Separating Unitive From Procreative Is Root of Culture of Death

British Pro-Life Doctor on How Contraception Has Led to Culture of Death, and the Steady Erosion of Parental Protection

The main root of the Culture of Death, a central aspect of the “throwaway culture” often highlighted by Pope Francis, is the artificial separation through contraception of the unitive and procreative dimensions of sexual relations.

This view is strongly held by Dr. Thomas Ward, vice-president and founder of the U.K.’s National Association of Catholic Families. Ward, a family doctor, argues the damage caused by this artificial separation is also being amplified by the steady removal of parental protection of children.

(Proof of this was seen in Scotland today, March 10th, when various Scottish health boards voiced opposition to pupils and teachers opting out of sex education lessons, or lessons on equal marriage and same-sex relationships).

Here below, in two short but compelling papers he recently gave in Russia, Dr. Ward explains these arguments in detail (emphases his).

He passed them on to me last week while he was in Rome to take part in the Pontifical Academy for Life’s workshop on "Assisting the elderly and palliative care".

The meeting, he said, “was quite excellent and a huge contribution to the highest standards of practice of modern palliative care worldwide” and he hoped that when its deliberations are published “they will get wide coverage.” More details on the workshop will be available on the pontifical academy website.


The International Forum

The Large Family and the Future of Humanity

Moscow 10-11 September 2014

Plenary Session. " Family its Present and Future"

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, The Hall of Church Councils.

 

Parents the Primary Educators of their Children.

Parents from legal outcasts to outlaws.

 

Dr. Thomas Ward.

Vice-President and Founder of the National Association of Catholic Families.

 

 

Parents from legal outcasts to outlaws.

O Blessed Virgin Mary, Chaste Mother of God, Immaculate Virgin.

Into your hands we entrust the great cause of protecting the civilisation of life and love.

Madame Chairman, Christian families of Russia, thank you for your call to the generosity and joy of large families. Yours is a revolutionary call for a new Civilization of Love and Life.

It is a challenge to our families to replace today's dominant Culture of Death with all its attacks on human normality: on life, love, sexuality, marriage, family and indeed Christianity itself. A culture enforced on our families at home and brutally imposed upon the families in poor countries abroad. It is also a culture of planned demographic collapse.

The only protectors of children from the imposition of the values of this culture are their parents, their Primary Educators who, as in Germany and Sweden, will increasingly have little moral alternative to civil disobedience and imprisonment.

But do not despair of us in the West. Many of us oppose this madness.

As a family doctor, I have worked over forty years to defend the family and families ... I am convinced that the root of the Culture of Death is the artificial separation in sexual intercourse of love, the unitive from life, the procreative in contraception.

This separation of life from love has spread from contraception, to in vitro fertilization and now logically and even theologically to homosexual "marriage".

And contraception is associated with a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate ... and hormonal contraceptives have been known to have an intrinsic abortifacient pharmacological action since 1926!

Contraception alienates life from love in a second and unrecognized way.

Secret contraceptive indoctrination and provision to children without parental knowledge or consent, by Governments, often at the behest of undemocratic pressure groups separate our children from our protective love. 

But if we parents contracept, how can we convincingly protect our children from contraception?

Revealingly both separations are promoted by one of the largest multinationals in the world, the birth control lobby.

But who removed our parental rights?

In 1922 Lenin initiated what was to become the Frankfurt School of Western cultural Marxism. His intention: to destroy the obstacle of Western Christian culture. The methods: the use of sexual instinct and overwhelming negative destructive cultural criticism. They targeted our families against the background of growing liberalism in church and state.

The same message, different messengers:

“Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of a child.”

1920 Alexandra Kollontai, the first Soviet People's Commissar for Social Welfare Kommunistka  "Communism and the Family,"

Compare this with:

"Children have to be freed from… religious and other cultural “prejudices” forced upon them by parents, civil and religious authorities […] sex education should be introduced in the 4th grade, (i.e. 9 to10) eliminating “the ways of elders” by force if necessary.”

Brock Chisholm, the first director of the World Health Organization in 1948, The Psychiatry of Enduring Peace and Social Progress 1946. Valerie Riches in Sex Education or Indoctrination? (London, 2004; Revised and reprinted version of Sex & Social Engineering 1986). 

Compare this with:

"It is now the privilege of the Parental State to take major decisions - objective, unemotional, the State weighs up what is best for the child....” 

(Lady Helen Brook The Times 16 February 1980)

Helen Brook started the “secret” provision of contraceptives to the young, the very first step in the usurping of parental rights on education and medication.

Compare with:

“Parents –  the most dangerous people of all.”

A Family Planning Association spokeswoman - (The Times, 5 April 1974, ref: Valerie Riches, Sex & Social Engineering, 1986)

Compare it with:

The British Government 1974 instruction prepared with the advice of the birth control lobby that prohibited doctors from contacting "parents of a child of whatever age" when she requested contraceptives.

When a parent challenged this the Law Lords ruled that when a doctor decided a child fully understood what was  proposed the child could consent to all treatments and parents' rights  stopped. This now covers abortion.

Compare it with:

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women which instructed nations to ensure the right to sexual education, to contraception and abortion for girls and adolescents without parental knowledge or consent.

Please understand that IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation) is the nerve centre of the world reproductive law reform, and is based in London. London is the centre of Common Law jurisdiction which covers one third of humanity, the former British Empire.

IPPF operates in 189 countries including Russia.

Parents… from legal outcasts to outlaws.

Because of same sex marriage legislation, Catholic adoption agencies, caring in loco parentis for our most vulnerable Catholic children, have been outlawed.

The [UK] Education Act 1996 imposes a duty on state schools, including religious schools, to teach about marriage. With the legalizing of same sex "marriage" parents who object to this being taught in general classes have no right to withdraw their children. The school because of its legal obligation to promote equality is itself obliged to refuse permission.

Because of same sex marriage legislation the  exercising of the parental primary right to educate has been outlawed.

And on the teaching of Christian sexual morality in schools the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has said:

"A curriculum which teaches a particular religion’s doctrinal beliefs as if they were objectively true… is likely to lead to unjustifiable discrimination”

Because of same sex marriage legislation the right to teach Christian sexual morality as objective truth in educational institutions has been outlawed.

Never before in the history of free men has our human right to be the primary educators of our children been removed. It is a right enshrined in Genesis, in the New Testament, in the doctrine of the Orthodox and of the Catholic Church, in  Aristotle and the Universal Declaration of the Human rights. It must be enshrined in all of our national constitutions.

Ladies and gentlemen, the demographic recovery of your great country will depend disproportionately on generous large  families. But they need enforced legal guarantees of their God-given inalienable human right as the Primary Educators.

Through these families Russia will, please God, become a Christian  beacon of hope to all humanity.

 A new civilization of Love and Life will begin.

Начнется новой цивилизации любви и жизни.

It will be our civilisation.

Она будет нашей цивилизации

It will be God's civilisation.

Это будет цивилизации Бога

Christian Families of Russia, thank you.

Христианские семьи России, спасибо


The Moscow International Forum.

The Large Family and the Future of Humanity

10-11 September 2014.

Interdenominational Round Table.

Moderator Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin.

Chairman of the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate  on Interactions of Church and Society.

In November 2012 I had the privilege of organizing the British stage of the Pilgrimage of the Black Madonna from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean in defense of life and the family. It was overwhelmingly the largest pro- family / pro- life event in the United Kingdom for many years. It enjoyed unprecedented cooperation of Orthodox and Catholics throughout the Kingdom.  

I wish to thank the Charity Fund for the Protection of Family, Motherhood and Childhood (Russia), Human Life International and HLI Poland and the Orthodox Centre for Pro-life Activity (Russia) for this spiritual gift to Great Britain.

I believe that our Forum on the Large Family and the Future of Humanity is the fruit of From Ocean to Ocean.

Christians: breaking the bonds of our Contraceptive Revolution

In 1930 a moral volcano erupted in England. Its epicentre was just opposite Parliament at Lambeth Palace, the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the Church of England.

The occasion was the World Conference of Anglican Bishops at which birth control advocate Helena Wrighton gave an address.

The Conference of Bishops concluded:

"Where there is clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, the method must be decided on Christian principles....the Conference agrees that other methods (other than abstinence ) may be used, provided that this is done in the light of the same Christian principles." (emphasis added)

For the first time in two thousand years of Christian history a Christian body  had morally sanctioned the artificial separation of love from life by the use of contraceptives in marriage.

Only ten years before the same body had condemned contraceptives as unnatural, morally and religiously dangerous, a danger to the nation and an incentive to vice which was basically the position of Luther, Calvin and Wesley.

There had been a revolution.

Within about 35 years almost all Protestant churches in Europe and America had accepted contraception and many had come to accept IVF and abortion  as compatible with Christian ethics.

But to me as a family doctor living in the real world things looked different. I had seen how contraception facilitates  extra marital sex, promiscuity, the inability to commit to marriage, marital breakdown, family disintegration and of course abortion.

A World Culture of Death was taking place;

e.g. 1.7 billion surgical abortions worldwide.

e.g.  350 to 750 million chemical abortions in US alone due to the abortifacient mode of action of the Pill.

e.g. 30 to 150  million unborn lives lost by IVF

Yes all estimated figures, but terrible.

Dr. Rowan Williams, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the Church of England, believes that since in contraception non pro-creative sex is morally acceptable it must logically follow that homosexual acts are morally justifiable and might reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage..

"In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures."

"An active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness." (emphasis added)

But in the real world same-sex legislation outlaws the exercise of the parent's primary right to educate, the teacher's right to teach Christian sexual morality as objective truth, and the vulnerable child's right to have an adoptive mother and father.  Moreover same-sex "marriage" is now legal in 16 countries.

So which is true? Is contraception in accordance with Christian principles (Lambeth Conference 1930) or is it a religiously dangerous incentive to vice (Lambeth Conference 1920)? Does an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex, (perhaps sodomy) reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage?

To my mind the answer has been given by the Rev. Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“Our concern is to raise an alarm about the entire edifice of modern sexual morality and to acknowledge that millions of evangelicals have unwittingly aided and abetted that moral revolution by an unreflective and unfaithful embrace of the contraceptive revolution.” (emphasis added)

But it is not only Anglicans and Evangelicals who have been seduced by the Contraceptive  Revolution. The great majority of Catholics  clerical and lay have  embraced this revolution and many have quite logically moved on to become sympathetic to the homosexual agenda and pro-choice on abortion. Some senior clerical examples:

"the Church is not against birth control at all." ~ Cardinal Walter Kasper

Or the eminent French bishop who has written that France's massive pro-marriage demonstrations Manif pour Tous perpetrated:

“violence against homosexuals.”

Or New York's Cardinal Dolan who welcomes homosexualist participation, banners and all, to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Or Bishop Galantino, the new secretary-general of the powerful Italian Bishops' Conference  who believes that:

“In the past we have concentrated too much on abortion and euthanasia. It mustn’t be this way .."

Such reckless folly!

Contrast the words of these clerics with those of the realist, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago:

"I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history."

In my speech at the Plenary Session I said that never before in the history of free men has our human right to be the primary educators of our children been removed. The loss of this fundamental freedom began with contraception.

Ladies and gentlemen contraception has caused Evangelicals and Catholics to stray widely from our common Christian moral roots. Together we must return to them. Contraception is not compatible with Christian principles and we now must say it.

Dr. Thomas Ward Vice-President and Founder of the National Association of a Catholic Families