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You know, there is such a thing as picking your battles.

Screaming about the "Morning after pill" is going to make you look like a nutcase who wants to ban things like condoms, rather than someone actually concerned about human life who wants to end such barbaric practices as partial birth abortion.

The left is really good at starting small and gaining momentum. Too bad prolifers haven't figured that one out yet, choosing instead to "freakout the squares" and parade around with gigantic placards of aborted fetuses. Such tactics worked so well for the anti-war movement, after all.

YOU

are an angry clam.

You have a point. Pro-life groups have not grasped the concept of incrementalism. Instead of demanding ROE be overturned right now, the pro-life movement would be better served advocating late term abortion bans, parental consent, and cutting all govt funding to Planned Parenthood.

Screaming about the "Morning after pill" is going to make you look like a nutcase who wants to ban things like condoms

But they do want to ban condoms, and every other type of birth control

And you're right, when the extremists denounce the morning-after pill and say that rape victims should have to give birth to the child of their rapist, they just hurt their own cause by driving away millions of potential supporters who think those postions are crazy

Nail hit on head. Great post.

The author of this article is not a nutcase. Just look at Europe if you want to know why. Or are you too addicted to birth control to see the facts when they stare you in the face?

Europe as we know it is a dying civilization. Pat Buchanan, in his book The Death of the West, uses United Nations statistics to project that the native populations of Europe will decrease by 70% in the next 100 years, simply because native Europeans are no longer having enough babies to reproduce themselves. In some European countries, the average woman is now having 1.1 babies in her lifetime. The number needed to maintain a population is 2.1.

The last time Europe’s population showed a drop remotely close to this magnitude was during the Black Plague of the 14th century. Nowadays, however, the deadly infection isn’t being carried by rats. It’s being carried by an ideology – one that bills itself as charitable, progressive, even Utopian. Indeed, the Planned Parenthood paradise of “unrestricted reproductive freedom” has materialized in post-Christian Europe during the early 21st century. Europe is exercising its “right to choose” and it is choosing cultural suicide. I hope the last European turns out the lights.

During the Black Death, the elderly died with the young. But the plague that envelops Europe today takes only the young. Of course, the nations of Europe have Social Security systems similar to ours, and as the people of these nations age, they are running out of young workers to fund their retirements. Reluctantly, they are allowing poor, uneducated immigrants from the Middle East and Africa to take the bottom rung jobs necessary to continue funding the retirement system. By the year 2100, these immigrants, mostly Muslims, will outnumber the native Europeans.

This next bit of information didn’t make the network news, but it represents the tip of a proverbial iceberg that I believe lies under the whole continent of Europe. It seems that a well-known psychology professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark is now calling for state measures to encourage childbearing among intelligent people and discourage childbearing among those with low intellectual ability . . . to create what he calls a “better Danish society.”

Gee, I wonder where we’ve heard proposals like that before. More to the point, I wonder why this and similar ideas seem to be popping up all over Europe . . . right now, 60 years after the fall of the 3rd Reich.

What has brought Europe to this point? One would have hoped that these kinds of ideas died in a bunker in Berlin. The answer, I think, is that the native populations of Europe – the Danes, the Germans, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Swedes, the Dutch -- are scared stiff. Facing the specter of becoming minorities in their own countries, a great many native Europeans are beginning once again to embrace Adolf Hitler’s ideas about building a Master Race of superior citizens.

Not to get too melodramatic or anything, but we are in the midst of a battle of dominions and principalities. You can almost hear the flapping of satanic wings, can’t you?

Where should we look for our armor in this battle? Well, I suggest that we start by remembering who warned us about what would happen if Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, got her way. It has been the constant teaching of the Catholic Church for two thousand years that artificial contraception is gravely immoral. Until the middle of the last century, public policy broadly supported Church teaching in every Christian country on the planet, Catholic and Protestant alike.

But along came the “sexual revolution” of the 1960’s, creating in its maelstrom an anti-family and anti-life mindset -- the contraceptive mentality -- which has resulted in 40 million surgical abortions in the United States alone since 1973, and God only knows how many chemical abortions.

Concerning that last point, perhaps Planned Parenthood's most diabolical legacy is the birth control pill. Indeed, Margaret Sanger supplied the primary funding for pill research and development in the 1950’s.

Did you know that the common birth control pill results in the abortion of a tiny human being in a small but meaningful percentage of reproductive cycles? If you don’t believe me, check out the Physician’s Desk Reference at your local library. This is the volume that the pharmaceutical companies use to advise doctors concerning the chemical effects of their drugs. If you do so, you will discover that the “pill” not only prevents sperm from fertilizing egg; it is also formulated to kill tiny but genetically complete babies 5 to 7 days after fertilization, when necessary to abort pregnancies. Popular birth control products like Depo Provera kill tiny babies roughly 50% of the time. Intra-uterine devices do so 100% of the time.

Pope Paul VI, in his historic 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, predicted that widespread use of artificial birth control would result in: • an increase in conjugal infidelity, • the general lowering of morality, • the loss of respect for women, • and it would be a dangerous weapon in the hands of public authorities.

If you are pretty depressed by all this, I can’t blame you. But I can tell you that despite this mess there is incredible reason for optimism.

Thankfully, just as the Church first warned us about the dangers of the contraceptive “paradise” promised by Margaret Sanger, the Church also provides the tools to “bruise the heel” of the serpent that lurks therein. The antidote to Planned Parenthood is the blood of our Savior. And we can arm ourselves with the blood of our Savior . . . and His body too . . . during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass . . . in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

We can also look to the Holy Mass to recruit powerful allies -- the angels and the saints. Most Christians, even most Catholics, don’t understand the fundamental proposition that worship is warfare. In the book of Revelation, God’s vengeance closely follows the prayers of the martyrs beneath His altar.

At Mass, we worship beside those martyrs as well as the angels. We call upon their help. Listen closely to the words which lead into the Holy, Holy, Holy: “Now, with all the angels and archangels, and the whole company of heaven, we sing the unending hymn of Your praise.”

The word “company,” as in the “whole company of heaven,” is a military term. Many Eastern liturgies refer to our alliance with the “hosts” of angels, like legions or divisions. In the Liturgy of St. Mark, we hear the prayer of the martyrs: “Crush under our feet Satan, and all his wicked influence. Humble now, as at all times, the enemies of Your Church. Lay bare their pride. Speedily show them their weakness. Bring to naught the wicked plots they contrive against us. Arise, O Lord, and let Your enemies be scattered, and let all who hate Your holy Name be put to flight.”

The Mass is nothing short of D-Day in the spiritual realm. It is our most potent weapon.

The new study, results of which were published in Lancet August, 1998, was sponsored by the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction (WHO/HRP), a program set up in 1972 by the World Health Organization to coordinate international efforts on priority research leads. WHO/HRP also supported the Hong Kong study and three other multicenter studies of the levonorgestrel tablet.

According to Dr. Sharon Camp, President of WCC

Sharon Camp, Ph.D., President of Women’s Capital Corporation (WCC), the U.S. distributor for Plan B. "We are really excited to be able to provide this important advance in emergency contraception to American women."

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(WOMENSENEWS)--U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, and Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat, introduced congressional legislation on Wednesday that would allocate $10 million annually for five years to educate health care providers and the public about emergency contraception. It was one of the first salvos in a muscular new campaign in March designed to raise the profile of the emergency contraception products with lawmakers, regulators, health-care providers and the American public.

Some states aren't waiting for the FDA to act. West Coast women already have access to drugstore dispensation under laws passed in California and Washington state, and through a test project in Alaska. Four more states--Hawaii, Minnesota, New Hampshire and New York--also have legislation pending to permit pharmacists to provide women with emergency contraception.

"When American women see it move forward in Canada, we will see more furor for it to move similarly fast here," Camp said.

snip

"A critical mass is building on EC," said Kirsten Moore, president of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project in Washington, a nonprofit organization that is coordinating the campaign. "Pieces are falling into place on the supply side. Now is the time to push the demand side."

Single Momz

Sharon L. Camp, Ph.D., previously, as Senior Vice President of Population Action International, she managed professional staff involved in lobbying, media liaison, policy research and publications. Dr. Camp has chaired or served as an elected director on the boards of Family Health International, the National Council for International Health, the International Center for Research on Women, the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, EngenderHealth, Management Sciences for Health and Population Action International.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute-www.guttmacher.org-is a not-for-profit corporation for sexual and reproductive health research, policy analysis and public education, with offices in New York and Washington, D.C. We look forward to welcoming Dr. Camp to AGI, in January 2004.

The "gradualism" theory you refer to usually works for evil enterprises and seldom does for good ones.

The problem is that most of the prolife movement has deliberately not made the abortificant argument about many of the contraception methods during the last 30 years. So today anyone, including the Pope, who attempts to make this argument is either ignored by the press or written up as a wacko when covered. Meanwhile, we have the pro-death forces pursuing parents' rights to kill infants up to 6 months to a year (Peter Singer and company) and a burgeoning "right to die" (duty to die/right to kill/futile care) movement.

So we have a ban on PBA (maybe), which if enforced (dubious) reduces abortions by maybe 0.5%. We have thousands of marvelous, compassionate people in the trenches every day helping women to see the other alternatives, which probably saves 100,000 babies per year. Meanwhile about a million fetal-stage pre-borns recognizable as human are killed each year. Untold millions of pre-borns at the fertilized-egg stage and slight further are killed (yes, killed) because the Pill and the morning-after pill often don't prevent conception but do prevent implantation. (More scientifically inclined readers, please forgive the lack of technical precision)

Thanks to the prolife movement's tactics, it will take every bit of 50 years and some luck to get the public to understand how both Pills often kill babies. Hindsight is 20-20, but it seems clear now that taking the principled holistic life-based argument from the very beginning after Roe v Wade couldn't possibly have taken longer, would likely have at least have ended "visible" abortion much sooner, and would have made the Peter Singers and Hemlock Society arguments appear as the real wackos.

There is not one word about condoms in the article. You brought that up. The article is about over the counter retail sales of powerful hormones that are not necessarily contraceptive in nature, but which on countless occasions act as abortifacients.

If the government by this recommendation is not only devaluing human life, but undermining the role of parents in a civilized society to care for, nurture and provide for the well-being of their children, then there is no more picking of battles; there is no battle left.

Cordially,

Such tactics worked so well for the anti-war movement, after all.

It did work for them. A ragtag group of stoned out humanist 20-somethings drove a President from office. (LBJ.) They caused America to lose it's first war, and bear some moral culpability for the murder of millions by Communists throughout Vietnam and SE Asia. So it was very effective in achieving their goals.

I am not advocating that we all grab a disgusting sign and start waving it. I wouldn't. But the concept of protest and making a moral statement is sound.