Free Republic

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham took on Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in her new book, writing that the veteran lawmaker “was using Trump to mop up the freebies like there was no tomorrow.” Grisham in her new book “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” set to be released on Tuesday, writes that Graham would use the president to receive free rounds of gold, food and access to celebrities. “It struck me that he was using Trump to mop up the freebies like there was no tomorrow (seems that he still is). He would show up at Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster...

Many women are realizing the synthetic hormones in most methods of contraception come with side effects and risks that are annoying and sometimes dangerous.If you’ve watched TV in the last week, you’ve likely seen a commercial for a novel form of birth control called Phexxi. You could hardly miss it, starting as it does with “Welcome to my vagina,” and starring actress Annie Murphy from the wildly popular Emmy award-winning Canadian sitcom “Schitt’s Creek.” As the bubbly Murphy struts about in a cavernous pink bedroom, she promises that Phexxi is something that women have always wanted: an effective, “in the...

Why hasn’t Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged pimp of deceased Clinton donor/pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, showed up for an interview with the FBI yet? Just kidding! We all know the ugly answer to that question. The Clintons have spent the past four years denying their years-long close personal friendship with Epstein and Maxwell, to limited success. A new and very blatant connection to the duo has just come to light, which makes us wonder why no one has uncovered it previously. It’s almost as if the media doesn’t want to look too closely at the Clintons’ relationship with Epstein and Maxwell! Hillary...

Pretend it’s 1960, and the Food and Drug Administration has just done something startling. It has taken a drug it had previously approved for infertility — brand name Enovid — and approved it for the opposite use: birth control. That pill — soon simply the Pill — triggered the sexual revolution. But not overnight. Doctors at first resisted giving it to unmarried women. Women were shy about carrying evidence that they actually planned to have sex. Feminists like Margaret Sanger and Katharine D. McCormick braved vilification to champion it. Madison Avenue chimed in: Ads featured Andromeda, the princess of Greek...

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked. The first sentence set the tone: “The battle...

FULL TITLE: How the Pill transforms your personality as revealed in a landmark book by a top psychologist: It changes who you fall for, It dictates the clothes you wear AND it lowers your libido (but the good news? You are less likely to divorce) After more than a decade on the Pill, our family complete, my husband and I decided on a more permanent way to prevent pregnancy. He took the lead by having a vasectomy, and I ditched the Pill. But a couple of months later, I realised that I felt . . . different. I didn’t notice...

Earlier this summer, a Citizen’s Petition was filed to the FDA requesting greater transparency concerning the many evidence-based health risks and side effects of different forms of hormonal contraceptives. We at Natural Womanhood published a breakdown of the FDA petition into a more digestible format in order to explain the forms of contraception discussed in the petition, the research behind it, and the overall goals and potential changes if this petition is successfully received. Ultimately, the goal of the Citizen’s Petition is to compel the Food and Drug Administration to better inform all prescribers and consumers of hormonal birth control...

The unintended consequence of widespread birth control — on individuals, families and society — cannot be denied. Loneliness has become an “epidemic” in the world today, says scholar Mary Eberstadt, author of the 2013 book “Adam and Eve After the Pill." “Fifty years after the embrace of the pill — undeniably, because of the embrace of the pill — loneliness is spreading across the materially better-off countries of the planet." She expands on the themes of her new article, describing the “prophetic power” of “Humanae Vitae” (“On Human Life”), Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical letter on birth control and married...

There is one teaching that most Protestants readily recognize as Catholic, and it is usually received with derision: the prohibition of artificial means of birth control. The Protestants in my circles often disparage this teaching with little knowledge of Humanae Vitae, perhaps the most significant document to address birth control over the last one hundred years. Our distaste for things Roman Catholic, dating back to the sixteenth century, has deprived us of a wealth of theological wisdom...Our acceptance of most forms of birth control is not helping us teach the next generation about sex and sexuality. It is time for...

The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age–and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm. Most evangelical Protestants greeted the advent of modern birth control technologies with applause and relief. Lacking any substantial theology of marriage, sex, or the family, evangelicals welcomed the development of “The Pill” much as the world celebrated the discovery of penicillin — as one more milestone in the inevitable march of human progress, and the conquest of nature. At the same...

Male reproductive health has been in decline since the 1960’s. Once considered a global problem by the 1992 study “Evidence for decreasing quality of semen during past 50 years,”[i] it has been shown that the decline in semen quality is largely limited to Western countries.[ii] Specific studies, largely carried out in the 90′s, showed falling sperm counts: - in Belgium— where the “percentage of candidate donors with sperm characteristics below the 5th percentile cut-off value of a normal fertile population increased from 13 to 54% during the [19 year] observation period.”[iii] - in Canada — where overall sperm quality showed...

Many people are looking forward to a time when men will be able to take an oral contraceptive. But there's a challenge with hormonal birth control: suppressing testosterone in men to super-low levels while avoiding the side effects of low hormone levels, such as changes in sexual function. (Of course, side effects have affected some women since the US Food and Drug Administration first approved "the pill" in 1960.) Researchers have looked at a number of ways to do this -- not only through a pill, but also through an injection and a topical gel. And now there's a new...

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...

December 18, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – One of the most influential evangelical Christian leaders in the United States says the sexual revolution began with the widespread availability of birth control. Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, made the remarks Saturday on David Wheaton's "The Christian Worldview" radio show. “We are clearly at a very important turning point, but you have to go back to the early twentieth century when sexual revolutionaries largely funded an effort to separate sex and procreation, and that was birth control," Dr. Mohler said. "Most Christians seem to think today...

RUSH: Lucy, Columbus, Ohio, Open Line Friday and it is your turn. CALLER: Hello, Rush. RUSH: Hi. CALLER: Hi. Yeah, I don't have a lot of time, I realize that. I want to get right to my point. I'm a vascular specialist who sees a lot of blood clots in the lung, in the leg, sometimes in the arteries, but a lot in the veins, and probably one out of every three blood clots that I see in women is from the use of contraception. RUSH: Wait just a minute. Wait just a minute. Are you telling me, did I...

She died after 25 days on the pill. She was only 21. As in so many blood clot cases caused by birth control, she was misdiagnosed when she went to the hospital struggling to breathe and experiencing pain in her legs and ribs. She was sent home diagnosed with a bruised sternum. Four days later, she collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. On May 14, three days after arriving at the hospital, she was pronounced dead. According to an article in Cosmopolitan, tests revealed a large blood clot on her lung. Her name was Fallan Kurek, and she worked with...

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 10, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - About one out of four children aborted early in America are killed by the abortion pill rather than a surgical procedure, according to an Associated Press report.The report concerns a Planned Parenthood study published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine touting the improved safety of a drug used in abortions that is now dissolved orally instead of vaginally - the latter being a technique that is more prone to causing severe and sometimes fatal infections.The chemical abortion method consists of first distributing mifepristone, also known as RU-486, which kills the child...

April 23, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new study confirms what numerous past studies have already shown: Birth control pills are reducing the fish population.A new laboratory study of the effects on fish of environmental exposure to the synthetic hormone found in contraceptive pills reiterates numerous previous studies from around the world that found evidence of fertility reduction, sex reversal, and even entire populations of fish dying off.Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Missouri exposed a small species of aquarium fish, the Japanese medaka, to 17a-ethinylestradiol (EE2), a major ingredient in oral contraceptives for women.The scientists stated...

LOS ANGELES, April 15, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Women who use the birth control pill may be shrinking their brains and increasing their chances of developing Crohn's disease, two new studies have found.Neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles found that the two main regions of the brain controlling emotion and decision-making are thinner in women who take the pill.A study published April 2 in the journal Human Brain Mapping reports that the pill’s chemicals block the body’s natural hormones, altering the brain’s structure and function.The study concluded that oral contraceptive use “was associated with significantly lower cortical thickness measurements...

March 2, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — An article in the Frontiers journal of medicine is sounding the alarm about the possible effects of hormonal contraception on the human brain, suggesting that the effects may be much more profound than previously thought and calling on the scientific community to devote more research to the topic.“Hormonal contraceptives are on the market for more than 50 years and used by 100 million women worldwide,” wrote Belinda A. Pletzer and Hubert H. Kerschbaum, a pair of Austrian neuropsychologists from the Paris-Lodron-University Salzburg.   “However, while endogenous steroids have been convincingly associated with change in brain...