleasurable lifestyle. We might have one or two, if that would be pleasurable to us, but after that the norm is to reject them.

How does widespread contraception lead to widespread abortion? I credit Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse with summing up the motto of our culture of sexual liberation this way, and keep in mind that our culture of sexual liberation was made possible only by our culture of contraception: She says ours is a culture in which, “all adults are entitled to unlimited sexual activity without a live baby resulting.” I’ll say that again, “all adults are entitled to unlimited sexual activity without a live baby resulting.”

What Dr. Morse touches upon is our culture’s prevailing disconnection between sex and babies. Before contraception was king, the prevailing assumption was that a baby was a natural consequence of sex. If you chose to engage in sex, you knew it could result in a baby. You might not have wanted that to happen, but you assumed that it could happen. If a baby did result, it was because of your freely chosen action, and so you were likely, not necessarily, but likely, to feel a certain kind of responsibility toward that child.

The contraceptive revolution changed all that. It led to the prevailing assumption that babies really shouldn’t have anything to do with sex. That is, not unless you wanted a baby to have something to do with sex, not unless you allowed that. Or as Dr. Morse said, not unless you’re into that kind of thing.

Now couples who think this way do know that keeping a baby out of the picture doesn’t just happen by itself; you have to do your part. You have to do something to the sexual act to make sure that a baby won’t be conceived. That’s what, quote unquote, taking responsibility for your actions now means with respects to sexual activity.

But if a couple has this kind of attitude, then when the contraception fails, as it often does, and there’s a pregnancy, they’re not going to tend to think the baby’s there because of their actions. They’re going to tend to think the baby’s there in spite of their actions. In other words, their mindset is not so much that this is their child that they conceived. Rather, they’re going to tend to think it’s an invader that they failed to repel. This kind of thinking is likely to foster quite a different sense of what’s the responsible thing to do next.

Now, I realize, we’re not talking about abortion, yet. Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer, and not everyone who uses contraception goes on to have an abortion when it fails. What I’m saying, though, is that contraception, by its very nature, and as a broad social phenomenon, tends to incline the heart of a nation toward abortion. As John Paul II put it in "Evangelium Vitae," Latin for the "Gospel of Life," the contraceptive mentality strengthens the temptation to abort. Contraception and abortion are not the same thing, but as John Paul put it, they are as closely connected as “fruits of the same tree.”





The Facts of Life & Marriage: Social Science & the Vindication of Christian Moral Teaching

By W. Bradford Wilcox

In 1968, Pope Paul VI released Humanae Vitae, an encyclical affirming the Christian tradition’s ancient and constant moral teaching that contraception is wrong. Sadly, Humanae Vitae came as a shock to many Christians inside and outside the Catholic Church, who thought that the church was ready to accommodate herself to the modern view of marriage as primarily a relational, not procreative, institution.

Indeed, in the wake of Humanae Vitae, the Catholic Church largely lost her ability to successfully convince the American laity, not to mention Christians throughout the West, of the truth and beauty of her moral teaching on matters related to sex and marriage. Three historical, sociological, and intellectual factors help account for this failure.

Three Failures
First, Humanae Vitae came at the worst possible moment in history. The encyclical arrived in the wake of Vatican II, just after the Catholic Church had thrown open her windows to the modern world. Unfortunately, the modern world was then succumbing to the siren song of the sexual revolution, was awash in a pervasive anti-authoritarianism, and inclined to a hedonistic ethic fueled by unprecedented affluence. As the Catholic biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson observed at a forum sponsored by Commonweal magazine, “American Catholics truly became American at [precisely the] moment when America itself was undergoing a cultural revolution.”
In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s ascendancy to the presidency, and their own dramatic increases in educational and economic attainment, Catholics in the United States were coming into their own as independent-minded Americans. With their newfound status, they were less inclined to extend undue deference to the opinions of the Holy Father, and the Catholic Church more generally, especially on matters that would require them to sacrifice their cherished American aspirations to upward mobility and consumer comfort—sacrifices often associated with having a large family. For all these reasons, most American Catholics in the late 1960s and 1970s rejected Humanae Vitae.

Second, and just as ominously, this rejection led many of these same Catholics to call into question their commitment to the whole fabric of Catholic moral teaching on sex-related matters. If the Catholic Church is wrong on birth control, the thinking went, she is probably wrong on divorce and remarriage, premarital sex, and so on. As Johnson, himself a critic of Humanae Vitae observed, “The birth control issue finally initiated many American Catholics into the hermeneutics of suspicion,” a hermeneutics that made them skeptical of all the church’s pronouncements regarding sexual morality.
Indeed, the controversy surrounding Humanae Vitae was, as Andrew Greeley pointed out in The Catholic Myth, “the occasion for massive apostasy and for [a] notable decline in religious devotion and belief,” as many Catholics concluded that the Catholic Church had fallen out of touch with the modern world. This controversy also hurt the church’s ability to speak to the larger Christian community on issues of sexual ethics and family life, as she was seen to be out of touch with the realities of modern marriage.
Third, the mistaken view that the church is hopelessly out of touch, hopelessly inflexible, and hopelessly bereft of compassion on matters related to sex and marriage has been and continues to be advanced by Catholic intellectuals with substantial public platforms. The pronouncements of Charles Curran, Andrew Greeley, Richard McBrien, and other like-minded Catholic theologians and social scientists have only added to the confusion, dissent, and scandal that swirls around Christian moral teaching.
In various ways, and with varying degrees of clarity and honesty, the dissenters argue that the church must accommodate her morality to the ways of the world if she hopes to speak in an authentic way to the experience and concerns of modern men and women. They also argue—and this is important—that the most compassionate route forward for the church is one that leads to changes in her moral teaching. Law must give way to grace, rules must give way to experience, dogma must give way to the Spirit, and the pope must give way to the people.

Accommodationist Error
In the heady decade of the 1970s, when a countercultural tide swept over the Catholic Church and the nation as a whole, and the academy was in thrall to the counterculture, this accommodationist agenda seemed to have a certain plausibility. No longer.
The first problem is that the accommodationist agenda is based on bad social science. When most of these intellectuals were in their prime, the best social science suggested that the ideal posture of the church to “family change,” as it was euphemistically called, was one of acceptance and support. But contemporary social science on the contentious issues of our time—such as contraception, divorce, and cohabitation—suggests just the opposite conclusion. The shifts in sexual and familial behavior to which these dissenters would like the church to accommodate herself have been revealed in study after study to be social catastrophes.

Let me be perfectly clear: The leading scholars who have tackled these topics are not Christians, and most of them are not political or social conservatives. They are, rather, honest social scientists willing to follow the data wherever it may lead. And the data has, as we shall see, largely vindicated Christian moral teaching on sex and marriage. So the intellectual foundation for dissent on moral matters is collapsing.

The second problem with the dissenting agenda is that its moral laxity has been most disastrous for the most vulnerable members of our society: the poor. The poor have paid and continue to pay the highest price for the cultural revolution that Curran, Greeley, McBrien, and others would like the church to baptize.

Let me now offer a summary of the social scientific research on contraception and divorce that illuminates the problems with the accommodationist agenda.

Broken Connection
In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI warned that the widespread use of contraception would lead to “conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality”; he also warned that man would lose respect for woman and “no longer [care] for her physical and psychological equilibrium”; rather, man would treat woman as a “mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.” Why? By breaking the natural and divinely ordained connection between sex and procreation, women and especially men would focus on the hedonistic possibilities of sex and cease to see sex as something that was intrinsically linked to new life and to the sacrament of marriage.

In the United States, Humanae Vitae was the object of unprecedented dissent. Let me summarize the argument of one dissenter on this subject, Andrew Greeley, a priest, Jesuit, and professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. First, Greeley argued that Catholic teaching on contraception does not appreciate that married Catholics rely on sex for bonding, and they should not have to worry about bringing a baby into their lives when they bond.

Second, he claimed that the hierarchy is more concerned about keeping its power, by blindly following church tradition on contraception, than with helping ordinary people. “The problem is the arrogance of power that makes many church leaders insensitive to the problems of ordinary people and heedless of their needs—and of the Holy Spirit speaking through their experiences,” he declared in The Catholic Myth. He even went so far as to suggest that “[messing] around with the intimate lives of men and women to protect your own power is demonic.”

There we have it. The popes’ and bishops’ efforts to uphold the Christian tradition’s consensus against artificial contraception—stretching from the Didache in the first century, through such documents as Calvin’s Commentary on Genesis in the sixteenth century, to at least the Anglican bishops’ notorious decision in 1930—is legalistic, unrealistic, and demonic.

But on this topic, as on others, Greeley does not reconcile his polling data with what he knows the sociological data says about the consequences of widespread contraception in the United States. What does this data tell us? Well, scholars from Robert Michael at Greeley’s own University of Chicago to George Akerlof at the University of California at Berkeley argue that contraception played a central role in launching the sexual and divorce revolutions of the late twentieth century.

Contraceptive Losers
Michael has argued that about half of the increase in divorce from 1965 to 1976 can be attributed to the “unexpected nature of the contraceptive revolution”—especially in the way that it made marriages less child-centered. [1] Akerlof argues that the availability first of contraception and then of abortion in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the crucial factors fueling the sexual revolution and the collapse of marriage among the working class and the poor.

I will focus on Akerlof’s scholarship. George Akerlof is a Nobel prize-winning economist, a professor at Berkeley, and a former fellow at the Brookings Institution; he is not a conservative. In two articles in leading economic journals, Akerlof details findings and advances arguments that vindicate Paul VI’s prophetic warnings about the social consequences of contraception for morality and men. [2] 

In his first article, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1996, Akerlof began by asking why the United States witnessed such a dramatic increase in illegitimacy from 1965 to 1990—from 24 percent to 64 percent among African-Americans, and from 3 percent to 18 percent among whites. He noted that public health advocates had predicted that the widespread availability of contraception and abortion would reduce illegitimacy, not increase it. So what happened?

Using the language of economics, Akerlof pointed out that “technological innovation creates both winners and losers.” In this case the introduction of widespread effective contraception—especially the pill—put traditional women with an interest in marriage and children at “competitive disadvantage” in the relationship “market” compared to modern women who took a more hedonistic approach to sex and relationships. The contraceptive revolution also reduced the costs of sex for women and men, insofar as the threat of childbearing was taken off the table, especially as abortion became widely available in the 1970s.

The consequence? Traditional women could no longer hold the threat of pregnancy over their male partners, either to avoid sex or to elicit a promise of marriage in the event their partner made them pregnant. And modern women no longer worried about getting pregnant. Accordingly, more and more women (traditional as well as modern) gave in to their boyfriends’ entreaties for sex.

In Akerlof’s words, “the norm of premarital sexual abstinence all but vanished in the wake of the technology shock.” Women felt free or obligated to have sex before marriage. For instance, Akerlof finds that the percentage of girls 16 and under reporting sexual activity surged in 1970 and 1971 as contraception and abortion became common in many states throughout the country.

Immiserating Sex
Thus, the sexual revolution left traditional or moderate women who wanted to avoid premarital sex or contraception “immiserated” because they could not compete with women who had no serious objection to premarital sex, and they could no longer elicit a promise of marriage from boyfriends in the event they got pregnant. Boyfriends, of course, could say that pregnancy was their girlfriends’ choice. So men were less likely to agree to a shotgun marriage in the event of a pregnancy than they would have been before the arrival of the pill and abortion.

Thus, many traditional women ended up having sex and having children out of wedlock, while many of the permissive women ended up having sex and contracepting or aborting so as to avoid childbearing. This explains in large part why the contraceptive revolution was associated with an increase in both abortion and illegitimacy.

In his second article, published in The Economic Journal in 1998, Akerlof argues that another key outworking of the contraceptive revolution was the disappearance of marriage—shotgun and otherwise—for men. Contraception and abortion allowed men to put off marriage, even in cases where they had fathered a child. Consequently, the fraction of young men who were married in the United States dropped precipitously. Between 1968 and 1993 the percentage of men 25 to 34 who were married with children fell from 66 percent to 40 percent. Accordingly, young men did not benefit from the domesticating influence of wives and children.

Instead, they could continue to hang out with their young male friends, and were thus more vulnerable to the drinking, partying, tomcatting, and worse that is associated with unsupervised groups of young men. Absent the domesticating influence of marriage and children, young men—especially men from working-class and poor families—were more likely to respond to the lure of the street. Akerlof noted, for instance, that substance abuse and incarceration more than doubled from 1968 to 1998. Moreover, his statistical models indicate that the growth in single men in this period was indeed linked to higher rates of substance abuse, arrests for violent crimes, and drinking.

From this research, Akerlof concluded by arguing that the contraceptive revolution played a key, albeit indirect, role in the dramatic increase in social pathology and poverty this country witnessed in the 1970s; it did so by fostering sexual license, poisoning the relations between men and women, and weakening the marital vow. In Akerlof’s words:

Just at the time, about 1970, that the permanent cure to poverty seemed to be on the horizon and just at the time that women had obtained the tools to control the number and the timing of their children, single motherhood and the feminization of poverty began their long and steady rise.

Furthermore, the decline in marriage caused in part by the contraceptive revolution “intensified . . . the crime shock and the substance abuse shock” that marked the 1970s and 1980s.

Falling on the Poor
One pair of statistical trends illustrates the way in which the social pathologies of the late twentieth century fell disproportionately on the poor. About 5 percent of college-educated women now have a child outside marriage (little change since the 1960s), but about 20 percent of women with a high-school education or less now have a child outside marriage (up from 7 percent in the 1960s).

Why were family decline and attendant social pathologies concentrated among poor and working class Americans? Think of marriage as dependent upon two pillars: socioeconomic status and normative commitment. The poor have less of an economic stake in marriage, so they are more dependent on religious and moral norms regarding marriage. Middle-class and upper-class Americans remain committed to marriage in practice because they continue to have an economic and social stake in marriage. They recognize that their lifestyle, and the lifestyle of their children, will be markedly better if they combine their economic and social resources with one spouse.

So the bottom line is this: The research of Nobel-prize-winning economist George Akerlof suggests that the tragic outworkings of the contraceptive revolution were sexual license, family dissolution, crime, and poisoned relations between the sexes—and that the poor have paid the heaviest price for this revolution. This research suggests that the Catholic Church’s firm commitment to the moral law in the face of dramatic and widespread dissent from within and without is being vindicated in precincts that are not normally seen as sympathetic to Catholic teaching.

This research also suggests that the dissenting agenda advanced by people like Andrew Greeley amounts to a false compassion. Greeley is right to claim that the Holy Spirit speaks through people’s experiences; but a sober look at our experience with contraception reveals that the Catholic Church’s magisterium, and the Christian tradition it conveys, best advances the earthly happiness of men, women, and children, not contraception.

Disordering Divorce
We have considered one of traditional Christianity’s most controversial moral teachings. I now turn to the issue of divorce and remarriage, where once again the church offers a sign of contradiction to the modern world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church aptly summarizes the church’s teaching on divorce and remarriage:

Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. Divorce is immoral . . . because it introduces disorder into the family and into society. This disorder brings grave harm to the deserted spouse, to children traumatized by the separation of their parents and often torn between them, and because of its contagious effect, which makes it truly a plague on society.
The Catechism is making two central points: (1) divorce harms children, and (2) divorce is an infectious social plague that hurts the commonweal. For these reasons, among others, the church condemns divorce and prohibits remarriage.
The church’s seemingly inflexible position on divorce also comes in for serious criticism from the dissenters. Notre Dame theology professor Richard McBrien, for instance, argues that the church’s position makes no allowance for individuals whose marriage falls apart “despite the best efforts of all concerned.” He further argues that this pope does not encourage “the way of compassion” in dealing with Catholics who have divorced and remarried, and does not acknowledge the “traditional Roman principle that laws are ideals to strive for and not standards one can realistically expect to achieve on a day-to-day basis.”
So McBrien’s argument, which echoes the arguments of mainline Protestants in the early twentieth century, boils down to this: The church should dispense with the moral law in an effort to be more compassionate to people in difficult situations. But what we have, once again, is false compassion.
This becomes clear when we take a careful look, once again, at the data. Numerous scholars—from Leora Friedberg at the University of Virginia to Nicholas Wolfinger at the University of Utah—have shown that divorce does in fact function as a social plague. Friedberg showed that passage of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s accelerated the pace of divorce by about 17 percent between 1968 and 1988. [3] Wolfinger showed that a parental divorce increases the children’s chance of later being divorced themselves by more than 50 percent, and is by far one of the most potent predictors of divorce.
We can see that Pope John Paul II is right when he says that divorce “has devastating consequences that spread in society like the plague.” And we can see that McBrien’s attempt to help people in difficult situations greatly increases the chance that their children will wind up in the same difficult situations, which in turn greatly increases their children’s chances, and so on.
But I would like to focus on the other aspect of the church’s teaching, namely, that divorce brings grave harm to children. I am going to focus on the research of Sara McLanahan, a professor of sociology at Princeton (and one of my advisors for my doctoral work there). Like Akerlof, McLanahan is no conservative. In the 1970s, as a divorced, single mother, she set out to show that the negative effects of divorce on children could be attributed solely to the economic dislocation it caused.
But after spending 20 years researching the subject, she came to the conclusion that the social and emotional consequences of divorce also played a key role in explaining the negative outcomes of divorce. She also found that remarriage was, on average, no help to children affected by divorce.
Children’s Benefits
In Growing Up with a Single Parent, written with her colleague Gary Sandefur of the University of Wisconsin, McLanahan argued that the intact, two-parent family does four key things for children. [4] First, children benefit from the economic resources that mothers and particularly fathers bring to the household through work and sometimes family money. Second, children see their parents model appropriate male-female relations, including virtues like fidelity and self-sacrifice in the context of a marital relationship.
Third, because both parents are invested in the child, they spell one another in caring for their children, and they monitor one another’s parenting. This reduces stress, helps to insure that parents are not too strict or too permissive, and makes the intact family much more likely than other family arrangements to forestall abuse. Finally, fathers often serve as key guides to children seeking to negotiate the outside world as adolescents and young adults. Fathers introduce them to civic institutions and the world of work, and provide them with key contacts in these worlds.
McLanahan also argued that stepfathers do not have the history, the authority, and the trust of the children to function—on average—as well as biological fathers.
From the child’s point of view, having a new adult move into the household creates another disruption. Having adjusted to the father’s moving out, the child must now experience a second reorganization of household personnel. Stepfathers are less likely to be committed to the child’s welfare than biological fathers, and they are less likely to serve as a check on the mother’s behavior.
So what effects did she find? Children from divorced families are more likely to drop out of high school: Data from the National Survey of Families and Households showed that children in divorced families had a 17 percent risk of dropping out of school, compared to a 9 percent risk for children in married families, even after controlling for parents’ education and race. Other surveys found similar results.
Girls raised in divorced families are more likely to have a nonmarital birth while in their teens: The National Survey of Families and Households showed this risk to be 15 percent for girls with divorced parents, compared to 9 percent for those with married parents. Again this survey is typical. McLanahan also found that boys raised outside of an intact nuclear family are more than twice as likely as other boys to end up in prison, even controlling for a range of social and economic factors. [5]
McLanahan also explored whether children in stepfamilies did better than children in single-mother families. Bear in mind that by the time she was conducting this latest round of research, she had remarried. Here is what she found: “Remarriage neither reduces nor improves a child’s chances of graduating from high school or avoiding a teenage birth.” In other words, remarriage does not mitigate the devastating social effects of divorce.
More Falls on the Poor
The final point I would like to make about the divorce revolution is that it has fallen, once again, disproportionately on the shoulders of the most vulnerable members of our society. My own research with the National Survey of Families and Households indicates that married couples with a high-school diploma or less education have a 19 percent higher risk of divorce than married couples with a college degree. Other studies show that poor and working-class married couples are much more likely to divorce than are middle- and upper-class married couples.
So, after spending 20 years researching the effects of family structure on children, McLanahan came to this conclusion in Growing Up with a Single Parent:
If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children’s basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal. Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting. The fact that both parents have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child.
This, of course, sounds quite similar to the perennial wisdom of the Christian moral tradition, articulated by figures as various as John Paul II, Calvin, and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Hopeful Notes
The portrait I have painted is sobering. But I would like to conclude on two hopeful notes. We are beginning to see a new openness among intellectuals to the importance of marriage and to the perils of divorce. For a long time, intellectuals were not willing to acknowledge the importance of marriage for children. But the intellectual tide is now turning towards a refreshing willingness to grapple with our children’s toughest social problems in a probing and open-minded manner.
Besides Akerlof and McLanahan, scholars like Linda Waite at the University of Chicago, Robert Lerman at the Urban Institute, Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution, and Norval Glenn at the University of Texas have all underlined the importance of marriage in recent years. Their willingness to speak up on behalf of the unvarnished truth—the truth written on our hearts, and the truth evident for all to see in our statistical models—suggests that the intellectual foundations of dissent are crumbling before our very eyes.
Second, there is a new openness among Evangelical Protestant scholars and leaders to the truth and wisdom of the ancient Christian teaching against contraception. Among others, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary professor Harold O. J. Brown, and Evangelical theologian J. I. Packer have raised serious concerns about the moral permissibility and social consequences of contraception. For instance, in a recent symposium on contraception in First Things, Mohler wrote:
Thirty years of sad experience demonstrate that Humanae Vitae [correctly] sounded the alarm, warning of a contraceptive mentality that would set loose immeasurable evil as modern birth control methods allowed seemingly risk-free sex outside the integrity of the marital bond. At the same time, it allowed married couples to completely sever the sex act from procreation, and God’s design for the marital bond. . . . Standing against the spirit of the age, evangelicals and Roman Catholics must affirm that children are God’s good gifts and blessings to the marital bond. Further, we must affirm that marriage falls short of God’s design when husband and wife are not open to the gift and stewardship of children.
This intellectual opening, itself a product of Evangelical Protestants’ growing appreciation of the ways in which the contraceptive mentality is connected to dramatic increases in sexual promiscuity, divorce, and abortion, represents an important opportunity for orthodox Protestants and Catholics to work together in recovering and rehabilitating Christian moral teaching about sex and the family.
Faithful Christian scholars need to seize this moment, and underline the intellectual power and coherence of Christian moral teaching to Christian colleges and universities, congregations, pastors, and the public square. Above all else, we need to drive home the point that social justice cannot be divorced from Christian moral teaching. More than anyone else, the poor have been devastated by the outworkings of the sexual revolution of the last forty years.
We must make it crystal clear that the church’s commitment to the poor requires nothing less than a vigorous proclamation of the church’s true and beautiful teaching about sex and marriage. In other words, we must make it clear that the preferential option for the poor begins in the home.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Talk given at an Emory University family conference in March 2003.
[2] George Akerlof, Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics CXI (1996); George Akerlof, “Men Without Children,” The Economic Journal 108 (1998).
[3] See Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (Broadway Books), p. 179; Margaret F. Brinig and F. H. Buckley, “No-Fault Laws and At-Fault People,” International Review of Law and Economics 18 (1998), pp. 325–340.
[4] Harvard University Press, 1994.
[5] Cynthia C. Harper and Sara S. McLanahan, “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration,” delivered at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in 1998. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. Bradford Wilcox is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (University of Chicago Press, 2004). 
“The Facts of Life & Marriage” is based on a paper he delivered to the 2004 meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars [www.catholicscholars.org]
Prof. Wilcox is also a fellow at the Institute for Family Values. Please visit their blog, Family Scholars Blog, at www.familyscholars.org 
This article was reprinted with permission from the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of Touchstone Magazine. 




Sunday, October 26, 2008

Humanae vitae at 40


Uploaded on authorSTREAM by frjessie


The façade that Lagman et al. want us to see

By Antonio J. Montalvan II

Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:06:00 06/23/2008

 

MANILA, Philippines - The Honorable Edcel Lagman, Janette Garin, Narciso Santiago III, Mark Llandro Mendoza, Eleandro Jesus Madrona and Ana Theresa Hontiveros Baraquel would have us believe that their bill respects religious convictions and is not pro-abortion. If only they knew whereof they speak. It is an established fact that the connection between contraception and abortion is not only inseparable; there is a close identity between them.

The unnumbered house bill of these honorable representatives that goes under the lengthy title of "An Act Providing for a National Policy on Reproductive Health, Responsible Parenthood and Population Development, and for other purposes," and referred to in brevity as the Consolidated Reproductive Health Bill, quietly passed the House Health Committee in an unprecedented two minutes without any decent discussion or appearance of meeting the requirements of the legislative process. With a seeming inclination to do away with lengthy processes simply to rush its approval, the bill is expected to proceed to plenary without dragging along public controversy.

Either out of naiveté or sleight of hand, the bill declares a stance against abortion. But is it unequivocal? In a bill that avows the promotion of the "full range" of family planning methods, both natural and modern, that anti-abortion stance remains much of a lame proposition. Call it even a myth. We can hardly believe that the bill's authors are ignorant of the inarguable fact that many contraceptives within that full range are abortifacients. And nowhere in the bill does it renounce abortifacients, at the very least.

Not a few contraceptives work by causing early term abortions. The intra-uterine device prevents a fertilized egg from being implanted in the uterine wall. The pill does not always stop ovulation but sometimes prevents implantation of the growing embryo. The new RU 486 pill works altogether by aborting a new fetus, a new baby.

There is a grave contradiction there. Not only is it a contradiction, it is a grievous mistake. By its failure to address abortion as an odious reality in our society, how can our elected representatives claim that they labor for the progress of that society where even new life cannot have the privilege of safety, much less of life? I am convinced that they did this not out of sleight of hand. Respect for life has become an ideological choice, not a natural moral condition for humanity. Without that moral imperative to respect life, the bill cannot even stand behind a façade of "responsible parenthood." For that is what it is, a façade that only cloaks its pro-death capabilities.

I like the manner that Janet Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, argues: We need to realize that a society in which contraceptives are widely used is going to have a very difficult time keeping free of abortions since the lifestyles and attitudes that contraception fosters create an alleged "need" for abortion.

Each year, a million and a half American women seek abortion, in the land where the full range of contraceptives has been available since long ago. As the American societal experience has taught us, abortion is a necessity in the contraceptive lifestyle. Smith tells us: The "intimate relationships" facilitated by contraceptives are what make abortions "necessary." "Intimate" here is a euphemism and a misleading one at that. Here the word "intimate" means "sexual"; it does not mean "loving and close." Abortion is most often the result of sexual relationships in which there is little true intimacy and love, in which there is no room for a baby, the natural consequence of sexual intercourse. Contraception enables those who are not prepared to care for babies to engage in sexual intercourse; when they become pregnant, they resent the unborn child for intruding upon their lives, and they turn to the solution of abortion.

The argument against the concept, often misused by many of our legislators, that contraception is the antidote to abortions and unwanted pregnancies, is a simple one. Contraceptions have been permeating this world for the past 30 years. Within that time, unwanted pregnancies and abortions have not gone down. The argument is clearly fallacious.

Lagman et al. define full range as "Hormonal contraceptives, intrauterine devices, injectables and other allied reproductive health products and supplies [that] shall be considered under the category of essential medicines and supplies which shall form part of the National Drug Formulary and the same shall be included in the regular purchase of essential medicines and supplies of all national and local hospitals and other government health units."

Notice the term "essential medicines." There is at once a pharmacological but social meaning. It is so very classic American contraceptivism. It is part of the pro-death lingo, so careful, polite and tame in its approach so as not to hurt religious sensibilities, yet unmasked by the realities of demographic truth.

If there is a victory that Lagman et al. would have us believe, it is that they have finally abandoned the other myth—that there is a population explosion that can only be arrested by our acceptance of contraceptives, saying that "reproductive health and population development goes beyond a demographic target because it is principally about health and rights," but there is still another fallacy there nonetheless.

Babies are no accident of pregnancy. It is only this that we have to think of when we register our opposition to the bill of Lagman et al. Babies, not contraceptives, are the fuel to our understanding of a healthy society.





Saturday, October 25, 2008

Legislation by popularity contest

A LAW EACH DAY (Keeps Trouble Away) By Jose C. Sison
Friday, October 24, 2008

As a law student and as a lawyer it never occurred to me nor have I ever thought that enactment of laws will be made to depend upon survey results. I always believed that laws are passed for the general welfare and the common good and that legislative power is "limited and confined within the four walls of our Charter". But in case of Reproductive Health and Population Development Act (HB 5043), it appears that the SWS survey result supposedly showing the popularity of the bill is now being used to convince our legislators in the lower house of Congress to pass it. This is indeed quite alarming if not weird.

The power to make laws and to alter and repeal them is assigned by our sovereign people to the Congress of the Philippines consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives. In the exercise of that power they are expected to study and decide on whether the contents of a proposed law are constitutional or not, beneficial or harmful, right or wrong, good or bad for the country and the people they represent. If the bill and its contents are inherently wrong or harmful or unconstitutional our legislators should not enact them into law. The great number of people favoring and supporting said bill and its contents will never make them right and constitutional. Bills are enacted into law because of their inherent validity and integrity rather than popularity.

One of the policies of the RH bill guarantees universal access to modern methods of family planning including the use of artificial contraceptives and devices (Section 2). Time and again it has been pointed out to its sponsors and supporters that some of these artificial contraceptives either block the implantation of, or expel the fertilized egg or ovum (biologically known as zygote) as medical science has already established. In other words they cause abortion which is illegal and punishable under the Revised Penal Code. The bill's proponents have not squarely disproven this fact by another credible medical finding to the contrary. To be sure they even impliedly admit it in the bill which mentions "post abortion complications" .

Furthermore, Section 12, Article II of the Constitution mandates the State to protect the life of the unborn from the moment of conception or the beginning of pregnancy when the egg and the sperm merge at fertilization to form the zygote or the fertilized ovum. The after-effects of these contraceptives and devices that the bill in its section 10 considers as essential medicines to be included in the regular purchase of all local and national hospitals clearly endanger rather than protect the life of the unborn and therefore run counter to this constitutional precept. Indeed this precept was incorporated in our Charter precisely to avert the possible adoption in this jurisdiction of the doctrine laid down by the US Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade (410 US 113 1973) which allows abortion anytime during the first six months of pregnancy. Under the bill, pregnancy is considered some sort of a disease that has to be feared.

Aside from promoting abortion-causing contraceptives however, there are other sections in the bill that apparently violate rights guaranteed by the Constitution or undermines basic and inviolable institutions that should be protected by the State.

Section 12 of the bill requiring reproductive health education of children from Grade 5 to fourth year high school impliedly to enable them to have a "satisfying and safe sex life" described in section 4 apparently interferes with the inherent right and duty of the parents in the rearing and education of their children and the development of their moral character in accordance with their religious beliefs and convictions.

Section 17 compelling employers to provide reproductive health care services, supplies, devices and surgical procedures (including vasectomy and ligation) infringes on the religious beliefs and convictions of individuals especially Catholics whose doctrines give the highest value to human life. The same is true with Section 21 (a) par. 1 that compelling health care providers to provide their patients with health care services which they believe are contrary to the teachings of their religion.

The same Section 21 (a) par. 2 that allows a spouse to undergo ligation or vasectomy without the consent or knowledge of the husband or wife as the case may be, intrudes into and undermines the inviolability of marriage as a social institution and the rights of spouses to found a family in accordance with their religious convictions and demands of responsible parenthood (Article XV Section 3 [1] Constitution) . It also desecrates the sanctity of family life and weakens the family as a basic autonomous social institution founded on marriage.

Worse is Section 21 (a) par. 3 permitting children who are still minors and therefore under parental authority, to seek reproductive health care services without their parents' consent. This clearly undermines parental authority and invades the sanctity of family life. It is manifestly detrimental to the solidarity and total development of family as the foundation of the nation and therefore contrary to the postulates of Article XV Sections 1 and 2 of the Constitution.

Capping the constitutionally objectionable aspects of this bill is the injection of a coercive policy in trying to achieve its hidden goal of population control by family size limitation. It imposes a penalty of imprisonment ranging from 1 to 6 months or fine ranging from P10,000 to P50,000 or both, at the court's discretion. It is clear however from the deliberations of the Constitutional Commission (V Record 41 pp 58-59) that coercive methods limiting family size is definitely prohibited.

Obviously this is the same method being pushed by the foreign groups and foundations that initiated this population control movement to achieve its racist's objective of breeding "quality children" mainly through universal access to abortion. The inclusion of this method in the bill therefore reveals to us its real source.

And so in the deliberations on this bill our legislators should always bear in mind that "the Constitution is the shore of legislative authority against which the waves of legislative enactment may dash, but over which they cannot leap".

THE ONLY HOPE FOR THE PHILIPPINES

by Father James Reuter, S.J.

By her own admission, GMA (Gloria Macapagal Arroyo) rightfully assessed that over the last decades; our republic has become one of the weakest, steadily left behind by its more progressive neighbors.' Forty years ago, we were only second to Japan in economic stature, and way ahead of Singapore , Hong Kong , Malaysia , and Thailand . Today, at our present growth rate, it will take us 30 years to get to where Thailand is. 

1. A population of 160 Million; 

2. Of those, 70 to 90 million (equivalent to our current population) will live below the poverty line; 

3. Our national debt is estimated to be at US$200B (compared to US$28B when Marcos fled, and US$53B today); 

4. We will be competing, not against Thailand or even Vietnam , but against Bangladesh

5. We will be the most corrupt nation in Asia , if not in the world (we're already ranked 11th most corrupt nation by Transparency International) ..

The signs are clear. Our nation is headed towards an irreversible path of economic decline and moral decadence. It is not for lack of effort. We've seen many men and women of integrity in and out of government, NGOs, church groups & people's organization devote themselves to the task of nation-building, often times against insurmountable odds. 

But not even two people's revolutions, bloodless as they may be, have made a dent in reversing this trend. At best, we have moved one step forward, but three steps backward. 

We need a force far greater than our collective efforts, as a people, can ever hope to muster. It is time to move the battle to the spiritual realm. It's time to claim GOD's promise of healing of the land for His people. It's time to gather GOD's people on its knees to pray for the economic recovery and moral reformation of our nation. 

Is prayer really the answer? Before you dismiss this as just another rambling of a religious fanatic, I'd like you to consider some lessons we can glean from history. 

England 's ascendancy to world power was preceded by the Reformation, a spiritual revival fueled by intense prayers. 

The early American settlers built the foundation that would make it the most powerful nation today - a strong faith in GOD and a disciplined prayer life. Throughout its history, and especially at its major turning points, waves of revival and prayer movement swept across the land. 

In recent times, we see Korea as a nation experiencing revival and in the process producing the largest Christian church in the world today, led by Rev. Paul Yongi Cho. No wonder it has emerged as a strong nation when other economies around it are faltering.

Even from a purely secular viewpoint, it makes a lot of sense. For here there is genuine humbling & seeking of GOD through prayer, moral reformation necessarily follows. And this, in turn, will lead to general prosperity. YES, we believe prayer can make a difference. It's our only hope.

Today, we launch this email brigade, to inform Filipinos from all over the world to pray, as a people, for the economic recovery and moral reformation of our nation. We do not ask for much. We only ask for 5 minutes of your time in a day, to fwd this email to your close friends and relatives.

This is the kind of unity which can make a big difference. Of course, if you feel strongly, as I do, about the power of prayer, you can be more involved by starting your own prayer group or prayer center.

We have tried people power twice; in both cases, it fell short. Maybe it's time to try prayer power. GOD never fails. Is there hope? YES! We can rely on God's promise, but we have to do our part. If we humble ourselves and pray as a people, GOD will heal our land. By GOD's grace, we may yet see a better future for our children. 

'If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sins, and will heal their land.'(2 Chronicles 7:14).

If you care for your children and grandchildren, PLEASE pass this on. .. .. 
Let's not just abandon the Philippines

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

THE PHILIPPINE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN OPPOSING THE CURRENT PHILIPPINE CONGRESSIONAL HOUSE BILL NO. 5043

SEC. 12 of HB 5043. Mandatory Age-Appropriate Reproductive Health Education. – recognizing the importance of reproductive rights in empowering the youth and developing them into responsible adults, Reproductive Health Education in an age-appropriate manner shall be taught by adequately trained teachers starting from Grade 5 up to Fourth Year High School. 

What is wrong with this Section of RH 5043?

1) Grade 5 (10-11 years old) and 4th Year High School (approximately 15-16 years old)

This is the Latency Period in the Psychosexual development of a child: 
The fourth stage of psychosexual development in psychoanalytic theory, from about five years to puberty, during which a child apparently represses sexual urges and prefers to associate with members of the same sex. [American Heritage Dictionary] The stage begins around the time that children enter into school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests. The latent period is a time of exploration in which the sexual energy is still present, but it is directed into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions. This stage is important in the development of social and communication skills and self-confidence. [Freud's Stages of Psychosexual Development]
2) From Familiaris Consortio:
Pope John Paul II refers to this time as the years of innocence (Fam. Consot. Para. 36). They deserve to have their innocence protected.
" the family is the securest forum through which to present delicate matters of sexuality. Sex education is not just another form of catechetical instruction, nor does it qualify as education in the strictest term. Education in these delicate matters must be very gradual and only the parent can ascertain where the child is at.”
In (Para. 36) "The right and duty of parents to give education is essential, since it is connected with the transmission of human life; it is original and primary with regard to the educational role of others, on account of the uniqueness of the loving relationship between parents and children; and it is irreplaceable and inalienable, and therefore incapable of being entirely delegated to others or usurped by others.” 
Contributed by: 

TEODORA: IN DEFENSE OF THE AUTHENTIC WOMAN, INC.





A woman for our time?

CATHERINE PEPINSTER


It was one of the most poignant photographss o far of the US presidential race. Sarah Palin, the Republican Party’svice-presidential nominee, cradled herbaby, Trig, in her arms. A classic Madonnaand Child pose. But it was one for which MrsPalin was particularly vilified, simply becauseTrig is a Down’s syndrome baby.
 
Rather than be applauded for the courageand hard work it takes to raise a child withspecial needs, Sarah Palin was, according toCarol Fowler, the chairwoman of the DemocraticParty in South Carolina, chosen becauseher “primary qualification seems to bethat she hasn’t had an abortion”, while CintraWilson, a columnist for the online Salonmagazine, said that Trig was “the anti-abortionplatform that ensures [Palin’s] own politicalambitions”.

Mrs Palin is not the first woman in the publiceye to raise eyebrows over her decisionabout her baby. Cherie Blair chose not to havean amniocentesis test when she was pregnantwith her fourth child, Leo, because of the riskto the baby, despite the relative likelihood ather age of having a child with Down’s syndrome.This was a view that went right againstthe grain. As a newly published report fromthe worldwide charity Down Syndrome Education International (DSEI), reveals, government policy and pressure from themedical establishment has led to screeningfor genetic abnormality becoming the normin Britain. The study by DSEI shows that thisscreening, requiring invasive techniques,leads to miscarriage in between one in 100and one in 50 pregnancies, and that arounda startling 95 per cent of positive screeningsare wrong.

But what the charity is really concernedabout is not just the “normal” babies who arelost through this screening but whether geneticscreening for physical and mentalabilities and disabilities during pregnancy isacceptable. For behind that screening policylies a conviction that abnormality, any deviationfrom the “perfect”, has no place in oursociety. For years the political and medicalestablishment has promoted the idea thatscreening is a sensible, rational option. It isa given that if abnormality is found, then thechild’s life should be terminated. And just howthat view came to be so popular owes its rootsto a woman whose life and work is this monthbeing given what one might call, literally, astamp of approval. Marie Stopes is beinghonoured with a stamp issued by the RoyalMail.

Stopes is, of course,  best known for being a birth-control pioneer. The correspondencebetween Stopes and thousands of letterwriters who contacted her afterpublication of her bestselling volumes, MarriedLove and Wise Parenthood, reveal thedesperation many felt at having large familiesthey struggled to raise, the despairwrought by sexual ignorance, and the compassionfelt by her for their plight. But MarieStopes was not all that she seemed. (Indeedeven her title was misleading. That she wasDr Stopes suggested she had a medical background;in fact she had a PhD in fossilbotany.) Like many of the early pioneers ofabortion and birth control she was a eugenicist.Eugenics, while long associated with NaziGermany, has a lengthy history in Britain. Theword derives from the Greek, meaning wellborn,and its followers advocate the improvementof the human race throughintervention. Its beginnings can be linked toThomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle ofPopulation”, published in 1798, which expressedthe fear that the poor, unless checked,would outstrip food supplies. During the nineteenthcentury, as the size of richer familiesdeclined, followers of Malthus feared that thepoor would start to predominate in society.The solution was segregation of the poor inworkhouses, where husbands and wives were kept apart so that they had no more children.By the beginning of the twentieth century,the belief that those unfit to breed shouldbe stopped from doing so began to grow inpopularity. Preventive methods proposed includedsegregation, sterilisation, euthanasia,and abortion, as well as birth control. Thisdesire to control population was not entirelyfocused on the poor; while the working classesshould limit their families, many eugenicistsand Malthusians were dismayed that themiddle classes were having fewer children.

The well-off woman was seen as shirking herduty by not improving the stock.While the Eugenics Education Society was formed in 1907, it was during the 1920s and1930s that the eugenics movement grew, attractingwell-known intellectuals such as Sydneyand Beatrice Webb and Bertrand andDora Russell. Although the society’s leadinglights were on the left, and an unsuccessfulbill was put forward in 1931 by a Labour MP to sterilise the unfit, there was a certain suspicionamong Labour Party members that eugenicswas focused on eliminating theworking class. As indeed it was: ProfessorF.A.E. Carew, when giving evidence to the1937 Birkett Enquiry into abortion, urged thatthe “slum womb” be abolished.In contrast, as Ann Farmer recalls in hernewly published study of abortion and eugenicsBy Their Fruits, the WestminsterCatholic Federation told the Birkett Enquirythat it was social conditions, not the child,that should be changed. It was a plea thatwent unheeded among the proponents ofabortion. Ann Furedi, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and oneof the staunchest advocates of the right toabortion in this country, revealed in a paperon abortion given at Kent University that policymakers long focused on limiting the childrenof the poor, right up to the passing ofthe 1967 Abortion Act.“Parliamentary discussion of the AbortionAct explicitly discussed its use in preventingunfit mothers from having unsuitable families,”she told the one-day conference. “Contemporarymedical journals discussed thevalidity of legal abortion alongside the needfor a birth control plan for Britain to limitthe numbers of the poor.”Back in the 1930s, as Ann Farmer’s meticulouslyresearched account reveals, a networkof campaigners made up of Eugenics Society members belonged to a wide rangeof other organisations and worked across party political lines, pushing for abortion andsterilisation for just these reasons. 

In the midstof all this was Marie Stopes. Stopes came toprominence in 1918 with the publication ofMarried Love, which had sold 400,000 copiesby 1923. In 1921, she and her husband, theaviator H.V. Roe, set up London’s first birthcontrolclinic in north London and formedthe Society for Constructive Birth Controland Racial Progress. Her views went well beyondan interest in people’s sexual wellbeing.“Are these puny-faced, gaunt, blotchy,ill-balanced, feeble, ungainly, withered childrenthe young of an Imperial race?” she askedthe readers of The Daily Mail in 1919 in anarticle entitled “Mrs Jones does her worst”.“Mrs Jones”, she went on, “is destroyingthe race!” 

The following year, in her book RadiantMotherhood, she urged that “the sterilisationof those 
totally unfit for parenthoodbe made an immediate possibility, indeedmade compulsory.” Marie Stopes’ beliefs affectedher own family. She cut her son outof her will for marrying a short-sightedwoman, outraged at the harm it wouldcause to her own bloodline. “Mary andHarry are quite callous about both thewrong to their children, the wrong to my familyand the eugenic crime.”These beliefs took Stopes to Germany, whereshe attended the Nazis’ Berlin congress onpopulation science in 1935. They were beliefsshe maintained throughout her life, leavingher money to the Eugenics Society andhelping to set up the International PlannedParenthood Federation in the 1950s, arguingthat no society should allow “the diseased,the racially negligent, the careless, the feeble-minded and the very lowest and worstmembers of the community to produce innumerabletens of thousands of warped andinferior infants”.

Such extreme language might seem outdatedtoday, but Stopes would no doubtapprove of the 
screening for congenitalabnormality so heavily promotedby the NHS, whose end result is frequentlytermination. And yet the numbers of childrenwith Down’s is increasing. The number of babiesborn with the condition has risen by25 per cent in the past 15 years in Britain. Accordingto Frank Buckley, chief executive ofDSEI and co-author of the charity’s new report:“More people are living with Down’s syndromethan ever before, with over 600,000across Europe and North America andmaybe 4 million worldwide.”All kinds of reasons could explain the increasein the number of Down’s children.Women are having children later in life, thusincreasing the likelihood of chromosomal abnormality.They feel encouraged to have thembecause other parents and charities have lobbiedhard for better healthcare and better opportunities for their children.

Above all, these figures are a sign that wehave made progress in the twenty-first century– not because of genetic screening butbecause, unlike Marie Stopes, people havelearned that they need not fear those who they deem less than perfect.

Marie Stopes,honoured on a new postage stamp, is well known as a pioneer in the field of contraception.What is less well known is the influence on her work of her belief in eugenics – that bylimiting the numbers of the poor by birth control it would be possible to improve the English ‘race’A woman for our time?The Royal Mail’s stamp featuring MarieStopes: her belief in eugenics took her tothe Nazis’ Berlin congress on populationscience in 1935




Sunday, October 12, 2008

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verific

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Thousands attend Legazpi’s “Prayer-Rally for Life”

LEGAZPI, Oct. 5, 2008—Over 4,000 Albayanos trooped to Penaranda Park to attend the “Prayer-Rally for Life” sponsored by the Diocese of Legazpi City, Friday, October 3.

The Apostolic Vicar, Bishop Lucilo B. Quiambao led the crowd in calling for strong opposition to House Bill 5043 whose principal author is Albay Congressman Edcel C. Lagman.

Students, religious groups and lay people from Legazpi’s three vicariates carried placards opposing the consolidated bill and marched the streets of the city before converging at Peñaranda Park for the speeches and concelebrated Mass.

Dra. Ligaya Acosta, Executive Director of Human Life International – Asia and former DOH employee, delivered an impassioned appeal to all Bicolanos to support the fight against the pending RH Bill up for plenary debate at the House of Representatives.

She said Bicolanos should be conscious of the negative effects of abortifacients and condoms, pills, injectibles, which will severely affect women’s health. She also underscored the bill’s unconstitutionality.

In his homily, Bishop Lucilo Quiambao said the Catholic Church’s position remains unchanging, that “human life begins at conception” as against the bill which adopts the view that life begins at the moment of implantation.

Bishop Quiambao lambasted the RH bill’s clause for mandatory for sex education for children and adolescents, saying that a child does not yet need to know things which are not yet appropriate at one’s age which will lead to promiscuity.

The bishop also cited his opposition to calling contraceptives in the bill as essential medicines.

The participants ended the payer-rally with a candle-lighting ceremony calling on God not to allow the passage of the controversial house bill.

“The Prayer-Rally for Life” was aired over local stations DwBS-AM (Radio Veritas), DZGB-AM and TV-6 Legazpi. (Jose M. Locsin, Jr.)