Archive for February, 2015

This man won’t be bullied: Bravo Archbishop Cordileone!

Cathy Ruse, February 19, 2015

It’s not easy swimming against the tide. I am sorry to admit that “pro-life activist” is not always my first response to the cocktail party question.

And standing by your belief in man-woman marriage sometimes feels like holding up a “punch me” sign.

But San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has shown again and again that he is made of the strongest stuff.

Here’s the tick-tock on his latest battle to protect Catholic teaching in Catholic schools:

February 3: The Archdiocese of San Francisco announces proposed changes in teacher contracts telling applicants that if they’d like a job teaching children at one of their schools, they will be expected to uphold and not publicly contradict Catholic moral teaching. In the view of the Archdiocese, this simply codifies the long-established expectation for school employees.

February 17: A group of legislators, all Democrats, writes a letter to Cordileone urging him to stand down, arguing that his plan would discriminate against the teachers and violate their civil rights to “choose who to love and marry, how to plan a family, and what causes or beliefs to support.”

February 19: The archbishop replies. Here is the meat of his letter:

First of all, I always believe that it is important, before making a judgment on a situation or anyone’s action, that one first obtain as complete and accurate information as possible. To this end, a number of documents and videos giving accurate and more complete information about this contentious issue are available on the website of our Archdiocese. I would encourage you to avail yourselves of these resources, as they will help to clear up a lot of misinformation being circulated about it (such as, for example, the falsehood that the morality clauses apply to the teachers’ private life).

The next thing I would like to mention is actually a question: would you hire a campaign manager who advocates policies contrary to those that you stand for, and who shows disrespect toward you and the Democratic Party in general? On the other hand, if you knew a brilliant campaign manager who, although a Republican, was willing to work for you and not speak or act in public contrary to you or your party — would you hire such a person? If your answer to the first question is “no,” and to the second question is “yes,” then we are actually in agreement on the principal point in debate here.

Now let’s say that this campaign manager you hired, despite promises to the contrary, starts speaking critically of your party and favorably of your running opponent, and so you decide to fire the person. Would you have done this because you hate all Republicans outright, or because this individual, who happens to be a Republican, violated the trust given to you and acted contrary to your mission? If the latter, then we are again in agreement on this principle.

My point is: I respect your right to employ or not employ whomever you wish to advance your mission. I simply ask the same respect from you.

This is how you do it. Bravo Archbishop Cordileone!

As the Archdiocesan announcement said: “Catholic schools exist to affirm and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Amen. Let them take their best shot at that goal, and complaining legislators stand aside.

Synod’s chief organizer seized books by top cardinals defending Church’s marriage teachings: report

ROME, February 26, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Allegations have surfaced this week that the lead organizer of the Vatican’s controversial Synod on the Family in October personally intervened to block the distribution of a book distributed by high-ranking cardinals, including Cardinal Raymond Burke, that defended the Church’s teachings on marriage.

Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, general secretary for the Synod of Bishops, who became the focus of much criticism from bishops at the Synod for allegedly “manipulating” the process, is reported to have ordered that the books be seized, despite them having been posted through the official Vatican City State postal service.

The highly respected Vaticanist Edward Pentin, writing for NewsMax on Wednesday, said “reliable and high level sources” had confirmed that the book, “Remaining in the Truth of Christ,” was “intercepted” on the orders of Cardinal Baldisseri on the grounds that it would “interfere with the synod.” Baldisseri was also said to have been “furious” at the attempt to distribute them.

Cardinal Baldisseri reportedly claimed the books were confiscated because they had been distributed “improperly.” Those entrusted with ensuring the books made it into the hands of the Synod bishops, however, insisted that the books had gone through the regular Vatican postal service, and were therefore legally protected material, Pentin reports.

The book includes a set of essays defending and explaining the Catholic teaching on the indissoluble nature of marriage and was intended by its authors as a means of clarifying the discussion.

The book was organized and authored by a group of the Church’s highest-ranking prelates – including Cardinal Raymond Burke, then-head of the Vatican’s highest court, and Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – who were gravely alarmed not only at the “proposal” by Cardinal Walter Kasper but at its positive reception among bishops and Catholic laity.

Cardinal Kasper had shocked the Catholic world at last year’s consistory of cardinals by his “suggestion” that the Church change its practice of withholding Communion from people in “irregular unions,” and by his claim that the pope had approved the proposal. The so-called “Kasper proposal” has since become the focal point of a nearly open civil war in the Church in which decades-long divisions between the “liberal/progressives” and orthodox prelates has been revealed by the world’s press.

At the Rome launch on October 6 of a different book opposing Kasper’s proposal, Cardinal George Pell, a member of Pope Francis’ Council of Nine, said that changing the practice or teaching of the Church would be “disastrous.”

Pentin writes, “Those responsible for mailing the books meticulously tried to avoid interception, ensuring the copies were sent through the proper channels within the Italian and Vatican postal systems.” Pentin added that his sources had “strongly” refuted the claim by the Synod’s secretariat that the books had been distributed “irregularly,” saying they had used the normal postal service that is governed according to Vatican state and international law and is known in Rome for its superior service to the Italian postal system.

Throughout the Synod, rumors circulated broadly among the assembled corps of journalists that the highly anticipated books had failed to reach the bishops and had in fact been confiscated on the orders of the Synod’s leadership. At the time, although this strange story had spread widely, none of the principal parties involved in the book’s publication or distribution were willing to come forward.

That rule of silence appears to still be in place; today none of the book’s authors or editors were willing to speak with LifeSiteNews “on the record” to confirm what had happened, and attempts to reach the Synod office went unanswered. It is public knowledge, however, that only a handful of bishops had been able to obtain a copy during the Synod itself.

Edward Pentin reported yesterday that the story has not stopped circulating in Rome since the Synod, despite having been dismissed at a December press conference by Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi. “Since then the allegations have become more widely known and have been corroborated at the highest levels of the church,” Pentin writes, saying that his sources believe the seized books were likely destroyed.

It is notable that the accusation could have a potential of a criminal liability for unlawful seizure of posted materials. The Vatican City State postal service is a member of the Universal Postal Union, a body under the auspices of the UN, which regulates the postal service practice of 192 member states. One Vatican source told LifeSiteNews today that a first attempt had been made to stop the books being sent by the Vatican Post Office, but that the postal workers had refused to cooperate, saying that it would be “unethical” to tamper with the mail.

Baldisseri, appointed as a permanent Secretary of the Synod of Bishops by Pope Francis, has become a public spokesman for the Kasper Proposal and he was heavily criticized during the Synod by many of the bishops themselves, who complained that the process was being strictly controlled to produce a particular outcome.

At a conference in Rome last month, Baldisseri told delegates that “dogma can evolve” and that the purpose of the Synod was not merely to restate Catholic teaching. He also confirmed that the documents of the Synod, including the highly contested “mid-term Relatio” that had called for the Church to “accept and value” the “homosexual orientation” had been read and approved for publication by Pope Francis.

Pro-Life Doctor Saved a Woman’s Baby Midway Through an Abortion

http://www.lifenews.com

Advancements in science and medical technology have proven to be great gifts to the pro-life movement time and time again. Doctors are able to routinely deliver premature babies at earlier and earlier stages of development. Innovations in sonogram imaging have provided a window to the womb enabling expectant mothers to see their unborn children face to face. We also have the ability to hear the unborn baby’s tiny heartbeat.

These glimpses at the baby’s humanity have inspired countless numbers of mothers to reject abortion and choose life. However, until now, once a pregnant woman selected a chemically-induced abortion, there was little hope that the unborn child would survive.

Now, a new medical advancement is saving lives in a previously unimaginable way. Dr. George Delgado, medical director at the Culture of Life Family Health Care in San Diego, California, has been instrumental in developing a technique to reverse what was the inevitably fatal effect of the RU-486 abortion pill.

Dr. Delgado’s story began when he received a call from a friend in El Paso, Texas, who informed him about a woman who had taken the abortion pill but immediately regretted the decision.

At the 2015 American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) conference, Dr. Delgado told attendees, “I started thinking about my years of experience with progesterone, and how I’d used progesterone to try to prevent miscarriage.” The protocol calls for taking the injectable progesterone as soon as possible after taking the mifepristone.

Dr. Mary Davenport, another pro-life physician at the forefront of this new innovation, explained how chemical abortions involve two drugs:

“Medical [chemical] abortion is actually performed in early pregnancy with TWO pills, the first – RU-486 – mifepristone or Mifeprex, antagonizes the hormone progesterone, which is necessary for pregnancy. This cuts off the nutritional supply to the pregnancy, ending in the unborn baby’s death. One or two days later the woman takes a second pill, misoprostol or Cytotec, which causes uterine contractions and expels the pregnancy. Medical abortion is frequently a horrible experience for the women, lasting up to 2-4 weeks with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hemorrhage, and intense pain.”

The reversal attempts to counteract the first drug, mifepristone, before the second one, misoprostol, is ever given.

Progesterone is a critical hormone during pregnancy, said Delgado. It helps nourish the placenta, keeps the cervix closed, and inhibits contractions. Mifepristone, a progesterone receptor antagonist, acts like a “false key” binding with the progesterone receptor and blocking its activity. This action softens the cervix, makes the uterine wall more vulnerable to contractions, and attacks the placenta, Delgado said.

“I thought, well, maybe we can out-compete [mifepristone] at the receptor [using progesterone],” he said.

At a press conference held at the National Press Club, AAPLOG physicians reported that as of the end of 2014, 78 babies have been born after abortion reversal treatment, with 45 women still pregnant, a 57% success rate out of 223 attempted reversals.

One success story is Andrea Minichini, her boyfriend Chris Caicedo, and their son Gabriel David. Minichini, though still wrestling with the decision, took the first abortion pill, mifepristone, while the abortionist at Planned Parenthood cheered her on.

Instead of taking the second pill the next day, which would induce contractions, she began to look into ways to stop the death of her unborn child. Not surprisingly, the abortion center staff was no help. A local hospital informed her that if she carried the baby to term, he would face severe health issues.

A Google search led her to Dr. George Delgado in San Diego. On December 31, 2014, she delivered a healthy baby boy they named Gabriel David.

“Obviously women are changing their minds and interested in options,” said Delgado.

As noted, Dr. Delgado’s innovations have already saved 78 young lives. And that is just the beginning! AAPLOG recently unveiled a new “Emergency Abortion Pill Reversal Kit,” which they would like to see placed in emergency rooms and urgent care clinics nationwide.

Dr. Davenport observed that there are approximately 200,000 chemically-induced abortions annually in the USA.

Dr. George Delgado will address the National Right to Life Convention this summer in New Orleans, Louisiana. The event will run July 9-11 and also feature keynote speakers Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, John McCormack of the Weekly Standard, NRLC President Carol Tobias, and many more.

For more information, please visit www.nrlconvention.com.

MDs can’t control pain, but now they’re expected to kill?

Brilliant! The same Canadian doctors who are apparently very poorly trained in palliative care, have been given a license to kill by the recent radical ruling of the country’s Supreme Court.

This medical and potentially humanitarian mess is sorted through in a good column in the Toronto Star by Harvey Max Chochinov. From, “Canada Failing on Palliative Care:”

Despite the impressive strides that palliative care has taken — in areas such as pain and symptom management, and sensitivities to the psychosocial, existential and spiritual challenges facing dying patients and their families — at their time of licensure, physicians have been taught less about pain management than those graduating from veterinary medicine.

Once in practice, most physicians have knowledge deficiencies that can significantly impair their ability to manage cancer pain.

Doctors are also not generally well-trained to engage in end-of-life conversations, meaning that goals of care often remain unclear; and patients may not receive the care they want or the opportunity to live out their final days in the place they would want to die…

For 70 to 80 per cent of Canadians, palliative care is not available and hence, not a real choice.

Yikes! And remember, the Supreme Court case legalized both assisted suicide and euthanasia to the dying, disabled, and mentally ill!

This means that doctors who can’t adequately care, will be allowed to kill–assuming they don’t botch it, which can definitely happen:

In the future, how might this kind of scenario play itself out in the many Canadian settings that do not have adequate palliative care? There, the choices will come down to settling for sub-optimal care; dislocating from friends and family to seek out better care elsewhere; or, if one is so inclined, considering medically hastened death.

We are about to become a country that extends patients the right to a hastened death, but offers no legislative guarantees or assurances that they will be well looked after until they die.

Some “choice.” Some “compassion.”

Global population decline in 100 years

BY MARCUS ROBERTS
http://www.mercatornet.com

George Friedman is the Chairman of Stratfor and his (free) Geopolitical Weekly articles often appear in Mercatornet. I always enjoy reading them. He has recently written on demography and the long term implications of a declining world population. “Global Decline and the Great Economic Reversal” is an interesting read and I strongly recommend that you have a look at it. The key points that Friedman makes are the following:

1. Population decline is happening and it is happening around the globe:

In fact, the entire global population explosion is ending. In virtually all societies, from the poorest to the wealthiest, the birthrate among women has been declining.

By the end of this century, Friedman predicts, all countries will be at 2.1 births per woman or below (that is, at or below the rate of replacement).

2. Population decline is irreversible and inevitable:

It is primarily a matter of urbanization. In agricultural and low-level industrial societies, children are a productive asset. Children can be put to work at the age of 6 doing agricultural work or simple workshop labor. Children become a source of income, and the more you have the better. Just as important, since there is no retirement plan other than family in such societies, a large family can more easily support parents in old age. In a mature urban society, the economic value of children declines. In fact, children turn from instruments of production into objects of massive consumption…Children cost a tremendous amount of money with limited return, if any, for parents. Thus, people have fewer children.


3. There is an argument that there will be massive economic dislocation due to a rapidly ageing population (an argument that we’ve made on this blog before):

But the argument is that the contraction of the population, particularly during the transitional period before the older generations die off, will leave a relatively small number of workers supporting a very large group of retirees, particularly as life expectancy in advanced industrial countries increases. In addition, the debts incurred by the older generation would be left to the smaller, younger generation to pay off.

4. The obvious answer to this problem is immigration from countries that still have surplus population. The problem is that for some countries, mainly in Europe and Japan, there is no history of successfully assimilating immigrants.

5. Friedman predicts that as populations contract, GDP per capita will rise, as he believes that GDP will not fall as quickly as productivity will increase:

The capital base of society, its productive plant as broadly understood, will not dissolve as population declines. Moreover, assume that population fell but GDP fell less — or even grew. Per capita GDP would rise and, by that measure, the population would be more prosperous than before.

6. Friedman also emphasises the unprecedented nature of the current reversal of population growth. This is the first time in 500 years that the population will not be growing. As he notes, this will have a massive impact on our economies. In short, he believes that the cost of labour will increase while the cost of capital will decline. He also believes that declining populations will result in declining land values and therefore the decline in the value of housing:

For the first time in 500 years, this situation is reversing itself. First, fewer humans are being born, which means the labor force will contract and the price of all sorts of labor will increase. This has never happened before in the history of industrial man…That would mean that in addition to rising per capita GDP, the actual distribution of wealth would shift…If the cost of money declined and the price of labor increased, the wide disparities would shift, and the historical logic of industrial capitalism would be, if not turned on its head, certainly reformulated.

7. He concludes that the “path to rough equilibrium will be rocky and fraught with financial crisis” and that some countries will fare much worse than others. He ends on a positive note however:

The argument I am making here is that population decline will significantly transform the functioning of economies, but in the advanced industrial world it will not represent a catastrophe — quite the contrary. Perhaps the most important change will be that where for the past 500 years bankers and financiers have held the upper hand, in a labor-scarce society having pools of labor to broker will be the key.

Those are only some of the salient points of what is, overall, an excellent and interesting article. I would like to share some ideas that came to me as I read the piece:

Why can’t rich societies “afford” children? It is interesting that it is an economic inevitability that we have fewer children now because they are no longer economically valuable. Western societies that have lower birth rates are far, far richer societies than they were when birth rates were much higher. You would think that that would make it easier now for us economically to have larger families than our peasant forebears. It would also be interesting to compare the average family size of rural workers against urban dwellers and the upper classes in earlier societies to see if the latter two groups (which had less of an economic imperative for big families) had fewer children. (As a tangential aside, Shannon noted last week it seems to be the wealthier families that have fewer children in New Zealand suggesting it’s not all economic imperative…)

Urbanisation and house prices. The argument that homes will get cheaper with a lower population is not necessarily true if urbanisation keeps on intensifying and a declining population wants to live in the same place. Land as a whole might get cheaper but demand for housing in some places might increase. (I’m thinking of Auckland, New Zealand as an example of this.)

We are entering unknown territory. Friedman assumes that we will reach some population and economic equilibrium in the future (maybe by the end of the century). However, he does not state why this is so. If fertility rates go below replacement rate as they are in so many countries nowadays, is there any guarantee that they will climb to the magic replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman? Not only is the reversal of population growth unprecedented in the last 500 years, I would argue that global population decline is unprecedented throughout recorded history. Before the last 500 years the population may have remained stable as mortality kept pace with large families, but we simply do not know what the result of the world’s population declining. Once people get used to smaller and smaller families, why will this below replacement fertility rate reverse? Friedman suggests a population decline of 20% as an example, but places like Japan are looking at a much greater decline than that.

Loss of the family as the basic unit of society: Allied to this last point, there is a greater loss that is not mentioned in Friedman’s article, the decline of the extended family unit. The end of having numerous cousins, brothers, sisters, aunties and uncles. The rise of “little emperors” or single children not knowing the joy (and difficulties) of having a sibling. As families grow smaller, will their importance as the building blocks of civil society also decline? If so, what will take their place?

How will the aged be supported? Finally, the article does not give an answer for the problem of an ageing, top heavy population. Who will pay for the pensions, healthcare etc of an elderly population? Even if per capita GDP is to rise, taxes will have to significantly rise to pay for the current social welfare schemes. Will the younger, working population agree to that? I think that the problem of an inverse population pyramid will be one of the rocks on the path to a smaller global population in the 22ndcentury.

Whether we reach population equilibrium in that century is, I think, unclear. What such a world means for family life is also unclear.

BASIC QUESTIONS ON PLAN B

The following questions and answers are based on the recent article on Plan B in the February, 2015 issue of the Linacre Quarterly. Feel free to contact the main author, Dr. Chris Kahlenborn with additional questions at drchrisk@polycarp.org

1. Would you say Plan B ever functions as a contraceptive (i.e., prevents sperm from fertilizing egg)?

Ideally, Plan B should be named emergency abortion/contraception instead of emergency contraception, because it has high potential of working as an abortifacient when given prior to ovulation. We noted in our recent paper (Linacre Quarterly, February, 2015), that when given prior to ovulation, Plan B frequently allows ovulation to occur and has no major impact on sperm flow or quality, yet one does not see any evidence of clinical pregnancy. If both sperm and an egg are present and one does not see evidence of clinical pregnancy, then abortion is the most likely mechanism of action. In the minority of cases, when Plan B truly stops ovulation, it likely works via a contraceptive method.

2. Plan B is supposed to “work” if taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. But your paper says if Plan B is taken on the day of ovulation or thereafter, it does not appear to impact a pregnancy. Thus, would you say Plan B is (useless) if taken during or after ovulation?

Yes, it appears to be useless or actually may increase a woman’s risk of getting pregnant when taken on or after the day of ovulation, according to the data presented by Dr. Noe in her 2010 and 2011 studies (Contraception). Other leading researchers such as Dr. Trussell and Davidoff also raise this very real possibility: “it even raises the counter-intuitive but undocumented possibility that Plan B used after ovulation might actually prevent the loss of at least some of the 40% of fertilized ova that ordinarily fail spontaneously to implant or to survive after implantation.” (JAMA, October, 2006). In practical terms this means that while Plan B likely often works by abortion if given prior to ovulation, it has either no efficacy or actually could have a pregnancy enhancing effect if given on the day of ovulation or after.

3. Would you say Plan B also appears to be (useless) if taken by women whose BMI is 30 or higher?

It’s almost useless: Dr. Glasier noted in 2011 (Contraception) that women with BMI’s over 30 who take Plan B have a 400% higher failure rate than women of normal weight.

4. For these and other reasons, are you saying the efficacy of Plan B is inflated (the ACOG efficacy rate of 85 percent is unsupported? and the Noe study estimate of 68 percent could also be too high?)

According to the Noe paper, Plan B is almost 100% effective in stopping clinical pregnancy if given prior to ovulation and 0% effective when given on or after the day of ovulation. This means that the efficacy of Plan B is likely determined by the parameters of the particular study. If researchers place the majority of women in the preovulatory group, then efficacy will be high: conversely, if they place the majority of women in the postovulatory group, efficacy will be low. We can see evidence of this phenomenon in the Noe study where 103 women were placed in the preovulatory group and 45 in the postovulatory group which corresponds almost exactly to their stated efficacy rate of 68% (ie, almost 103/148 or 69.6%).

5. What are implications for rape-crisis centers to hear that Plan B only works if the victim hasn’t ovulated yet?

The Noe study has huge implications for women who have been raped who are told that Plan B makes it harder to become pregnant. The reality is, that most emergency rooms test for pregnancy, but rarely if ever test women’s ovulatory status (ie, by measuring Luteinizing Hormone and progesterone levels). As we noted earlier, top researchers who strongly advocate for Plan B, have noted that Plan B has either no effect or may actually be increasing the risk of pregnancy in cases where a woman has begun or already has ovulated. This has serious implications both ethically and medically. Rape centers who continue to give Plan B without checking ovulation status, are subjecting many woman to a hormonal drug that may actually be increasing their risk of pregnancy all the while claiming that Plan B has an efficacy rate of 85%!

6. What are implications for Catholic hospitals, who believe that Plan B acts like a contraception, when in fact, your paper recommends Plan B be renamed as “emergency abortion/contraception”?

In 1995, then Bishop Myers, accepted what is known today as the Peoria Protocol which in a nutshell states that it is okay to give Plan B to women who have been raped if it is given prior to ovulation, since it is based upon the assumption that Plan B consistently stops ovulation in this phase. Many Bishops have accepted this protocol while other have remained skeptical. Unfortunately, we now know from several large studies such as that of Dr. Croxatto (Contraception, 2004), that Plan B does not consistently stop ovulation. Therefore, the entire Peoria Protocol is based on a faulty premise.

This has immediate and serious implications for Catholic Hospitals because if Plan B is given prior to ovulation it is likely working via an abortive mechanism of action much of the time. Catholic Hospitals who currently use this faulty protocol are likely allowing abortions to occur in their facilities.

7. What are implications of redefining Plan B as an effective abortifacient (versus contraceptive) for purposes of healthcare battles, such as Hobby Lobby/others who do not want to pay for “abortion-causing drugs” in their insurance policies. (In other words, does your study strengthen the hand of Hobby Lobby, et. al.)

Plan B should be redefined as emergency abortion/contraception if given prior to ovulation since abortion appears to be its’ dominant method of action. Women should be informed of this method of action and people who value human life in the earliest stages should not be coerced to give or pay for this type of hormonal abortion.

8. Proponents who claim that Plan B works only as a contraceptive claim that it has little effect upon the endometrium, so therefore it could not cause an abortion? Is this true?

No. Proponents of Plan B often note that Plan B does not appear to have an effect on the endometrium on a histological level. However, we noted in our Linacre paper that when Plan B is taken prior to ovulation, it causes endometrial bleeding within 7 days about 30% of the time, which is gross anatomical evidence of an unstable endometrium. In addition, we noted that there is theoretical evidence that Plan B may cause slowing of tubal transport of the zygote, which theoretically could delay the timing and efficacy of implantation. While there are many different ways in which Plan B may be causing abortion, at this stage it is difficult to determine the exact mechanism of action due to current technological constraints. However, as we noted in our Linacre article, in the future one will probably be able to quantify how frequently Plan B causes abortion by employing the use of sophisticated hormonal assays (ie, Early Pregnancy Factor) which can often detect the presence of pregnancy within 48 hours of fertilization.

Pope laments low birthrate, emphasizes that children are a gift and a joy

Source: Catholic World News

Continuing his series of Wednesday general audiences on the family, Pope Francis spoke on February 11 about children.

“Children are the joy of family and society,” he said. “They are not a problem of reproductive biology, or one of many ways to realize oneself in life, let alone their parents’ possession. Children are a gift.”

“Each is unique and each is unrepeatable; and yet unmistakably tied to his or her roots,” he continued. “You love your child because he is a child, not because he is beautiful, healthy, and good; not because he thinks like me, or embodies my desires.”

The Pope said that the “experience of being a son or daughter allows us to discover the most gratuitous dimension of love, which never ceases to amaze us. It is the beauty of being loved before … Before we have done anything to deserve it, before we can speak or think, even before coming into the world.”

Expanding upon this theme, he added that “being a child is the fundamental condition to know God’s love, which is the ultimate source of this real miracle. In the soul of every child, not matter how vulnerable, God puts the seal of this love, which is the basis of his or her personal dignity, a dignity that nothing and no one can destroy.”

Reflecting on the Fourth Commandment, he said that

a society of children who do not honor their parents is a society without honor, when you do not honor your parents you lose your honor! It is a society destined to fill itself with arid and greedy young. However, even a society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society.

Just think of the many societies we know here in Europe. They are depressed societies because they don’t want children, they don’t have children. The birth rate doesn’t even reach 1%, why? Everyone should think about that and answer it personally.

The Pope added:

As the encyclical Humanae Vitae of Blessed Pope Paul VI teaches, having more children cannot be automatically viewed as an irresponsible choice. The choice to not have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: It is enriched, not impoverished! Children learn to take charge of their family, they mature in the sharing of sacrifices, and they grow in appreciation of its gifts. The experience of joyful fraternity animates the respect and care of parents, who are due our gratitude.

Review Finds Plan B has ‘Significant Potential’ of Causing an Abortion

Source: http://www.all.org

A major scientific review by Christopher Kahlenborn, MD, et al, published last week in the Linacre Quarterly, found that levonorgestrel emergency contraception, also known as Plan B, has “significant potential of working via abortion.” The review also revealed that arguments claiming Plan B is not an abortifacient are not scientifically defensible.

The review states:

Physicians who dispense LNG-EC [Plan B] to rape victims in the preovulatory period . . . are giving LNG-EC at a time in a woman’s menstrual cycle when it has significant potential to work via the death of the embryo. Physicians who dispense LNG-EC in the postovulatory period may be increasing a woman’s risk of becoming clinically pregnant.

“Catholic bishops have been assured, by Plan B proponents, that the drug does not cause an abortion,” stated Judie Brown, president of American Life League. “We now know this is not true. There is a grave risk that preborn human lives are being killed by Plan B, and Catholic hospitals need to immediately halt dispensing these drugs and review their policies.”

The authors of the review concluded that “Catholic hospitals that allow the dispensing of LNG-EC [Plan B] prior to ovulation-especially when given within 48 hours of ovulation-are permitting the use of a drug which has a significant potential of working via abortion. . . . If given prior to ovulation, LNG-EC should be labeled as emergency abortion/contraception.”

Carl Djerassi, father of the pill, dies

February 3, 2015 (MercatorNet.com)

Carl Djerassi, widely dubbed “the father of the Pill”, has died at his home in San Francisco at the age of 91. Though best known for synthesizing the hormone that became the key ingredient of the contraceptive pill, the eminent Stanford University professor emeritus made a number of significant contributions to science and technology.

He was also well-known for his books, plays, art collection and cultivation of artists. Another contraceptive scientist this week called him “a true Renaissance man and scholar”. Stanford President John Hennessy hailed him “first and foremost a great scientist” who with his colleagues “transformed the world by making oral contraception effective.”

In an interview about his latest play last year Dr Djerassi told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was “sick and tired of talking about the pill”, and after 60 years who wouldn’t be? Perhaps also he had lived long enough to be disenchanted with the revolution he helped set in motion, or at least have some doubts about the social changes it fuelled.

As an Austrian-born Jew fleeing Hitler, Carl Djerassi arrived in America in 1939, with his mother, at the age of 16. His parents, both doctors, had divorced when he was six, although they remarried to assist the flight of mother and son from Austria. The marriage was annulled soon after, and the elder Dr Djerassi only emigrated to the US in 1949. Penniless in 1939, young Carl wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt to ask for help and received it in the form of a college scholarship.

He excelled in chemistry and after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a doctorate in 1945 (still in his early twenties) went to work for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba in New Jersey, where he developed the first commercial antihistamine.

In 1949 he was recruited to work for Syntex, a company established in Mexico by American chemist Russell E Marker to synthesize the pregnancy hormone progesterone from the Mexican wild yam. Marker, who pioneered this particular technique, left the company after a dispute with his partners who then hired George Rosenkranz to carry on the programme. It was Rozenkranz who hired the young Dr Djerassi and others.

Djerassi at first successfully led a programme to convert the steroid derived from the yam – diosgenin — into cortisone, then a new drug working wonders for sufferers from rheumatoid arthritis.

Syntex also competed with other drug companies in the hunt for an effective oral contraceptive, their researchers focusing on a synthetic form of progesterone, the hormone which prevents ovulation during pregnancy. This was linked with research on treatments for severe menstrual disorders, infertility and cervical cancer.

In 1951 Djerassi’s group made their breakthrough, synthesising norethindrone, the active ingredient in the first practical (economical and effective) oral contraceptive. Although G.D. Searle and Co actually marketed the first “pill” – following FDA approval in 1960 — Syntex’s product accounted for more than half the oral contraceptive market by the 1970s. In 1951 Fortune magazine headlined: “Syntex makes the biggest technological boom ever heard south of the border.”

Djerassi maintained his connections with the company, becoming president of Syntex Laboratories in Mexico City and Palo Alto, California, and growing wealthy on the strength of his shares in the company. He famously bought 1200 acres near Palo Alto, where he started a cattle ranch, began collecting art, and eventually made half the property over into an artist’s colony in memory of his only daughter, Pamela, an artist who took her own life in 1978.

At the same time he pursued an academic career, joining the faculty of chemistry at Stanford in 1959. Between then and his full retirement in 2002 he published more than 1,200 scientific papers, a rare achievement even by today’s standards, notes the Stanford obituary. It notes also his seminal contributions to molecular research and early computer modelling. In 1968 he founded Zoecon, a company that developed insect controls using modified insect growth hormones.

As a public figure, he was above all an apologist for the pill, travelling widely to promote it and also to defend it against the likes of Germaine Greer — “always a vociferous opponent of the pill,” he noted in a 2007 interview with The Guardian — and Barbara Seaman, whose 1969 book The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill exposed side effects including the risk of blood clots, heart attack, stroke, depression, weight gain and loss of libido.

He was dismissive of such claims – “everything has side effects” – and countered the feminist critique (Why not a male pill?”) by arguing that feminists, above all, should know that women could not trust men to take a pill. Scientifically, he told the Guardian, there was no difficulty; they knew how to make a male pill. But sharing the burden of contraception would take away women’s control over their own fertility, and potentially all the political gains of the previous 50 years.

It’s a comment that sheds quite a lot of light on the effects of the contraceptive revolution. The pill’s “guarantee” of sex without children is also the death of trust between spouses or partners, and between men and women generally. Sex from now on is about negotiation between two people who are (theoretically) equal in power, though equally uncertain of each other’s motives and feelings. And society is reduced to competing camps.

Djerassi’s own life experience perhaps helps to explain why such a miserable state of affairs would seem acceptable. His childhood experience of divorce was echoed in his own two divorces and three marriages. Each divorce was preceded by an affair with another woman – the first arranged when he announced that the woman who would become his second wife was pregnant with Pamela, his first child. (He is survived by her brother, Dale.) These ruptures suggest one reason why “effective contraception” would make good sense not only in terms of the population control for which it was mainly intended but also as a remedy for the social chaos it would cause.

Djerassi conceded that the pill had its downside for women. Its very “effectiveness” (did he ever acknowledge the massive abortion industry it spawned?), he told the Guardian, led men to take it for granted and not bother with condoms – “it is yet another thing that is put on women’s shoulders.” And although it facilitated women’s entry into more professions, it also meant that they postponed childbearing – with all the problems of infertility and unfulfilled dreams that go with that.

We read that in his books and plays he explored the ethical, political and interpersonal dilemmas resulting from science and technology — what really amounts, in the case of the pill, to social engineering. But nothing seems to have shaken his faith in science to provide answers and politics to make use of them. A deeper philosophical or moral perspective is lacking.

In the Guardian interview he said that the flipside of sex without children – that is, children without sex – was the way of the future: we would freeze our sperm and eggs , get sterilised (as he did after his two children were born, as his daughter did at the age of 25 and without children) and check out gametes from the bank when we wanted them later. “Then you might as well forget about contraception. I am absolutely convinced that is the direction in which we’re going in the long run in the Western world.”

Perhaps he was only playing the “agent provocateur” as he liked to style himself, but one would have liked to hear such a clever man, with the hindsight of so many years –not excluding personal tragedy – talk about what was wrong with that direction. What was soul destroying and inhuman about it. It would be too much to expect a confession that the pill itself was a wrong turn, but it is hard to believe that the idea did not occur to him. At least once.

Does the Pill cause abortions?

By Gerard Migeon

https://naturalwomanhood.org/

Even during the wildest times of my youth, I would never have wanted to be the cause of an abortion. Yet, there is a possibility that I have been responsible for one, unaware. How? Because of contraceptive methods that my wife and I used before we knew about the natural methods.

While women’s positions on the legal and moral question of abortion vary, most would agree that full disclosure of the risk of abortion is a basic right of women using contraceptive drugs.

However, studies conducted among women 18-49 in the US[i] and in six European countries[ii] showed that about 8 out of 10 women do not know about the potential of some contraceptives to cause abortion.

The same studies shows that 75 percent of them would want to be informed about any reasonable possibility of this happening, and 3 out of 10 women would choose not to use a contraceptive that would risk causing an abortion.

Let’s look at the facts.

The right to informed consent

Being fully informed by the provider about a drug as potent as hormonal contraceptives is a basic and well recognized right of patients. The World Health Organization recommends that patient information about birth control methods include effectiveness, mechanisms of action, side effects, health risks and benefits, correct use and reversibility. In practice, it doesn’t happen. In general, physicians frequently don’t take the time to inform patients even of the side effects of medication they prescribe[iii], let alone the mechanisms of these powerful drugs.

Preventing implantation of an embryo

In order to reach high effectiveness rates, hormonal contraceptives rely on two main mechanisms: prevention of the fertilization of a woman’s egg (prefertilization effect), and prevention of the implantation of an embryo by the modification of the lining of the uterus (postfertilization effect). The second mechanism is what we’re concerned with here. If ovulation occurs and if the egg is fertilized by a sperm, which sometimes happens, especially with today’s low-dose pills[iv], the resulting embryo will travel to the uterus and attempt implantation. However, scientific literature shows that oral contraceptives, implants, the shot, the patch[v] and IUDs make the lining of the uterus inhospitable to it. It is also clearly stated in the labels of these contraceptive methods[vi].

Is this an abortion?

You may not agree that human life starts at conception, but rather at implantation, when the embryo attaches to the lining of the uterus about six days after conception. In which case, you wouldn’t consider the process described above an abortion. Some studies show that a majority of people believe it does start at conception. But it’s not actually a matter of opinion or belief. In a remarkable scientific paper[vii], Maureen L. Condic, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine, writes:

The scientific evidence supports the conclusion that a zygote is a human organism and that the life of a new human being commences at a scientifically well defined ‘moment of conception.’ This conclusion is objective, consistent with the factual evidence, and independent of any specific ethical, moral, political, or religious view of human life or of human embryos.

Because abortion is legal, this conclusion leaves the user of contraceptives with a personal moral choice about what may happen to the embryo once it is created as a result of the relatively small, yet real, possibility of the failure of a contraceptive’s first mechanism, the prevention of fertilization. But in order to freely exercise this moral choice, a woman has to be informed.

Lack of information

Full disclosure to all women about this possibility seems essential to ensure proper informed consent. Yet women don’t know about these risks, as the table below tells us[viii]. Women in the US are the most informed and only 22 percent of them know. In France (my homeland), it’s only 7 percent. Yet, 72 percent of US women want to know, as in most other countries. And the reality is that if women knew, not all, but a large number of them would not use methods that have a risk of postfertilization effect or abortion.

table informed consent

These facts are important for medical professional to know because they point to a real disconnect between them and their patients. It is also important for our readers to know so that they may be able to make a choice consistent with their moral beliefs.

What to do

If you’re currently using a contraceptive method described above and are concerned with the risk of abortion, here is what you can do:

Check the label of you current contraceptive method
Have a conversation with your spouse/partner
Have a conversation with your doctor about alternatives that guarantee no postfertilization effect
Consider learning about natural methods, which avoid this risk (learn about them here)
Share this article with the hashtag #DiscloseAbortionRisks

Back 25 years ago, my wife would have never used the Pill had she known about these risks. It comforts us both, though, to know that with this article we may help others avoid the same mistake.

Gerard Migeon is the editor of Natural Womanhood, a non-profit that promotes fertility charting so that women know their bodies, and enjoy good health, sexual intimacy, and effective family planning. This article first appeared on Natural Womanhood, a MercatorNet partner site.

Author’s note: I want to thank the following medical professionals for conducting this research and sharing their conclusions with Natural Womanhood: Jokin de Irala, MD, PhD, MPH. University of Navarra, Spain; Cristina Lopez-del Burgo, MD, PhD. University of Navarra, Spain; Joseph B. Stanford, MD, MSPH. University of Utah, USA. For more information about the research, they can be contacted at jdeirala@unav.es, cldelburgo@unav.es ;jstanford@dfpm.utah.edu.

Footnotes:

[i] Clinical sample in Utah and Oklahoma: Dye et al. BMC Womens Health 2005;5:11. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1325031/

[ii] European national representative samples: Lopez-del Burgo et al, Contraception 2012;85:69-77 and Lopez-del Burgo et al, J Clinical Nursing 2013 http://dadun.unav.edu/handle/10171/34346 Spain: Lopez-del Burgo et al, Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol 2010;15:56-61.http://dadun.unav.edu/handle/10171/19107

[iii] SOURCES: Tarn, D.M. Archives of Internal Medicine, Sept. 25, 2006; vol 166: pp 1855-1862. Derjung M. Tarn, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, department of family medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles.http://www.webmd.com/news/20060925/study-doctors-dont-explain-rx-drugs

[iv] http://www.stacommunications.com/journals/cme/2009/09-Sep-09/WNiCRCME.pdf

[v] Hormonal contraception is available in oral contraceptive pills and in newer formulations, including the transdermal patch, the vaginal ring, subcutaneous implants, and IM injections. Prevention of pregnancy is achieved by inhibiting ovulation, fertilization, and/or implantation of an egg. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16567739

[vi] http://www.consciencelaws.org/background/procedures/birth014-002.aspx

[vii] When does human life begin, A Scientific Perspective, Maureen L. Condic, http://bdfund.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/wi_whitepaper_life_print.pdf
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