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During the advent of my first pregnancy, in 2012, I was comfortably settled into my own unique brand of postmodern feminist Christianity. I remember lounging on the couch amidst waves of debilitating nausea, watching news coverage of the controversial Contraceptive Mandate, rolling my eyes in anger and disgust at those regressive Catholic priests in their prim white collars, telling women what to do with their bodies. Yet almost exactly two years later, I would be standing before such a priest at the Easter Vigil Mass, publicly confessing my desire to be received into the largest, oldest male-helmed institution in...

Medical Examiner noted daughter's use of NuvaRing in report MUSKEGON, Mich. — A mother in West Michigan is warning women about the potential dangers associated with certain birth control methods. Alexzandria Givens died in July, just two days shy of her 21st birthday. She had gotten out of bed to use the restroom when she collapsed. Her boyfriend quickly dialed 911 and Ally's parents. Ally's mother, Carla Givens, told FOX 17 on Friday, “It was a worst nightmare phone call you’d ever get in your life. We got it and we rushed out of bed and went to his house...

Like most of my colleagues, I intended to have two, maybe three kids. And like them, I thought the Catholic view of sex and contraception was ridiculous. That was about 25 years ago. Since then, I’ve discovered Theology of the Body (TOB) — Pope John Paul II’s biblical analysis of what it means to be human. This radically transformed my view of the body, human sexuality — and in turn, birth control. And now, I don’t think the Catholic view is ridiculous. I think it’s biblical. And though I’m not dogmatic about it, I, like a growing number of evangelicals,...

Clearly, the mentality that drives abortion, drives contraception. And when evangelicals embraced contraception they began thinking like pragmatists. Children became liabilities, not blessings. Marriage became a means to personal fulfillment, not family and sacrifice. And birth control became essential to personal health, as though our natural design was somehow defective. Posted to the website of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) is a shocking quote by Pastor Joel Hunter. “Unmarried sex with contraception is not God’s plan,” he says. “(B)ut unmarried sex without contraception is not a plan at all. If holy living is not the choice of some in...

I used to think like most evangelicals when it came to family planning. I strongly opposed abortion, but embraced contraception and thought Catholic objections to birth control were on par with praying to Mary. Abortion, I reasoned, takes an innocent life and is clearly wrong. But contraception merely prevents conception. What could be wrong with that? Sadly, I had never considered arguments on the other side. When I did, I found they aren’t flimsy or far-fetched. They’re solid and Scriptural. And they aren’t just Catholic either. Every Protestant Reformer opposed contraception. In fact, before 1930, every church — Protestant and...

In the fall of 2015, a rash of posters appeared around Copenhagen. One, in pink letters laid over an image of chicken eggs, asked, “Have you counted your eggs today?” A second — a blue-tinted close-up of human sperm — inquired, “Do they swim too slow?” The posters, part of a campaign funded by the city to remind young Danes of the quiet ticking of their biological clocks, were not universally appreciated. They drew criticism for equating women with breeding farm animals. The timing, too, was clumsy: For some, encouraging Danes to make more babies while television news programs showed...

TEXAS, November 12, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – As the Trump administration opens the door to legitimate health organizations receiving money that previously went to the abortion industry, pro-life pregnancy centers are hoping to seize the opportunity to grow. But one Texas-based pregnancy center alliance is trying to do so with an inconsistent stand on birth-control methods that can function as abortifacients. In February, the Trump administration finalized the Protect Life Rule, which requires “clear financial and physical separation between Title X-funded projects and programs or facilities where abortion is a method of family planning” and bans “referral for abortion as a...

A three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld a block against the Trump administration’s religious exemption to the HHS’s contraceptive mandate. In January, Judge Haywood Gilliam of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued an injunction against the new rules on contraception coverage, which allowed employers to opt out of providing birth control and abortion-inducing drugs in their health insurance plans if it violated their religious or moral beliefs. In a 2-1 decision released Tuesday, the majority decided to uphold Gilliam’s injunction banning enforcement of the religious exemption...

Abortion rates have dropped again in Colorado, and heath authorites are crediting increased access to birth control statewide. Pharmacists have written thousands of prescriptions for the birth control pill since 2017, when Colorado became only the third state in the nation to allow women to get prescriptions for oral contraceptives at the pharmacy instead of only from a doctor. State and federal dollars are funding free and low-cost IUDs — intrauterine devices that prevent pregnancy for five years or more — for low-income women and teens who visit community health clinics across the state. Another contributing factor: the so-called morning-after...

Neocatechumenals Heading Into the Sunset, With a Push From the Pope On Friday September 20 Pope Francs received in audience, at Casa Santa Marta, the founder of the Neocatechumenal Way, Francisco “Kiko” Argüello, accompanied by his two lieutenants María Ascensión Romero and Fr. Mario Pezzi. On the occasion, Kiko offered the pope a sketch he had made with the likeness of Saint Francis Xavier, a Jesuit and a great missionary of Asia.The gift was not a random one. An illustrious relic of Saint Francis Xavier is kept in Macao, on the coast of China, where the Vatican congregation “de Propaganda Fide”...

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...

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...

For the past several years, many of us have seen headlines referencing the development of birth control drugs for men. It does seem like for too long women alone have borne the burden of pregnancy prevention, despite how baby-making requires two parties to take place. Further, since men are fertile 100% of the time, while women are only fertile about a quarter of the time in their menstrual cycles, it seems a little heavy-handed to put the responsibility solely on women, for couples hoping to postpone kids. As it turns out, the history of birth control includes attempts to find...

Recent numbers released by the American Academy of Dermatology revealed a dramatic spike in the incidence of melanoma cases among young women. Melanoma is the most dangerous type of skin cancer, and for women aged 18-39, its rates have increased by 800% from 1970 to 2009. In Caucasian women under 44, the number of cases has increased by just over 6% annually. (1) Now, in addition to being the most dangerous, melanoma is one of the most common cancers in young adults (especially young women). More than 7,000 people in the United States are expected to die of melanoma in...

[Catholic Caucus] Pro-contraception priest invited to teach at new John Paul II Institute in Rome  ROME, July 30, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — An Italian moral theologian who has argued that “responsible parenthood” can obligate a married couple to use artificial birth control has been invited to teach at the newly established John Paul II Institute in Rome, LifeSite has confirmed. Two informed sources in Rome told LifeSite that Fr. Maurizio Chiodi, a professor of moral theology at the Northern University of Milan and new member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, has been invited to teach at the new institute, but his...

Axiom: It is better to be alive than to be dead. Major threats to human existence and genetic death of the human race include: 1. Alien attack 2. Sun death 3. Major asteroid collision with Earth But Freepers do not worry as I have a plan to protect against the events listed above. This plan is based on two necessary human achievements: 1. We must live and reproduce on other planets/moons/spacecraft. 2. We must advance technologically so that we can defend ourselves against an alien attack. The necessary precondition to these achievements is massive technological growth. And technological growth is...

Turns out George Stephanopoulos did more than just donate to the Clinton Foundation while working as an ‘impartial’ media person for ABC. He also joined Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein at Lolita Island in 2010. Lolita Island is also known as ‘Pedo Island’. This one documented trip by George Stephanopoulos and Bill Clinton was in December of 2010. George Stephanopoulos was at ABC at the time. This was just two years before that ridiculous GOP debate where George Stephanopoulos badgered Mitt Romney about banning contraception. Now I know why it was such an issue for George Stephanopoulos.

I first read Humanae Vitae as a Protestant. Its truthfulness made me weep. It was Humanae Vitae that succinctly described my dignity as a human being, that as a woman I was not a second-class citizen to man. The encyclical, which mentions early on “the dignity of woman and her place in society”, stresses the reciprocity and complementarity of man and woman. A woman must be revered: artificial contraception encourages a man to “disregard…her physical and emotional equilibrium” and “reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires.” Paul VI’s words told me that my...