By BRIAN CLOWES
Part 2
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 21 of The Facts of Life, “Contraception,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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We have seen that contraception fails frequently and so often leads to abortion. There are many other intimate connections between contraception and abortion.
The primary mission of the research arm of the vast “family planning” industry is to develop more and more effective abortifacients. Every year, fewer women use true contraceptives and more are using abortifacient chemicals.
There are several reasons why abortifacients are preferable to contraceptives from a “family planning” point of view. To begin with, abortifacients are much more effective at ending pregnancies than contraceptives are at preventing them. The best user (“real world”) effectiveness rates of the birth control pills, the IUDs, the injectables and the insertables average about 96-98 percent, and the best user effectiveness rates for the male and female condoms, cervical cap, diaphragm, and sponge average only about 80 percent.
There is another reason that “family planners” prefer that women use abortifacients. Despite all of the propaganda promoting “woman-controlled” birth control, the population controllers are actually more interested in increasing their own control of women’s fertility, primarily in developing nations.
Abortifacients put more control into the hands of the medical profession and mean more money for the international pharmaceutical cartel than true contraceptives do. Abortifacients must be prescribed by health professionals. By contrast, contraceptives are controlled by the user. Greater abortifacient use will ensure that physicians — and, in some cases, the state — will be able to strictly monitor and even control the fertility of the people. This is now happening in the People’s Republic of China and has happened on a smaller scale in more than 30 other nations.
The Legal Connection. More than 25 years ago, pro-abortion lawyer Frank Susman recognized that the “rights” of abortion and contraception now actually merge:
“For better or for worse, there no longer exists any bright line between the fundamental right that was established in Griswold and the fundamental right of abortion that was established in Roe. These two rights, because of advances in medicine and science, now overlap. They coalesce and merge and they are not distinct. The most common forms of contraception today — IUDs, low-dose oral contraceptive pills, which are the safest type of oral contraceptive pills available — act as abortifacients.”
The principle used to justify all anti-life practices in the United States is the “right to privacy,” which actually appears nowhere in the Constitution of the United States. The United States Supreme Court first stumbled upon this mythical “right” in its 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized contraception for married couples nationwide. Three years later, the court extended this “right” to unmarried people. And, of course, five years after that, it quickly applied the “right to privacy” to abortion in its Roe v. Wade decision.
Every American values personal privacy. Everyone wants the government to interfere with his or her private life as infrequently as possible. So the “right to privacy” is used as a cover to justify practices that the public will not accept until it has been exposed to them for years. We can see this principle at work in the seamless progression from contraception to abortion to euthanasia. And the “right to privacy” is also used to justify homosexual acts, adultery, infanticide, and all kinds of pornography.
The public has “evolved” to accept acts that were once universally believed to be immoral and loathsome. Anti-lifers now label any opposition to abortion, euthanasia, pornography, and other evils “anti-choice,” “anti-freedom,” and “anti-American.”
The Psychological Connection. So there are legal, medical, and practical connections between contraception and abortion. But they all pale in comparison to the most important connection of all: The fact that the belief system that accepts contraception will inevitably require abortion.
Most people — including most Christians — use contraception because they can’t afford a baby, they have problems with their relationships, they want to avoid single parenthood, they aren’t ready for the responsibility, they have all the children they want, or they are concerned about how a child (or another child) would change their lives.
These are exactly the same reasons women give for having abortions. Underlying them all is the fundamental denial of God’s design of man and woman as sexual beings, and His plan for children in our lives. People today want to “plan” their families.
Why does a couple contracept? Because they don’t want a child. Why don’t they want a child? Because they have made Important Plans for Their Lives. And when contraception fails, the resulting “unplanned” child is often seen as an intruder, one who will spoil the couple’s carefully laid plans.
And when a couple has denied God’s plan for their lives once through contraception, it is so much easier to do it again through abortion. As Blessed Teresa of Calcutta observed:
“In destroying the power of giving life, through contraception, a husband or wife is doing something to self. This turns the attention to self and so it destroys the gifts of love in him or her. In loving, the husband and wife must turn the attention to each other as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception. Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily.”
For decades, pro-abortionists have worked to blur the distinction between abortion and contraception in people’s minds. For example, a writer for “Catholics” for Choice said: “If RU 486 is also used monthly, pro-lifers would have a hard time convincing the public that the drug isn’t just another contraceptive. Indeed, a 1982 New York Times story on [Etienne-Emile] Baulieu and RU 486 described the drug as ‘a new birth control pill.’ Planned Parenthood released a ‘Fact Sheet’ in October that refers to RU 486 as a type of ‘interceptor (luteal contraception).’ If most people hear a new drug described as ‘birth control,’ they’ll think of the Pill and IUD, not abortion.”
And the National Abortion Federation has said: “If RU 486 is referred to as an ‘abortion pill,’ it has significantly less support than if it is called a new form of birth control. In many polls, the description can change support by as much as 15-20 points and determine if a majority of those polled are in favor of the Pill.”
Pro-Lifers And Birth Control. Some pro-life activists will certainly be offended by the classification of contraception as “anti-life,” because they have completely separated contraception from abortion in their minds. As far as they are concerned, abortion and contraception are two entirely separate issues.
I used to think that way until HLI founder Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, set me straight.
Many pro-life activists use contraception. In fact, it is safe to say that many pro-life women use “birth control” methods that are actually abortifacients. These men and women may not want to hear that they may be committing one or more “silent” abortions themselves every year, but it would not be intellectually or ethically honest to deny the truth in this matter.
It is extremely ironic that a “pro-life” woman who uses an intrauterine device or the Pill for a decade will suffer 10 to 20 “silent” abortions, while a “pro-abortion” woman using the same methods may only commit only one or two additional abortions through surgical means.
Fruits Of The Same Tree
The late Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo, former prefect of the Pontifical Council on the Family, said:
“Getting human sexuality ‘right’ is one of the great challenges of our time. Meeting this challenge is very much part of the work of the pro-life movement. The mysterious links between sexuality, life, and death, are part of our psychology and our experience of life. The anti-life mentality began, not with abortion, but by separating sexuality from the transmission of life in contraception and sterilization. As the Holy Father points out in Evangelium Vitae (n. 13), ‘Despite their differences of nature and moral gravity, contraception and abortion are often closely connected.’
“I invite everyone here to think seriously about the roots of the anti-life mentality. I urge you never to fall for the shallow argument that providing widespread contraception will reduce the number of abortions.”
Evangelium Vitae (n. 13) points out that “contraception and abortion are often closely connected, as fruits of the same tree.”
As such, all of this tree’s fruits — whether they be contraception, abortion, euthanasia, homosexual activity, masturbation, or pornography — are poisonous to the soul. Everyone who genuinely seeks God’s will for his or her life must avoid them like the spiritual plagues they truly are.
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