The deafening silence of dissent: Humanae Vitae after Forty years

The deafening silence of dissent
Humanae Vitae insists that the Church’s writ runs as far as the marital bedroom, but many married couples have disagreed. The ensuing breakdown in communication between Church and society has cost both dear


What kind of Church has the Catholic Church become in the last 40 years since Humane Vitae was published? To focus only on its rejection of artificial birth control would be to do the encyclical a disservice. For it is not without its understanding of love and acknowledges the unitive purpose of sexual intercourse.

The encyclical was published at a time when Victorian prudery had been undermined by dramatic social changes in postwar Britain – and in Europe – and literature and film offered radically different ideas about the nature of sexual love from the conventions of Christianity. Humanae Vitae acknowledged how changes in society affect marriage and family life. It refreshingly recognises the “new understanding of the dignity of woman and her place in society”.

The encyclical insisted that there must be no division between the unitive and procreative aspect of sexual intercourse. The alternatives were abstinence or natural family planning, restricting sex to the infertile periods of a woman’s cycle. Its critics argue, of course, that the very fact that women have this infertile period suggests that for a woman at least nature makes a division between the unitive and procreative aspects of sex.

One of the greatest ironies of the last 40 years is that the pressures on couples now seem to have reversed. For many of them, the difficulty is not avoiding pregnancy but getting pregnant at all. Research suggests that professional couples are often too exhausted for lovemaking during their most fertile years so that procreative sex is the problem today. The interest in the natural cycle of a woman is to often track her fertility in order to conceive. Pharmacy shelves are filled with kits to analyse ovulation. Even natural family planning practitioners are often asked to help people conceive, rather than help avoid pregnancy. They do so by encouraging a more holistic approach to life, helping people find ways of dealing with stress, the most insidious cause of damage to the contemporary relationship.

Does this therefore make Humanae Vitae prophetic, given the sexual dysfunctioning of society? The theologian Tina Beattie has argued the opposite – that in fact “Humanae Vitae has had a disastrous effect on the Church’s capacity to influence the public sphere with respect to sexual morality”. It damaged the authority of the Church for many loyal and faithful Catholics, she says, and also gave those outside the Church reason for ignoring it. While it is not the role of the Church to bend to the will of society, it clearly has a role to play in dialogue with the world. Both are losing from this breakdown in communication.


Read here the full article by Catharine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet

Eugenic abortion for disabled infants

The leader of Britain's Tory opposition party has stated that he supports eugenic abortion for disabled infants up to the time of birth. In the build-up to party conference season in the autumn, David Cameron was asked if he would be willing to change the law, amended in 1990, that allows disabled children to be aborted at any time of gestation up to the point of birth.

Read it all here

Most unsafe abortions in India - The Hindustan Times

The Hindustan Times - Indian Newspapers in English Language from three editions

Most unsafe abortions in India

Namita Kohli, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, August 09, 2008
First Published: 23:36 IST(9/8/2008)
Last Updated: 23:45 IST(9/8/2008)







The Mumbai High Court judgment disallowing the abortion of a 26-week-old foetus has sparked off a nationwide debate on abortion and a woman’s right of choice. But for a majority of Indian women, ‘medical termination of pregnancy’ (MTP, the medical term for abortions) remains largely unsafe.

Unsafe abortions are those performed illegally, by untrained practitioners with faulty equipment, leading to injuries, infections and even death.

India has the highest number of unsafe abortions in the world. According to government estimates, 8.9 per cent of maternal deaths in India every year — around 15,000 — are caused by unsafe abortions. The irony is apparent when doctors say MTP, if done right, is among the safest medical procedures.

Of the 6.4 million abortions performed in India in 2002 and 2003, 56 per cent or 3.6 million were unsafe, says the Abortion Assessment Project I, 2004. The study — one of the largest in recent times — was managed by the Mumbai-based Centre for Equity into Health and Allied Themes and Healthwatch Trust. It included qualitative and quantitative studies across various states by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), researchers and healthcare professionals.

It also pointed out problems of reach and access with public investment in abortion facilities being woefully inadequate. Only 25 per cent of abortion facilities in the organised sector are government-owned; the rest are private clinics. These are so expensive that they completely exclude the poor sections.

“There’s inadequate, inequitable distribution of facilities for safe abortions. Contraceptive usage is low in India, hence the great demand for safe abortion services,” said Dr Jaydeep Tank, chairperson of the MTP Committee at the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India (FOGSI). Besides, only six per cent of India’s 23,000 primary health centres (PHCs) provide abortion services.

“Besides risk to life, unsafe abortions have serious long-term repercussions like life-long disabilities and reproductive tract infections,” said Sushanta Banerjee, senior advisor at Ipas, an NGO.

For a country with a ‘liberal’ law on abortion, Banerjee said awareness about it is extremely low even three decades after it was enacted. “In Jharkhand, for instance, we found that 82 per cent of women didn’t even know abortion was legal,” he said. In a related study by the Population Council in Rajasthan in 2002, the figure was 84 per cent and in Maharashtra at least 37 per cent of those who had had abortions thought they were illegal. This misconception leads many women to unqualified professionals. Other barriers to safe abortion are “social stigma and myths attached to MTP”, said Tank. “Awareness about abortion through drugs like Mifepristone and Misoprostol is also low, despite they being legal and easily available.”

Social barriers like spousal consent and judgmental doctors are also deterrents, though the law requires no such consent. Under the government’s Reproductive and Child Health Project, safe abortions are a key concern and some progress is being made — maternal mortality due to abortion was 11 per cent in 2001. “We need to generate awareness at the community level about contraception and safe abortion, in both rural areas and urban slums,” said Thomas Chandy, CEO, Save The Children in India. Ipas also advocates training of mid-level service providers like nurses and non-allopathic doctors in remote areas where access to trained doctors is a problem.
(non-text potions removed)

U.S. Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson Claims Bible for Abortion-Rights

Monday April 18, 2005
courtesy: LifeSiteNews



Homosexual Episcopal Bishop Out to Claim Bible for Abortion-Rights Activists

Washington, D.C., April 18, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) The logical consequences resulting from the first ever consecration of a homosexual bishop continued to manifest themselves as Bishop V. Gene Robinson of the U.S. Episcopal Church addressed those Planned Parenthood's fifth annual prayer breakfast in Washington on Friday April 15th.

The Washington Times carried a news article in which Rev. Robinson was reported as directing his comments against "people of faith" and suggested that Planned Parenthood should target them so as to "promote abortion rights and comprehensive sex education".

The main theme of Robinson's comments dealt with the reasons surrounding last year's election results in the United States. The large number of people who voted for President Bush was, according to Robinson, a result of the disconnect between religious people and the pro-abortion mindset, saying, "In this last election we see what the ultimate result of divorce from communities of faith will do to us."

Robinson believes that the only way to defend the pro-abortion mindset is to reach out religiously. He noted that, "our defense against religious people has to be a religious defense. ... We must use people of faith to counter the faith-based arguments against us."

In essence Robinson is advocating the complete reinterpretation of the Scriptures. He is quoted in the Times article as saying "We have allowed the Bible to be taken hostage, and it is being wielded by folks who would use it to hit us over the head. We have to take back those Scriptures," he said. "You know, those stories are our stories. I tell this to lesbian folk all the time: The story of freedom in Exodus is our story. ... That's my story, and they can't have it. … We need to teach people about nuance, about holding things in tension, that this can be true and that can be true, and somewhere between is the right answer. It's a very adult way of living, you know. What an unimaginative God it would be if God only put one meaning in any verse of Scripture."

Rev. Robinson gained worldwide notoriety in 2003 when he was elevated to the office of bishop within the Episcopal Church (known as the Anglican Church outside the U.S.). Robinson had left his wife and two young daughters in 1986 and moved in with a man. His stand on abortion, however, mirrors faithfully the Episcopal Church's position on abortion, adopted in a resolution during its 71st General Convention in 1994, stating: "While we acknowledge that in this country it is the legal right of every woman to have a medically safe abortion, as Christians we believe strongly that if this right is exercised, it should be used only in extreme situations. We emphatically oppose abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience."

Planned Parenthood has made limited inroads in subverting the Christian faith. The Rev. Ignacio Castuera, a Methodist and Planned Parenthood's national chaplain, indicated that the size of their clergy network, numbers around 1,400 pastors and clergy, mostly on the East and West coasts. However, Mr. Castuera said, "When you move further into the country it gets harder. ... In the center of the country we have a lot more conservative perspectives on the Bible and sex."

The comments and activities by Rev. Robinson and other clergy are not going unchallenged however. David Bereit, national director of Stop Planned Parenthood (Stopp), an organization that espouses the belief that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder, said his organization is "not going to allow Planned Parenthood to hijack Christianity." According to the Washington Times, Mr. Bereit said his group will work to build coalitions of churches who will then try to remove Planned Parenthood materials from public school sex education courses and lobby government against funding the group.

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