Archive for the 'Contraception' Category

The No Room for Contraception Blog reports on a new billboard campaign sponsored by the Diocese of Tulsa. They’re a response to a billboard campaign launched by the local Planned Parenthood affiliate that claims, “Birth Control is Easy.”

And, speaking of billboards, I’ve included below an e-mail we recently received from Judy Climer of Flint (MI) Right to Life, whose organization has put up over 50 billboards in the Flint area on behalf of the local affiliate of Black Americans for Life, with which she is also involved. To say the least, the campaign has gotten people talking:

I’ll share a little of our success with BAFL, and you use it however it will bless and help others in this battle to save life.

We bought a 10-billboard blitz to put out there for the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade in January of 2004, and the message was: “Abortion, the #1 Killer of African Americans.” (This board is on our website – www.FlintRTL.com)

I received a phone call from The Flint Journal (liberal newspaper), ironically, the exact day that the boards were going up. The reporter had talked to Jim Richardson, the Director of PP, and he told them they were giving out free coffee at the Coffee Beanery to “celebrate” Roe vs. Wade. She wanted to know what we were doing.

So., I told her we were breaking forth with the truth about how African Americans have been deceived by PP, that little black babies are aborted 3 times more often than babies of all other races (in MI, they accounted for 37% of the abortions) and it makes abortion the #1 killer of African Americans. (more…)

I was really annoyed with a particular article from last Sunday’s Chicago Tribune. I have to wonder if Ross Werland is stuck in the 60′s? Doesn’t he realize that there are dozens of STDs because people choose to sleep around? And that most of these STDs wreak havoc on women – possibly rendering them infertile? But why should he care about that? He’s more concerned about whether or not people think he’s a freak.

As an aside, I happened to really like being part of a “small crowd” and so do most people I know from large families.

I suggest you write to our dear friend and enlighten the poor soul: (rwerland@tribune.com).

It’s a stiff competition, but the Patch continues to make a convincing case for why it deserves the title of Most Dangerous Form of Hormonal Birth Control, as this article from No Room for Contraception explains:

Ortho Evra Birth Control Patch: 1,000 Claimants and Counting

Youngest victim was 14

By Ruben Obregon

According to Johnson & Johnson’s third quarter SEC filing for 2006 , there are over “1,000 claimants who have filed lawsuits or have made claims regarding injuries allegedly due to Ortho Evra.” [1] Ortho Evra, also known as the birth control patch, is a transdermal hormonal contraceptive which is applied weekly to the skin. In addition to being a contraceptive, the patch can act as an abortifacient by preventing implantation of a fertilized egg.

Serious health problems have been associated with Ortho Evra including fatal and non-fatal blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, and death. From April 2002 to December 2004, over 27,974 ‘adverse effects’ were reported by users of Ortho Evra.[2] Many of the complaints are serious, and the patch is alleged to be responsible for over 23 deaths, including the death of 14 year old Alycia Brown.[3]

The claims keep mounting – last week a lawsuit was filed on behalf of 40 women against Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical Inc, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson and the manufacturer of Ortha Evra.. The lawsuit alleges that the Ortho Evra patch was responsible for the serious health problems, including the death of one user.[4]

“We were saddened for these women and their families but not surprised by the news of these cases,” says John David Hart, of the Law Offices of John David Hart in Fort Worth, who represents women who have used the Ortho Evra patch. “All of the women we’ve met with and all of the research we’ve done suggest that this is a real problem and that women are being harmed by using this drug.”[4]

Rather than pull the drug off of the market, it appears Johnson & Johnson finds it cheaper to settle with victims. (more…)

Yesterday, the aptly named Project Reality announced the following:

Congressional Committee on Government Reform Finds Rep. Henry Waxman’s Report on Abstinence Education Inaccurate and Misleading

Glenview, IL – An official Congressional Report, released this October 27th by the Committee on Government Reform, has found that a Democratic Staff Report released in December, 2004, entitled “The Content of Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Education Programs” is inaccurate and misrepresentative of abstinence education programs nationwide.

The 2004 report, commonly referred to as “The Waxman Report,” was widely and misleadingly critical of federally funded abstinence education programs. It was prepared by partisan staff and released by Rep. Henry Waxman, the Minority Chair of the Committee on Government Reform. This report received widespread and favorable media coverage and was hailed as a “Congressional Report” despite the fact that it was prepared by Minority Staff and never reviewed by the full committee. It referred to abstinence education programs as “inaccurate” and “dangerous” and called for more funding for so-called “comprehensive” sex education programs. Since its release, The Waxman Report has been used by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) to perpetuate national campaigns against abstinence education programs and funding.

The new report “Abstinence and Its Critics” released on Friday by Rep. Souder, reveals that The Waxman Report itself was misleading and dangerous in that it failed to examine any content of the sex education programs it recommended and contained errors and half-truths in its analysis of abstinence education programs. (more…)

A friend of mine from college, Father Robert Zwilling, stopped by our office recently to celebrate Mass in the Pro-Life Action League’s St. Joseph Chapel.

Since then, I have had the good fortune to be able to read his Sunday homilies, which he sends to an e-mail list, along with a reflection, a “Catholic term of the week,” a bit of humor, and some suggestions for further reading on the topic(s) addressed in the homily.

Last week, Father Robert preached on contraception.

I was very impressed — first, simply by the fact that he preached on what many consider to be the unpreachable. (Unfortunately, it seems that a homily on contraception is about as rare as a Honus Wagner cigarette card.)

Most people assume it’s foolish for a priest to preach against contraception:

Most of the parishioners are using contraception themselves, so many of them will be offended, and they’ll stop coming to Mass — which means they’ll stop giving to the church.

Or so the argument goes.

Thankfully, there are still holy priests who care more about souls than money — priests who are serious about shepherding their flocks, and are courageous enough to proclaim the truth about human sexuality from the pulpit, knowing full well that many in their congregations may have never heard these teachings before.

I especially liked Father Robert’s use of an analogy I’d never heard before to distinguish between contraception and NFP: (more…)

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I received some mail from:

The Executive Mansion
410 E Jackson
Springfield, IL 62701-1719

It was addressed “To the Parents of Maria Jansen.”

“What could this be?” we both thought.

Upon opening it, we found a card saying “Welcome, Little One” with a collection of stuffed animals looking out the window at an approaching stork carrying a bundle in its beak.

Opening it up, the right flap said, “The world is one baby sweeter now.”

The main part of the card reads:

Congratulations on the birth of your new baby! Childbirth is an exciting event for every family, and we are proud to share in your joy.

A healthy child is a happy child. Therefore, it is important that your baby receive proper immunizations by two months of age. It will help to ensure protection against future illnesses.

Best wishes to your whole family on this very special occasion.

Rod Blagojevich

At this point, we had to chuckle. Honestly, we don’t know which of our girls’ births this card was intended to recognize, as all three of our daughters are named Maria. (We call each of them by their middle names).

Presumably, it was sent in response to the birth of our yountest daughter, Maria Lucia, who was born in September 2005. Which means the card is at least a year late (“…it is important that your baby receive proper immunizations by two months of age”).

I guess when your office is as scandal-plagued as Governor Blagojevich’s is, these sorts of things get put on the back burner. (more…)

Reader Ellen recently alerted us to an entry posted earlier this month on the pro-abortion blog RHRealityCheck — the same blog that also recently included a series of posts by one Tyler LePard, who attended our “Contraception Is Not the Answer” conference last month.

In an entry titled “Rethinking Overpopulation”, Andrea Lynch writes:

Amidst the media hysteria about the U.S. population reaching 300 million this month, it seems an opportune moment to reflect on the deeply subjective nature of the concept of “overpopulation.” One example: how is it that Europe’s low birth rate is a population “crisis,” whereas Africa’s high birth rate is also a population “crisis”? Three guesses.

For this and other food for thought, I highly recommend 10 Reasons to Rethink ‘Overpopulation’ [PDF], a thoughtful new resource from Hampshire College’s Population and Development Program that explores the links between population, reproductive health, human rights, racism, and the environment. Here are some particularly compelling reasons to rethink:

1. Population control targets women’s fertility and restricts reproductive rights.
2. Population alarmism encourages apocalyptic thinking that legitimizes human rights abuses.
3. Conventional views of overpopulation stand in the way of greater global understanding and solidarity.

If I had my way, it would be required reading for all 300 million Americans…

In response, reader KellyR posted a comment that begins:

I was surprised to see this post. I would consider these old arguments to be harmful rhetoric and should be placed as such under that portion of your website. The paper referenced above only harms the family planning/reproductive health movement now that we’ve moved on.

(more…)

A study [PDF] published this month in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings provides further evidence of a connection between the Pill and breast cancer.

In a related post a few days ago — regarding an article titled “Breast Cancer and Oral Contraception” posted on the No Room for Contraception website — Mark Shea summed it up: Contraception: The Gift that Keeps on Taking.

Dr. Janet Smith gave a presentation at last month’s “Contraception Is Not the Answer” conference titled “Hormones ‘R’ Us,” in which she discussed in detail these and other harmful side effects of hormonal birth control on a woman’s body (as well as some downright bizarre side effects on the environment).

You can buy a copy of Dr. Smith’s talk, as well as any or all of the other seven conference talks, here.

Regarding last week’s outrageous New York state court ruling that religious social service groups must pay for employees’ birth control coverage — even if the groups believe that contraception is sinful — we issued this press release today:

Court Shows Anti-Catholic Bias

CHICAGO, Oct. 24 — “It is outrageous to expect the Catholic Church to go against its own beliefs, said Joseph M. Scheidler, National Director of the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, in response to the ruling by New York State’s Court of Appeals that Catholic Charities must provide contraceptive coverage to its employees.

“Some common forms of contraception can even cause abortions,” said Scheidler. “This ruling is a blatant affront to the right of conscience that should protect every religion.” (more…)

Which means we must be doing something right.

Our recent “Contraception Is Not the Answer” conference certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed in the “pro-choice” world.

The nation’s leading abortion provider is the latest group to mention it, doing so in a recently launched e-mail campaign:

Dear [Planned Parenthood Supporter],

A few weeks ago, 250 anti-choice activists from around the nation converged on Rosemont, Illinois. They were there to attend a conference called “Contraception Is Not the Answer.” The Chicago Tribune reported that “experts at the gathering assailed contraception on the grounds that it devalues children, harms relationships between men and women, promotes sexual promiscuity, and leads to falling birth rates, among social ills.”

That conference was sponsored by the anti-choice Pro-Life Action League, whose extremist president, Joseph Scheidler, told the Tribune that “contraception is more the root cause of abortion than anything else.” (more…)

This is a headline I didn’t want to see today. Or tomorrow. Or ever.

Still, I’m not entirely surprised to see it:

Court: Religious social service groups must cover contraceptives

So much for freedom of religion.

From AP:

ALBANY, N.Y. — Catholic and other religious social service groups must provide contraceptive coverage to their employees even if they consider contraception a sin, according to Thursday’s ruling by New York’s highest court. (more…)

Any day now, the U. S. population will cross the 300 million mark. There are two ways to look at this news. You could say:

1. This is good. Or:
2. This is bad.

Georgie Anne Geyer, in her recent column, “A World of Hurt Will Follow Population Explosion”, goes with #2, and therefore gets it wrong.

Father Tom Euteneuer, in his recent column, “Baby Three Hundred Million”, goes with #1, and therefore gets it right.

Some highlights from Euteneuer’s article:

First, why is it that “growth” is only a problem when it concerns humans? When a new calf is born to a farmer he knows he’s a richer man; but when a new baby is born to him we call him irresponsible.

And:

Second, there is a deep-seated hypocrisy in the attitudes of westerners toward world population growth: that is, we only become alarmed at the growth of the populations of poor people, not rich ones. Ask the average American what areas of the world are overpopulated and she will inevitably tell you Africa and Asia. She may add Latin America due to the number of people who are undoubtedly so populous that they have to sneak across our borders to feed themselves. She will be wrong on all counts but facts are not relevant to overpopulation propaganda. Ask her what country has the third largest population in the world and she will likely not know that it is her own. We’ve been programmed to intuitively connect population growth with people of color and then to think that the best way to eliminate their poverty is to eliminate them.

And:

Third, there is a profound ignorance about the nature of modern population growth. Since the end of the Second World War the world’s population more than doubled, sending shock waves of panic throughout the well-developed countries blaming the growth exclusively on the number of babies that all those poor people were having. The over-population histrionics ignored the reality that advances in health care and modern technology have contributed the lion’s share of that growth by simply keeping people alive longer and providing them with a better standard of living.

Read the whole thing.

Looking back on laughable examples of pop culture birth control propaganda from the late Sixties, it’s astonishing to think that the overpopulation hoax still refuses to go away.

We’ve all heard it before.

Kids are going to have sex anyway, the argument goes, so we should teach them how to have “safe sex” “safer sex”.

Wrong.

Pro-Contraception Sex Education programs (often referred to by the term “Comprehensive Sex Ed” by supporters), have repeatedly been shown to be not only ineffective, but harmful to adolescents.

And these programs are always closely connected to pro-abortion organizations.

I’ll be talking more about this connection and about the harm done by so-called comprehensive sex ed programs — and, on the other hand, the well-documented success of abstinence education programs — at the GFL Pro-Life Youth Conference next Saturday, October 21st. (If you haven’t registered yet, I encourage you to do so.)

My interest in this topic was piqued last summer, when we first heard about a fundraiser — which we picketed — for the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH).

The goal of ICAH is to strip all funding of abstinence-only education for Illinois schools and instead require them to use “comprehensive” sex education programs. (They recently succeeded in doing so in the Chicago Public Schools.)

The adults-only fundraiser was held at — of all places — the Playboy headquarters. You can view the invitation here [PDF]; I blogged about it here.

The guest of honor at the event was Playboy CEO Christie Hefner. It was she who decided that the company could make more money by producing increasingly harder-core pornography — something that even her father, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, was reluctant to do for a long time.

At the time, I wrote that this fundraiser tells us everything we need to know about the advocates of so-called comprehensive sex education.

Oh, and did I mention that the nation’s leading abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, is one of the major partners of ICAH?

I invite you to come to the conference to learn more.

As I mentioned in my most recent post, Chicago Tribune reporter Judith Graham’s article on the Pro-Life Action League’s recent “Contraception Is Not the Answer” conference was, on the whole, fairly balanced.

I also noted that it contained a few misleading points, however, some of which I will address here.

In the article, Graham notes the following:

Unlike abortion, birth control is part of the daily lives of most women of childbearing age in America. A stunning 98 percent of women 15 to 44 who have had sex report using at least one method of contraception; almost 40 million women of that age use birth control, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

As I noted in a post last month, it’s no surprise that self-styled pro-choicers are making a conscious effort to shift discussion away from abortion, because they know they’re up against the ropes in the arena of public opinion on that issue.

Make no mistake: We’re under no illusion that the figures for those opposed to contraception are as high as the figures for those opposed to abortion.

But as far as gauging public opinion is concerned, the “98 percent” figure, as Graham reports it, is meaningless. (more…)

The Pro-Life Action League’s “Contraception Is Not the Answer” conference was a huge success!

What’s more, an article on the conference was prominently featured in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune.

On the whole, we found the article to be fairly balanced. It does contains a few misleading points, though; we plan to address those in a separate post.

For now, here’s the article, without further comment:

Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement’s success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal group of Christian conservatives is arguing that it’s time to mount a concerted attack on contraception.

Their voices were raised in Rosemont on Friday and Saturday at an unusual anti-abortion meeting that drew 250 people from around the nation to condemn artificial birth control. Experts at the gathering assailed contraception on the grounds that it devalues children, harms relationships between men and women, promotes sexual promiscuity and leads to falling birth rates, among social ills.

“Contraception is more the root cause of abortion than anything else,” Joseph Scheidler, an anti-abortion veteran whose Pro-Life Action League sponsored the conference, said in an interview. (more…)