Will court enforce rules about RU-486?

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow -

An Ohio law dealing with the abortion drug RU-486 will see even more court action.

The law simply requires abortion facilities administering the drug to do so according to federal guidelines, rather misusing it. An abortion business filed a lawsuit in 2004, saying the statute was ambiguous. The case has been in the courts since then, but Mark Lally of Ohio Right to Life tells OneNewsNow the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=651832

Iran’s plummeting birth rates

Michael Cook
Despite its fundamentalist Islamic reputation Iran has experimented with birth control with some unexpected, and unwelcome, consequences.

If demography is destiny, the family of Farzaneh Roudi is a snapshot of Iran’s past, present and future. A program director at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC, Ms Roudi was born in Iran. Her grandmother had 11 children, her father had 6 and she has 2.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/irans_plummeting_birth_rates/

China’s abortion surge blamed on young, single women

Carolyn Moynihan

A report in the official Chinese newspaper China Daily reveals some shocking figures on abortion in that country: 13 million surgical abortions a year performed in hospitals, 10 million abortion pills sold every year, and unknown number of abortions done in unregistered rural hospitals. “Family planning” statistics are usually considered state secrets, so why this sudden revelation?

Apparently, nobody knows, but the original report -- picked up by media around the world -- highlighted the information that nearly two thirds of the hospital abortions were done on single women aged between 20 and 29. A government official quoted in the report said nearly half of those having abortions reported using no contraception when they conceived. A sex therapist blamed it all on a lack of sex education (and doesn’t that sound familiar?).

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/chinas_abortion_surge_blamed_on_young_single_women/

£6m drive to cut teen pregnancies sees them DOUBLE

By Daniel Martin

A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving.
The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.
But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were 'significantly' more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198228/6m-drive-cut-teen-pregnancies-sees-DOUBLE.html

Christian legal group battles FDA over 'morning after' pill

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow -
The Alliance Defense Fund is seeking permission to intervene in a court decision ordering the Food and Drug Administration to sell the "Plan B" pill to minors.

The Plan B pill, otherwise known as the "morning-after pill," is a very strong dose the same hormones used in oral contraceptive pills. Some doctors believe it could cause an abortion to an expectant mother. Matt Bowman is an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=589130

Obama would ax abstinence-only funding

Jim Brown - OneNewsNow -

If Congress approves President Obama's budget requests, there will be no more federal funding of abstinence-only education programs.

Barack Obama has recommended completely zeroing out Title V abstinence programs to states, as well as abstinence education programs to community-based organizations (CBAE) and replacing them with more than $100 million for contraceptive-based sex-education programs. The massive omnibus bill signed by the president had already reduced funding to abstinence programs by $14 million.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=522676

'Plan B for girls' court decision hailed as triumph of science over politics

Carolyn Moynihan

With new bosses about to take over at the US Food and Drug Administration, a New York judge has ordered the federal drug regulator to make the morning after pill available to 17-year-olds and to review whether to make the emergency contraceptive available to all ages without a doctor’s order. Judge Edward R Korman’s 52-page decision is the outcome of a lawsuit by the Centre for Reproductive Rights against the FDA’s 2006 decision to deny girls younger than 18 access to the Plan B pill without a prescription.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/plan_b_for_girls_court_decision_hailed_as_triumph_of_science_over_politics/

Contraception: Why Not?

Janet Smith explains why the Catholic Church keeps insisting, in the face of the opposite position held by most of the rest of the modern world, that contraception is one of the worst inventions of our time.

My topic for tonight is the Church's teaching on contraception and various sexual issues. As you know, we live in a culture that thinks that contraception is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. If you were to ask people if they wanted to give up their car or their computer or their contraceptive, it would be a hard choice to make. It's really considered to be something that has really put us, greatly, into the modern age and one of the greatest advances of modern medicine and modern times. Yet, there's this archaic church that tells us that, really, this is one of the worst inventions of mankind. According to the Church, contraception is one of the things that's plunging us into a kind of a disaster.

So we have this great polarization: a world that thinks contraception is one of the greatest inventions of our time and the Catholic Church that says it's one of the worst. I am going to try to help people see tonight why the Church's teaching certainly deserves serious consideration.

http://catholiceducation.org/articles/sexuality/se0002.html

FDA cracks down on pill’s lifestyle claims

Carolyn Moynihan

To some of us it may seem that the contraceptive pill has always promised too much. It’s chief claim, “99 per cent effective in preventing pregnancy when taken as directed”, depends on reading all the fine print, knowing all your contra-indications and never missing a day. But how many women do all that? Even granted that it prevents pregnancy, many women have been disillusioned by side effects ranging from weight gain to cancer risks, and have given up taking the pill.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/fda_cracks_down_on_pills_lifestyle_claims/

US 'baby bust' may come without govt. funding

by Carolyn Moynihan

Another thing Nancy Pelosi should have thought of before trying to justify $200 million for birth control in the stimulus package: during the Great Depression of the 1930s the birth rate in the US fell to an unprecedented low of 2.1 children per woman, without the contraceptive pill or government intervention. During the inflationary “oil shock” of the 1970s, it fell again to 1.7 -- this time, no doubt, with the help of the Pill, but with how much government funding?

Since people seem likely to postpone births anyway during this recession, putting hundreds of millions of dollars at the disposal of Planned Parenthood could make the birthrate sink dangerously low. The Population Reference Bureau -- a population control organisation -- thinks there could be a “baby bust”, but we won’t know until early 2010, “when the recession will probably already be over.”

However, the problems from such a “bust” might only be beginning. ~ PRB, January 2009

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/us_baby_bust_may_come_without_govt_funding/

Excuse me, Madam Speaker

by Jennifer Roback Morse

If Nancy Pelosi wants to save the American economy some money she needs to stop investing in irresponsible sex.

Nancy Pelosi made “stupid” history this week by her claim that “family planning” funds will stimulate the economy. Her argument, if you can dignify it with that term, is that reducing unwanted pregnancies will reduce the burden on taxpayers. But she doesn’t ask herself whether more contraception is really the answer to “unwanted” pregnancies.

Continue...

Stimulus still funds anti-family programs

Charlie Butts and Jody Brown- OneNewsNow - 1/29/2009

A multi-million dollar proposal for contraception and abortion has been removed from the huge economic stimulus bill. But the bill still contains funding for controversial projects.

Earlier this week Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) vehemently defended the idea of spending millions of dollars on birth control and abortion as part of the economic stimulus package. "Contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government," she stated on ABC. But after pro-life advocates -- including several in Congress -- cast a spotlight on that portion of the package, it was removed. The U.S. House passed the stimulus package on Wednesday and has now passed it on to the Senate.

Continue...

Use of condoms misreported by young people

By Carolyn Moynihan

Here’s something to be taken into account when claims and counter-claims are being made about the relative importance of abstinence and contraceptive use in the ups and downs of teenage pregnancy and STIs. A study by Eve Rose of Emory University and colleagues conducted among 715 black women and girls ages 15 to 21, who were enrolled in an HIV prevention programme, showed that one third (34 per cent) of those reporting condom use every time they had sex had physical evidence (Y chromosome DNA in vaginal fluid) to the contrary.

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Calling population control

Amongst the 1800 workers at a New Delhi call centre taking calls for US retail and technology companies are 17 graduates handling enquiries on birth control. Placed there to make their "socially sensitive work" invisible, the mainly female workers are paid by India's National Population Stabilisation Fund - a name that needs no further explanation. The Washington Post gives a run-down on India's 1 billion-plus population, quoting officials who say it will take some Indian states 18 to 45 years to achieve the stabilising fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. As a matter of fact some states must be below replacement already, as the national fertility rate is already down to 2.76.

The National Population Stabilisation Fund's executive director speaks of "empowering" callers with answers to their queries about contraception and related issues, but power to the people is clearly not the main motive of this -- and other -- population control strategies. And the effects can be drastic: badly-skewed sex ratios in favour of males in some states are largely the result of ultrasound scanning and abortion.

Many calls are made by cellphone and are said to be from areas outside big cities where there are few "health-care and social workers". When the centre opened in June 2008 it received almost 800 calls a day, but slowly the number declined to 250 a day. Staff blame this on the service not being toll-free. If it were free, says one agent, the calls could go up to 1000 a day. ~ Washington Post, Jan 5

ACLU: No contraception? No federal dollars...

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 1/14/2009

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to prevent the use of federal funds for religious and pro-life organizations that help victims of sexual trafficking.

According to an ACLU news release, the lawsuit was filed to ensure that groups or ministries who help victims of human and sex trafficking can provide a so-called "full range of needed services," including birth-control pills and other forms of contraception, the "morning-after pill," and abortion.

Continue...

Pill inventor slams ... pill

Eighty five year old Carl Djerassi the Austrian chemist who helped invent the contraceptive pill now says that his co-creation has led to a "demographic catastrophe."

In an article published by the Vatican this week, the head of the world's Catholic doctors broadened the attack on the pill, claiming it had also brought "devastating ecological effects" by releasing into the environment "tonnes of hormones" that had impaired male fertility, The Taiwan Times says.

The assault began with a personal commentary in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard by Carl Djerassi. The Austrian chemist was one of three whose formulation of the synthetic progestogen Norethisterone marked a key step toward the earliest oral contraceptive pill.

Read the rest of this article here.

Pharmacists sue IL governor over right of conscience

Illinois pharmacists have been granted legal permission to challenge Governor Rod Blagojevich's executive order that forces them to dispense "emergency contraception" against their wills.

The pharmacists sued because the order violated their religious beliefs against selling certain abortifacients like the "morning-after pill." Brian Rooney of the Thomas More Law Center explains why the pharmacists filed suit.

"There is a law in Illinois that allows pharmacists and pharmacies to allow their rights to conscience to take precedence over these kinds of things," he notes.

Rooney believes the governor's executive order requiring them to dispense and sell the drugs was illegal. "When you have a duly enacted statute of law by the legislature, it always takes precedence over an executive order," he points out.

Blagojevich's executive order, according to Rooney, has already hurt the pharmacy industry in Illinois. "There were businesses going out of business," he adds. "There were pharmacists that were being let go -- all because they had deeply held religious beliefs and deeply held moral beliefs."

The state Supreme Court has ruled that pharmacists should be heard, so a trial will soon be held in a lower court.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=368086

Even More on Humanae Vitae

One more thought: The Pill was supposed to deliver us from every manner of trouble by separating sex from reproduction. We now have sex without babies and babies without sex. In the end, the culture of contraception has separated men and women from each other.

More on Humanae Vitae

I posted about Mary Eberstadt's article on Pope Paul IV's birth control encyclical, Humane Vitae (Of Human Life) earlier. I have been thinking about Paul's prediction that artificial birth control would sour relations between the sexes. Now, I have to say, in advance, that my training is in economics. One of the first things you learn in economics is that the best test of a theory is its predictive power. Sounding reasonable at the outset isn't enough. Having "realistic" assumptions isn't enough. The real test of a theory is whether the predictions of the theory are falsified or verified by events.

By that standard, Paul VI should get a Nobel Prize. The enthusiasts who predicted that birth control would usher in an era of "every child a wanted child," look pretty silly in retrospect. Paul VI had a superior theory of the human condition.

In any case, here is what Mary Eberstadt has to say about his prediction that contraception would damage relationships between men and women.

Perhaps the most mocked of Humanae Vitae's predictions was its claim that separating sex from procreation would deform relations between the sexes and "open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards." Today, when advertisements for sex scream from every billboard and webpage, and every teen idol is sooner or later revealed topless or worse online, some might wonder what further proof could possibly be offered.

But to leave matters there would be to miss something important. The critical point is, one might say, not so much the proof as the pudding it's in. And it would be hard to get more ironic than having these particular predictions of Humanae Vitae vindicated by perhaps the most unlikely—to say nothing of unwilling—witness of all: modern feminism….

Consider just what we have been told by the endless books on the topic over the years. If feminists married and had children, they lamented it. If they failed to marry or have children, they lamented that, too. If they worked outside the home and also tended their children, they complained about how hard that was. If they worked outside the home and didn't tend their children, they excoriated anyone who thought they should. And running through all this literature is a more or less constant invective about the unreliability and disrespect of men. …

Beneath all the pathos, the subtext remains the same: Woman's chief adversary is Unreliable Man, who does not understand her sexual and romantic needs and who walks off time and again at the first sashay of a younger thing. What are all these but the generic cries of a woman who thinks that men are "disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium" and "no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection"?...

That there is no auxiliary literature of grievance for men—who, for the most part, just don't seem to feel they have as much to grieve about in this new world order—is something else that Humanae Vitae and a few other retrograde types saw coming in the wake of the revolution. As the saying goes, and as many people did not stop to ask at the time, cui bono? Forty years later, the evidence is in. As Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver observed on Humanae Vitae's thirtieth anniversary in 1998, "Contraception has released males—to a historically unprecedented degree—from responsibility for their sexual aggression." Will any feminist who by 2008 disagrees with that statement please stand up?

I'm not exactly a feminist. And I don't exactly disagree with Archbishop Chaput. But I do think that there is a grievance literature for men: the dispossessed fathers that I and Steven Baskerville have written about. Ironically, these are the men who are doing what they ought to be doing. They are trying to be good husbands and fathers, but have been kicked out of their family's lives. These men, are, for all practical purposes, invisible in our society. (My website has a page called The Reluctantly Divorced. I call them the Unknown Soldiers of the Culture Wars.) They are dismissed by some, even in the Fatherhood Movement, who call them "Mad Dads."

There is something seriously wrong when the most aggrieved people in society are those who are trying to be responsible parents and spouses.

The Vindication of Humanae vitae at Age 40

The controversial "birth control" encyclical, Humanae Vitae, "Of Human Life," has held up better than its critics expected. That is the message of this long and rewarding article by Mary Eberstadt at First Things.

Full Disclosure Notice: Mary Eberstadt is my friend.

Shameless Self Promotion: One of the talks on my Smart Sex Series CD set is called, "How Science Shows the Church has Been Right Along."

Anyhow, Mary goes through and shows that every one of Pope Paul VI's predictions about the moral and social consequences of contraception has come to pass. But one of my favorite parts of the article addresses the question of WHY the opposition to HV was so intense, when the negative consequences weren't really that hard to foresee:

It is less than coincidental that the high-mindedness of saving the planet dovetailed perfectly with a more self-interested outcome, the freer pursuit of sexuality via the Pill. Dissenting Catholics had special reasons to stress the "science of overpopulation," and so they did. In the name of a higher morality, their argument went, birth control could be defended as the lesser of two evils (a position argued by the dissenter Charles Curran, among others)….

She gives considerable attention to the new book Fatal Misconceptions:

so discredited has the overpopulation science become that this year Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly could publish Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population and garner a starred review in Publishers Weekly—all in service of what is probably the single best demolition of the population arguments that some hoped would undermine church teaching. This is all the more satisfying a ratification because Connelly is so conscientious in establishing his own personal antagonism toward the Catholic Church (at one point asserting without even a footnote that natural family planning "still fails most couples who try it").

Fatal Misconception is decisive proof that the spectacle of overpopulation, which was used to browbeat the Vatican in the name of science, was a grotesque error all along. First, Connelly argues, the population-control movement was wrong as a matter of fact: "The two strongest claims population controllers make for their long-term historical contribution" are "that they raised Asia out of poverty and helped keep our planet habitable." Both of these, he demonstrates, are false.

Even more devastating is Connelly's demolition of the claim to moral high ground that the overpopulation alarmists made. For population science was not only failing to help people, Connelly argues, but also actively harming some of them—and in a way that summoned some of the baser episodes of recent historical memory:

The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they knew it themselves. . . . The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the "unfit," or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them. It appealed to people with power because, with the spread of emancipatory movements, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory. That is why opponents were essentially correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished business of imperialism.

The forty years since Humanae Vitae appeared have also vindicated the encyclical's fear that governments would use the new contraceptive technology coercively. The outstanding example, of course, is the Chinese government's long-running "one-child policy," replete with forced abortions, public trackings of menstrual cycles, family flight, increased female infanticide, sterilization, and other assaults too numerous even to begin cataloguing here—in fact, so numerous that they are now widely, if often grudgingly, acknowledged as wrongs even by international human-rights bureaucracies. Lesser-known examples include the Indian government's foray into coercive use of contraception in the "emergency" of 1976 and 1977, and the Indonesian government's practice in the 1970s and 1980s of the bullying implantation of IUDs and Norplant.

Should governments come to "regard this as necessary," Humanae Vitae warned, "they may even impose their use on everyone." As with the unintended affirmation by social science, will anyone within the ranks of the population revisionists now give credit where credit is due?

Read it all here.