It’s probably not a stretch to say that most people in our pill crazy society don’t know exactly how any one of their prescription drugs work. Here is a short version of the documentary 28 Days on the Pill highlighting how many people are uninformed about how hormonal contraceptives work:
Not only does the pill not totally prevent pregnancy, but it can have some harmful, even deadly, side-effects on the woman as well, including an increased risk of breast cancer.
Of course, there is only one 100% effective way to truly avoid pregnancy and it’s 100% natural, so no unpleasant side-effects either.
View the entire 28 Days documentary:
Next Monday, HBO will air the documentary 12th and Delaware about an abortion clinic and pregnancy care center located directly across the street from each other in Fort Pierce, Florida:
The film has already been shown at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, which is where Anne Lotierzo, director of the Pregnancy Care Center featured in the film, was able to see it. Not surprisingly, she’s not exactly pleased with the way things turned out. In a few videos here, she talks to Fr. Tom Euteneuer about how the filmmakers were…less than honest about their intentions for documenting the CPC and how they were unfairly portrayed in some parts. One review in the Hollywood Reporter says that the film is relatively objective, but ads that, “[t]here’s little doubt here that the filmmakers’ sympathies lie with defenders of abortion rights.”
I know I certainly do not have very high expectations for a truly “fair and balanced” documentary. Nevertheless, I suppose I am glad to see that there is still some public interest in both sides of the abortion debate. When over 1 MILLION unborn children killed in the U.S. every year, the last thing we need is for the issue of abortion to slip into obscurity.
This is just awesome!!! From the Jefferson City News Tribune:
HANNIBAL, Mo. (AP) — Army Capt. David Cooper was in Afghanistan when his daughter was born in Missouri. But thanks to technology, he was able to not only witness the birth but help coach his wife through labor.
David and his wife Laurie used Skype and, though they had some trouble connecting throughout the day, it worked perfectly for two hours before Charlotte Rose was born.
Laurie says she and hospital staff were able to see the sun come up in Afghanistan as the baby was being born just after dusk in Missouri.
Is that not the best advertisement for Skype or what? As military divorce rates rise due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hopefully something like this can help to (at least somewhat) ease the stress on both the active-duty service members and their spouses.
Want a really “spiced up” sex life? Wait till you have a ring on your finger (wedding, not engagement) and invite God into your bedroom. It’s also much safer and healthier this way!
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I got this image from Robert Colquhoun’s blog Love Undefiled
Jill Stanek’s most recent weekend question was that ever-popular pro-choice, knee-jerk reaction to pro-life opposition: “So…Are pro-lifers going to adopt all the unwanted babies?” One of Jill’s followers on Facebook had several great responses. This one was my favorite:
Unwanted describes not the child but an attitude of some adults toward the child. The real problem isn’t unwanted children, but unwanting adults.
This is the selfishness that fuels the culture of death Men and women “unwanting” of the other if it means they must completely give of themselves, and it’s not just about the “unwanted” unborn children or the sick and the elderly who are a “burden” on society. Think of the marriages and other relationships that fail or fall apart because of clashing egos, for example. True love calls for total self donation. It means wanting the good of the other, even at the cost of the self. This is the meaning of the body. This is what it means to be human:
There is no such thing as unwanted human life. Unwanting men and women…now that’s another story.
“Man…cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” Gaudium et Spes, 24
Therefore, in all things, let us learn how to daily die to ourselves, trust in the Lord and become true gifts of self to one another, especially the weak and most vulnerable members of our society.
The family is a community of persons and the smallest social unit. As such it is an institution fundamental to the life of every society. (JP II, Letter to Families, 17)
Today is the feast of Sts. Joachim and Anne, wonderful patrons for all families!
Parents of Mary, pray for all parents that they may provide the loving home and faithful teaching that you provided your daughter. Amen
This week is Natural Family Planning Awareness Week 2010! I’ve posted some of these videos before, but they never get old:
This is only one of a seven part series of videos contrasting NFP and contraception. All the videos were directed, written, acted, and edited by Catholic seminarians at the Institute for Priestly Formation in Omaha. You can see the other six videos here.
The major difference between NFP and contraception, quite obviously, is that infertile intercourse is an act of God, whereas, through contraception, the couple, takes the powers of life into their own hands with the intent of thwarting God’s creative designs. But this does not mean that natural family planning is just a Church approved method of birth control. The Church maintains that the practice of NFP must always be undertaken with a “procreative attitude” and should really only be used to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons:
The right and lawful ordering of birth demands, first of all, that spouses fully recognize and value the true blessings of family life and that they acquire complete mastery over themselves and their emotions (HV, 21)
This is to combat the culture of death that the “contraceptive mentality” has spawned while at the same time allowing couples the freedom to effectively and responsibly space out births in a way that cooperates with God’s creative designs.
It must also be said that, by “NFP”, we’re not talking about your grandma’s old “rhythm method” and that the modern method of charting a woman’s cycle is not just for the purpose of avoiding pregnancy, but also helps identify and effectively treat many female medical problems relating to PMS, infertility and achieving pregnancy, ovarian problems, frequent miscarriage, endometriosis, postpartum depression etc… In many ways, NFP has become much bigger than itself, expanding into a whole area of medicine dedicated to monitoring and maintaining a woman’s reproductive and gynecological health.
Find out more about NFP at these websites, for starters:
Pope Paul VI Institute, NaProTechnology.com, Couple to Couple League, USCCB
http://reflectionsofaparalytic.com/?p=2487
And for my take on all things NFP please check out my NFP archive as well.
It was such a pleasure to meet both Doug Barry and Fr. Mark Mary, hosts of Life on the Rock on EWTN, the other week. I did not know this, but Fr. Mark has a blog called Power & Witness and in his most recent post he mentions my appearance on the show and reflects on suffering and growing in holiness:
This past week we had Chelsea Zimmerman on “Life on the Rock” speaking about the sanctity of human life. Chelsea is paralyzed from the chest down from a car accident when she was 17. Today, 11 years later, she works for her parents and finds time to blog on a number of pro-life issues.
I was deeply impressed by her positive attitude and her moving forward with life despite her disability. Her life after the accident entails some harsh realities and limitations, yet Chelsea focused on what she was still able to do. She made decisions about what was important to her and what was going to be the focus of her life. One of those decisions was to be close to God, and to try to order her life to God.
She was drawn to the message of St. Therese and her doctrine of spiritual childhood in dealing with weakness and suffering. St. Therese once said that, “The goal of all our undertakings should not be a task perfectly completed, but the accomplishment of the will of God.” Sometimes we focus on what we do not have in terms of gifts and abilities instead of focusing on God’s will in our lives. Childlike faith is to accept all things from the hands of the Father. As St. Therese once said, “Now, little children do not know what is best. Everything is right in their eyes.”
We all are tempted to rebel at the suffering God allows in our lives. In and of itself, suffering is an evil. Ultimately it is the result of the disobedience of Satan, and Adam and Eve. But through the incarnation and the paschal mystery of Christ (His suffering, death and resurrection), God has redeemed suffering. He does not take it away or remove the pain of it. But He has made it redemptive through the cross of Christ. By faith, we can unite our cross with His, and, through the cross, we have a new likeness to Christ who suffered for us. He draws close to us in the midst of our sufferings.
Read the rest and do take some time to check out some of his other writings. He’s got such wonderful insights!
Thanks for the mention, Fr. Mark! And thanks for a wonderful interview…we should do it again sometime 
Ha! After this week’s post on manliness, I just couldn’t resist sharing this one. I found it via Joe Carter’s First Things post 50 Things a Man Should Be Able To Do Enjoy:
How to give the perfect man hug from Charles Clayton on Vimeo.
Narrator: “The modern world is a complex place for many men.” So true. There is no doubt, our society is very sexually confused.
Related: What it Really Means to Be a Man
Never Let Me Go starring Keira Knightley is supposed to be released this October:
Near as I can tell, it’s about a group of friends from an English “boarding school” who find out that they are actually clones who were born and raised for providing organ transplants. Kind of similar to The Island, maybe? Though, judging by the trailer, significantly toned down, action-wise. Of course the premise sounds outrageous, but, with scientists already cloning human embryos and a society relatively comfortable with the idea of creating and harvesting some human beings for scientific research, this is exactly where we are headed out here in the real world.
Thanks to Rebecca Taylor for providing this passage from the book that the movie is based on about how society can accept the creation and harvesting of clones:
After the great war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This is what the world noticed the most, wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum.
But by the time people came to consider…whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?
There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like us. That you weren’t really human, so it didn’t matter. [Taylor's emphasis]
