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“Pope Francis has urged us to have fewer children to make the world more sustainable,” a panelist at a Vatican-run workshop on “how to save the natural world” stated on Thursday. This solution to securing the world’s sustainability was presented by botanist and environmentalist Peter Raven during a press conference that concluded the “Biological Extinction” workshop that took place at the Vatican earlier this week. Greg Burke, director of the Holy See Press Office, moderated a panel including Raven, President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) Werner Arber, University of Cambridge Professor Emeritus of Economics Partha Dasgupta, and PAS...

Consumer Reports gave Planned Parenthood’s condoms the worst possible score for both “strength” and “durability” Consumer Reports’ ratings use a scale one to five.In the February 2005 print issue, they tested condoms for two different categories: “strength” and “durability.”The condoms called “Planned Parenthood Honeydew” received the worst possible score in both of these categories.The text of the article can be read here.The ratings for the different brands of condoms can be seen here.

The acting head of the Knights of Malta is alleging that Cardinal Raymond Burke, patron of the Order, personally asked for the resignation of a top Order official who had overseen a condom distribution program in the developing world. That the Cardinal would have made this request himself is being treated as some sort of scandal by his opponents. But as a prince of the Church with moral responsibility for the Order’s fidelity to Catholic teaching, why shouldn’t he have done so? No faithful Catholic leader who loves the life-giving truth of the faith would stand idly by when indisputable...

A new book by a priest who led the vanguard of dissent on birth control in Canada reveals for the first time his decades living as an active homosexual. Father Gregory Baum, a laicized priest married to a former nun for 30 years, admits in his forthcoming autobiography The Oil Has Not Run Dry that his wife did not mind the fact that he had a gay priest-lover on the side. "Shirley did not mind that, when we moved to Montreal in 1986, I met Normand, a former priest, with whom I fell in love," Baum writes in Chapter 32....

In a stunning break with Pope John Paul II’s insistence that abortion should always be discussed as the murder of an innocent child, Pope Francis instead adopted the linguistic rhetoric of the abortion and population control lobby. Addressing participants of Italy’s fifth annual March for Life this past Sunday, Pope Francis encouraged the crowd to “pray for the babies who are at risk of the interruption of pregnancy.” In order to ensure that there was no translation error, we found an Italian news source for the comments, and a video of Pope Francis giving the address. Beginning at the 0:45...

As we had reported at the end of last year, Pope Francis terminated the membership of all the then-current members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and there were around seventy of them at that time. A well-informed source told us recently: At the end of 2016, the Pontifical Academy for Life was closed and all its members dismissed. The Academy will be reconstituted in 2017 with new statutes, and the Academy will then be repopulated. The process for naming new members of the Academy is not yet known. When one looks at the official website of the Pontifical Academy...

International outrage is growing after the Vatican extended an invitation to population control pundit Paul Ehrlich to speak at a February 27-March 1 workshop on “Biological Extinction.” Ehrlich, a supporter of forced sterilization and forced abortion, has epitomized the “ecologist’s” position for decades in his apocalyptic (and false) predictions about the effects of population growth. Sponsored and organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS), the three-day conference also includes other controversial speakers besides Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb. Several presenters have similar, if less well-known pedigrees, as proponents of population...

The leading population control activist speaking at the Vatican next month has compared human babies to garbage, said every sexually active woman needs "free access" to abortion and contraception, and said the Catholic Church's moral teachings are "just as unethical" as a "terrorist act." Dr. Paul Ehrlich is the undisputed father of the modern, pro-abortion population control movement. He has defended mass forced sterilization and even forced abortion. Ehrlich has made inflammatory statements about the hierarchy of the Catholic Church being a force of "evil." He has criticized Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si' for not endorsing population control and said...

In the effort to dismantle Obamacare, women's health takes a hit. In 2012, a women's preventative health care provision within the Affordable Care Act went into effect making birth control free for women with insurance. When it was first rolled out, an estimated 26.9 million women benefited. If the mandate is struck down, it will leave 55 million women without no-copay birth control.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Health insurance would have to cover birth control without co-pays in New York even if President-elect Donald Trump repeals “Obamacare,” under legislation proposed Wednesday by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The bill would codify into state law the Affordable Care Act mandate for cost-free contraception and expand upon the federal requirements to provide cost-free coverage for all birth control methods, including vasectomies and emergency contraception like Plan B. It also would allow access to a year’s worth of contraception at one time and prohibit insurance companies from reviews that can limit or delay contraceptive coverage.

Following Francis’ purge of the Vatican’s entire apparatus dealing with marriage, family and the defense of life, and the appointment of a raft of reliably progressive Bergoglians, the Pontifical Academy for Life has effectively been put out of commission. As LifeSiteNews reports, the new statutes for the Academy delete “the requirement for members to sign a ‘Declaration of the Servants of Life,’ an avowal geared to members who are physicians and medical researchers, which makes explicit the members’ willingness to follow Church teaching on the sacredness of human life and an obligation to not perform ‘destructive research on the embryo...

(CNN)Some women are on the hunt for reversible birth control that could last through a Donald Trump presidency. Tweets and Facebook posts about getting intrauterine devices, or IUDs, swept social media Wednesday as women warned each other that their access to birth control might dwindle once the President-elect takes office next year.~SNIP~Throughout his campaign, Trump has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which mandates that insurers in the health insurance marketplace provide coverage for all FDA-approved birth control methods, including IUDs, with no copayment or coinsurance when provided in-network.

"It’s a privilege to be heartbroken by the system for the first time at age 30." Prominent Hillary Clinton supporter Lena Dunham has been silent since Donald Trump won the presidential election early Wednesday morning, but the Girls creator broke her silence in her Lenny newsletter Friday morning. Dunham wrote a passionate response to Donald Trump's win, mourning Hillary Clinton's loss and sharing the story of her Election Day. In an essay titled with a Florynce Kennedy quote, "Don't Agonize, Organize," Dunham wrote about Trump's win, mourning Clinton's loss and her Election Day, which she said she began "like a...

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen the headlines jeering at men after the news broke that a trial for male birth control was cancelled because men “couldn’t handle” the side effects. The mocking was practically immediate. Men were derided as being whiners who were unwilling to tolerate the side effects that women endure every month, so not only were they weak, they were misogynists as well.People titled Julie Mazziotta’s article “Men Back Out of Male Birth Control Study Because They Couldn’t Handle the ‘Changes in Mood.’” She wrote that it was time for guys to “woman up.”...

Members of the Pontifical Academy for Life will no longer be required to sign a declaration that they uphold the Church’s pro-life teachings. In new statutes for the Vatican body promulgated on November 4, Pope Francis has also expanded its mandate to include a focus on the environment. Pope Francis approved the statutes last month, the Vatican website announced. Previous statutes were issued in 2004 and enumerate the “specific tasks” (§2) of the Academy in three points: to “study questions and issues connected with the promotion and defense of human life from an interdisciplinary perspective,” to “educate in a culture...

Pushing Forced Birth Control in Netherlands Progressive cultural ideas are like viruses. A noxious notion starts one place and soon it spreads like a, well, cultural plague. That is why the proposal from Rotterdam to subject some women to mandatory contraception is so wrong and concerning. From The Independent story: Rotterdam city council has called for mothers, judged to be incapable to raise children, to be given compulsory contraception by court order. The Dutch council has launched a voluntary contraception drive for 160 women believed to be at risk due to learning difficulties, psychological issues or addiction, nrc.nl reports. The alderman responsible...

The State Department painted it as an elegant way out of a ballooning crisis involving Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng — but by day’s end, it looked like a disgraceful performance by US diplomats. Initial reports had Chen so pleased by the deal that he told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “I want to kiss you.” The agreement Clinton negotiated with Beijing yesterday supposedly allowed Cheng to stay in China and get medical attention, with the authorities guaranteeing his future safety. But things started unraveling just hours after the compromise was inked. First, while State claims Chen never wanted to leave...

A federal judge has ruled in favor of a Missouri lawmaker who cited religious objections while challenging the inclusion of birth control coverage in his government-provided health insurance. State Sen. Paul Wieland said Friday that the ruling, while applying only to his family, could serve as a guide for others seeking to challenge the application of a section of President Barack Obama’s health care law that requires insurers to include coverage of contraceptives. “I think this sets a precedent, so that if anybody else has religious convictions and they find these drugs offensive … they can use this as a...

Truncated titled. Full title:ACLU Sues To Obtain Documents Showing Catholic Hospitals ‘Harm’ Women By Refusing To Perform Abortions A senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project says the civil rights organization is filing a lawsuit in the hope of obtaining documents that show Catholic hospitals are “harming” women by taking taxpayer dollars for public services yet upholding their belief in the dignity of every human life.

MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President-elect Rodrigo Duterte said he will defy the Roman Catholic Church and seek to impose a three-child policy, putting him on a new collision course with the bishops a day after he called them "sons of whores". The southern mayor has yet to be declared the May 9 poll winner, but an unofficial vote count by an election commission-accredited watchdog showed him ahead over his four rivals, three of whom conceded defeat. Duterte assumes office on June 30. Duterte's often outrageous comments have won him huge support and his tirades about killing criminals and a joke...