Have you ever wondered what this planet might be like if there was never any form of birth control or abortions? If families of 10 to 15 children were the norm, would it be a better place? Parents working more jobs, families packed into giant homes, more and more schools and hospitals to be built to accommodate the masses. Safety nets stretched ever tighter, but many still falling through the cracks.
Where does the Roman Catholic Church get off in its relentless and uncompromising insistence that more and more human life is God’s great plan and that he will provide for everyone no matter what?
Slums, ghettos and alleys teeming with hopeless poor and hungry seem to be a bizarre way to demonstrate God’s plan. Unchecked birth control leads to untold suffering and death across the planet.
I got my vasectomy 30 years ago after our second child was born and was found to be healthy. We looked at income and reality and family patterns and decided not to go for 10 kids. The reality is Catholic couples and those of virtually all faiths ultimately do take steps to limit family size lest a family flock of unwieldy numbers might take them down.
So are priests supposed to be disciplining couples that stop with two, three or five children— when they could have 20 without birth control? There is some disobedience here somewhere, isn’t there? And a pox on those Catholic couples who don’t want children.
Birth control is one thing, abortion is another. Like it or not, abortions occur primarily from pregnancies of women who lack the wherewithal or, at least, the will to have and care for their babies well. So we can reason that larger numbers of children would grow up in an environment where they would be poor, abused and less than wanted. In the end, many, who might have never been born, are added to those who weigh down the economic-social system, as well as prisons and drug treatment centers. The National Right to Life Web puts the number of abortions in the U.S. since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling at 49,551,703. If those embryos all were people today, coming from troubled homes, if any, what would the landscape of that population look like?
Sure, we’d have some doctors, educators, humanitarians, politicians, etc., reaching maturity if those fetuses had gone to term, the babies born and they became adults. But would we be prepared to handle the deeply troubled and neglected folks, as well.
On Dec. 12, the Vatican issued a 32-page document, “Dignitas Personae: The Dignity of the Person,” reaffirming its position on biomedical technology. The New York Times called it the “most authoritative and sweeping document on bioethical issues in more than 20 years.” Again the church states it opposes in vitro fertilization, genetic testing on embryos before implantation, embryonic stem cell research and human cloning. All violate what the church says are the sacred principles of human life, including that babies should on be conceived through normal sex. The document comes with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI and was developed through a six-year discussion process.
The so-called “morning-after pill” that puts a quick end to any new conception, the IUD device and the pill RU-486 are also unacceptable to the church because, the Vatican says, those, in essence do the same thing as an abortion. Then there is also to freezing embryos for possible later transplantation. The document said the freezing might expose them to potential damage and manipulation. Then there’s the ultimate fate of those embryos never going anywhere – at least 400, 000 embryos in the U.S.
In response to the Vatican’s statements, a think tank, the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y., called Rome’s reactions “deplorable and scientifically insupportable.”
“The Vatican’s position has no justification other than religious doctrine,” the center said. But, it “may have serious adverse effect on scientific research and the development of medical therapies.”
“Do we have to wage the Galileo battle again?” asked the center’s chairman and founder, Paul Kurtz. “The Vatican claims that their objections are ‘moral’ but they are based on a theological doctrine that a formless fertilized egg is a full human being, a position that most scientists reject.”
Center president Ronald Lindsay said the Vatican has “once again manifested its regrettable preference for religious doctrine over science.”
Then he noted that through the natural process, 60 to 80 percent of embryos conceived are spontaneously aborted for whatever reason. “If the Vatican wants to prevent embryos from ‘dying,’ then they will have to instruct couples to avoid sex completely,” Lindsay said.
