The pill and 50 years of misery [the pill kills!]

RenewAmerica ^ | 5-6-10 | Judie Brown

[mlizzy]

Isn't it interesting that as the United States of America approaches the 50th anniversary of this nation's most popular recreational drug, the birth control pill, special interest media is ginning up the presses — or in this case, the web sites — with all sorts of ideas for the next 50 years. A sampling of what America's birth control worshippers are saying may give one pause to rethink.

For example, on May 3, the Los Angeles Biomedical Research institute (LA BioMed) announced "that it has received $1.5 million in grant funding to study a contraceptive for men that uses a combination of two hormonal gels applied to the skin of the arm and abdomen."

The report explains:

The Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill on May 9, 1960, giving women greater control over their reproductive choices and their lives. Drs. Christina Wang and Ronald Swerdloff are LA BioMed principal investigators and directors of one of only two of the National Institutes of Health centers dedicated to clinical research on male contraceptives. They have conducted several studies of male contraceptives, including the current one. Dr. Swerdloff, the director of the LA BioMed at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center's Male Contraceptive Clinical Trials Center, says the development of a male contraceptive will change men's view of their health and their role in reproductive decisions.

"Just as women gained greater control over their reproductive choices and their health with the advent of the birth control pill, a male contraceptive would get men more involved in their personal health care and would give them greater reproductive choices," said Dr. Swerdloff.

If one is to believe these comments, then the pill is celebrated today as a drug that gives women "control" over their ability to conceive or not to conceive a child, depending on their whims and fancies. Or to put it another way, in blunt but honest terms, the unveiling of the birth control pill in 1960 invited females and their male counterparts to consider, for the first time in our brief history, the idea that fornication and adultery could be a group sport because this little chemical concoction was going to do away with the possibility of conceiving a child. At the same time, the pill created the idea, perhaps subconsciously, that all those who used it would no longer be put in the unpleasant position of having to accept responsibility for their actions. This life-changing prescription meant not having to live with the consequence of — God forbid — being with child (i.e. pregnant). In other words, the pill changed everything, turning the truth about human sexuality — waiting until marriage to engage in relations and welcoming a child as a gift — on its head and then denying those truths because they were merely old-fashioned, outdated ideas.

Now clinical research is investigating the possibility that men should perhaps no longer carry little packages containing latex in their hip pocket or army boot but rather a prescription gel, so that they are always prepared and can take charge of the situation with less delay. Sounds almost like the scientists are arming men for war games with females.

In my humble opinion, any man worth his salt would never consider using a chemical that could, as has been the proven case with the birth control pill, result in a heart attack, a stroke, cancer or even death. On the other hand, proponents of these various chemicals do not admit to the fact that not only does the birth control pill abort on occasion; it is also not what one would describe as a health benefit. If those concerned with the health and wellbeing of humans were truly consistent, they would point out that no recreational drug is actually healthy, whether one is discussing cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, cigarettes or birth control chemicals.

In addition to the research devoted to men, there are other voices with different bones to pick about the pill's 50th anniversary.

Susan Reimer's opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun laments that the pill "didn't stabilize marriages that might be stressed by too many children or sexual tension. Divorce has only increased since 1960, impacting almost half of all marriages. The pill didn't stabilize populations in developing countries or control disease, famine and political unrest. The women in those countries couldn't get the pill."

"And it didn't prevent unwed pregnancies, either. Those numbers have nearly tripled."

But what she says the pill did create was more women in the workforce. Huh?

Reimer suggests that the enormous number of women in the workforce was a byproduct never projected by the lofty promise makers of the 1960s. But she doesn't seem to get the point that, while the pill made it easier, perhaps, for women to enter the job market, it also, almost simultaneously, created a breakdown in the family. As more and more women entered the workforce, leaving their children in day care and their husbands to fend for themselves, the family unit started to decay to a point where today the television or the internet is the babysitter that nobody could have imagined. The pill has been among the most sociologically damaging instruments in history.

But these are the sort of things to which Reimer cannot admit.

Oh yes, and then there's Geraldine Sealey, who hasn't got a good word to say about the pill, about her life, about her sexual libido or frankly about anything at all. She is an angry woman, whose article carries the very appropriate title, "Why I hate the pill." I thought I might be about to read an exposé on what the pharmaceutical companies have done to deceive women, using them as human guinea pigs and lying to them.

But no, that is not where Sealey went in her diatribe.

She just wants women to have more choices. And she wants the industry to do something about it because she is positive that all those "unwanted pregnancies" are happening because there still are not enough choices for females who want desperately to have sex but certainly don't want to be troubled with a child.

She tells readers:

The birth control pill didn't just magically appear in women's medicine chests one day. Its creation was a hard-won victory for women, by women, specifically, Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick, the activist duo most responsible for its development. As Elaine Tyler May describes in her new book, America and the Pill, these heroines began their fight in the early 20th century against the same sexist forces that once prevented women from voting, as well as conventional wisdom that equated birth control with vice and immorality, but ultimately managed to get the pill introduced here decades later.

Oh, come on, lady! Let's face facts and tell it straight for a change. Why do women want the pill along with as many other selections on the sex-at-any-price menu as they can get? Because, quite simply, they have become infatuated with the idea of never having to be accountable for anything they do in order to satisfy their sexual urges. It is as if sex alone was worth denying everything that is moral and good about being faithful, pure and chaste before marriage as well as after it. Those values have become near-artifacts in the history of the human race.

Chastity and fidelity are the focus of sneers, derision and mockery. And yet, after nearly 50 years and only God knows how many damaged women, men, families and dead babies, many in our midst are still racing ahead, demanding more ... more misery, more heartbreak, more death, more perversion.

Pope John Paul II in his remarkable Gospel of Life, explained this societal negativity (Chapter 1:13):

It is frequently asserted that contraception, if made safe and available to all, is the most effective remedy against abortion. The Catholic Church is then accused of actually promoting abortion, because she obstinately continues to teach the moral unlawfulness of contraception. When looked at carefully, this objection is clearly unfounded. It may be that many people use contraception with a view to excluding the subsequent temptation of abortion. But the negative values inherent in the "contraceptive mentality" — which is very different from responsible parenthood, lived in respect for the full truth of the conjugal act — are such that they in fact strengthen this temptation when an unwanted life is conceived. Indeed, the pro-abortion culture is especially strong precisely where the Church's teaching on contraception is rejected. Certainly, from the moral point of view contraception and abortion are specifically different evils: the former contradicts the full truth of the sexual act as the proper expression of conjugal love, while the latter destroys the life of a human being; the former is opposed to the virtue of chastity in marriage, the latter is opposed to the virtue of justice and directly violates the divine commandment "You shall not kill."

But despite their differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion are often closely connected, as fruits of the same tree. Until that tree is uprooted, tossed aside and killed, the problems that confront mankind will not soon disappear. The honest response to the pill-loving in our midst and their hackneyed celebratory yammering should be that 50 years of deceit, misery and death is enough.

[vladimir998]

The pill is an abortifacient.

[BenKenobi]

In an article in the research journal Contraception, Drs. Chowdhury, Joshi and associates state, "The data suggests that though missing of the low-dose combination pills may result in 'escape' ovulation in some women, however, the pharmacological effects of pills on the endometrium and cervical mucus may continue to provide them contraceptive protection."[7]

[A.A. Cunningham]

Taking the pill is not abortion.

Use that line during your particular judgment and see what it gets you.

Birth control and abortion

Plenty more reading for you.

[ransomnote]

Just my humble opinion. Writings of this nature would be more persuasive if they did not imply that the one and only reason anyone ever took contraception was ‘free love.’ My grandmother had 11 children back to back...the last two were stillborn. This was actually considered a small family prior to condoms and the pill. I recall reading a letter of author Jane Austen (circa 1800) where she received news of a peer who was yet again pregnant hard on the heels of yet another pregnancy. Jane remarked on the woman’s exhaustion from continuous pregnancies with sympathy. I think some people wondered if 12 children were about as many children as they had the ability to provide for. Especially as childborth has come along way medically - it used to be more dangerous. I am not saying that other comments posted here are entirely groundless but that the paint brush used to paint anyone/everyone who ever wanted to try or tried contraception as those who wanted unrestrained fornication etc. Balance...perhaps those worried about increasingly difficult pregnancies were told that they would not conceive if they took the pill - shall they too be counted with the free love, no responsibility fornication ‘addicts?’

[mlizzy]

I'll ask my same question once again.

The pill is an abortifacient. And is responsible for the destruction of family as well ...

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. --Humanae Vitae

[MHGinTN]

It can do that because of the way it interrupts the leutinizing hormone cycle, which results in the endometrium ‘remaining’ heavy with mucosa. The primary way the contraceptive pill works is to prevent maturation of ova for release. The poster stated that that method was not what ‘the pill’ does. It is incorrect to state flatly that the pill does not prevent conception. In some rare cases an ova is released and even more rarely conception occurs, based upon timing of dosing and the hormonal flux of the female body.

[A.A. Cunningham]

You obviously don’t understand that there is more than one type of pill.

[tiki]

For Socialism to work you have to kill the Church and kill the family. They have come near killing the family.

[MHGinTN]

LOL ... I just posted a post which makes the point that the poster was perhaps confusing two different ‘pills’. I was a Searle rep for years. I absolutely understand this issue, exquisitely.

[MHGinTN]

For what it’s worth: I lost a good job at SZearle because I refused to sell interuterine devices named the ‘CU 7’ and ‘Tatum T’. I did sell Demulen and Ovulen, until I realize by talking with an in house scientist that these too can cause abortion.

[Salvation]

More from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

                From the Catechism of the Catholic Church (click on the book for the link.)    

2399 The regulation of births represents one of the aspects of responsible fatherhood and motherhood. Legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception).

2370 Periodic continence, that is, the methods of birth regulation based on self-observation and the use of infertile periods, is in conformity with the objective criteria of morality. These methods respect the bodies of the spouses, encourage tenderness between them, and favor the education of an authentic freedom. In contrast, "every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible" is intrinsically evil:

Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality. . . . The difference, both anthropological and moral, between contraception and recourse to the rhythm of the cycle . . . involves in the final analysis two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of human sexuality.

[MHGinTN]

intrauterine, not interuterine ... sheesh, tired old head.

[mlizzy]

Balance...perhaps those worried about increasingly difficult pregnancies were told that they would not conceive if they took the pill - shall they too be counted with the free love, no responsibility fornication ‘addicts?’

This encyclical explains: HUMANAE VITAE OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF PAUL VI.

[ConservativePsychProf]

Back to Sanger — her main interest was NOT the emancipation of women — it was eugenics, pure and simple. More from the “fit” and less from the “unfit.” She was a big hit with the Klan, as can be seen here (scroll down for famous picture): http://bigjournalism.com/sswift/2010/01/22/thirty-seven-years-after-roe-v-wade-a-disenfranchised-silent-generation/

[mlizzy]

[ransomnote]

I am no Sanger fan. I was just commenting that, if this or posts like it are meant to persuade, they may be more effective if they acknowledge that not all impulses toward the pill were eugenics or licentiousness. As I read repeated references to craven individuals refusing to accept responsibility etc, I imagined the faces of some of those women who actually had 15 plus children and wondered how to care for the next one. Or those women who suffered complications with growing frequency until childbirth became a routine fight for life. I am not suggesting that posts should support these women should they use contraceptives, just found myself thinking that they should not be lumped in with tireless fornicators, adulterers etc.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Traditionally, when new electronic military technologies became available, there was always a pervasive rumor that “they would make you sterile.” This caused great fear and trepidation among soldiers.

So here is an idea that maybe its time has come. Not as a real thing, but as a cautionary warning to those who seek to “play God” with reproduction.

Pretend that some unnamed company has invented a single pill, that if one is given to a man, woman, or child, it will permanently and irreversibly sterilize them. And that millions or even billions of these pills had been made, warehoused, and that vast numbers were stolen and are missing.

Purely as a thought problem this is a horrifying possibility, and would probably make a terrifying horror movie. (Though some in the “scientific” community would applaud the concept as a great idea.)

Suddenly, tyranny and genocide become *easy*. If a tyrant has a hated and despised minority, he can give each and every one of them a single pill, perhaps in their food, and they will eventually be entirely gone.

Likewise, with an enemy nation, even if it guarded its food and water, if somehow, anyhow, such a pill could be administered, the hated enemy or religion would be gone forever.

And hatred could turn into terror. One political party sterilizes the members of a competing party. All criminals are sterilized.

Eventually the pill becomes more feared than nuclear weapons. If anyone is adjudged as sterile, which is not naturally uncommon, by the way, they would be assumed to be a victim of the pill, and demand retaliation.

Men could slip women a pill for the guarantee that there would be sex, but no pregnancy. And women could do the same to their husband, if they didn’t want him impregnating any other woman.

In short, the world turns into a race to preserve your own fertility and sterilize everyone else. Every person turned against every other person.

It would make one hell of a movie. It would make Hell on Earth.

But more than anything else, it would be a profound allegory to what the birth control pill represents, just taken to an extreme. And to show how those that hate life now, if empowered, would likely be more than willing to exterminate most, or in some cases, all, of mankind.

[Salvation]

FR threads:

The pill and 50 years of misery [the pill kills!]
. The dawn of demonic deception [the birth control pill]

Researcher finds strong link between contraception and HIV
The Birth-Control Riddle
Social Science Proves Humanae Vitae
"Contraception Is Wrong. Now Here's How You Use It . . ."
Suit claims birth control warning not enough
Natural and Unnatural (father of 5 shocks mother of 1)
Planned Parenthood Uses Teens to Distribute Injectable Birth Control in Rural Ecuador
Study: Low-Dose Birth Control Pills Decrease Bone Density in Young Women
Spanish drug agency confirms grave effects of morning-after pill
Another Woman Dies of Hormonal Contraceptive in Switzerland

Study Finds Half of Women on "Birth Control Shot" Suffer Bone Problems
The Re-Birth of Population Control: Human Life Seen as a Carbon Problem
Radio Replies First Volume - Birth Control
Abortion, birth control pill linked to breast cancer, surgeon says
God before contraception (Australia)
Fighting the 'contraceptive mentality'
Birth control pill creator regrets population decline
Polluted Water, Polluted Culture (one more consequence from contraception)
Abortifacients -- The Other Forbidden Grief
NFP and Contraception: What’s the Difference?

Wisconsin requiring Catholic institutions to provide contraceptives coverage
Contraception: The history you may have missed and would rather not know
Why does Pope Benedict talk about Humanae vitae in the new encyclical? [Catholic Caucus]
New Evangelical Documentary Exposes Abortifacient Qualities of the Birth Control Pill, Promotes NFP
In Quiverfull Movement, Birth Control Is Shunned
Press in a Dither Again over Pope’s Reaffirmation of Catholic Teaching
How Birth Control Changed America for the Worst
If You Are Contracepting, You Are Part of A Very Big Problem
Vatican and Italian government criticize sale of RU 486 in Italy
New Condom Ads Target Catholics, Latinos

St. Padre Pio, Humanae Vitae, and Mandatory Abortion
Responsible Parenthood in a Birth Control Culture, Part Two [Open]
Responsible Parenthood in a Birth Control Culture, Part One [Open]
Humanae Vitae and True Sexual Freedom — Part 6 of 6 [Open]
Contraception v. Natural Family Planning — Part 5 of 6 [Open]
Sex Speaks: True and False Prophets — Part 4 of 6 [Open]
Contraception and the Language of the Body — Part 3 of 6 [Open]
Does Contraception Foster Love? — Part 2 of 6 [Open]
Contraception and Cultural Chaos — Part 1 of 6 [Open]
Priests still suffering from effects of Humanae Vitae dissenters, Vatican cardinal says (Must read!)

"Provoking reflection" (Contrasting views on Humanae Vitae)
Humanae Vitae The Year of the Peirasmòs - 1968
Catholics to Pope: Lift the Birth Control Ban
[OPEN] The Vindication of Humanae Vitae
Catholic Clergy Challenge Colleagues to Reacquaint Themselves and Their People with Humanae Vitae
White House proposes wide "conscience clause" on abortion, contraception
THE EX CATHEDRA STATUS OF THE ENCYCLICAL "HUMANAE VITAE" [Catholic Caucus]
“A degrading poison that withers life”
Australia Study: 70 Percent of Women Seeking Abortions Used Contraception
[Fr. Thomas Euteneuer] In Persona Christi: The Priest and Contraception

A Challenging Truth, Part Two: The Day the Birth Control Died
A Challenging Truth, Part One: How Birth Control Works
Ten Challenges for the Pro-Life Movement in 2008
The concept of the "intrinsically evil"
Pope Tells Pharmacists Not to Dispense Drugs With 'Immoral Purposes'
Massive Study Finds the Pill Significantly Increases Cancer Risk if Used more than Eight Years
Birth Control Pill Creates Blood Clot Causing Death of Irish Woman
Seminarians Bring Church’s Teaching on Contraception, Sexuality to YouTube
Abortion and Contraception: Old Lies
History of Catholic teaching on Contraception

Pope: Legislation "Supporting Contraception and Abortion is Threatening the Future of Peoples"
Contraception: Why It's Wrong
On Fox News Fearless HLI Priest Takes on Sean Hannity (may be indebted for saving his soul)
VIDEO - SEAN HANNITY vs REV. THOMAS EUTENEUER (must see!)
The Early Church Fathers on Contraception - Catholic/Orthodox Caucus
Pope on divine love vs. erotic love
Conjugal Love and Procreation: God's Design
Being fruitful [Evangelicals and contraception]

[mlizzy]

It would make one hell of a movie. It would make Hell on Earth.

Boy, I'll go along with that. The writers make stupid stuff up to scare people, when they only have to exaggerate [a little!] what's currently going on today, to REALLY terrify the troops ...

[Dajjal]

Find an old copy of George Gilder's 1973 book (1975 PB) Sexual Suicide.

Gilder argues that the contraceptive mentality will lead inevitably to the suicide of a civilization.