Displaying items by tag: contraception

[It's a sad day for Ireland, whose citizens have voted to repeal the 8th Amendment, that which ensured protection for the preborn. No longer does she "acknowledge the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantee in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right." Pro-life campaigners have been hampered by an extremely pro-abortion press, vast sums of foreign money funding abortion groups and even politicians apparently deliberately misrepresenting Catholic Church teaching.

World-renowned speaker, Jason Evert, was in Melbourne this week for a series of talks on the true nature of love. Jason has spoken to more than one million people about the virtue of chastity and has been a keynote speaker at five World Youth Days. He has written several books, including “Theology of the Body for Teens” and “How to Find Your Soulmate Without Losing Your Soul,” and has studied counselling and theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. It was my great pleasure to meet him and ask him a few questions about how a return to chastity can put the brakes on the abortion culture.

All sources used in this article are either medical or secular, so there can be no accusation of a pro-life bias. Abortion providers and advocates are very eager these days to push Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives (or LARCS) onto their patients. There have been more than a few studies on their use and uptake, with an abundance of advice for practitioners on how to increase their sales. It's been of particular interest to me, to note that abortion providers are very keen to fit women with LARCS right after an abortion.

It is my pleasure to join a wonderful group to help Australians think about and hopefully challenge some of the trends in this seemingly modern society.

I thought I would start with some comments about marriage, given it was the dominant issue for public policy discussion in 2017 (even if most Australians did not realise the public policy implications).

It is sobering to reflect how quickly one of the fundamental aspects of marriage moved from ‘naturally assumed’ to incidental.

 I grew up in a very broken very liberal minded home. From my earliest years I knew that I was “the missed pill” as my Mother so eloquently liked to put it. My Mother grew up in the 50’s .... She was very young and had a few dalliances with school boys.. Nothing serious but her father got wind of it and as punishment she was sent away at aged 16 to a school in the City which trained young women to be a nurses. Some of the girls there were in the ‘family way’ and we often wonder if this is what happened to our Mum.

In 1993 God began to speak to me about taking the Pill. I had been taking the mini-pill since D’s birth in 1983. I loved it - great contraception and the added bonus of no periods.

How secular was my thinking? No thought of God’s plan for my fertility.

For many, the link between contraception and abortion is clear: when the potential for babies is taken out of sexual activity, then pregnancy becomes an intrusion, an unintended consequence. It becomes something to be avoided at all costs – even if that cost includes taking a life. But sadly, that connection isn’t clear to every pro-life person – even to many Christians. This is the first in a series of testimonies by Christians who rejected artificial contraception because they were convicted by God to grow in faith and leave their fertility in His hands.

The founder of Marie Stopes International left a legacy rivalled only by Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger: the belief that discrimination on the basis of race, wealth and wantedness is the right of women and that they are only truly free when allowed to legally dispense with their children. Marie Stopes saw herself as a visionary whose ‘evolutionary’ take on marriage would create a world where child labor was acceptable but unplanned children were not.

The evolution of mankind will take a leap forward when we have around us, only fine and beautiful young people, all of whom have been conceived, carried, and born in true homes by conscious, powerful and voluntary mothers. Then at last will God’s will be done on earth and the power of Satan broken. Radiant Motherhood, p 252.

I think you'll agree that the power of satan is increased, rather than diminished by the world's insistence on physically perfect, wanted children born into exclusively wealthy, caucasian households!