contraception

Does Contraception Help, Or Hurt, The Poor?

The Witherspoon Institute has an important three part series that begins by looking at the Contraceptive Mandate, and then moves more deeply to address the persuasive task that confronts us in the culture: given that the formidable evidence documenting the destructive nature of contraception is on our side, how do we turn the tide? A…

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The First and Enduring Sin

This past Saturday–September 29, 2012–in Minneapolis, Minnesota was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the temperature was a warm 80 degrees, and the fall colors of the changing leaves were done as by a master painter. A perfect day for my 7-year-old daughter to play in the front yard. Indeed she was. Into this…

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Humanae Vitae was the Soap Box Encyclical

I wasn’t alive when P.Paul VI issued the Encyclical letter Humanae Vitae.  I’ve seen and heard about it throughout my life, though. For one thing, people who were in their 20s and 30s at that time say things like, “We heard about it, but the priests never said anything so we didn’t think it mattered.”  Others…

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Obama’s “Accommodation”

The February 10th statement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops noted that President Obama, in revising his health care mandate, “has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.” His decree “would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in…

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The HHS Mandate: Obama Regime Claims the Prerogative of God

On January 20, 2012, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius ordered that, effective August 1, 2012, health insurance must cover preventive services including all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity, without charging a co-payment, co-insurance or a deductible. “Nonprofit employers,” said Sebelius, “who, based…

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Waking the Sleeping Giant

One of the more memorable (and apocryphal) quotes to come out of the Second World War was the quote of Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander and mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the attack he was supposed to have said: “I fear all we have done is wake a sleeping giant and…

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Judases

In the May-June 1973 edition of The Humanist featured an article by Paul Blanshard and Edd Doerr in which they stated: We feel like throwing a champagne dinner in honor of the U.S. Supreme Court for its January decision on abortion…The Blackmun decision, in which the only Catholic on the Court (Brennan) concurred, constitutes the…

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Metaphysics and Contraception

Recently a class of high school seniors that I teach read St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” from his magisterial Summa Theologiae. The students struggled through the work and great discussion was sparked over the topic of law generally and the natural law specifically. In leading the class through the discussion with several of my…

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