feminine-genius

"a permanent way to fix me"

So thought Rachel Long, a young mother of three who didn't want more children. The Essure device could be inserted in a routine doctor visit, seemed simple, and was covered by insurance. Why not?

Long’s problems began within weeks of insertion, necessitating five trips to the emergency room in just three days and costing her family thousands.

“I felt like I was going to die, I felt like death,” Long said. “I had this deep, deep pain in my abdomen just two to three weeks after placement, anyone in their right mind would think this all started when this device was put into my body.”  Eventually, she too had to have a full hysterectomy.

At least one death has been reported in relation to the use of Essure, according to a report by ABC 2 in Baltimore.  A woman went to the emergency room with abdominal pain sometime after having the device installed, and was found to have a raging infection in her reproductive tract.  Her cervix, fallopian tubes and uterus had all become necrotic, dead tissue.  The infection ultimately killed her.

Over 5000 women have joined a Facebook group for those with unmanageable side effects, and their stories reveal a very dark side to the device:

Group founder Angie Firmalo, 41, told the Chicago Tribune that she started the page two years after getting Essure – two years she spent suffering with heavy periods, joint pain, cramps and other symptoms.  Ultimately, she discovered the coils had drifted out of her fallopian tubes and become embedded in her uterine wall.

“They sell Essure like a cruise, hand you a pamphlet like you're going on vacation,” Firmalino told the paper.  But Firmalino is not alone in thinking her experience has been anything but a holiday.  She says in just the last year, 435 members of her Facebook group reported having to get the supposedly permanent devices removed due to complications ranging from chronic pain to organ damage.

Easy to insert, very difficult to remove, and the kicker is that the parent company is immune from prosecution:

None of the women who have been negatively impacted by Essure are able to sue its manufacturer, Bayer, for damages.  The device was granted “preemption status” upon its approval in 2002, which grants its maker immunity from lawsuits related to its use. This is a major reason Erin Brockovich has gotten involved – she wants to strip Essure of its preemption protection and allow women to seek compensation for their pain and suffering.

“Preemption is not about the Essure women – it affects all consumers," Brockovich told ABC. "If someone had a medical device installed, there's no recourse for victims, and the company is protected. If there's a problem, the company gets a pass, because they have preemption. It dawned on me the consumer didn't know. The women didn't know that this existed.”

Once more, the war on women isn't concocted in conservative circles or by religious groups. It's a permanent battle waged by the sexual libertarians who teach that sexual intimacy can easily be rendered sterile. Women don't need to be "fixed," but respected -- and that respect is essential when it comes to their delicate reproductive system.

Might be time to rethink your aspirin -- in principle.

Kudos to the parents

In a time when so many special needs babies are killed before birth (9 out of every 10 Down's Syndrome persons) this marvelous family should be commended for allowing the world to see what its missing by such an attitude. Alex Bilodeau as had a marvelous career thus far:

Bilodeau is the son of Serge Bilodeau and Sylvie Michaud. His older brother, Frédéric, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at a young age and told that he would be unable to walk by the time he was 12. Frédéric is now age 28 and still has the ability to walk. He also has a younger sister, Béatrice.

Bilodeau says that his heroes are his brother Frédéric and Canadian freestyle skier Jean-Luc Brassard. In his free time, he enjoys skiing and playing the piano. Bilodeau speaks fluent French and English.

He notes firmly the impact his disabled brother has had in his life:

“The motivation that he has, if he had had the chances like I did, he would have been four times Olympic champion. He’s a great inspiration, a great person and he’s going to be an inspiration for me after my career also,” the 26-year-old said.

“Every little thing in life is hard for him, whether it’s going from his seat to go and see me here, walking in the snow, it takes so much energy, it’s very hard.”

“I always complain, and he has every reason in the world to complain and he never does. And why is that? He enjoys life, he takes the best out of it.”

This post-event interview last night was stellar, and indicates the sort of generosity of spirit that must have pervaded the Bilodeau home over the years. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Alex dedicated the medal to his brother, Frédéric.

From slave to saint

The story of Saint Josephine Bakhita is a marvelous testament to the power of God's love, the power of forgiveness, and the power of love to overcome evil. She was kidnapped by slave traders when she was a small child, beaten and scarred, treated as a near-worthless object—but she persevered until she found a new way to live. This short segment from my book explains how forgiveness fits in:

It was her fifth owner, the Italian consul at Karthoum, who first showed her kindness and ultimately brought her to Europe, where she discovered Christ. While taking care of the young daughter of a family there, she was introduced to the Canossan Sisters with whom she eventually found a home as a religious sister. Fifty years of quiet consecrated life allowed her to witness to others the deep abiding peace that faith and forgiveness can bring. Seeing God’s hand even in the difficult path of her life, she noted, “If I was to meet those slave raiders that abducted me and those who tortured me, I'd kneel down to them to kiss their hands, because, if it had not been for them, I would not have become a Christian and religious woman.”

At her beatification, Pope John Paul II praised her as “Our Universal Sister,” pointing out that she offers us “a message of reconciliation and evangelic forgiveness in a world so much divided and hurt by hatred and violence.” Note that Bakhita didn’t say that what the slave traders and her owners did to her was right—it most certainly was not. But she recognized that through her wounds she found salvation, which she could not ignore.

Cardinal Weurl reminds us of the importance of her story as it relates to the suffering of women even today:

At Bakhita’s canonization, Blessed John Paul II called the first saint from Sudan “a shining advocate of genuine emancipation” for women victimized in today’s world. “The history of her life inspires not passive acceptance, but the firm resolve to work effectively to free girls and women from oppression and violence and to return them to their dignity in the full exercise of their rights,” the pope said.

Some have promoted Bakhita as a possible patron saint for the victims of human trafficking, the modern-day form of slavery that includes forced labor and many women and children of both sexes being forced into prostitution. The feast day of Saint Josephine Bakhita, February 8, has been designated by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as a day of prayer to raise awareness of, and to help end, the scourge of human trafficking.

The severity of human trafficking cannot be underestimated.  It is estimated that there are as many as 27 million trafficking victims at any given time worldwide. A recent article in the Catholic News Service notes that experts estimate that five million of these trafficked and enslaved people are children.  The evil is unfolding not only in foreign countries.  A 2013 report from the U.S. State Department confirms that the “United States is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children – both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals – subjected to forced labor, debt bondage, involuntary servitude, and sex trafficking.” 

That number—27 million—defies comprehension, but try to imagine the horror of each of those isolated souls. We must beg Saint Bakhita's intercession to bring light, emancipation, and joy to these captives. But there's more to the suffering than even the statistics reveal:

There are many forms of slavery, including those that do not have visible chains or leave outward marks. We suffer from them as long as we cannot name them, claim our own dignity which comes from being created in the image and likeness of God, and renounce them from holding us captive. The liberation that forgiveness can offer is as stark as the sundering of iron fetters and the opening of a prison door—it is for the one who suffers to choose freedom and wholeness of heart, despite her surroundings. The graces of God are available to all even in the darkest hours and each cross bears within it the seeds of Easter for those who cling to Christ.

Please pray for for all who are captive—from those enduring physical constraints to those trapped in a cell of resentment over past injuries. Consider how freedom may be lacking even in the lives of those around you, and share Bakhita's story. Even when all the slaves have been freed, it remains for us to show them how to rise above the past, and how to realise all the good that God has in store for those who forgive.

Statistics and lies

There is a meme used regularly in the HHS mandate debate concerning how many Catholic women adhere to their Church's teaching concerning contraceptives. The government's push to make Catholic institutions provide contraceptives in their health plans is based on this 2011 Guttmacher study, which claims that 98% of Catholic women contracept. It begins with this snarky and condescending tone:

The debate over contraception has long been settled in real-life America. At some point in her life, virtually every woman in the United States uses at least one contraceptive method. Likewise, contraceptive services are recognized by government bodies, professional health care organizations and a wide range of other experts as a vital component of preventive and public health care. 

Even so—and despite the strong body of evidence demonstrating that contraceptive use and the prevention of unintended pregnancy improves the health and social and economic well-being of women and their families—contraception continues to be perceived as controversial among some policymakers and is opposed by the Catholic hierarchy and some other socially conservative organizations.

So already we have labeled the pro-contraceptive side to be based on "real life" and health-enhancing, while suggesting that the social conservatives are warbling about a non-existent controversy from their flat-earth perches. It's obvious where this is going, but even the 98% will look absurd to anyone to takes the time to remember that a large chunk of Catholic women are beyond the child-bearing years, many are not in relationships -- and heck, a great number are Religious. So how do we dissect the study?

Thankfully, this sharp cookie, Lydia McGrew, already has, noting a key point:

The relevant tables are Figure 3 on p. 6 and the second Supplementary Table on p. 8. The survey was limited to women between 15-44. Ah, well, that explains how we weren't including the elderly, but it also means that the silly "percent of all Catholic women" thing should be chucked out right from the beginning. More strikingly, as Neil pointed out to me after looking up the study, it excluded any women who were a) not sexually active, where that is defined as having had sexual intercourse in the past three months (there go all the nuns), b) postpartum, c) pregnant, or d) trying to get pregnant! In other words, the study was specifically designed (as the prose discussion on p. 8 makes explicit, in bold print) to include only women for whom a pregnancy would be unintended and who are "at risk" of becoming pregnant. Whether or not it included women who considered themselves neither trying nor not trying to get pregnant (there are some such women in the world) is unclear. It's also unclear whether it included women who have had their reproductive organs removed because of some medical problem. Presumably the study was intended to exclude women in both of these categories, as neither would count as a woman "at risk of an unintended pregnancy."

So we have excluded at least half of Catholic women from the start, as well as those who are hoping to conceive, those who are pregnant, and those who are unmarried and living chastely. Think about that: We want to know what Catholic women think about birth control, but we'll start by NOT talking to chaste, single women. Excluding those who will skew the results of a sample is not good scientific practice in most fields, but perfectly acceptable when bullying the Church is the end-game.

The author of the blog post adds another key point later:

Upon reflection, I have realized clearly an additional major problem with the 98% statistic. It is including all the Catholic women who expressly told researchers that they used "no method" to avoid pregnancy. In the table, that is 11%. The 98% statistic is apparently derived by subtracting only the 2% who said that they used NFP from 100%. So women who said they used no method of contraception are apparently being included in a statistic about how many Catholic women use contraception. How's that for crazy? And that's in addition to the problems discussed already in the original post.

So we can easily see that the 98% claim is absurd. It is sad that many Catholic women don't see the wisdom of the Church's teaching on conjugal love, but don't be flummoxed by the crazy claim touted by the government. There's a lot of catechesis to be done, but we're not as bad off as the secularists would have us believe. 

Sanger's "baby code"

We know that abortion-rights activists who used "choice" as their lynchpin argument are strangely silent on the forced abortions that take place around the world, mostly in China. That is because below the gloss (meant for pedestrian consumption) is the real goal: social engineering. Just as "same-sex marriage" advocates don't really want marriage (read their literature, they want to destroy the very institution) pro-choice advocates want to interfere with the lifes of others and create their own utopia:

America needs a baby code!! And I want to make a few suggestions that might be considered in the formulation of such a code:

Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies, to assist couples who wish to prevent overproduction of offspring and thus to reduce the burdens of charity and taxation for public relief, and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.

Yes, most will recognise the words of Margaret Sanger, who was president of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. Of course since birth control doesn't always work, the coupling with abortion is a natural outcome. She elaborates:

Article 2. Birth control clinics shall be permitted to function as services of city, county, or state health departments, or under the support of charity, or as non-profit self-sustaining agencies, subject to inspection and control by public authorities.

Article 3. A marriage license shall in itself give husband and wife only the right to a common household and not the right to parenthood.

Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit for parenthood.

Article 5. Permits for parenthood shall be issued upon application by city, county, or state authorities to married couples, providing they are financially able to support the expected child, have the qualifications needed for proper rearing of the child, have no transmissible diseases, and, on the woman’s part, no medical indication that maternity is likely to result in death or permanent injury to health.

Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth.

Notice, first, that the coupling of marriage and parenthood vanishes. The inborn mission of conjugal love -- to create a family -- is jettisoned for a stricly human construct.

Secondly, all of her arguments are couched in economic terms, materialist that she is, and the state will be given the ability to facilitate the outcomes. With the American government now in control of our health care and vested in its expense, we have to be very attentive to the mission of Planned Parenthood, which carries her work forward.

It's interesting that she justifies her worldview by aligning it to happiness and economic well-being, but if we look at the fallout from expanded use of contraceptives, we see that neither family welfare nor financial well-being have ensued thus far. Promiscuity, divorce, and cohabitation are sky-rocketing, and the state is caring for increasing numbers of fatherless children. Who can fortell what is the next plank in their strategy for modern America?

Exposure to exposure

This poor girl survived abuse that she couldn't categorise until later:

In a candid interview, the daughter of a famed pornographer about the abuse she underwent as a child through early exposure to pornography. Liberty Bradford Mitchell was the daughter of Artie Mitchell, whose life ended when he was shot by his brother and business partner, Jim, in 1991.

The brothers ran a strip club and a pornography studio in San Francisco throughout the girl’s life. She was present at the location many times, with her earliest memories of the place dating back to when she was four-years-old.

“I saw [the customers] all sink into this disgusting depravity where every woman in the room becomes a target. It became this entitlement that the men had and it made me sick,” she said in an interview with Salon.com.

“I experienced firsthand how confusing it can be to be exposed to sexual imagery as a child.”

She explains that even as a child, she found the activity "distubing" and "weird," which attests to the natural law written on every human heart. I would imagine that she was named "Liberty" from her father's misunderstanding of the concept, perhaps thinking that freedom is the license to do whatever he wanted. Praise God she found the true meaning in stepping beyond the childhood hell (where was her mother?!) into a place where she could describe perversity for what it is. 

According to the National Coalition to Prevent Child Abuse and Exploitation, exposure to pornography on young people can have many negative side-effects, including objectification, fostering positive attitudes towards violence against women and other types of sexual aggression, cynicism, sexual uncertainty, and other sexual and relational dysfunctions.

we must remember that it doesn't take a porno palace now to bring such exposure to children -- they can find most of the same material on the internet, in many movies, and described in a plethora of song lyrics. Even many sex education programs expose youngsters to such imagery at a very young age. Shame on our culture and on those who don't treasure and guard the innocence of children (or the persons abused in the making of such vulgar things.)

Kudos to Salon for publishing her interview, which ought to be a wake-up call for at least some of the readers there.