Respecting Women . . . Catholic Doctor Tells Why He Stopped Prescribing Contraception

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — What’s St. Peter asking at the Pearly Gates to decide if people are qualified to enter Heaven?
If the hopeful entrant is a woman, the saint wants to know if she’s bringing 10 men with her, according to James Asher, DO, vice president of the Catholic Physicians Guild of Phoenix, affiliated with the national Catholic Medical Association.
Asher said a priest told him this story to illustrate the importance of the moral example women should give to men.
“We men are kind of weak and brain-damaged, and we need women to keep us in line” and “hold us to a higher standard,” Asher told The Wanderer during an April 23 interview.
He chuckled that perhaps 10 is too high a number of men for every woman to be responsible for getting to Heaven.
However, this recalled a time not so long ago in society when women might be thought of as the better angels among humanity, tempering men’s rough edges or too-tough characters.
But that was before young women in the latter 20th century routinely were expected to be “equal” by fighting for paycheck jobs downtown and joining the elbowing Wall Street frenzy that feminism earlier viewed as demeaning.
That was before a “hijacked” feminist movement turned from asserting women’s dignity to promoting permissive abortion and driving women out of the home even if their primary desire had been to be wives and mothers, Asher said.
Asher recalled asking female classmates decades ago about their goals. Being a wife and mother came first for them, he told The Wanderer, although some other career might be farther down their list, after they established their family life.
Then hijacked feminism cast men as the enemy, marriage as oppression, and “a bunch of kids” as an overpopulating danger to the planet.
The hard-edged feminists attacked mothering a traditional family “as a crashing bore,” Asher said, adding that he didn’t know why forming the next generation “would be considered a menial task.”
Maybe childless and focused on punching the office timeclock, these feminists were “trying to become like the men they despised,” Asher said.
The Wanderer suggested maybe that’s why such feminists didn’t even like themselves.
During a February meeting on bioethics of the Phoenix Catholic physicians’ group, Asher had said “assisted suicide” and euthanasia didn’t exist by themselves, but are part of the culture of death, and “artificial birth control is the root of this whole thing.”
Many people have trouble seeing that connection, and he once had been among them, Asher told the February 11 meeting. (See the February 23 hardcopy edition of The Wanderer, p. 3, “Even As ‘Assisted Suicide’ Looms, Ethics Expert Tells How Roe v. Wade Might Be Reversed.”)
The Wanderer interviewed Asher on April 23 to follow up about why he’d changed his own attitude toward artificial contraception.
Asher recalled the debate and confusion after Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 against contraception.
Dominant news media already were fervently in favor of the Planned Parenthood agenda back then. As usual, anything the communications cyclone deeply disliked was hammered incessantly, while whatever they favored was kissed with a gentle breeze.

His Turning Point

During his residency in family practice at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1973-1974, Asher said, he asked a Jesuit priest from the local Creighton University to lecture to medical students about the Church’s stand on birth control. The result wasn’t an affirmation of the encyclical.
Noting the different arguments being advanced about contraception, the Jesuit told the students, “You are in good company, whatever you want to do,” Asher recalled.
Even before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized permissive abortion nationwide in January 1973, Asher said, it was “easy for a woman to get an abortion” in Nebraska if she alleged a mental-health reason, and the High Court simply made it easier.
Asher didn’t see the deeper implications to artificial contraception at the time, he told The Wanderer, and thought, “By prescribing birth control, I am keeping women from having abortions.”
He wasn’t aware, he said, that birth-control pills and IUDs could act as abortifacients themselves.
The “real turning point came” when he was talking to a surgeon who also was a Protestant minister, who “said you have no right to do that,” being contrary to the natural law by dispensing artificial contraception, Asher recalled.
“I stopped immediately,” Asher said.
The surgeon said “you have no right to interfere with God’s plan for this woman….That’s like a sacred thing,” Asher said.
Asher said he soon learned of Church-approved Natural Family Planning and encouraged people to take NFP courses.
He later moved to Arizona, in 1982, and started practicing at a Phoenix hospital.
Earlier in this decade, Asher blogged for a few years at the website of the Phoenix diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Sun.
In a June 2012 blog, noting both the major and minor risks to women’s health from artificial contraception, Asher wrote that the Church is accused of waging a “war on women.”
“Really? Consider that contraception has made possible a radical feminism with its concomitants of — on an unprecedented scale in human history — abortion, infidelity, divorce, illegitimacy, promiscuity, sexually transmitted infection and the poverty of single parenthood,” he said.
“And where would you suppose most of the suffering from these societal ills falls? Hint: You see very few secular men complaining about the sexual revolution.”
In a January 2013 blog, writing that artificial contraception interferes with God’s presence in people’s marriages, Asher wrote:
“Contraception has been readily available, very efficient, and in a number of inexpensive forms for some 53 years. In 1960, there were about 800 legal abortions. There are now 1.2-1.3 million abortions annually — almost one out of four viable pregnancies. About 55 million babies have been legally killed since January 22, 1973.
“And although many people still believe all the abortions are because contraception is not yet available enough, the only rational conclusion is that contraception somehow fuels abortion — both its continued legalization and its proliferation,” he wrote.
“The Church consistently condemns not only contraception, but also its largely unrecognized fruits — including promiscuity, cohabitation, divorce, sterilization, and abortion.”
With society and culture so strongly misdirected over recent decades, Asher suggested to The Wanderer that conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher has ideas worth considering in his recently released book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. It examines St. Benedict’s sixth-century vision for preserving society.
Asher said, “You don’t try to overturn or fight” to conquer this culture, “but build parallel structures.”
A description at Christianbook.com says: “The Benedict Option offers not only a critique of modern culture from an orthodox Christian perspective, but more importantly, it also extends an invitation for modern lay Christians from every church and confession to embrace and develop communities like those governed by Benedict’s Rule — communities rooted in a shared sense of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, blending countercultural biblical faithfulness with a world-engaging, Christ-exalting vision.”