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[Catholic Caucus] A Contagion of Barrenness There is a law that the time required to complete a task matches the time available. The feast of the Annunciation fits conveniently in the Lenten cycle this year, as the season comes unusually late. Our Lady conceived when she said "Yes" to the Creator. Many today are saying "No." In some parts of our country there is growth in the number of seminarians, but in most places the harvest is sparse, and that is directly related to the dearth of children. The birth rate is the lowest in history: 60.2 births for every 1,000 women....

Kelsie Bryson says the excruciating migraines started around 2008, when she was 18 years old. They would come about once a month and cause what the now 28-year-old Bryson calls “really terrifying side effects.” “I would experience numbness in the right side of my body — including in my mouth, which would prevent me from talking for 15 or so minutes at a time — vomiting and confusion,” she told Global News. “I would be at work, and suddenly, it would be hard to read words or speak. I would bump into things and then my body would go numb....

In the days after President Trump was elected, some women saw his victory as reason to worry: Would he fulfill his campaign promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act? And if so, would it eventually become harder and costlier to obtain birth control? News organizations sounded the alarm: “Get an IUD Before It’s Too Late,” a Daily Beast headline warned. “Here’s Why Everyone Is Saying to Get an IUD Today,” said a New York Magazine piece. In November 2016, Sarah Christopherson, the policy advocacy director at the National Women’s Health Network, told Broadly, a branch of Vice Media, that women...

Infertility is a part of life for 1 in every 8 couples in the United States. Most people know that risk factors like age and tobacco use can make having a baby difficult, yet, there are young, tobacco-free families who struggle to get pregnant in every community. Because knowledge is critical in safeguarding your reproductive health, here are five causes of infertility you may never have heard of. 1. LEEP Procedures If you’ve ever had an abnormal Pap smear, you may have heard of LEEP (Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure). With this treatment, doctors use an electrically heated wire loop to...

You know the one, with all of the stylishly dressed young women killing it in the workplace, telling you that they’ve “armored up” against an unplanned pregnancy? It’s clever enough, as the Nexplanon implant goes into one’s arm. Unfortunately, Merck (the makers of Nexplanon) may have to come up with another clever slogan for their device, as reports have surfaced that the matchstick-sized implant has a nasty habit of migrating elsewhere in a woman’s body, instead of staying put in her arm. Like other methods of long-acting reversible contraception (or, “LARCs”), the Nexplanon implant is increasingly favored by patients and...

Beijing appears to be on the cusp of abolishing all of its family planning rules — and is even encouraging young couples to have more children as a matter of patriotic urgency. … As China’s population ballooned to close to one billion in the 1970s, the government became concerned about the impact that would have on its plans for rapid economic growth. So Beijing introduced the one-child policy in 1979. People who defied it faced hefty financial penalties and some civil servants lost their jobs. But much worse, many women faced the horror of sterilization and forced abortions. … Data...

Well, well, well, it turns out that Planned Parenthood might not be the immaculate champion of women’s rights they insist to be. Well we all knew that, but it sure is nice to see it as an official story written by The New York Times. In a Thursday report, The New York Times exposed the abortion giant’s “discrimination” against its own pregnant employees. The Times cited the firsthand accounts from several Planned Parenthood employees, including assistant Ta’Lisa Hairston, who complained the “reproductive rights” provider ignored her doctor’s requests that she be allowed to take breaks for the sake of her...

Six Christian organizations have won their years-long legal battles against an Obama-era federal mandate ordering the provision of contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs in their employee health care plans.U.S. District Court Judge Phillip Brimmer in Colorado issued an order granting the organizations an injunction against the Department of Health and Human Services Affordable Care Act contraception mandate that they felt required them to violate their organizations’ deeply-held religious beliefs about the sanctity of human life or be forced to pay millions in crippling fines.Those organizations include three Christian higher-education institutions — Taylor University in Indiana, Indiana Wesleyan University and Asbury Theological...

A U.S. appeals court Thursday blocked rules by the Trump administration allowing more employers to opt out of providing women with no-cost birth control. States were likely to succeed on their claim that the changes to President Barack Obama’s health care law were made without required notice and public comment, a divided, three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said. The panel upheld a preliminary injunction against the rules issued by a lower court judge last year. An email to the Justice Department seeking comment was not immediately returned. Obama’s health care law required most companies to...

Births and Religious Marriages Collapse in Italy. After Two Synods on the Family On the very same day on which the Pontifical Urban University was opening an exhibit (see photo) dedicated to the heroic Ulma family of Poland - “this big family,” Pope Francis said, “shot by Nazi Germans during the second world war for having hidden and given aid to Jews” - in Italy the National Institute of Statistics released the figures on births and marriages in the year 2017.Anything but “big” families, like that of those Polish martyrs or like many in Italy a century ago. The collapse...

The media aided abortion activists’ misrepresentation. CNN said Brett Kavanaugh referred to contraceptives as ‘abortion-inducing drugs.’ While he didn’t, some of them in fact are. Following a week of theater billed as confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, desperate Democrats turned to the media for help peddling yet another unwarranted attack on the Supreme Court nominee: that Kavanaugh believes birth control is abortion.The charge followed an exchange during Thursday’s hearing when Sen. Ted Cruz asked Kavanaugh, who has served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals since 2006, to explain his dissent in the Priests for Life case. That case, as...

*Original Title: "Humamae vitae: cosi le nata e guai a chi le tocca" Google translation, lightly copy-edited for clarity The demolition project aimed at "Humanae Vitae" --- Paul VI's 1968 encyclical that said no to artificial contraceptives --- now faces an unexpected stumbling block in a book that reconstructs the genesis of that text, thanks to the access, for the first time, to the secret documents concerning it, authorized by Pope Francis in person: Gilfredo Marengo, "The birth of an encyclical, 'Humanae vitae' in the light of the Vatican archives", Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City, 2018. The stumbling block is...

Penny Mordaunt spoke after meeting the President of the Pontifical Academy for LifeA British minister has called on the Church to permit artificial contraception after a meeting with senior Vatican officials last week. Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, said 800 girls and women lose their lives every day due to pregnancy and childbirth complications, and claimed that wider access to contraception would help alleviate the problem. Faith leaders should help change “deeply held beliefs and attitudes” in order to allow women greater access to “reproductive healthcare”, she said. Ms Mordaunt disclosed her words to the Daily Telegraph after meeting...

Paul VI, in October 1967, during the first Synod of Bishops held in the Vatican, had the Cardinal Secretary of State ask for an opinion on contraception in view of the publication of the encyclical. Only 26 of the 200 bishops present produced a written response. Of these, most said they were in favor of some opening to the pill, while 7 were against. But Pope Montini, who had already removed the subject from the Council discussion and had listened to the opinions of a commission of experts (the majority of whom were in favor), did not believe that there...

RUSH: This is The Daily Wire. “Pro-Abortion Women Start ‘Sex Strike’ To Save ‘Roe v. Wade.” My question is this: Will anybody notice if these babes stop having sex? Will anybody notice? Maybe Harvey Weinstein, but beyond that, would anybody notice that these women are having a sex strike? And what is this? A sex strike to save Roe v. Wade? I’m trying to figure out how this actually works. Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin have offered a tremendous sacrifice. A 24-hour food strike to protest Trump’s immigration policy. Twenty-four hour food strike. Martin Sheen is the guy that used...

The rate of teenage pregnancies in Britain has fallen to its lowest level since 1969 Evidence suggests pregnancy rates fell sharply in those areas where budgets were most aggressively cut Government cuts to the funding of sex education and contraceptive services have contributed to a drop in the rates of teenage pregnancies to their lowest level since 1969, a new study has found. The findings by two academics have added to a growing body of research which is exposing the failings of decades of sex education policies. Family planning gurus have argued since the 1970s that teenage pregnancies could be...

ABSTRACT Birth rates in the United States have recently fallen. Birth rates per 1000 females aged 25–29 fell from 118 in 2007 to 105 in 2015. One factor may involve the vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV). Shortly after the vaccine was licensed, several reports of recipients experiencing primary ovarian failure emerged. This study analyzed information gathered in National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which represented 8 million 25-to-29-year-old women residing in the United States between 2007 and 2014. Approximately 60% of women who did not receive the HPV vaccine had been pregnant at least once, whereas only 35% of...

A federal court has ruled that four Christian universities based in Oklahoma will not be penalized for refusing to provide health care coverage for the birth control services they consider contrary to their religious beliefs. In 2013, Mid-America Christian University, Oklahoma Baptist University, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, and Southern Nazarene University filed suit against the Obama administration over their mandate that forced most employers, regardless of religious convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs and contraception. A decision released Tuesday by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma granted relief for the four universities, in large part...

Henry Sire, the author of the bestselling book “The Dictator Pope” told Gloria.tv the “real reason” why the former Grand Master of the Order of Malta, Fra Matthew Festing, was disavowed by the Holy See. The Order was about to receive a large donation for which the controversial German Grand Chancellor Albrecht Boeselager was the go-between. But Boeselager was suspended by Festing for his role in distributing condoms and abortive hormones. Now, this donation promised to bring benefits also to the Vatican and at least to one high ecclesiastic, “That was more important to them than a question of...

The speed with which the German population is shrinking seems to be even too much for the statisticians of Destatis, the official German bureau of statistics, who posit that by 2060, with a zero level of net immigration, the German population will have declined to 60.2 million. However, our research team has found out that this number is far too optimistic: in 40 years Germany will have a population of 52.6 million people, a considerable 34% drop from the current 81 million inhabitants, and by the end of the century the native German population, the indigenous people without a migration...