Posted on 03/03/2005 7:06:40 AM PST by St. Johann Tetzel
Contraception: Newest effort to defeat pro-lifers
By Jill Stanek
Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Abortion Federation and pro-abortion politicians all make money directly or indirectly from abortion, and that is why they push it. But abortion comprises only one-third of their financial portfolio. They make another third by selling contraceptives, pregnancy tests and sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment.
Posted: March 2, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
The final third comes from the government, which pays them to promote the illicit sexual behavior via "sexual education" that generates business for the aforementioned two-thirds of their operation.
Never forget that everything abortion activists do is to make money from promiscuous sex, and they have developed a clever triangular scheme toward that end. They have carved out their market niche through selling all aspects of illicit sexual behavior – first by promoting it, and then by preventing or reversing its consequences.
But their marketing strategies of the past 30 years have finally started to fail – the "pro-choice" sound bites; the rigid, vicious fights against any attempts to tamper with abortion in any way; and turning to judicial tyrants to get their way when the people try to subdue them.
The 2004 election was the last straw, forcing them in recent months to dramatically shift their strategies. They have determined to appear sensitive about abortion and to focus less on that and more on contraception.
Their two new talking points are:
Pro-aborts have repeated those two points in the press in recent weeks like cloned parrots.
NARAL even placed an ad in the conservative Weekly Standard last month on talking point No. 1. Note NARAL goes so far as to call us the "Right-To-Life Movement," glaring evidence it has switched tactics to appear more thoughtful and less barbaric to the American people. (NARAL also came out neutral on the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act – a huge concession.)
Point No. 1 is a win-win for pro-aborts. It makes them appear rational on the topic of abortion while at the same time promoting sex ed and contraceptives – both moneymakers for them. And when contraceptives fail, they know they will still make money from abortion without having to push it so rabidly.
Pro-lifers can counter this point by demonstrating the great success of abstinence training and the upsides of chaste living.
We cannot budge on the counterfeit "abstinence plus" training the other side is hawking, which says it's great to teach abstinence, but kids should also be given "tools" if they cannot control themselves. This is ridiculous.
To correlate, I don't know one wife who would pack a condom in her husband's suitcase saying, "I expect you'll be faithful while away on business, but just in case ..." In other words, let's not advise our children any differently than we advise ourselves.
And I also don't know one teen boy who has gotten so drunk he made a pass at his own mother. In other words, we all have the wherewithal to resist sexual urges if we really want to.
Point No. 2 is smart, too. Because the American public no longer considers the pro-life view on abortion extremist, pro-aborts must figure out another way to make us appear fanatical. They have settled on the topic of contraception.
The contraceptive mentality is so engrained in American minds that to consider reverting to the day when sex was practiced solely within the confines of marriage – with each act carrying with it the potential blessing of children – is simply crazy to them.
Pro-aborts know this is a wedge issue for pro-lifers. The natural family planning mentality is foreign to most Protestants and prehistoric to many Catholics.
I am one Protestant who has come to believe that contraception is wrong, based on my analysis of Scripture. But I remember thinking what a bizarre concept this was when my Catholic pro-life friends first brought it to my attention.
Pro-lifers must get on top of these latest attempts by pro-aborts to pigeonhole and divide us and come up with counteroffensives.
Pro-life groups and churches must take greater responsibility for abstinence training and not leave that up to the pregnancy help centers. We must also continue to dialogue about the issue of contraception and make up our minds not let the other side divide us on that.
Jill Stanek fought to stop "live-birth abortion" after witnessing one as a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. In 2002, President Bush asked Jill to attend his signing of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. In January 2003, World Magazine named Jill one of the 30 most prominent pro-life leaders of the past 30 years.
On top of everything else, you're a hypocrite. This does not surprise me.
In fact, it is the position of Nanny Statists that is immature. Mature people recognize that sometimes they just have to put up with being annoyed if they cannot show legitimate cause why the annoyance rises to the level of a violation of their rights.
Hocndoc,
I appreciate the civility of your post.
You did not address Aristotle's distinction between the actual and the potential human life. That is the crux of the matter. After the fall of Aristotle's thought came Christianity with its emphasis on original sin, the evil of fornication etc. Because I have never subscribed to that theory of man, I don't believe in the idea that the potential embryo is an actual human life. Therefore, no evil occurs during abortion. It's just that simple.
However, I will add that I personally believe that the projection of evil onto this debate springs from the idea that sex is evil. I think nature granted man two perfect attributes: reason and the ability to be conscious of how good sex feels. From that comes the choice to engage in sex, unlike animals, and then comes morality, when and with whom is it proper to engage with?
I would call it a conglomeration of individual choices. You, apparently, think there is some sort of groupthink or hive mind involved. I am reminded of the "Overmind" from Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. Unless you can provide some hard, objective evidence of some sort of emergent group mind, I must reject your Platonic conception of "Society".
But the individual choices do not happen in a vacuum. And they do not fail to affect others in our world, even those we do not personally choose to affect. It's like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.
I don't think there is some entity or intelligence out there directing our actions and feeling direct harm when somethign goes awry. I am not that foolish.
What I am saying is that our collective decisions and actions amount to a collective consensus-type product that can be described as a "society." That's number one.
What "we" think evolves over time. Seeing women in pants would be scandalous 100 years ago. Now we are adjusting to the idea of routinely viwing the thong-straps of adolescents.
Something has changed. Our sense of what is outrageous, what is acceptable. I call it the general view of society. I'm not sure if you are objecting to my terminology or simply denying that any such collective thing exists.
Number two is the idea that "society" can be harmed in indirect ways by the immoral actions of another. Again, I don't see why this is not self-evident to you.
Surely an individual has a free will, and ultimately is responsible for his choices. But family, church, community, society, help to shape a person into what they are.
As we relax moral codes and become more permissive, we breed a generation of barbarians, of animals consumed by their desires.
That's the way I see it anyway. But if you can not agree that sexual mores are worse now than they were 40 or 50 years ago, we are far, far away from acheiving consensus on a solution.
Have a great weekend.
SD
Specifically, public decency is indeed regional. What is indecent in a particular state or town in America should be also illegal in that locale, but not necessarily in another locale.
Adultery is a breach of contract and so is an objective wrong. If the other spouse does not press charges, and the marriage has no dependent children, prosecution typically stops, -- unless the state has some other public interest to prosecute anyway. This is how it works for any criminal wrongdoing.
Abortion is homicide, and use of abortifacient drugs, is at a minimum attempted homicide. It cannot be justified by any real or imaginary good that might be its side effect. Also note that the right of the woman not to become pregnant is only relevant if pregnancy resulted from a rape; even then killing the baby is criminal, although leniency should be advised under such circumstance.
You wrote (mysteriously): "I don't believe in the idea that the potential embryo is an actual human life." Uh, a sperm and an ovum in a fallopian tube or petri dish are 'potential embryo' producers. If you are unable to differentiate potential and actual, here's a hint: the embryo is an actual human life and thus a member of the human species and a human being at earliest age. If the embryo were not an actual human life, in vitro fert clinics wouldn't waste time and energy trying to implant them into women's uteruses. What that embryo will develop into is the potential of the actual embryo. If you choose to arbitrarily dehumanize human life until some arbitrary threshhold is reached which you will agree to recognize as the 'start of a human being' then be honest and don't try to obfuscate the realities; an embryo is actual and alive, what he or she will develop into is as much merely 'potential' as how your body will change in the coming years, provided you live long enough to undergo self-directed changes such an an individual human being in embryo age carries out.
I can think of some examples when an immoral act does no harm to others. Such are closeted acts of fornication, or benign contraception between spouses, or masturbation. They do, however, cause harm to the people involved in them. Indeed, I do not think that such acts should be punished by law, -- not because the harm is self-inflicted, but because the law would replace what is more effectively addressed by religion. As religion is systematically driven underground in the West, I think that the time will come when law will be the only instrument, and very blunt at that, to preserve what remains of human dignity and freedom. Then, criminalizing even victimless sin would be progress. We are simply not at that point yet.
Regarding decency: morality is absolute. Baring a breast is not intrinsically immoral, it is immoral where that leads to fornication or adultery of the heart. This is what decency laws protect: not bare skin but purity of mind.
Regarding breach of contract, yes, treating adultery in civil court would be a good start. However, this does not address the harm adultery does to the children, and to the general population when it is flagrant. Beside, when a tort is easily defined, it is often criminalized. For example, leaving a restaurant without payment is a tort, yet it is treated like a crime of theft in most societies.
Re. abortion, you don't understand the difference between killing in self defense and murder. Abortion is murder.
I had an uncle who contracted tuberculosis in the South Pacific during World War II. He spent two years in required quarantine at Fort Devens, Massachusetts knitting afghans to while away the time and never expressed resentment even once through his death last year at having been quarantined. He understood that his desire to live normally in society did not trump the right of others to live free of TB. It is only in the case of the "politically correct" HIV/AIDS virus that priority is placed on the "right" of the diseased to infect others. TB was curable. Thus far, HIV/AIDS is not.
"As limited as possible" is NOT a term of legal art. It is a weasel phrase to place the default position on the right to practice of immorality at the expense of the general public.
If something is NOT immoral. why on earth would that something be prohibited as a matter of criminal law. We very much need a return to the notion that crimes ought to be limited to malum in se, acts evil in and of themselves: rape, murder, manslaughter, robbery, theft, sexual acts that are against the natural law, etc., rather than malum prohibitum, evil ONLY because prohibited: speeding, "hate" crimes which are actually thought crimes (assault is evil in itself but no more evil just because the assailant's thoughts are poliically incorrect), owning and possessing and carrying a firearm in conformance to the RTKBA but in violation of statutes passed by liberal legislatures in defiance of the constitution.
I acknowledged that libertarians favor a few general moral laws. Their list is grossly insufficient. So is shunning and shaming which is the classic libertarian solution to everything. As Ludwig von Mises shouted to Ayn Rand at his 75th brirthday party: "So you are the silly woman who believes that you may have liberty without God!!!!"
Insisting on the morality of natural law is not a moral disconnect. One need not defend the sexual relation between man and household pet or between Catherine the Great and the soldier of the evening (or worse) or between lavender and lavender of whatever sexual equipment in order to defend the sexual relationship between one husband and one wife in a marriage inclusive only of the two of them. Indeed, the moral connection between prohibiting and punishing all but the last of these while upholding the last of these would seem obvious to the moral at all times and more obvious to the immoral in better times than our own.
Your arena of permissible governmental prohibition or regulation seems to be that devised by libertarian theorists and not by conservatives. That is my primary point. There is some room for libertarianism among conservatives as demonstrated by the late Frank Meyer's In Defense of Freedom but note that Meyer, raised as an atheist, and an anxious agnostic for much of his later life, converted to Roman Catholicism and was baptized on his deathbed. Conservatism itself need not yield its very name to those who seek to establish a community of a godless form of capitalism (a la Rand) coupled with a laissez faire attitude toward sexual abominations.
If the name libertarianism has not gotten very far in the election of public officials, that does not justify the pose that conservatism is somehow exclusively libertarian as to matters of personal morality.
Should we regulate "consensual" sado-masochistic "marital" relationships by requiring of the couple that they take lessons on how far they may go safely in pursuit of the desired injuries? On the actual definitions of terms in the contract that may produce the injuries? On the attitude of the potentially deceased as to punishment in the event that things go so awry as to convert a "consenting" but not suicidal party of the second part into the corpse of the second part through negligence?
I remember that Ronald Reagan opposed the Briggs Amendment in California which would have denied public employment to lavenders. I also remember that he vigorously special rights schemes for lavenders as well. I remember that early in his governorship, Ronald Reagan signed into law the most permissive abortion legislation in the nation to that time and that a mere two years later, realizing his tragic mistake, he was personally, as governor, walking petitions door-to-door for an initiative seeking repeal of that permissive abortion law. Ronaldus Maximus, as president, was notable for many things. Shrinking government or even slowing its growth significantly was not high on his agenda much less on his significant list of accomplishments.
You may be talking about LINOs but you are not talking about CINOs. I do not care for big government that sticks Planned Barrenhood's nose into the education of children in government schools. Heck, I do not support a government big enough to maintain government schools. The use of "big government" in the context of your argument is misleading. It does not take vast bureaucracies to investigate, prosecute and convict perpetrators of gross immoralities. Further, whatever SCOTUS may imagine, such enforcement is quite constitutional unlike most functions of government.
What is immature about government that abandons moral responsibility is that it subsidizes through inaction the attitude that people are entitled to do as they please, regardless of consequences so long as it is in the area of sex and drugs.
And then will have Christian Shar'ia. I hope my children do not see that day.
"And then will have Christian Shar'ia." With a careful reading of the New Testament, it is just such a kingdom that Christ identifies. The distinction might be lost to you, but living at the foot of the Cross (a life I cannot claim to have obtained, yet) is freedom with responsibility for personal action, exercising restraint so that harm is not done to others or to the kingdom. God your Creator is righteous and unassailable.
Wish it were so. We'll get a liberal overweening all-controlling state, and the Christians will get the catacombs.
Please read Black Elk's post above yours. The conservative ideal is that individual sin is left in the domain of the church, subject to persuasion and shunning, but not prosecution. Intrinsic public evil, -- crimes against life and property are in the domain of the state. This ideal is not far from the libertarian ideal.
As the church is removed from the public life, the free society breaks down. It becomes necessary to legislate against sin. The conservative position becomes that sin should be properly identified and the church position of dominance in the public square restored, and the libertarian position, that ignores moral teaching, stops making any sense.
If spiritual awakening happens in America, liberty may still triumph. If not, we are facing a rearguard action and descent into a secularist-liberal hell.
It is evil to rob banks. It is evil to trespass upon and seize the real estate of another in the absence of necessity and without intention of restoring the property as soon as possible to the actual owner. It is evil to shoplift. That Marxists may disagree with any of those three examples is no argument against any of those three examples.
That there were humans in our country who thought it legitimate to lynch blacks or that there were governmental officials in Germany in the first half of the last century who may have thought thought it moral to gas Jews or that Kim Il Sung may think that the presumed incredible gloriousness of the People's Republic of North Korea justifies North Korea's entry into the world nuclear weapon club, does not mean that any of these subjective notions or preferences are in themselves moral or tolerable just because the perps or intended perps think so.
If I and others regard each abortion as a homicide and WE REALLY MEAN IT, is that all right with you ONLY so long as we act as though we do not mean it? We are at 45+ million surgical infant homicides and counting. How many sliced, diced and hamburgerized kids are enough?
No one tells you what church to attend or that you have to attend any church at all. In a civilized society, your personal behavior may well be governed. To protect your home ownership, the government will, if necessary, use armed force to remove a Marxist who passionately believes that property is theft. His/her irrational belief does not trump and should not trump your home ownership. Likewise, the scientifically unsupportable preference you display for the notion that the unborn are disposable like used kleenex does not mean that the community should stand idly by while you exercise that belief to the extreme prejudice of the continued life of the unborn.
We had a very costly civil war (partially) over the question of whether one human being may own another. Most states in the confederacy punished abuse, much less killing of slaves. Read some of the Revolutionary War era literature of Hector St. John de Creve Couer as to slavery in Virginia. No state allows one to kill one's born children although that would be the logical consequence of Herod Blackmun's decision in Roe vs. Wade which ultimately depended on the ancient Roman law of Pater Familia which allowed the father (not the other) to arrange the executuion of any child of his prior to the 21st birthday. If you don't agree with that analysis, read Roe vs. Wade as so few have.
You want the right to kill unborn offspring without question so long as you do it before birth. Not only that, but you want some sort of right to be regarded as not evil if you should do so. You are willing to concede that I need not kill so long as you are allowed to kill without being arrested or apparently criticized. That's mighty generous of you!
Your subjective suspicions as to the nature of the unborn ought not, for obvious reasons, to be law for you or anyone else. Ayn Rand posed as Aristotelian. Despite her passionate and unrestrained love of abortion, she admired his assertion that "A is A." Well, I have no way of knowing whether you (or I for that matter) are accurately described as Aristotelian. That unborn child has his/her own set of 24 chromosomes distinct from the 24 chromosomes of the father and from the 24 chromosomes of the mother. There is similarity to each but not identity with either. The baby is a baby. A is A.
If you believe in the intentional killing of an innocent unborn child, yes I call you and that belief evil whether you like it or not. If you happen to believe in RTKBA or property rights, in those respects, you are not evil. Don't take it so personally. There is much evil in the world in which we live and probably no people who are without any aspect of evil in their lives and actions and thoughts. Rational judgment of others is not malum in se.
I am pinging ninenot and sittnick to give more informed views than my own on the matter of Aristotelian claims of those who are not Christian in their thinking or probably Jewish or Muslim for that matter.
By the way, was Hippocrates an Aristotelian? Clearly he was not a Christian but his oath required physicians not to perform or facilitate abortions. I believe that he was an Athenian. Was he an Aristotelian?
Don't you think that's putting your interpretation on others?
But if "it becomes necessary to legislate against sin", won't the result be an "overweening all-controlling state".
It could be. My point is, I guess, that we get bigger state no matter what, the issue is whose cultural interest it will serve. If conservatism wins, a foundation for another century of freedom (19th was the previous one) will be laid. If the liberals win, we get social and economic collapse, and who knows what afterwards.
I missed that we were having a liberal/conservative discussion.
My point is that if we continue to use emotionally charged labels and rhetoric, rather than sound analysis to discuss and decide important points, everyone is likely to lose.
I missed that we were having a liberal/conservative discussion.
My point is that if we continue to use emotionally charged labels and rhetoric, rather than sound analysis to discuss and decide important points, everyone is likely to lose.
I think, the analysis of the contraception issue as being at the root of the impending collapse of civil society in the West is very sound, despite its sweeping character, and the only emotianalism is coming from the liberals addicted to their pill.
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