Posted in Uncategorized on May 31, 2010| 30 Comments »
Catherine Palmer is working on a project stemming from her article posted below. We’re looking to catalog all of the pro-choice euphemisms in existence, and ask that you write in whatever ones you know.
For example: Product of conceptus (for embryo/fetus).
Please pick your brains, your pro-life friends’ brains, and write in whatever you have. Thanks so much.
Posted in Abortion, Birth Control, tagged ellaOne, FDA, Ulipristal on May 31, 2010| 4 Comments »
ellaOne (Ulipristal 30 mg) is the new and improved version of RU 486. Its mechanism of action is similar in that it blocks the hormone progesterone from its effect of maintaining the endometrial lining of the uterus.
Recall that while estrogen is key to stimulating the growth and development of a new uterine lining (endometrium), progesterone is tasked with maintaining the structural integrity of that lining (to which the embryo attaches). In a normal menstrual cycle, the former egg follicle, the corpus luteum, produces progesterone and dies if no embryo has been produced. Thus the definition of menstruation is progesterone withdrawal from an estrogen-primed uterus.
If an embryo happens to be nestled in that endometrium and ellaOne is taken to block the effects of progesterone, the endometrium will break down, flushing the embryo out in the process.
Whereas RU 486 was taken as a morning after pill, ellaOne can be taken several days later.
The FDA is set to hold hearings on ellaOne this coming June 17. At those hearings we will hear of how this drug is not an abortifacient, that it is meant as emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy.
Enter the verbal engineering.
The pro-aborts have actually outrun their own verbal engineering, which is always engaged in as the necessary pre-requisite to social engineering. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology defines pregnancy as the implantation of the embryo. It used to be defined as conception. However, this definitional change does have a curious logical coherency.
In vitro fertilization (IVF) continues to spawn all manner of derivative evil. It is because of IVF that the definition of pregnancy was changed. A woman is said to be pregnant when she has conceived in her body (in vivo). However, when a woman donates eggs, which are then fertilized in a petri dish (in vitro), the woman is not said to be pregnant, and rightly so. She may have 30-40 live babies in their embryonic stage in a petri dish, but her body remains without child. Thus, a mother of 40 can remain never having been pregnant.
The definition needs to be reworked, back to conception, but including IVF. I propose the following:
Pregnancy: The status of a woman whose body possesses nascent human life from the moment of in vivo conception, or has received nascent human life through artificial implantation.
It makes a difference.
Through the current IVF-inspired definition, RU 486 is held to be an emergency contraceptive. Taken early enough, ellaOne could fit that same definition. However, ellaOne can be taken when the embryo has already implanted, running up against even the current and tortured definition of pregnancy. As such, there can be no doubt that ellaOne is an abortifacient. Thus the pro-aborts are now hard-pressed to find verbal engineering sufficient as to give them cover. However, what they lack in the way of rhetorical cover, they may well gain by brute political force.
FDA is always at the mercy of Congress and the White House for funding. With the demonic trinity of Obama-Reid-Pelosi, do they dare reject this new drug? It’s a dilemma to be certain.
November is coming.
Posted in Abortion on May 30, 2010| 8 Comments »
Over at the Center for Morality and Public Life, President Andrew Haines wisely brought on board a great new author, Catherine Palmer, who has just finished her second year at the College of William and Mary. Ardently pro-life, Catherine also has her own blog, Vita Pro Omni. We welcome her to the ranks of pro-life authors and activists, invoke God’s continued blessings in her life, and pray that she see the end of this scourge in her lifetime. Catherine wrote the following article for her new column at CFMPL. It is reprinted here with her permission.
Disrobing Pro-Choice Euphemisms
by Catherine Palmer
There are those ideas which serve the fulfillment of the human person and there are those ideas which diametrically oppose this purpose. Of course, there are also those which are somewhere in-between—but such ideas are less noteworthy and unrelated to our discussion today. For the time-being, I would like to focus on a string of modern thought which has abused humanity and poisoned minds over the last 50 years in particular.
Throughout the course of a few decades, this mentality has essentially seeped into every corner of our society. When considered at face value, this seems an almost shocking phenomenon: how could an ideology so dangerous, so depraved, get past the conscience of millions of Americans? But when we realize that this philosophy is a great masquerader, concealing its true colors behind the guises of “women’s liberation” and “population control”, it all begins to make a bit of sense.
The ideology to which I am referring is, broadly speaking, the pro-choice ideology. This doctrine insists, sans sound premise, that certain human beings ought to be labeled non-persons and thus be denied rights. It insists further that the choice to destroy a living human fetus is fundamental to a woman’s freedom and equal place in society. According to this mindset, abortion is a constitutional right and ought to be protected as such.
The ramifications of this mentality are unspeakable, but not unprecedented. Anytime unpopular human beings are reduced to something disposable, we see horrific effects. We saw it in our segregated nation under Jim Crow laws in the 1950’s, when African-Americans were lynched by the thousands because they were dark-skinned; and we see it in America today with abortion-on-demand, where the unborn are dismembered, burned, and suffocated because they are inconvenient. But I would like to think (and generally do think) that the propagators of these killings would never commit them were they to see them for what they really are.
As far as I understand, segregationists genuinely believed in their racial ideology and pro-choicers (by and large) truly believe in abortion as a just societal policy. But popular ideologies may or may not be at the service of truth. And there is good evidence that neither the segregationist nor the abortionist has his story straight.
By drawing an analogy to segregated America I do not intend to offend pro-choice readers but rather to illuminate a historical moral evil that is perhaps more clearly a moral evil due to the boon of retrospect. Masquerading ideologies are characteristically deceiving in their own time, but become transparent in following years.
This transparency comes about in several ways, but two in particular. Perhaps one could classify them as a single means involving paired steps. In any case, it seems there are several initiatives we must undertake to try to disrobe the costumed pro-choice ideology, leaving it naked and stripped of its charm.
The first initiative is educational in nature. In short, we have a responsibility to learn the facts about the unborn. The abortion question ultimately comes down to their moral status, so knowing 1) what they are and 2) how to articulate what they are is crucial. Embryology, biology, philosophy, sociology—all are at our service in correcting the inimical pro-choice mindset. Where there is intellectual confusion, we must submit ourselves to the service of truth and aim to correct it.
The second initiative is active in nature. Armed with proper knowledge, we can enter the realms of higher education and politics to make a legitimate case for life. This is what groups like ALL (American Life League), AUL (Americans United for Life), and the Susan B. Anthony List do, to name a few pro-life powerhouses. Without resorting to extremist tactics, never considering violence, these organizations nonetheless make measurable strides toward advancing pro-life philosophy and policy.
Utilizing history as our teacher, we see that the Civil Rights Movement required authors and activists, professors and preachers, to bare segregation for the world to see. The Pro-Life Movement will likely prove no different.
Surely, inhuman ideologies parading in dress-up clothes and pretending to be human are among the most dangerous sort[1]— and C.S. Lewis understood this ably: “But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.” Pro-choice euphemisms, be gone.
[1] Joseph M. Scheidler, paraphrased
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Trinity on May 30, 2010| 10 Comments »
Today in the calendar of the Church we celebrate the Solemnity of The Most Holy Trinity. It is a great feast day for the pro-life movement.
In our understanding of the Trinity, the Father gives Himself totally to the Son, and the Son gives Himself totally to the Father. In this reciprocal act of radical self-donation made in Love, the Holy Spirit of God is generated. The Church holds out sacramental marriage as an icon, a window, into the inner life of the Trinity.
The mutual submission of husbands and wives to one another of which Saint Paul speaks is not the servile condition that radical feminism would have us believe. It is rather the same total emptying of self, the same radical self-donation as characterizes the inner life of God. In that complete giving and receiving of self between spouses, there can be no barriers. In that self-donation, new life is generated as the product of spousal love.
The Church teaches contraception as an intrinsic evil precisely because it is an assault on our imitation of the inner life of the Trinity, because it is an assault on our fertility, of our capacity to generate new life as the expression of our love. It is a barrier that is out of sync with the natural rhythms of human fertility and its cycles. Natural Family Planning takes into view those cycles and does not erect such barriers as to make of marital union a mere plaything devoid of openness and responsibility.
Sterile marriages, marriages that are parsimonious in their approach to love and its fullest expressions beyond the bedroom, that are even hostile to life, are marriages that reject the paradigm of the inner life of the Trinity. The four Gospels are nothing, if they are not one long revelation into the inner life of the Trinity. As Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me {completely}, so I have loved you {completely}.” and “Love one another as I have loved you,” which is to say, completely and selflessly.
So God gives us marriage that we might have a vehicle through which we learn to love, mirroring the example set by the inner Life of the Trinity. God is truly three persons in one entity because that oneness comes about through radical, mutual self-donation. That’s how the two become one in marriage: two persons, one in mind and heart, and even almost in being. And in those best of marriages where self-donation comes closest to perfection, we have reflected for us the inner life of the Trinity. This is what Jesus was getting at in His prayer to the Father in John 17:
20″My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24″Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. 25″Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
This model of the Trinity in our lives works when we ask the Holy Spirit of God to move in us, in our marriages. It works when we ask the Spirit to teach us wisdom and love, when we are prepared to abandon sin and empty our lives of all impediments that lead us to parsimony, rather than openness.
Especially openness to Life.
Posted in Biomedical Ethics, tagged Biomedical ethics, Emergency consult, NCBC on May 28, 2010| 1 Comment »
In light of our discussions on the Phoenix case, this one is going into the side panel as a permanent feature. NCBC offers free emergency ethics consults 24/7. This is worth having on the Rolodex or electronic equivalent.
From NCBC:
To submit a consultation request via our website, please click to navigate to our consultation page. The NCBC provides free consultation services to individuals facing difficult ethical decisions related to health care. In emergency situations, an NCBC ethicist is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by calling 215-877-2660. NCBC ethicists do not provide legal or medical advice.
Posted in Uncategorized on May 28, 2010| 2 Comments »
Posted in Uncategorized on May 28, 2010| 4 Comments »
Memorial Day weekend is a good time for watching short clips. Here is a treat that came to me via Lisa Mladinich. I’ve known all about this molecule for 15 years as a Molecular Biologist, but this guy brings it all home. Watch this to completion!!
