Thursday, June 21, 2012

Define Pro Life, Please.....

In the mid 1960’s Pope Paul VI appointed a commission on birth control to advise him on the issues regarding conception and birth control. An overwhelming majority of its members favored lifting the ban oncontraception. In his 1968 Encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) the Pope summarized the argument of the majority: 

... world population is going to grow faster than available resources, with the consequences that many families and developing countries would be faced with greater hardships… not only working and housing conditions but the greater demands made both in the economic and educational field pose a living situation in which it is frequently difficult these days to provide properly for a large family…(we need to take into account) a new understanding of the dignity of woman and her place in society, or the value of conjugal love in marriage and the relationship of conjugal acts to this love…
…if one were to apply here the so-called principle of totality, could it not be accepted that the intention to have a less prolific but more rationally planned family might transform an action which renders natural processes infertile into a licit and provident control of birth? Could it not be admitted, in other words, that procreative finality applies to the totality of married life rather than to each single act? A further question is whether, because people are more conscious today of their responsibilities, the time has not come when the transmission of life should be regulated by their intelligence and will rather than through the specific rhythms of their bodies…



Pope Paul VI decided that the rights of the sperm transcended any and all of these arguments. The use of contraception, he concluded results in “an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design.”
But the biological facts make the idea of a God’s design less than clear. Consider that when artificial birth control or abortion is not used, more often than not "God" chooses death, not life. A third to a half or of fertilized eggs do not implant. Some doctors believe this figure could be as high as 80 percent. A third of those that do implant end up in spontaneous miscarriages. Does the pro-life movement believe this makes God a mass murderer?

The philosophical and theological knots that were raised by this debate, might have, perhaps, contributed to the circumstances that contributed to Paul VI rather hasty and still unexplained demise. 
What are we to make of the new trend for pregnant women to create Facebook accounts for their fetuses, featuring pictures of the sonograms on their personal pages?
This makes me wonder about how the more we treat fetuses like people—including them in our family photo shoots, tagging them on our Facebook walls, giving them their own Twitter accounts—the harder it will be to deny that they are people when the next, say, personhood amendment comes up, with legislators and activists arguing that “the unborn child” inside a pregnant woman’s womb should have the same rights as the living among us. Would it be immoral for a mother to "unfriend" her fetus after the first trimester?
The Republican Party would eliminate Title X created in 1970 with Republican support from President Nixon and the elder George Bush, then a congressman. Title X does not pay for abortions. Only some of it covers birth control.
It appears that today’s Republican Party will pull out all the stops to protect the rights of the sperm but all but turn its back on the rights and needs of babies. This is what the term pro-life has come to mean in 2012. And why we need to change the language we use when we talk about the issues surrounding reproduction. And please, try not to use the word, VAGINA, when actually trying to communicate with a Republican. They get all weird on you....

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