...about how contraception would make abortion go away? Turns out a Spanish study finds, much to its chagrin, that as contraceptive use rates increased, abortion rates skyrocketed, thus thwarting their assumption that they would plummet. Eric Scheidler offers his analysis.
Turns out that when you decouple sex from having children, you teach people that children are an interfering imposition on one’s right to pleasure at all costs. If “costs” include “the cost of the interfering nuisance’s life” then lots and lots of people say, “Works for me” and kill their child (after first swallowing euphemistic rubbish to dull the sense of guilt for their crime).
The euphemistic rubbish doesn’t work well, especially in a culture where so much of our information is visual and not verbal. That’s why, as Ross Douthat points out, the visual media are so exquisitely uncomfortable at showing us what abortion actually means.
I am ambiguous about the good done by the gory shocking photos of aborted children. I think that some people of good will who are still on the fence will simply feel assaulted by them and tune out the prolife cause in sheer visceral numbness. I also think that as Flannery O’Connor pointed out, sometimes the remedy for communicating with the deaf is shouting. Certainly, neither the prophets nor the successful English abolitionist William Wilberforce were averse to making people face the stench of the death they were enabling. But whatever the good done by horrifying images, I think there is no doubt the good done by beautiful ones. The ultrasound is the greatest enemy the abortionist has ever faced. A culture of life that simply shows the beauty of the growing and developing blows to pieces all the lies about “blobs of tissue” and “fetal material” that Culture of Death serves up. A Culture of Life that will likewise show us real stories of women who are supported and nurtured through difficult pregnancies and given a future and a hope in raising their child is a Culture that will defeat the lie. But we had better bloody well keep supporting that woman and her child after the pregnancy comes to term or we simply provide aid and comfort to everything the abortionist says.
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Amazingly, people still think contraception ought to work, like Communism. William Saletan (for example) believes that, if people just take a rigorous, disciplined approach to it, then unplanned pregnancies will reduce and the demand for abortion will drop. He recognizes that reality is failing to match up with his ideals but can’t even begin to question his basic assumptions. That’s where we need to hit them—right at the foundations of their empire’s structure.
Let us not confuse the debate of the use of contraceptives by married couples with the use of contraceptives outside marriage.
Outside marriage Natural Family Planning is not permitted.
contraception is not used by married couples. contraception is a disqualification of marriage. marital contraception, therefore is an oxymoron and does not exist.
timmy baugh: It’s true that total lack of intent to ever be children is grounds for nullification of a marriage. However, the mere use of contraception, or intention to ever use contraception, is not.
...and a hope in raising their child is…
lest we forget… and the hope that adoption may bring…
this is a swell piece : )
Just a couple of thoughts…
While I expect that few would practice it, there is no reason that NFP could not be practiced by sexually active couples outside of marriage. NFP in and of itself is simply a method of delaying pregnancy. In practice of course, it is probably exclusively practiced by married couples (The vast majority of which are probably faithful Catholics). Of course, one could argue that chastity outside of marriage is a form of NFP as well :).
Contraception in and of itself may not be properly speaking grounds for the nullification of a marriage, but it is a grave sin. When one integrates sin into the very heart of a marriage, it is little wonder that our society has such a high divorce rate.
If reading the following is not enough to make one squeamish about abortion, then I submit that one has gone wildly off the rails:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/114200224.html?cmpid=15585797
x
Ooops, mistake above. Good post, Mark. I continue to wonder at the fact that so few people follow through to find out whether all those rosy promises (abortion will be safe, legal and rare; we will be out of Bosnia/Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam in six months) ever pan out. How short our attention span is! Thanks for shedding light on this.
The book “Sex Au Naturel: What It Is and Why It’s Good for Your Marriage” explains it all, signed copies of which can be ordered here: www.patrickcoffin.net.
Cheers!
PDC
Shameless plug!
I was thinking about the question of how much gory pictures help or hurt the pro-life cause while reading excepts from Abby Johnson’s conversion story. She says how pro-lifers screaming at her drove her further into the pro-abortion camp, while pro-lifers simply praying outside abortion clinics were more challenging to her world view. At the same time, the trigger for her conversion was watching an ultrasound during an abortion. In short, at least in her case, prayerful pro-life witness may have softened her heart, but the “gory pictures” of an ultrasound were what ended up turning her life around.
The documentary BloodMoney actually has a former abortionist describing a ‘family planning clinic’ strategy: low dose / low quality contraceptives, in the hopes of yielding higher abortion rates at their clinics.
“[We would] break down their natural modesty, separate them from their parents and values and become the sex experts in their lives so they would turn to us. When we could give them a low dose birth control pill they would get pregnant on it or on a defective condom…”
http://bloodmoneyfilm.com/
We must certainly be positive and show the upside of having a child but reality being what it is, showing the downside is also necessary because we cannot hide from the consequences of our actions. A sign showing a fetus intact is beautiful but justice demands we also show the consequences of abortion in a sign revealing a dismembered fetus.
its really incredible how people (pro choice and pro life) will fearfully ignore those images of aborted babies in the womb, even the cases of those very early stages that clearly reveal the mutilation of that teeny person.
You must see the discussion/debate recently aired on Hannity Foxnews (I never watch Fox news or much tv) but I was given the clip of this debate between Al Sharpton and Rick Santorem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6vwAVB30Ls its incredible how foggy Al Sharptons thinking is, and it is set on the table. You can see what the ignorance of truth leads the human mind towards…..a tipsy type of thinking that truly turns one “alien” to the reality of the matter. Life begins at conception-says science….“but we must preserve the Law for women to exercise their “rights” chants Sharpton…....while just being witness to the facts about human life beginning at conception, and the fact that 1/2 his race missing due to abortion. Seriously?! so the “right” to snuff the smallest of all people must be protected by Law? what??!
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