feminine-genius

God's perfect timing

Crescat's heart-rending post about her hidden abortions cannot go without comment, for she is offering the exact witness mentioned in the previous post. As the comments below it indicate, she has the total support of her readers, who extend their love and understanding -- as it should be (while clarifying that we can never really understand the suffering others).

One comment in particular must be noted:

Your story is my story. Two abortions, one miscarriage. Your honesty has power though. I have sat debating abortions with people over and over again and they ignore what I'm saying - apparently I only think like this because I'm Catholic!

Kindly remember that we will always be marginalised: if it's because we're Catholic, we're brain dead; if we're not, ours is just a private opinion; if we've had an abortion, we have no room to talk; if we haven't, we don't understand what leads women to it. It doesn't matter how the argument is framed, the messenger must be indicted so that the message can be dismissed. That's how a malformed conscience operates.

Arguments won't work -- only grace can prepare hearts, soften wills and make the truth known. Now is the favourable time, now is when we are called to speak out. Love and prayers for Kathleen, and let's do all we can to make her confession one for the ages. The world needs such stories shouted from the rooftops, and let her witness be the sign of contradiction to illuminate the confusion of her generation.

Behold the modern woman

  

The entire message is so sickening that I'm appalled for the entire family. What lies behind the surface of every sentence, every thought, is the fact that nothing can be accomplished without "medication" that will sterilise intimacy, without the ability to engage in sinful behaviour. My daughter cannot join the military without birth control pills. My daughter cannot enjoy her life without uncommitted sex. My daughter will be less of a person if she doesn't tamper with her reproductive capacity -- for God's physiological design and the exciting dreams of women are radically opposed to each other.

This woman has sexualised two dear little girls, for the subject matter distracts the observer into extrapolating: "Now what's the relationship between setting that alarm clock and this ad?" or "What will keep those smiles alive as the wind tousles their hair?" Ah yes, sexual licence. And children. God forgive her.

She is entirely right about the ubiquitous pills in the medicine cabinet. Such is the culture in which we operate. Such is the battle to be fought at every turn -- for Christ despises the corruption of his little ones. Our challenge is to love this mother while renouncing Every. Single. Word.

The issue of religious liberty aside, our culture has enshrined uncommitted, sterile copulation as a birthright, and is trying to make it the measure of a woman's freedom -- ignoring the fact that it allows every woman to be used as an instrument of other's pleasure. Keep this in mind as you encounter the world. It has rejected the very meaning of existence, and traded it for a mess of pottage.

Pray without ceasing, be faithful, and remember that you are the living sign of contradiction -- simply by remaining in God's embrace. Courage!

The value of a woman in China

No matter what the Chinese state says about its citizens, the women are not feeling valued, and why would they? Granted, it's not Communism that says boys are of more value than girls, but when a draconian policy interferes with natural fertility, forcing families to have but one child, the cultural preference for boys means that girls are caught in the cross-hairs.

“A woman takes her life every three seconds in China,” and men outnumber women by 40 million because of the “systematic elimination of girls” through forced abortion and sterilizations resulting from China’s one-child policy, Chai Ling, founder of the human rights group All Girls Allowed, said Tuesday.

Ling testified during a House Foreign Affairs Subcommitte on Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese activist who was imprisoned by the Chinese government and fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He is waiting to complete paperwork so that he can travel to the United States.

This is the nature of "human rights" in China that Chen has documented and protested--for which he has been made a folk hero. This is the message that China wants buried. And this is the sort of embarrassing detail that the US abhors, because trade is more important than such rights.

And what do the large, unwieldly numbers hide? Individual stories like this:

“I would like to share some of the stories and images that will show you what is happening in China even as we speak. I should warn you that these stories are disturbing,” Ling said.

Ling shared the story of Deng Lourong, the second of three girls, whose parents wanted a boy desperately enough to violate the one-child policy only to have Chinese officials demolish their home and confiscate their belongings.

Lourong’s mother disappeared three days after giving birth to her third child, and her father fled too, giving the girls over to the care of their grandmother. “Undeterred, officials detained the girls’ grandmother in 2002 and left them without a guardian,” Ling said.

“During the night, a man broke into their room and raped the 12-year-old Lourong. Her sisters managed to obtain the release of their grandmother after this, but the elderly woman died a month after she returned home,” Ling said. Lourong’s rapist only received five days in administrative detention.

Lourong was sold as a child bride three years later to a man twice her age, and her sisters were sold by traffickers and have yet to be found, according to Ling.

“When a German reporter and Chinese volunteers found Lourong’s father last November, he told them that Lourong’s husband had turned her into a prostitute to earn income for him. He beats her frequently and sold her body to bachelors in that area. Deng was in poor mental state. She would roam the mountains for over a week sometimes before returning to the house,” Ling said.

Multiply that by millions and you have a world of hurt. God sees, no doubt, but he also wants us to see and act. God wants us to weigh our imports against these broken lives, for us to weigh diplomatic protocols against cries of anguish for those dismembered bearing the divine image, for us to consider the price of our silence.

True Empress of China, intercede for these, your dear children!

35,000 per day

That's the average daily abortion rate in China, and you can be sure that the great majority of those abortion--13 million yearly--are targeted at baby girls. That is the impetus for this firm reminder from US Rep. Christopher Smith:

“The war on women is very real, and it’s being employed by the Chinese government every day of the week against Chinese women, including mothers, but also against unborn baby girls who are killed simply because they happen to be female,” Smith said.

“And the number of sex-selection abortions in China has no parallel,” Smith said. “It is the direct consequence of the one-child-per-couple policy, and unfortunately, the Obama administration has given money to the very organization – the (United Nations) population fund – that defends to the hilt the one-child-per-couple policy and says it ought to be replicated around the world.”

A 2011 report by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy states that in 2000 more than half of abortions in China were a result of prenatal sex selection.

Smith called the Democrat charge [that Republicans are waging a war on women] “nonsense” and said that the Obama administration should be helping Chen and his battle against the Chinese government’s forced abortion and sterilization policies.

“They ought to be standing firm with Chen Guangcheng and fighting for his asylum and, on an every day basis, be fighting against China’s forced abortion policy,” Smith said.

Instead, the Obama administration is following China's lead on family planning programs--not only at the UN but in the US--which begin with free hand-outs and end up with coercion on the government dime.

And to the Church's shame, a “Catholic” institution will give a soap-box to the head of the program for one of its graduation events:

Former governor of Kansas and current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, will be addressing the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.

That explains why when Chen risked everything to escape to the US embassy in China, he saw for himself what our government prioritises:

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who has suffered years of imprisonment and beatings for objecting to forced abortions and sterilizations in his native country, thought he could find shelter and friendship in the United States embassy following his recent escape from house arrest. He is now learning the hard way that the pro-abortion Obama administration, which helps to finance the same “one-child policy” that Chen is fighting, would rather see him disappear.

Pray, friends, and keep your lamps lit.

Always Lent in some places

As Prison Planet notes, China's one-child policy still stands, with no discernable protests from the "enlighened" West. We begin with a piece cited from the Epoch Times, which gives an account of an incident from June, in which a woman in her last weeks of pregnancy was kidnapped by representatives of the Birth Control Office, who brought her to a site where the unborn child was injected with poison. The story notes that she was of "advanced maternal age" (unexplained) but that the child was healthy.

Half a dozen men pushed the woman down on a bed and injected her with a drug to induce labor. The woman fought desperately and got away twice, but not the third time.

In the early morning of June 12, the woman had repeated pains in her abdomen. At around 6 a.m., she had a stillbirth. The injection had poisoned and killed the fetus. According to the doctor, immediately after the woman’s placenta was passed, she had a massive hemorrhage. She died after hospital staff attempted an emergency rescue. 

Although the husband wasn't there, he was offered a paltry compensation, and she was immediately cremated, making the reader wonder when and how he actually learned what had happened.

Holy Week began with another documented case of murder, this time in Moshan, which is in the Shandong province of China:

Because the parents of the baby already had a child, they were hunted down and forced to comply with China’s draconian one child policy. The mother was injected with a poison that induced an abortion, but after the baby was “pulled out inhumanly like a piece of meat,” it was still alive and began to cry before doctors slung the defenseless child into a bucket and left it to die.

Trading rights with China, the current trade imbalance and national debt drives our foreign policy. Although millions of women are regularly abused in this way, and millions of babies snuffed out, it doesn't register on the financial spread sheet. On towards the Passion...

ADDENDUM: LifeSiteNews adds a sad footnote by passing along the news that approximately 500 Chinese women commit suicide each day. (There are some interesting conjectures as to why, but I admit I was sad to see that suicides among American men is higher.) The one-child policy may be part of it, but it's not necessarily because of women being robbed of motherhood --rather the fact that the policy crystalises the point that boys are preferred. They always have been, but perhaps the rising rate of sex-selection abortions targeting girls drives it home? Hard to tell, but sad all the same. Furthermore, with the sex imbalance growing and men unable to find wives, these statistics are only more alarming.

Mother and baby not fine

Found at LifeSiteNews:

A new study of post-abortive women in China found a high correlation between induced abortion and depression among pregnant women, adding to the growing body of evidence that links abortion with negative mental health outcomes.

The findings were reached by a team of Chinese researchers from Anhui Medical College who analyzed data that had been previously collected as part of an on-going study on child development.

Their study, titled, “The Impact of Prior Abortion on Anxiety and Depression Symptoms During a Subsequent Pregnancy: Data From a Population-Based Cohort Study in China,” was published recently in the Bulletin of Clinical Psychopharmacology.

The mothers suffered, and the babies conceived subsequently suffered not to mention those killed in the procedures, of course). With 6,887 women participating in the study, it's hard to dispute the firm evidence of both anxiety and depression, which go hand in hand with attendant physical harms; and the data is completely in line with previous studies. Unfortunately, our health care system--held hostage to the Planned Parenthood lobby--will not consider this dimension of women's well-being. But be armed with the information, so that you can help the women in your life.

Sin and the body politic

I have a new piece over at Catholic Lane:

Ultimately, that classic American icon—the rugged individual—reigns supreme, and sadly, that individual has determined that sexual libertinism is his right. Not only has he resolved that he has the right to be promiscuous, but his promiscuity must be barren and uncomplicated. The supreme irony is lost on this principled individual, of course, that other rugged souls—the Catholic’s—have their own principles which proscribe them from subsidizing his behavior, and in light of this brazen thick-headedness, we must ask why...

 

Brilliant essay on hormones

Anthony Esolen knocks it out of the park, comparing the widespread rejection of synthetic hormones for men in sports and the obsessive demand that they be available to women in everyday life.

Moreover, estrogen, like testosterone, is a tissue-growing hormone, and therefore subjects the woman who ingests it to a much higher risk of developing cancer, not to mention other serious medical troubles. Indeed, if it were not dangerous, drug companies would not be struggling to keep the dosage as low as possible. So the widespread use of estrogen actually involves widespread and grave medical harm. In a country as large as ours, with breast cancer as common as it is, even a smallish increase in the risk of cancer would mean thousands of deaths; and the increase in risk is not small.

And this brings us to the heart of the matter. The argument for the use of this drug is not medical (since it does not remedy anything, it does not shield against communicable disease, and it actually subjects the user to medical risk). It is social. It is simply this: Without the drug, many millions of sexually active women would become pregnant who do not wish to be so. But now we are not in the realm of individual choices alone. We must address the whole of society. We must address the common good.

He has written in a clinical way that will clarify the points for those who don't want to hear about God, encyclicals or morality. One can conclude, of course, that faith and reason are in sync, that science and theology are revealing the same truths, but that takes faith. For those who's faith is in common sense, health and human integrity, this article is an excellent tool. Highly recommended!

Mortal elixers, key to utopia

Two recent stories show the absurdity surrounding the defense of abortion, for those who are entirely honest admit that killing in the womb is no different than killing outside the womb. Denial of personhood is subjective and utilitarian, and powerful in the hands who have no fundamental respect for the sanctity of life.

In Britain’s “Journal of Medical Ethics,” two writers defend infanticide, arguing that “newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons … [because] individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons.” The authors elaborate further, noting that if babies cannot explain themselves, then they’ll hardly understand their own loss of life.

Britain, of course, is enduring a health care crisis with soaring costs and limited revenues -- so killing the defective babies is merely an exercise in fiscal prudence. A newborn is only days apart from a nine-month old fetus, so these "ethicists" are right in saying that birth is an arbitrary line in making such a choice. They are not the first to seriously propose killing infants on the basis of their health, and other countries have already embraced "physician assisted suicide" with and without the consent of the victim. The voices are simply given more volume in more "prestigious" platforms.

And then there is this heartbreaking account of a "reduction" (abstract term which means killing the extra babies in utero so that only one survives). To his credit, the father tries hard to defend them and then will not turn away when the mother insists that the procedure goes on.

[L]et nobody fool you.  It is not painless for the child, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.  Abortion is not an excision of a featureless bunch of cells; it is infanticide.  We have revived the practice of child sacrifice to the new deities of casual sex and convenience.  We rationalize the reality of murder by altering our perspective of the nascent life through euphemisms like "fetus" or descriptions of "a clump of cells"...just like the Nazis convinced themselves that the people screaming as they were shot or gassed were "Untermenchen," subhuman, and therefore guiltlessly exterminated.

This is how every perpetrator of genocide has always rationalized his or her actions.  By doing likewise, we condemn our own souls

He prays that his remaining child survives. I pray that their marriage survives -- for most unions cannot endure when death comes between them. The grace is there, but every step of the journey will be bittersweet, as the father already knows.

He has the courage to call abortion what it is, although it indicts him personally, and particulary as a Jew whose own people have been targeted in the same chilling manner over the centuries. He is contrite and knows he needs God's forgiveness -- what about the rest of us? How dare we make moral judgements on other cultures and eras, when our own is built on materialistic indifference to legalised murder? As Fr Longanecker points out, our transformation into darkness isn't going to come at the point of a sword, but a pen, with laws that turn our sterile halls of medicine into well-scrubbed citadels of death, where the cries of patients are dulled with mortal elixers, and those outside relieved of anxious burdens.

Perverting an honoured profession further

Midwives have traditionally been heroic women who helped others bring new life safely into the world. As far back as the Book of Exodus, their singular devotion to life was clear:

The king of Egypt told the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was called Shiphrah and the other Puah, "When you act as midwives for the Hebrew women, look on the birthstool: if it is a boym kill him; but if it is a girl, she may live." The midwives, however, feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt had ordered them, but let the boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, "Why have you done this, allowing the boys to live?" The midwives answered Pharaoh, "The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women. They are robust and give birth before the midwife arrives." Therefore God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and grew very numerous. And because the midwives feared God, God built up families for them (Exodus 1:15-21).

Unfortunately, this reputation not withstanding, most British midwives have long been diverted from the beauty of birth to the dirty work of aborting those babies who are unwanted, and now the government of England is forcing two experienced midwives to oversee these abortions despite their firm objections.

Both the midwives have served for over 20 years at the Southern General Hospital, caring for many thousands of mothers and babies. The case arose when the hospital demanded that all senior midwives must take responsibility for overseeing mid-term and late term abortions. Since 2008 the hospital has insisted that these abortions, mostly for suspected disability in the foetus, must be conducted on the labour ward, rather than the gynaecology ward where most early abortions are performed.

The midwives in the case, Miss Mary Doogan and Mrs Connie Wood, argued that they had never been required to supervise abortion procedures in the past, and that the hospital was asking them to be morally, medically and legally responsible for abortions. They argued that this conflicted with their profound objection to abortions and with the right to opt-out that is protected in the 1967 Abortion Act.

The ruling handed down at the end of February said that their objection is not covered by the "conscious clause" of the Abortion Act, allowing Lady Smith, the judge in the case, to exercise a tyrrany that Pharaoh himself couldn't manage. When even the fundamental issues of life and death are not covered by a conscious clause, a culture has pretty well lost its understanding of the human person. Thus we see on both sides of the pond a sifting of health-care personnel, so that those with ethics and respect for the dignity of the human person are shaken out before certification.

Ultimately, this will leave us and our health care in the hands of those who have a ghastly sense of ethics, and the draconian nature of bureacracy will oppress us even more thoroughly than was possible in ancient Egypt ... and we know how God dealt with them.