http://eagnews.org/expert-comprehensive-sex-ed-to-blame-for-increase-in-activity-among-teens/

By: Steve Gunn

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A long decline in the percentage of American teens who are sexually active has leveled off, and an increasing number of teen girls are using the morning after birth control pill on a regular basis, according to the findings of a recently published study.

None of that surprises Valerie Huber, president and CEO of the National Abstinence Education Association.

She says sex education in public schools in recent years has been focused on the assumption that all or most kids are sexually active, which puts pressure on more teens to meet that expectation.

That drowns out the main message students should be hearing – that the best way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease is to put sex on hold during the middle school and high school years, Huber said.

“The recent stall in declines is precisely correlated to the Obama administration’s change in the kind of sex education being given to America’s youth,” Huber wrote to EAGnews in an email.

“A real emphasis should be renewed on sexual delay because it removes all the possible consequences of teen sex, including those that are not the ones people usually think of – pregnancy and STDs. Teens could greatly benefit from messages reinforcing the healthiest choice of waiting for sex.”

Huber was reacting to a new survey on teen sex from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The survey is based on interviews with about 2,000 teens between the ages of 15 and 19, conducted between 2011 and 2013.

The survey revealed that 1 in 5 sexually active teen girls have used the morning-after pill, which was a huge increase from 10 years ago, when the statistic was 1 on 12, according to a news report from the Associated Press.

The most obvious reason for the increase is that the morning-after pill is now obtainable for girls and women of all ages, without a prescription.

Huber cited a lot of facts about the morning-after pill, and she wonders if the many teens who use it are aware of the potential pratfalls.

“Do teens think they are ‘safe’ as long as they use the morning after pill?” Huber wrote. “Do they know that Plan B offers NO protection against the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among young adults?

“Do they think that if they use emergency contraceptions, they are protected from pregnancy? A March, 2015 Princeton meta-analysis showed EC has effectiveness ranging from 62-85 percent, which is far from 100 percent.

“Do they know that if they have a high body mass index, EC may have a decreased or no effect on preventing pregnancy?

“Do they know that the CDC and EC providers warn that Plan B is not intended for use as a routine form of birth control and should not be used in this manner?”

The CDC report also showed that there is no statistical change in the percentage of teens who are sexually active, compared to a decade ago, the news report said. About 45 percent of boys and girls who participated in the study reported being sexually active.

The percentage of teens who were sexually active dropped steadily between the late 1980s and early 2000, but that trend appears to have ended.

Today’s “comprehensive” sex education is responsible for the new wave of sexual activity, according to Huber.

“Is it any surprise that when the predominant message is ‘have sex but use contraception’ that we are beginning to see sexual delay is stalled and even slightly decreasing and multiple partners in teens are increasing?” she wrote.

“Rather than normalizing teen sex, our sex education should promote information and skills that promote optimal sexual health. That means normalizing teen sexual delay.”

http://www.breitbart.com/author/fr-frank-pavone/

Undercover investigators in recent weeks have added to the evidence that we already had that the abortion industry, and Planned Parenthood in particular, sells the body parts of the babies it kills

As one of those who is close to this project through my partnership with Operation Rescue, and who knows the key players in this investigation, I have been asked by some reporters whether these videos represent a new strategy that replaces for the pro-life movement some of the older strategies like showing graphic pictures of aborted babies.

My answer: not at all. On the contrary, these videos fit into a coherent strategy that I and other pro-life leaders have taught for decades and that is rooted in the history of social reform: social injustices thrive when they are hidden; therefore, you expose them.

Planned Parenthood sells baby body parts. That is undeniable, and Congress as well as the individual states will now play their role in investigating the extent to which Planned Parenthood has broken the law. But whatever direction those investigations take, another investigation has also begun: the American people are being given a chance to look abortion in the eye.

I have always said that America will not reject abortion until America sees abortion. The abortion debate is too abstract; words lose their meaning, and an abundance of words can justify anything.

But when instead of abstract philosophical and legal debates about freedom, choice, and the Constitution, you talk about selling hearts, livers and brains, or see the pictures of them, you cut through the rationalizations and confront the reality of the injustice. That is exactly how the anti-slavery movement, the child labor reform movement, and the civil rights movement accomplished their goals.

It is how the pro-life movement will accomplish its goal, too. Expose abortion.

This is done in three distinct ways, in which the undercover videos fit in two places.

The first way we expose abortion is through images and descriptions of the procedure itself and what it does to the baby. Read articles and speeches defending abortion, and you will practically never read any description of the procedure. You will hear about choice and rights, but not about the body parts. But when the procedure is exposed in all its gory details, defending the practice becomes virtually impossible.

The second way to expose abortion is to expose what it does to those who undergo the procedure. The testimonies of mothers who have aborted their children reveal the devastation it brings to them — the suicidal thoughts and actions, the despair and loss of self-esteem, the nightmares and broken relationships, and more. When people hear these testimonies, as shared, for instance, through our Silent No More Campaign, they see abortion exposed — not as a solution to a problem, but as an action that creates more problems.

The third way we expose abortion is by lifting the veil from the abortion clinics themselves and looking at how corrupt the abortion industry is. This is accomplished in three ways: through dialogue with practicing abortionists and clinic workers, through the testimony of former abortionists and clinic workers, and through undercover conversations, recordings, and videos.

There is a distinction between two different groups of abortion advocates, the propagandists on the one hand and the practitioners on the other. The practitioners see the women crying and screaming. They deal with the bloody parts of little babies. They cope with the literal stench of death.

Of the two groups, the propagandists succeed more readily in the rationalizing necessary to support legal abortion. The reason is simple: they don’t see abortions. Nor do they deal with devastating results for child and parents. The practitioners, on the other hand, see the concrete evidence every day, and it is harder for them to deny. That is why they are more willing to talk with us on the pro-life side. They know we see what they see.

But for the propagandists things are a lot cleaner and simpler: they send out press releases; hold press conferences; prepare reports in cushy offices; and talk about freedom, rights, and choices. One thing the propagandists rarely discuss, however, is what an abortion actually is. For them it’s about viewpoints, not victims; it’s about beliefs, not bloodshed.

We are living in a world proud to turn a blind eye to the obvious. That great blind spot in our culture covers the children in the womb. Our mission is to shine light on that darkness.

One of the most helpful words in the English language is empathy, the feeling that we understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions. William Wilberforce, the catalyst in Britain’s abolition of the slave trade, gave the “Abolition Speech” to Parliament in 1789, and in that speech revealed a human imperative that took hold of him and made his commitment to abolition absolute:

As soon as ever I had arrived thus far in my investigation of the slave trade, I confess to you sir, so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did its wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for the abolition. A trade founded in iniquity, and carried on as this was, must be abolished, let the policy be what it might, let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest till I had effected its abolition.

Observe how Wilberforce’s commitment is rooted not in some abstract “nuance,” but in a concrete, human connection with the victims. This connection did not lead Wilberforce to despair but rather a determination that he “would never rest.”

Exposing abortion leads to that same determination to stop its damaging effects. The undercover videos do not replace that strategy; they embody it.

http://ablogaboutmiscarriage.blogspot.com/

It’s Natural Family Planning Awareness Week and I didn’t really think I’d have much to add to the conversation. The Catholic blogging world is already saturated with posts about NFP this week and I’ve read many, many wonderful posts on every angle of the topic in the past. My experiences are unique (aren’t ours all?) but not necessarily anything completely new or different. But to do my part, I wrote this post on Facebook yesterday to share my perspective and as I was writing it, for the first in my life it occurred to me exactly why NFP is so difficult – because it was never part of God’s original plan.

You see, in the perfect world God intended – the world without sin or suffering – NFP doesn’t have a place. The situations that make postponing a pregnancy necessary – physical and mental health issues, financial concerns, marital problems, lack of support system, etc. – they wouldn’t exist. And fertility problems that require couples use NFP to become pregnant, they wouldn’t exist either. There simply would be no need for Natural Family Planning. It’s not the default for human beings as God designed us. But it’s there because we live in a flawed world; not the natural order of things but a gift given to us by God to help us cope with our imperfect situations in an imperfect existence.

Many people need NFP for one reason or another, and I am incredibly grateful that it exists for those situations. For most of our marriage, we’ve used NFP. When we got pregnant with Lucia in 2011, my husband and I had hoped we’d never use NFP again. We looked forward to the idea of our family planned completely on God’s timing, of never looking at a chart again, of being genuinely surprised (but not too surprised) by a new pregnancy. But then we went through a period of unemployment. Followed by miscarriage after miscarriage. And then my current bout of prenatal depression and anxiety (yes, it’s back). And it seems that for the rest of our childbearing years we’ll always have one reason or another to use NFP to either avoid pregnancy or help us decrease chances of future miscarriage. That’s a tough pill to swallow.

Yes, the day to day practice of NFP can be difficult. But the emotional strain is even harder because it reminds us of the brokenness of our world (and my body). My chart is a symbol of how far we are from Eden. For all that people talk about how wonderful NFP is for marriage and communication and knowing your body and (fill in the blank), the truth is that if all were as it should be, we simply wouldn’t need it.

NFP strikes me as similar to a cancer treatment, let’s say chemotherapy. Of course, it’s not poisonous or painful like chemotherapy (NFP is green! And completely natural! No physical side effects!), but bear with me. The only reason chemotherapy exists is to combat cancer. Those who have cancer (and their loved ones) are grateful it gives them the opportunity to fight the cancer, but they’d rather they didn’t need it in the first place. My family has had several extra years (and hopefully many more) with my 84 year old grandfather because of two rounds of chemotherapy. But the chemo itself took its toll on him and is a reminder of the brokenness of his body, the unnaturalness of the cancer that necessitated it in the first place. I wish there was no chemo because I wish there was no cancer. Actually, I suppose that’s how we feel about most medication. I’m grateful to God for well-trained doctors and medical researchers who allow us to combat the illnesses of the mind and body, but I’m still sad and bitter that we even have illnesses we have to treat.

So too with NFP. I wish we didn’t need it. I wish we lived in a perfect world where the circumstances were always perfect for more children to be welcomed and everyone had perfect, healthy, functioning fertility. Since there is a need for NFP, I’m grateful it’s there. But even if I appreciate it, I don’t have to like it. It’s ok if it doesn’t feel natural and beautiful and effortless, because it’s simply not how it was meant to be. 

by: J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) When Bill Gates, along with Paul Allen, began a little tech venture called “Microsoft” in a garage in 1975, he couldn’t possibly have imagined that the company would grow into the largest personal computer company and most widely used PC operating system on the planet.

Or make him the richest man in the known galaxy.

But all of that happened, of course, and for the last two decades Gates, through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have been involved in socially engineering the world to be a place they want to mold in an image they have devised.

In recent months Gates has taken his vision a step further, with the development of computer chip technology that will essentially serve as one element of his quest for population control and reduction.

As reported by the Activist Post’s Heather Callaghan, soon medical microchip implants will be introduced to the general population, which will serve as “the new face of medicine that polygamously marries Big Pharma, biotech, nanotech and wireless remote technology.”

“Maybe hooking oneself into the Internet of Things will be an additional app, although this sounds like a passive form of medicine where someone else gets to call the shots, so to speak,” she added.

From ‘pro-choice’ to ‘no-choice’
Perhaps not surprisingly – given its propensity to favor technology that reduces planetary human presence – the same developers who are bringing wireless, remote-controlled implants are currently focused on a product that is the cornerstone of future efforts: Gates Foundation-funded birth control microchip implants.

Callaghan notes that wireless technology allows the remotely controlled chips to essentially activate a woman’s ability to conceive, or prevent it, at will, which amounts to temporary sterilization (if a decision is made, say by an all-powerful government agency, to prevent a woman from bearing a child). Government in the U.S. would instantly transform itself from “pro-choice” (through the permission of abortion) to no choice.

The writer also observed:

Of course with remote technology funded by eugenics depopulation fanatics, the first questions should always be, “the ability to conceive by whose will?” This would be the complete antithesis of female empowerment or a “woman’s right to choose” – would it not?

What’s more, the chips are encrypted, so no hacking – not by cyber criminals or by technologically clever souls who are simply trying to bypass a government’s oppression.

The microchip is implantable into arms, hips or somewhere on a woman’s back. The development of the chip was kept under wraps while researchers and scientists worked to complete work the past couple of years. But the existence of the chip was finally confirmed publicly as beta testing of the technology is scheduled to begin towards the end of 2015, when volunteers will be sought.

If poor women are the target, why encrypt the chips?
As reported by TWCN:

The birth control chip is the brain child of a professor, Robert Langer, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation has funded the research and the prototype is ready for human testing. The chips will be ready for sale by the year 2018 according to Robert Langer. The institute’s Chip Foundation and Bill Gates’ Foundation have been working on the birth control chip for past three years.

The safety tests would begin by the end of year 2015 and Robert Langer is confident that the chips will hit market sometime in 2018. The main target of these chips are women in third world who are often subject to pain and risks of death during early pregnancies.

That report noted that the chip is expected to remain viable for at least 16 years once implanted.

While the “target” population is poor, third-world women, such technology is, of course, ripe for abuse. After all, think about it: If that demographic is the primary target, why would the chips need to be encrypted? How many third-world populations have within their midst the technological capability or the power to resist?

When he began Microsoft, Bill Gates likely never thought he’d become rich enough to hold the power of life in his hands. Talk about your “evil corporations.”

Sources:

http://www.activistpost.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/029911_vaccines_bill_gates.html

http://news.thewindowsclub.com

July 21, 2015 (PregnancyHelpNews) — Now is as good a time as any to mention a factoid about the average salary for a Planned Parenthood regional CEO: just a cut below $200,000.

In other words, about one Lamborghini a year. And that’s before you consider the bonus potential of wheeling and dealing with aborted baby parts distributors.

Yessir, the sky’s the limit when you sign on to work for America’s most profitable non-profit—experts at exploiting existing revenue streams like taxpayer dollars and paid baby dismemberment, and veritable creative geniuses when it comes to pioneering innovative business lines like the resale of livers, kidneys and lungs.

Of course, climbing Big Abortion’s corporate ladder does have its downside.

For instance, you might need to crank up the music in your posh ride to drown out the voices in your head that call you a grave robber, or compare you to Dr. Frankenstein’s lab assistant.

Plus, business can get a little slow when you’ve only got 800 abortions per year at the “much smaller affiliate” of Planned Parenthood you might find yourself overseeing.

At that rate, it can almost feel like you’re not making a big enough contribution to the 327,166 abortions per year your parent company is “performing”—always a strange verb to use, since there’s generally no applause to follow the monetized snuffing out of a life.

Again, these thoughts can be drowned out pretty simply by the turning of a dial and the roar of your 641 horsepower machine—brought to you every year thanks to the American taxpayer, women overwhelmed by the shock of an unexpected pregnancy, and the retail of various body parts of aborted babies.

Let’s be fair, Planned Parenthood’s Medical Director’s Council President Dr. Mary Gatter was clearly joking when she said she wanted a Lamborghini in today’s video, released by The Center for Medical Progress.

It was tongue-in-cheek, and we need not take it out of context or blow it out of proportion. To do so would be dishonest and deceptive, and we need to remember that it’s Big Abortion—specifically Planned Parenthood—alone who has something to hide.

But, as the wheels continue to fall off Planned Parenthood’s hearse, let’s not miss the truth the latest evidence puts on a platter for us: Abortion is a profit game. Always has been. Always will be.

Which raises an interesting contrast. Every single day, while “doctors”—again, I’m searching for a better noun here—all across the United States are putting our hard-earned tax dollars to work by preying on roughly 3,500 desperate women, robbing these moms of motherhood and aborting their innocent children, there’s an alternative army of healers at work.

The 2,500 healers who make up this group bring home an average of $43,144 per year, and run their organizations on an annual budget the size of 3/4 of the cost of a Lamborghini. Like the highly paid practitioners and facilitators of abortion, this group wakes up every morning with a singular goal in mind.

It so happens that those who belong to this group have the same client in mind as their counterparts at Planned Parenthood: a woman facing an unexpected pregnancy.

It’s just that there’s a major difference between these two opposing schools of thought: You might even call it a life and death difference.

Who is this alternative force? It’s the leaders of a counter-movement that is responsible for reaching and rescuing over 3,000 lives every week from the violence of abortion.

It’s the leaders of the pregnancy help community, which traces its roots to the pre-Roe days of the late 1960s, when abortion on-demand became legalized in Colorado, California, and New York.

Seeing the need for a woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy to be surrounded by loving and compassionate support, fully equipped to make the healthiest decision for everyone involved, people began opening their homes, their lives, and their pocketbooks to see that every mother felt loved and supported during her pregnancy.

On their own dime, these life-minded individuals began to organize themselves in the early 1970s, when a doctor named John Hillabrand partnered with a Holocaust survivor named Lore Maier to form what would come to be known as Heartbeat International—now the largest, most expansive network of pregnancy help centers, medical clinics, maternity homes and non-profit adoption agencies.

Unlike highly profitable abortion businesses, pregnancy help organizations keep their lights on by raising their own money with local fundraisers like crab feeds and wedding dress resale shops—which offers a mind-blowing contrast to what Planned Parenthood is in the business of reselling.

The people who run these organizations actually believe that every life has inestimable value—like, wait for it, more value than a Lamborghini.

From start to finish, the motivation of the pregnancy help community’s pioneers, its 24-7 pregnancy helpline,Option Line, and all the way down to the smallest pregnancy center in Podunk, U.S.A., is a simple one: to reach and rescue as many lives as possible.

That’s it. Rescuing lives.

That kind of thinking won’t get you a Lamborghini, but, as the old saying goes, “The benefits are out of this world.”

by Fr. Peter Mitchell

Pastor of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Greenville, Wisconsin Given on the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, June 28, 2015

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” – Abraham Lincoln

My dear parishioners, I had hoped I would not have to give this homily. But as your pastor and shepherd, I must speak today, lest I sin by silence and act in cowardice. This past Friday, June 26, 2015 by a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court has told us that our entire nation must accept the redefinition of marriage. The decision is being hailed by many as a victory for love. Our President’s twitter account acclaimed the decision as victory for freedom with the signature #LoveWins. It is no secret that the Catholic Church opposes this decision, and so it would seem to many in this confused cultural moment that we are now part of a church that is opposed to love, and is in fact a church that proclaims hatred by its teaching. For a long time now our society has been being prepared to celebrate and affirm this decision as a victory for love – the press, the entertainment media, our schools, the medical profession, business associations, the military – every aspect of our society has very aggressively been told that to oppose this decision is to be against the free expression of love. Why would we withhold the right to happiness and love from fellow citizens? Why would we tell others they cannot fulfill themselves in the way they choose to? Everyone is now forced to accept this redefinition by means of judicial rewriting of the law. And – here is the crux of the issue for us as the church – if we will not accept this redefinition, we are expected to be silent. And it is in this light that I wish to take President Lincoln’s challenging words – “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men” – and ask how we may respond courageously and joyfully to the present challenging cultural moment.

Let’s be clear about what happened on Friday in terms of the big picture of the history of Western Civilization. I’ve brought a few books along for dramatic effect. Let’s see… Socrates…out the window. Plato…out the window. Aristotle…out the window. Roman law…out the window. Notice we haven’t gotten to Christian sources of law and culture yet. The Old Testament – Genesis 19, out the window. The New Testament – Romans 1 – read it, it is so clear! “While claiming to be wise they became fools…God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper” – out the window. St. Augustine, out the window. Thomas Aquinas, out the window. The entire legal precedent of the United States up to 2003, out the window. The implication of course is that all of these sources of our law had a blind spot of prejudice when it came to the definition of marriage. All of these wise men were unenlightened, and it is only as of June 26, 2015, that we can say that we truly live in a free and loving society.

What was the reason for all of these foundational sources of our culture condemning the behavior associated with the redefinition of marriage, for calling such behavior a sin and a crime? Let’s say this very simply – with great wisdom, they understood that such behavior is destructive. It is destructive of the human body because it goes against human nature – it causes disease and death, and no less importantly it is destructive of the human soul. It leads to depression, anxiety, loneliness, mental illness, and even suicide. It is destructive of families and of children’s happiness. This was the established consensus of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), until 1973, when it removed such behavior from its lists of mental disorders in a change that had absolutely no scientific or medical basis but was pushed through by pressure from a small group of activists.

Now, however, we are told that the entire society must legally accept the redefinition of marriage and thus affirm the rationalization that what is bad and destructive is actually good and fulfilling. My dear people, let’s say this simply and clearly – to call what is bad good is a lie. And the redefinition of marriage into some thing other than a permanent covenant between a man and a woman for the purpose of raising a family is a lie. Why would we be opposed to Friday’s decision? The simple answer is- because it is based on a lie. If someone would ask us, “Why is it a lie?” we need to be able to connect the dots as to how we got here. There is a very simple thread of logic running through the Supreme Court’s decisions since 1966 concerning, first contraception, then abortion, and finally the redefinition of marriage. All three issues are intertwined, and ultimately to embrace one as a right is to embrace the others. We need to be able to understand that logic so as to refute it.

First, in 1961 Planned Parenthood sued the State of Connecticut for the right to distribute contraceptives, which was at that time against the law. In 1966 in Griswold v. Connecticut, the US Supreme Court defined the right to contracept as part of the “right to privacy” it claimed to find in the Constitution. This decision was then invoked in the decision with which we are all familiar,
Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized the right to abortion as part of the “right to privacy.’ It made logical sense. If children intrude upon our right to privacy, we need to have a way to eliminate them. To fully embrace the use of contraceptives, many of which act as abortifacients by killing the developing embryo in the mother’s womb, is to affirm abortion, which is the ultimate act of contraception. The Church’s beautiful teaching has always seen this connection and proclaimed it, even as our culture has scoffed. This brings us to 2015. Friday’s decision was entirely consistent with the precedent of Griswold and Roe. If we as a culture have sterilized married love by legalizing contraception and abortion, it is logically consistent that we would redefine marriage so that it no longer has any necessary connection with procreation, based on the “right to privacy.” A culture where everyone is contracepting and in which anyone can get an abortion, must, to be consistent, redefine marriage. Our Supreme Court acted consistently on Friday. It invoked its own language defending the right to abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood v Casey, 1992). Justice Kennedy’s opening sentence in Friday’s decision reaffirms this definition of liberty: “Liberty includes the right to define and express one’s own identity.” This is the heart of the lie. But there can be no freedom divorced from the truth of God’s law, which is also the law of human nature. In ignoring the natural law, our Supreme Court has proclaimed that we must all accept a lie.

What is to be our response as disciples of Jesus Christ to the lie? It is the same joyful witness that we always give: living lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience and mercifully inviting others, with us, to heed the first words of Jesus in the Gospel, “Reform your lives, and believe in the Gospel!” (Mark 1:15). Our witness needs to be joyful and compassionate, convicted and committed. No less than we are convicted that we would never let our little ones play with matches, because they are potentially destructive, so we must be convinced that the redefinition of marriage is destructive to individual people and to our entire society. If we are so convinced, we will joyfully invite others as fellow sinners to turn to the Merciful Jesus and know his healing grace as the woman with the hemorrhage did in today’s Gospel.

We can turn more than ever to the intercession of some of the great martyrs of our faith who were called on to witness to the truth of God’s law in the face of legal redefinition of the truth. I am thinking of the joyful witness of St. Thomas More and the Martyrs of England in the 1500’s. When King Henry VIII wished to deny the truth of his marriage, he ordered Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy, which proclaimed Henry head of the Church and thus able to redefine marriage. The vast majority of bishops in England acquiesced to Henry’s demand. The law was changed and persecution followed for those who did not remain silent. The courageous martyrs of that storied moment in English history are interceding for us. They stood firm as they were accused of hating their King and hating their country. St. Edmund Campion’s powerful words ring clear – at his sentencing to execution, he said simply, “In condemning us, you condemn all of your own ancestors, all that was once the glory of England.” The present redefinition of marriage has indeed condemned all the great figures in American history as having been fundamentally opposed to freedom and rights in their understanding of marriage as a God-given gift between a man and a woman.

I am thinking of the joyful witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the martyrs of the Third Reich. All of the reforms of the 1930’s were accomplished legally as the German nation was told to embrace a lie about the human person – that the Jews were not truly persons. As long as people were silent, the lie had room to grow. Anyone who loved Germany was expected to support the Fuhrer. The law was changed and persecution followed for those who did not remain silent. Those who spoke out paid the ultimate price. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who dared to speak out in protest and to resist, wrote before his execution, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

I am thinking, lastly, and perhaps most powerfully, of the courageous witness of John the Baptist, whose birth the Church just celebrated this past week. Face to face with King Herod, who had redefined marriage by taking his brother’s wife to be his own wife, John spoke the truth about marriage: “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife” (Mark 6:18). John chose not to remain silent, and persecution followed. Because he spoke the truth about marriage, John was beheaded.

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” My dear people, all we have to do today is to remain silent in the face of the lie and we will be able to remain comfortable. May this comfortable silence never be our response. In the words of the great Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The Church in America in 2015 needs to call upon the intercession of all of these holy martyrs, asking them to obtain for our bishops and priests and for all of us the courage to bear witness to the truth about marriage.

So many are confused and hurting in their search for love today – they are searching for Christ without even knowing it. It falls to us at this moment to show forth Jesus by our witness of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This witness will mean having the courage to face whatever persecution, large and small, will come to us as a result of our refusal to remain silent. It will mean enduring accusations that we are opposed to love and hateful of those who celebrate and promote the redefinition of marriage. Let’s be confident that the Holy Spirit is with us and is raising up a great generation of witnesses  loving, compassionate, merciful, courageous witnesses. I am confident that I am looking at those witnesses as I preach to you today.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

St. Thomas More, Edmund Campion, and the martyrs of England, pray for us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the martyrs of the Third Re ich, pray for us. Amen.

Come, Holy Spirit!

The Pill made same-sex nuptials inevitable.

By DONALD SENSING- Updated March 15, 2004

Opponents of legalized same-sex marriage say they’re trying to protect a beleaguered institution, but they’re a little late. The walls of traditional marriage were breached 40 years ago; what we are witnessing now is the storming of the last bastion.

Marriage is primarily a social institution, not a religious one. That is, marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken the same basic form in all those cultures. Marriage existed long before Abraham, Jesus or any other religious figure. The institution of marriage is literally prehistoric.

The three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) actually recognize this explicitly in their holy writings. The book of Genesis ascribes the foundation of marriage in the very acts of God himself in the creation of the world: “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him. . . . A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:18, 24).

The three great religions base their definition of marriage on these verses and others that echo them. In Christian theological terms, the definition of marriage is part of the natural law of the creation; therefore, the definition may not be changed by human will except in peril to the health of human community.

Psychobiologists argue that marriage evolved as a way of mediating the conflicting reproductive interests of men and women. It was the means by which a woman could guarantee to a specific man that the children she bore were his. In biological terms, men can sire hundreds of children in their lives, but this biological ability is limited by the fact that no one woman can keep pace.

Siring kids by multiple women is the only way men can achieve high levels of reproduction, but there is no adaptive advantage for women in bearing children by men who are simply trying to sire as many children as possible. For a mother, carrying and raising a child is a resource-intensive, years-long business. Doing it alone is a marked adaptive disadvantage for single mothers and their children.

So the economics of sex evolved into a win-win deal. Women agreed to give men exclusive sexual rights and guaranteed paternity in exchange for their sexual loyalty and enduring assistance with childbearing and -rearing. The man’s promise of sexual loyalty meant that he would expend his labor and resources supporting her children, not another woman’s. For the man, this arrangement lessens the number of potential children he can sire, but it ensures that her kids are his kids. Guaranteed sex with one woman also enabled him to conserve his resources and energies for other pursuits than repetitive courtship, which consumes both greatly.

Weddings ceremoniously legitimated the sexual union of a particular man and woman under the guidance of the greater community. In granting this license, society also promised structures beneficial to children arising from the marriage and ensuring their well-being.

Society’s stake in marriage as an institution is nothing less than the perpetuation of the society itself, a matter of much greater than merely private concern. Yet society cannot compel men and women to bring forth their replacements. Marriage as conventionally defined is still the ordinary practice in Europe, yet the birthrate in most of Europe is now less than the replacement rate, which will have all sorts of dire consequences for its future.

Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can’t reliably gain men’s sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations “without benefit of clergy,” as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities–that is, have sex without sex’s results–the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.

When society decided–and we have decided, this fight is over–that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society’s permission to have sex and procreate.

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of “saving marriage” is pretty specious. There’s little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.

If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

Rev. Sensing is pastor of the Trinity United Methodist Church in Franklin, Tenn. He writes at DonaldSensing.com.

Association of American Physicians & Surgeons

An undercover video of a lunch meeting between Planned Parenthood official, Deborah Nucatola, M.D., and a man and a woman posing as buyers for a biologics company shows a discussion of how a dismemberment abortion is modified to meet customers’ needs, states AAPS executive director Jane M. Orient, M.D., who viewed the recording.

“The abortionist uses ultrasound to guide placement of forceps so as not to crush the organs to be procured,” Orient says. “According to Nucatola, who does abortions herself, livers and hearts are in great demand. Lungs and legs are also being requested.”

The fetus may be rotated into a breech position to facilitate recovery of an intact calvarium (head), the largest part, as cervical dilation increases during the procedure, Nucatola said.

The team “huddles” before the day’s work begins, Nucatola explained, to plan the most efficient way to meet demand for parts.

Allegations about trafficking in fetal body parts have been around for years, Orient said. Concerns were raised by Life Dynamics in 2000, but the practice apparently was just driven further underground.

American Life League states that the sale of human body parts is illegal throughout the U.S. It called for an investigation and immediate suspension of the $400 million in funding that Planned Parenthood receives annually from Medicaid.

“Developing human beings, capable of feeling pain, are apparently being torn apart and sold piece by piece,” Orient stated. “The truth about this practice needs to be exposed. Lawbreakers need to be prosecuted, and all public funding needs to be withdrawn from any entities connected in any way with this horrendous enterprise.”

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, founded in 1943 to preserve private medicine and the patient-physician relationship.

Ruling to force nuns to violate faith or pay massive IRS penalties

By Denver Catholic

July 14, 2015

In a departure from the U.S. Supreme Court’s protection of the Little Sisters of the Poor last year, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Little Sisters must comply with the government’s contraceptive mandate.

The federal Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate forces religious ministries to violate their faith or pay massive IRS penalties.

Sister Loraine Marie Maguire, Mother Provincial of the Little Sisters of the Poor, stated, “As Little Sisters of the Poor, we simply cannot choose between our care for the elderly poor and our faith. And we should not have to make that choice, because it violates our nation’s commitment to ensuring that people from diverse faiths can freely follow God’s calling in their lives.”

The Little Sisters have served the neediest in society across the world with dignity for more than 175 years.

“All we ask is to be able to continue our religious vocation free from government intrusion,” she said.

Attorneys from The Becket Fund for Religious Freedom presented the nuns’ case in a lawsuit challenging the mandate, a part of the Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare. The nuns argued the government is forcing them to act against their religious beliefs because of its requirement to provide free contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to employees, or pay steep fines.

Churches are exempt from the mandate, but charitable organizations like the Little Sisters are not.

Mother Patricia Mary Metzgar, l.s.p., who oversees the Little Sisters’ Mullen Home for the Aged in Denver, has attended some of the court hearings with other nuns. The Little Sisters of Denver employ about 67 full-time employees.

Mark Rienzi, senior attorney of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and lead attorney for the Little Sisters, reacted to the ruling saying he was disappointed.

“After losing repeatedly at the Supreme Court, the government continues its unrelenting pursuit of the Little Sisters of the Poor,” he said in a statement. “It is a national embarrassment that the world’s most powerful government insists that, instead of providing contraceptives through its own existing exchanges and programs, it must crush the Little Sisters’ faith and force them to participate. Untold millions of people have managed to get contraceptives without involving nuns, and there is no reason the government cannot run its programs without hijacking the Little Sisters and their health plan.”

Rienzi appeared on Fox News’ “The Kelly File” July 14 to discuss the court ruling.

Before the court’s ruling, the nuns filed an appeal Feb. 2014 in Denver federal court and were granted a temporary injunction, which shielded them from the HHS mandate and its fines. At issue is a waiver form the sisters could sign to receive an exemption from the mandate, but the appeal states that it “would make them morally complicit in sin, would contradict their public witness to the value of life, and would immorally run the risk of misleading others.” The form in fact would authorize a third-party to provide the services they find morally objectionable.

The appeal argued the HHS mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment that guarantee freedom of religion. The court heard oral arguments in the case in December, when Sister Maguire delivered her first public statement.

On July 14, the 10th Circuit ruled that the government can force the Little Sisters to adhere to the mandate. It said that participating in the HHS mandate is “as easy as obtaining a parade permit, filing a simple tax form, or registering to vote.” It also ruled that although the nuns argued it would make “them complicit in the overall delivery scheme,” the court “ultimately rejects the merits of this claim” because the court believes the exemption “relieves [the Little Sisters] from complicity.”

The Little Sisters and their attorneys are reviewing the court’s decision and will decide whether to bring their case to the Supreme Court, according to the Becket Fund.

“We will keep on fighting for the Little Sisters, even if that means having to go all the way to the Supreme Court,” Daniel Blomberg, attorney at the Becket Fund, said in a statement.

The court’s order also impacts the Christian Brothers Services and Christian Brothers Employee Benefit Trust, the Catholic ministries through which the Little Sisters obtain their health coverage.

July 13, 2015 (POP) — On July 11th, the United Nations celebrated its 26th World Population Day. The point of this annual exercise is to raise money to promote abortion, sterilization and contraception among poor and vulnerable women by alarming us about the dangers of global population growth.

The problem with this narrative is that, in many regions of the world, the population is declining, not growing. About half the world’s population lives in “low-fertility” countries, where women have fewer than 2.1 children on average over their lifetimes. Low-fertility countries now include all of Europe (except Iceland), the Americas (17 countries), and most of Asia (19 countries). The list of low-fertility countries include China, the United States, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Japan and Viet Nam.

In other words, growth rates have dramatically declined from the late 1960s when the global population grew at a rate of 2.1% each year. That rate is now about 1% a year. The UN’s low variant projection (historically the most accurate) indicates that it will peak at around 8.3 billion in 2050. Even the medium variant projection shows population growth slowing to 0.1% by the century’s end, and turning negative beyond 2100. In either case, the population of the world will never double again.
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As these numbers suggest, fertility rates have dipped to all-time lows. The U.N.’s medium variant projection estimates that women are now averaging 2.45 children over their reproductive lifetime, while the low variant pegs this at only 2.05. The global average was 4.97 just 60 years ago. Under either variant, this number will be well under replacement by century’s end. After all, global replacement fertility—the rate needed to replace the current generation and prevent population decline—is 2.23 children per woman over her reproductive lifetime.

Many developed nations are already suffering from the effects of population decline. Populations in many areas are rapidly aging as younger cohorts are becoming smaller. Social safety nets are being strained to the breaking point as fewer workers are struggling to support increasing numbers of elderly.

In Japan, increasing urbanization in conjunction with falling fertility rates have resulted in a drastic depopulation of many rural towns and villages. Economic growth is being compromised as workers are in increasingly short supply. The elderly are being abandoned as their only children go on to have no children at all. There are simply too few members of the younger generation to care for them.

Europe is also reeling from the effects of declining populations. In Italy, Portugal, Poland, Russia and throughout most of Southern and Eastern Europe, crude death rates exceed crude birth rates. The fertility rate for all of Europe is 1.58, well off the 2.09 replacement fertility rate, and recipe for demographic disaster.

Growth rates have also slowed in many developing nations. Thailand, Myanmar, and Tunisia are all below replacement level fertility. Even once-fertile Bangladesh is projected to fall below the replacement threshold 2020. The U.N.’s medium variant projection predicts that the population of Bangladesh will begin to contract after 2060, sooner under the low variant.

China’s Planned Birth policy (one child in the cities; two in the countryside) has driven its fertility rate down to an unsustainable 1.66, far below the estimated 2.22 it needs to stabilize its population. Little girls continue to be aborted or killed at birth in shocking numbers. There are 116 boys born in China for every 100 girls, one of the most skewed sex ratios in the world. Millions of Chinese men will never marry.

In spite of this dismal picture, population alarmists continue to push for population control programs.

Under the Obama administration, population control remains a key foreign aid objective. Various agencies of the U.S. government spent a whopping of $2.77 billion on “family planning and reproductive health” in 2014, a sum of money that dwarfs spending on all other health-related assistance, such as nutrition, water supply and sanitation, malaria, pandemic diseases, and general health care.

Only HIV/AIDS received more funding at $3.42 billion, and much of this money also went to population control organizations for population control purposes. The same devices that supposedly stop the spread of AIDS also stop the “spread” of pregnancy.

Expenditures for maternal and child health care, on the other hand, came to a paltry $497 million. Yet the surest way to lower fertility is to lower infant and child mortality rates.

USAID does not exaggerate when it says that it “has been the leading donor in international family planning for more than 40 years…in most years making up 40–50% of all donor funds.”

Given that birth rates are falling farther and faster than anyone imagined possible a couple of decades ago, what’s the U.N. to do to galvanize the U.S. and the world to continue putting this kind of money into the overpopulation pot?

Change the subject, that’s what.

The theme for this year’s World Population Day is not “Overpopulation,” but rather “Vulnerable Populations in Emergencies.” This is nothing more than an attempt to exploit the tragic and desperate conditions of the millions displaced or threatened by war, disaster or violent extremism to raise funds for population control.

Of course, it is true that the UNFPA has no qualms with pushing contraception and abortion on vulnerable populations in their time of greatest need. In its own words: “UNFPA works in emergency settings around the globe to respond to…the needs of women and girls…restoring their access to sexual and reproductive health care.”

Refugees are in desperate need of almost everything. They generally lack shelter, food, access to clean drinking water, health care—the list goes on and on.

And, for this year’s World Population Day, the U.N. wants to give them … birth control.

Reprinted with permission from Population Research Institute.

Léalo en español aquí

San Diego, CA, July 9, 2015 (Operation Rescue) — A quietly-handled wrongful termination lawsuit brought in San Diego, California, against Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest gives insight into Planned Parenthood’s defensive mechanisms that kick into full throttle when employees fail to march in lockstep.

But more disturbingly, it reveals something sinister about Planned Parenthood’s unethical treatment of at least one minor girl and its aggressive eagerness to cannibalize one of their own rather than admit there might be serious internal problems.

The 2014 suit was explained in a well-written piece that appeared in the San Diego Reader, a quirky, alternative newspaper that focuses on the trendy – and often gritty – cultural side of San Diego. Amid the bright promotions of local events, flashy concert advertisements, restaurant reviews and personal ads, one can find some of the best investigative reporting anywhere. The Reader dares to go where mainstream media will not, including behind the veil of obfuscation that usually characterizes abortion rhetoric that is force-fed to the public.

The case is Murray v. Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest. It was brought by Carla M. Murray, nurse practitioner with an exemplary employment record who worked for Planned Parenthood for over ten years.

Murray worked at Planned Parenthood’s Chula Vista clinic, which offers abortion pills, birth control, STD testing, and other services to the primarily Hispanic community near the border with Mexico.

Murray’s problems began in mid-2012 when she reported to the clinic manager, Thelma Mendoza, that employees were accessing the clinic’s drug cabinet and dispensing drugs to patients without proper authorization in violation of California law.

Murray’s suit contends that Mendoza began to retaliate against her by writing her up for exaggerated and blatantly fabricated infractions. Murray alleges that Mendoza went so far as to sabotage her attempt to move to another Planned Parenthood clinic.

The final straw came on March 8, 2013, when a woman brought her minor step-daughter to the Chula Vista Planned Parenthood clinic for birth control. The young girl indicated to Murray that she did not want the Depo-Provera birth control shot. It became apparent to Murray that her young patient was being forced by her step-mother into taking a birth control injection that she did not want and apparently did not need.

Instead, after receiving guidance from Janeen Bullison, Planned Parenthood’s Quality Assurance Manager, Murray gave the minor girl “emergency contraception, condoms, and educational handouts” in lieu of the Depo-Provera shot.

Afterwards, the step-mother became irate and could be heard “screaming” at staff and demanding that her step-daughter be given a birth control injection. Murray contacted Mendoza’s supervisor, Julia Jura, for additional guidance but was told by Jura to allow Mendoza to handle the situation.

According to Murray’s suit, a medical assistant was illegally ordered by Mendoza to give the minor girl the Depo-Provera injection, even though Mendoza is unlicensed and not qualified to authorize drugs to patients.

This action violated Planned Parenthood’s own Mission Statement, which asserts that patients should be allowed to “manage their own fertility” regardless of their age. Could it be that such statements are merely window-dressing for a gullible public?

“It is clearly illegal and unethical to force a birth control injection on anyone against their will. Yet, Planned Parenthood seemed unbothered by the effects on their young patient, both physically and emotionally,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “It seems that if a parent is in opposition to a child receiving an abortion or birth control, they have no rights. However, if the parent is the one coercing a child into an unwanted abortion or forced birth control, then it is their wishes that prevail. We have to wonder how many girls there are out there that have been forced into ‘reproductive services’ such as abortion and birth control against their will and bear the emotional scars today. It’s probably more than we think.”

Murray reported the incident and lodged a complaint against Mendoza for practicing medicine without a license. She was promised an investigation, but days later, she was told that there had been no wrong-doing on Mendoza’s part.

It appears that there was an orchestrated conspiracy inside Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest at the highest levels to protect Mendoza from the consequences of illegal actions that she committed and allowed, while vilifying the one that attempted to set things right.

Four days later, on March 30, 2013, Murray was terminated in an act that she believes was in retaliation for blowing the whistle on Mendoza.

After months of legal motions and maneuvers, the case was set for trial on August 14, 2015. However, it now seems that the facts will never see the inside of a courtroom.

On June 30, Planned Parenthood settled the suit with Murray and the case was dismissed.

Who knows what other information would have come out in open trial? Now we will never know.

“It would have served the public to allow this case to go to trial, but it would not have served Planned Parenthood’s interests. Now, the full reality of apparently illegal activity that led to the abuse and violation of a minor girl will never be told in court,” said Newman. “This only guarantees that the abuses will continue at Planned Parenthood and that employees that witness them will be too intimidated to speak out.”

The San Diego Reader asked, “Who’s giving injections at Planned Parenthood?”

The answer is something Planned Parenthood has gone to great lengths – and expense — to hide. In the meantime, a young girl has been violated by those who were entrusted with her care and protection.

She and others like her are the true losers in this case.

Reprinted with permission from Operation Rescue.

Ben Johnson

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 9, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – After the Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex “marriage” is a constitutionally guaranteed right, many Americans have asked, “How did we get here?” Last month’s opinion tells us the road stretches back more than 50 years.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges gave additional proof that the legal basis for same-sex “marriage” is inextricably tied up with abortion-on-demand and other aspects of the sexual revolution.

In his 5-4 decision, Justice Kennedy says the newly discovered constitutional right to enter into a homosexual “marriage” is granted, in part, by the “right to privacy.”

That right, first propounded by the court in 1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut ruling, also conferred a woman’s right to abortion-on-demand, according to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

“Same-sex couples have the same right as opposite-sex couples to enjoy intimate association,” Justice Kennedy wrote last month, in an opinion that quoted Griswold. “Like choices concerning contraception, family relationships, procreation, and child-rearing, all of which are protected by the Constitution, decisions concerning marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make.”

“As far as the right to life is concerned, that is the most troubling line in the opinion,” wrote Kelsey Hazzard, a pro-life lawyer, in an analysis of the decision posted at the Secular Pro-Life blog. That sentence “can be read as polite legalese for killing preborn children.”

But Kennedy actually put the same-sex “marriage” case on stronger ground even than abortion. “Justice Kennedy was smart,” Hazzard wrote. “By writing an opinion that does not cite any abortion cases, he has assured that Obergefell will withstand the reversal of Roe and Casey.”

Instead, he based his argument in part on the case that granted Americans the right to use contraception.

That lawsuit was brought by Estelle Griswold, the former executive director of Planned Parenthood in New Haven, against the state of Connecticut. Lawmakers had passed a law forbidding anyone, married or unmarried, from using contraception. Planned Parenthood challenged the law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On June 7, 1965, Planned Parenthood prevailed.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote that, while the “right to privacy” is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution – much less the right to birth control – the idea flows from ideas embedded in the Constitution.

“Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance,” he wrote.

For the state to determine whether married couples used contraception would require an invasion of their privacy, Douglas wrote; thus, couples had an inalienable right to contraception.

“Griswold took a major leap for women’s health by removing state interference with one of the most important and private decisions an individual considers: whether and when to have a child,” wrote Elizabeth G. Taylor, the executive director of the National Health Law Program (NHeLP).

That ruling applied only to married couples. The right to privacy was then extended for unmarried individuals to use contraception in the High Court’s Eisenstadt v. Baird decision in 1972.

And one year later, the right to privacy emanated further, to grant women the “right to choose” an abortion.

Over the last 50 years, the “right to privacy” has been used to cover every form of sexual practice, displacing the public’s right to object on moral grounds – something contained in Kennedy’s 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling.

Finally, last month, that right – granted in Griswold and expanded in Eisenstadt, Roe, and Casey – demanded a nationwide legal recognition of homosexual relationships on par with heterosexual marriages.

Thus, Lauren Barbato could write in Bustle that “marriage equality may very well not be here on June 27, 2015, without Estelle Griswold and her fight to provide birth control to New Haven couples.”

By: Andrea Mrozek

July 8, 2015 (IMFCanada) — Across North America today, there are calls to make the birth control pill accessible over the counter. The Pill, we are told, is part of comprehensive health care and it is an insult that women should need a doctor’s prescription to use it. Recently, a columnist at the National Post complained that it is easier to get the Pill in Abu Dhabi than in Calgary or Toronto.

Most calls for the Pill to be made more broadly accessible—ideally free and without a prescription—all share the same subtext. Denying access to the Pill isn’t merely denying health care, it’s denying women’s rights.

Yet this is not about the right to get the Pill but rather, the right to not get pregnant.

This stems from the modern idea that men and women are only equal in dignity when we are exactly the same. As a result, we think that if men can have sex without the responsibility of childbearing, then women should too. This is why some feel so strongly that it is wrong for women to not have access to the Pill—one of the most effective contraceptives the world knows today.

Why, however, should pregnancy diminish a woman’s dignity or her rights in the world? And if this is indeed the case, why is it the woman who must remain child free in order to thrive?

Barring fertility from the workforce?

For starters, it remains a matter of opinion, not fact, that total control over fertility improves women’s rights.

This is a creation of the later waves of the feminist movement, over which there has never been complete agreement. Early feminists were better able to accept, embrace and celebrate motherhood, while simultaneously demanding that others rise up to support this unique and beautiful aspect of women’s lives.

A first wave feminist might ask that work conditions be altered to suit a woman who is pregnant—the opposing view, very much supported by modern contraception, demands that a woman not get pregnant in order to continue working.

The Pill does not advance women’s rights. It normalizes the idea that women shouldn’t be fertile, let alone pregnant. As evidence, see how major corporations like Apple and Facebook have the chutzpah today to offer women egg freezing as a job “perk.” In reality, this highlights how little we are willing to incorporate pregnancy into the working world.

The Pill: Stridently pitched as being in favour of women’s rights, it simultaneously puts women into a disadvantaged position. Women who want to have children must negotiate this desire at work with their employers and at home with their partners who are often comfortably uninterested. Then there’s the negotiation you never win with the biological realities of Mother Nature. Extended education and job training most often mean women are left to conjure up pregnancy at an age when it is far more difficult or impossible. The bitterness of the Pill is that almost universally, women don’t care about age-induced infertility until they are experiencing it.

A tainted medical legacy

Even if we all accepted that not getting pregnant makes women more equal, thereby bestowing greater rights—it is not clear that the Pill is the best way to do this. The Pill has health risks, has been declared to be carcinogenic by the World Health Organization and there’s that pesky class action suit against Yaz and Yasmin. The death of 23 women in Canada taking those birth control pills would not be so blithely overlooked were the cause of death something different.

Beyond catastrophic health events, however, the Pill denies women valuable information about their health. The body sends us clues about how we are doing. For women, this includes the daily ups and downs of our reproductive cycles. Women who are in the know can better monitor their own health unaltered by a daily dose of hormones. It’s empowering.

For the vast majority, the Pill is not medicine in any meaningful sense of the word. To designate it as such castigates pregnancy as a disease. It is no surprise, then, that this is how we treat pregnancy today, as a clinical problem, not a beautiful miracle.

All this said, yes, please do make the Pill over the counter. Perhaps when it sits beside Tylenol on a drugstore shelf, advocacy groups will stop yammering on about how the Pill is a major component of women’s rights. Or that it is patronizing when doctors show concern. Perhaps then we will stop targeting excellent doctors who won’t prescribe it for very good reasons.

And about the Pill being more freely available in Abu Dhabi? Just shout out if you want to move there, as a Canadian or American woman today.

Andrea Mrozek is the Executive Director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (www.imfcanada.org). She is currently co-authoring a book about the effects of the sexual revolution in women’s lives. Reprinted with permission from IMFC.

TEXAS RIGHT TO LIFE JUL 7, 2015 | 8:19AM WASHINGTON, DC

The U.K.’s Alliance of Pro-Life Students (APS) released an eye-opening perspective piece written by a pregnancy center volunteer who has interacted with hundreds of women seeking abortions. Her experience shatters common perceptions painted by the abortion movement, which suggest that virtually all women who undergo abortions do so as an exercise of their own free will and rights. On the contrary, according to APS’s anonymous guest blogger, “the word ‘choice’ is often the last word a woman in a crisis pregnancy feels applies to her when she’s looking for an abortion.” The volunteer enumerates the many reasons that motivate women to seek abortion. Indeed compelling, the reasons indicate that these women are certainly in crisis. But not, the volunteer explains, because they are pregnant.

Rather, the crisis is the reaction of those closest in their lives to the news. “The crisis,” she says, “is the fact that her workplace is prejudiced against pregnant women, or that she feels she has to do what her partner says, or that she is not financially stable, or that her boyfriend won’t commit, or that she is in an abusive relationship, or that she is being threatened with homelessness.” Pregnancy magnifies these tragedies in the woman’s life, and the natural conclusion for many is that by eliminating the preborn child, the crisis will go away. In reality, the crisis remains without the child who seems to be exacerbating her ordeal. The writer shares the story of a woman who was utterly under the control of her child’s father. He had the power to have her deported or ejected penniless onto the streets. “She was completely dependent on him and he was physically and emotionally abusive,” the volunteer shared.

But forcing the woman to abort her child proved to be an effortless endeavor for the abusive man; he took her from the pregnancy center to the abortion mill, and the child was dead within hours of their encounter. Abortion is portrayed as a woman’s right – an inviolable badge of her autonomy and freedom. And yet, every day countless women are forced and coerced into unwanted abortions, and the abortionists who operate under the auspices of “women’s rights” do absolutely nothing to counteract these disasters. “Silent complicity with abusive boyfriends is not what feminism has fought for,” said the volunteer.

While U.S. pregnancy resource centers have come under intense attack by the anti-Life movement in recent years, they are needed now more than ever. If this is the era of feminism – equality of the sexes – pregnancy resource centers are the hallmark of that age. Pregnancy centers are a singular refuge offering real compassion and concern without Big Abortion’s profit-driven tactics, which only come to fruition in the suctioning of children from their mothers’ wombs. “Women in the 21st Century should not feel they have to enter this secret world where ‘their mistake’ can be ‘fixed’, no questions asked,” the volunteer concludes. “They should feel that those who are putting pressure on them will be held accountable and that they have control over their lives.”

LifeNews Note: Reprinted with permission from Texas Right to Life.”

BY SHEILA LIAUGMINAS
http://www.mercatornet.com

Read this open letter to the Gay Community from a loving daughter.

She wonders why there isn’t more attention on the rest of this story, namely the children raised by two mothers or two fathers.

Same-sex marriage and parenting withholds either a mother or father from a child while telling him or her that it doesn’t matter. That it’s all the same. But it’s not. A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost.

I grew up surrounded by women who said they didn’t need or want a man. Yet, as a little girl, I so desperately wanted a daddy. It is a strange and confusing thing to walk around with this deep-down unquenchable ache for a father, for a man, in a community that says that men are unnecessary…

I’m not saying that you can’t be good parents. You can. I had one of the best. I’m also not saying that being raised by straight parents means everything will turn out okay. We know there are so many different ways that the family unit can break down and cause kids to suffer: divorce, abandonment, infidelity, abuse, death, etc. But by and large, the best and most successful family structure is one in which kids are being raised by both their mother and father.

And she wonders why gay people’s kids can’t be honest in talking about the realities, for them, of gay marriage.

It promotes and normalizes a family structure that necessarily denies us something precious and foundational. It denies us something we need and long for, while at the same time tells us that we don’t need what we naturally crave. That we will be okay. But we’re not. We’re hurting.

She notes that children of divorced parents, adopted children of biological parents they never knew, are “allowed” to speak out about their pain, suffering, longing, feelings.

But children of same-sex parents haven’t been given the same voice. It’s not just me. There are so many of us.

One of the first to publish such an account was Robert Lopez, and his account of being ‘raised by two moms’ clearly reveals his love for his mother, but also the long term impact that home life had on him. It opened the door for many other children of same-sex parents who were afraid to speak up because they loved them and didn’t want to hurt them.

In the past couple of days, that link has become inaccessible, and the online journal that published it has been dealing with technical issues. Which may or may not be related to the silencing Heather Barwick referred to in her honest, open letter.

If we say we are hurting because we were raised by same-sex parents, we are either ignored or labeled a hater.

This isn’t about hate at all. I know you understand the pain of a label that doesn’t fit and the pain of a label that is used to malign or silence you. And I know that you really have been hated and that you really have been hurt. I was there, at the marches, when they held up signs that said, “God hates fags” and “AIDS cures homosexuality.” I cried and turned hot with anger right there in the street with you. But that’s not me. That’s not us.

That’s not most of us. It’s the extreme left and right doing the most outright condemnation. Most of us who are trying to engage at all, are trying to do so reasonably and charitably. Many of us make efforts to speak clearly and listen closely, with the courage of conviction and respect for the dignity of those who challenge and even try to silence our beliefs, beliefs which at core witness to human dignity.

So Heather Barwick closes her letter to the Gay Community in which she was raised, with which she identified most of her life, who she understands with great compassion, and appeals to now as a children’s rights activist, with this:

I know this is a hard conversation. But we need to talk about it. If anyone can talk about hard things, it’s us. You taught me that.

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