By Judie Brown
How did mankind become gobsmacked with the penchant to control fertility? Since when is the object of the unitive and procreative aspects of the marital act nothing but a leftover from the days when respect for human beings meant something? It seems to us that in these days of rampant media claims that may or may not hold water, it is time to take a step into reality and look at the facts.
The team that created the government’s contraception guidelines are upset because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fired them. The Trump administration did not feel compelled to explain itself to the media, and for that we can be thankful. But some folks took the decision badly.
According to Politico,
Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the layoffs “short-sighted,” suggesting it could backfire on the Trump administration’s pro-family message.
“Especially if we’re going to be pumping more money or more rhetorical power into IVF or . . . maternal mortality, an area with a lot of bipartisan support, we should be investing in the kind of research that helps inform those debates and approaches.”
Such comments may be well intentioned, but as with most public debates in the arena of human sexuality, the most important aspect of sexual relations is ignored. That is the fact that when two people love each other totally, they trust God and not the scientists who make a living figuring out ways to avoid procreation or accomplish it in a petri dish.
But there are many sides to this twisted coin because, as we have learned, a recent European study found that the use of birth control pills can triple the risk of stroke.
An article in Contemporary OB/GYN explains, “The final analysis included 2,025,691 women with 22,209,697 person years of follow-up time. Among these patients, an adjusted incidence rate ratio of 2 was reported for ischemic stroke when using oral contraceptives with estrogen and progestin. This highlighted hormonal contraceptives as a risk factor for ischemic stroke.”
Ischemic stroke is the existence of blood clots in a vessel supplying blood to the brain. This is a serious side effect of the birth control pill and has been a known complication of its use for decades. But those who want to rely on the pill roll the dice and use it anyway.
In an age when pregnancy seems to be anathema to so many women, it is not surprising to observe these deadly statistics as nothing more than a sign of the age itself. The era of controlling the number of children people have and the way those children are created has led us deep into the throws of Orwellian group think. This is best understood by hearing it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.
Patrick Steptoe, one of the men who created the in vitro fertilization process, said, “I’m not a wizard or a Frankenstein tampering with Nature. We are not creating life. We have merely done what many people try to do in all kinds of medicine—to help nature.”
Yet these words fly in the face of true nature. Between a husband and a wife, there is the opportunity to procreate children according to God’s natural design. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the “conjugal act preserves in its fullness the sense of true mutual love and its orientation toward man’s exalted vocation to parenthood.”
So, when in the course of human events, man removes God from the equation and imposes his will and his scientific prowess instead, man is rendered sterile and broken. That is the love deficit.