By DEXTER DUGGAN
The 1960s didn’t live up to all the happy hopes from the start of that decade, and we’re living with the consequences — as every age bequeaths its good and bad to successor years.
With rocketed payloads circling the Earth and eagerly anticipated to head on to the moon before long, that decade was christened the Soaring Sixties as it began. Before it ended, the soaring had sickened as the radical New Left embroiled nations in riots and other forms of social upheaval.
One of the New Left’s aims was wresting control of academia from what it regarded as the liberal but stodgy establishment, and the success of that assault appears daily in what the national Democratic Party in 2019 offers up to the U.S. with its left-skewed presidential candidates and their reality-starved supporters.
In the 1960s, whoever would have dared forecast that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the national Democrats’ agenda would include seeking power by massively aborting new American citizens out of existence, to be replaced by an unending invasion of illegal aliens?
Dominant media in the twenty-first century declared dangerous sexual immorality to be the only acceptable standard, and anyone whose conscience dared oppose this was mocked as religiously benighted.
National conservative columnist Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer: “For more than half a century now, leftists have been trying to ban faith from the public square, as if freedom belongs to everybody except the faithful. In the name of stopping an ‘establishment of religion,’ what they actually push is bigotry against religion.
“This runs directly against the ideals that served as the basis of the American experiment. James Madison wanted all faiths to be free to proselytize in the public square. Anybody who tries to use the power of the state to do otherwise is quite literally un-American,” Hillyer said.
Back in 1963, the Catholic archdiocesan weekly newspaper of Chicago, The New World, served to offer a taste of what was to come in overturning morality.
Like many U.S. Church newspapers of the time, its stories included euphoria that a handsome Catholic and Democrat, John F. Kennedy, was the first Catholic president of the nation.
However, a decline in morality already brought troubling warnings on The New World’s news and opinion pages. Articles warned of the growth in divorce and pressure to expand birth-control promotion into the government itself. An April 26, 1963, editorial cartoon depicted busy devils labeled “divorce,” “birth control,” and “immoral movies & literature” undermining “The American Home.”
In the twenty-first century it may almost seem ordinary that the privately run Planned Parenthood organization is treated as a sort of official government agency, apparently guaranteed to be funded by tax dollars and beyond any serious scrutiny by dominant media — far less scrutiny, for sure, than that being focused on pro-life Republican President Donald Trump.
But there had been a battle in the 1960s as PP sought to burrow itself into government. PP won that one and launched its war using semi-government status against traditional morality. Before long, birth control for married couples became birth control, abortion, and whatever’s kinky for anyone capable of breathing.
Now, with transgenderism as a new unchallengeable priority, one can only wonder what the next aberration will be.
The May 10, 1963, front page of The New World carried a story from what then was called the National Catholic News Service. The headline was, “ ‘Time Has Indeed Come’. . . Family Life Leader Rips Birth Controllers’ Push To Gain Government Aid.”
The story, datelined New York, began: “A family life leader expressed alarm here at efforts by birth-control backers to make government ‘a sub-department of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.’
“Msgr. George A. Kelly, director of the New York Archdiocese’s Family Life bureau, cited efforts at the federal, state, and local levels to establish tax-paid birth-control programs,” the story continued, quoting Kelly’s warning against “departments of welfare subsidizing fornication and adultery.”
Also in prominent news at the time was John Rock, MD, an obstetrician/gynecologist and Catholic who confused consciences by furthering artificial birth control. He played a major role in developing the artificial contraceptive pill and thought the Church should accept it.
After his death years later, PBS’s American Experience reported: “In his later years, having lost faith in the Church, the man who once attended Mass daily stopped going to church altogether. When Rock died in New Hampshire at age 94, on December 4, 1984, he was still bitterly disappointed by the Church’s refusal to change its position on the Pill.”
Retired Phoenix Catholic physician James Asher, DO, told The Wanderer of how his own stand had changed from confusion about artificial contraception to eventual rejection of it.
“I don’t remember much conversation or even coursework in contraception in medical school, from which I graduated in 1973,” Asher said. “Once I began residency, I got right into it because my patients were asking for it, and I moonlighted in a women’s clinic, where prescribing the birth-control pill and inserting IUDs was a part of the job.
“I believe at the time,” he said, “I thought that by prescribing contraception I was preventing abortions, which had been legalized the year I graduated — and I didn’t connect that there were such things as full-term pregnancies with normal deliveries when the Pill had been used or an IUD had been in place — that hormonal contraceptives such as the Pill and the IUD can prevent implantation of the developing embryo, thus act not as contraceptives but as abortifacients.
“Also, I didn’t get that with the birth-control pill and IUD, the demand for abortion had actually increased,” Asher said.
“Prior to implementation of Roe v. Wade at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the psychiatry residents were kept busy going from bed to bed to certify (give a rubber stamp, really) to a woman’s supposed severe mental problems that were sure to develop if she didn’t have an abortion,” he said. “In those days, an abortion could be got if pregnancy threatened a woman’s health — including her mental health.”
Asher said that in 1974 he invited a faculty Jesuit from Creighton University to talk on the Church’s stand on birth control. “This young priest told us that at this time there were bishops, theologians, priests, et al., who were opposed to contraception, neutral about it, or in favor of it; therefore, one could take any moral position desired, and be in very good company.
“I don’t remember his mentioning Humanae Vitae,” Asher said, “which left me feeling like it was okay to prescribe the birth-control pill, although I maintained perfect clarity regarding the evil of abortion.”
Going into medical practice while “wondering about what was right,” he said, he eventually learned about Natural Family Planning. “NFP technology was a real eye-opener, and I became an advocate for this method of family planning, lecturing wherever I could about it.”
After moving to Phoenix, Asher said, he “allied myself with the Phoenix Natural Family Planning Center . . . but never really got asked to be too involved. About two years before I retired from the Phoenix Indian Medical Center working the emergency department, I was told I would have to prescribe birth control. I told them I would not, and nothing happened.”
He currently gives classes on NFP to men at Phoenix’s First Way Pregnancy Support Center.
Ann Howard, a retired attorney in Tucson, with a master’s degree in counseling psychology, also had been a Catholic diocesan pro-life director. The rest of this article is direct quotation of Howard’s comments to The Wanderer.
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“1963 was a very pivotal year, as I recall. The sexual revolution which had been simmering and bubbling up periodically for over seven decades in the English-speaking world was about to explode into a tsunami of changes.
“Although the Pill had been around for a few years, Doctors Rock and (Gregory) Pincus —abandoning traditional medical ethics of full disclosure and first doing no harm — had just concluded a huge trial of their Pill on Puerto Rican women who were not told that it was experimental.
“Their Pill, manufactured by Searle, was approved for contraceptive use in 1960.
“In 1963, Dr. Rock the Catholic doctor also became Dr. Rock the moral theologian. He released his book The Time Has Come to a world of Catholic quaverers who could rationalize use of contraceptives based on Rock’s prestige and his quasi-theology.
“The Catholic bishops seemed ill-prepared to fight a war against contraception and the sexual revolution. I do not remember hearing anything from the Church about the issue locally. I do remember the propaganda.
“Perhaps the bishops believed lay Catholics would reject the new morality. But that did not happen and there was no way that funding for Planned Parenthood in 1963 was going to be defeated. The secularists owned the moment.
“We were in Denver in 1963. My husband was in medical school and there, of course, talk was all about the issue, the book and the Pill. Many of the professors were adamant that the Pill was unproven and harmful. Some said that they would never put their daughters or wives on it. That was then.
“Now there are Catholic doctors willing to put children and wives and patients on a substance now known to be harmful and in opposition to a developed theology which has articulated the moral objections to contraception, using the Pill, with clarity.
“Although the Church has not been totally silent on the issue, it has not vigorously taught its position. Its meager efforts were not sufficient against the forces intent on making the peoples of the world creatures of a Godless secularism acting on every erotic impulse.
“There are so many people in the Catholic world who can help develop an approach to implementation of good programs, but it will take the bishops as a whole, money and organization.
“The bishops may now, with commitment, be able to make up for the past lack of wholehearted attack on the errors destroying so many people,” Howard concluded.
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