Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Tzar
True contraception doesn’t involve killing but abortifacients, which are often falsely described as contraceptives, do. In any case, I never said that contraceptives kill. I only stated that they lead to a worldview which necessitates abortion. Abortion is absolutely a necessary failsafe for contraception.

A woman who uses contraceptives does not end up being rabidly pro-abortion. There are plenty of pro-life women here on FR and elsewhere who have nothing but contempt for those who use abortion, and criticize them for not using contraception. Logically, if you're pro-life, then you want women to use contraceptives. The rate of contraceptive failure is low enough that it does not excuse the practice of abortion. Furthermore, there is reason to think that a woman who is pro-life who does not want children is going to seek the most reliable contraceptive possible and use it as correctly as possible. That's because she has a strong motive to not get pregnant. And if she's the 1% for whom the contraceptive fails, she won't suddenly become pro-abortion.

Your logical mind needn’t understand my post. You only need to understand Roe v. Wade and the Lambeth conferences, both of which occurred without any imput from me. Seven of nine Supreme Court justices as well as hundreds of Anglican bishops agreed that pro-abortion policies are firmly grounded in pro-contraceptive policies. Feel free to disregard my beliefs but think twice before summarily dismissing the wisdom of these men.

Roe vs. Wade was about using the fiction that women were dropping like flies from "back-alley" abortions to justify legalizing it. It had nothing to do with Anglican bishops. It had nothing to do with contraceptives being legal. There was a lot of gibberish about it being about women's rights, and a lot of other trash. The pro-abortion viewpoint has little, if anything, to do with contraceptives. Abortion mills don't profit from women using contraceptives; they profit from as many women as possible getting pregnant with children they have no intention of bearing alive.

Natural family planning has been shown to be as effective as artificial contraception. And no, I do not feel motivated enough to find a link to the study so if you are interested you will have to search for it yourself. Contraception is primarily about enabling extra-marital, including so called pre-marital, sex and secondarily about controlling family sizes of married couples. The later function is so that we can all have precisely 2.1 children and thus have more time to store up earthly treasures and be good little workers for the benefit of our social betters.

From what I can tell in PubMed, "natural family planning" methods have a fairly high failure rate, and are not suitable for all women. I wouldn't have been able to use such a method even if I'd had a philosophical reason to do so (which I didn't). In the real world, very few couples choose to use that method, less than 5% (according to some abstracts in PubMed). I've also read about and even met women who won't use contraceptives because of religious reasons, but abort every time they get pregnant.

There are very valid reasons to limit one's family size. Before the modern era of good medical care, people used to have large families in the hopes of ensuring that at least one child would survive to carry on the family. These days, there is a reasonably high chance that children will survive to adulthood. Not everyone can afford a large family. It is valid to wonder if there are resources to continue to sustain everyone if the population keeps growing. There are three times as many people now as there were when I was a child; while we're still able to produce enough food, there really will come a time when, even if we were to convert all wild areas to agriculture, we won't be able to keep up if population growth is unrestrained. While replacement rates are lower than the 2.1 children needed to maintain the population, that could be a natural response to the size of the current world population.

One last remark: there are enough couples that cannot naturally have children that no child who results from contraceptive failure would ever be homeless. In fact, I think that it is the lack of children for those couples to adopt that led to practices such as IVF. I think IVF is extremely unwise, and will cause an overall decline in human health (there are indications we're already seeing that effect, and IVF has only been used for a generation). Stigmatize abortion, improve adoption laws, improve education/resources for young pregnant women--there is no reason for elective abortion to remain legal.

62 posted on 01/12/2013 2:14:28 PM PST by exDemMom (Now that I've finally accepted that I'm living a bad hair life, I'm more at peace with the world.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 59 | View Replies ]


To: exDemMom

You might find this book and information interesting given your concern and comments about resource depletion and popultation. Otherwise, you’re spot on in your comments.

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Resource-Julian-L-Simon/dp/0691003696/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358040647&sr=1-4 The book is a bit a pricey.

http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/ this covers the same material and wiki is very good too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

It’s an interesting counter-argument to the linear thinking that population will outstrip resources. So far Malthus has been wrong.


64 posted on 01/12/2013 5:45:27 PM PST by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson