A Plea to Pastors---Birth Control, NFP, and the Pulpit

I didn't realize it's been over a month since the last post. I'm currently trying to put together a great team of writers and guest writers so that the posting can be more consistant and regular.

This entry however is from my husband, an unlikely guest writer since he's pro NFP only 20 days out of the month and usually curses it the other ten ; ).

This "Plea to Pastors" is a three part series that will be published in our local Catholic Diosesan newspaper. It came about from the need to try and ask Pastors to speak about NFP in their sermons since it is often times a silent subject.

Feel free to use it in your own parishes if you need to - Can anyone else relate or has found other solutions that work well?

A Plea to Pastors ---Birth control, NFP and the Pulpit

The symptoms were visible. The sickness was evident. The tests now complete. Sarah took a deep breath and shifted side to side in her chair as she waited in a small room at the cancer hospital to hear the diagnosis. In a short time, the doctor gracefully entered into the waiting room, closed the door behind him, adjusted his glasses and held his clipboard in front of him. “Well…Doc, hit it to me straight,” Sarah blurted out. “Is the tumor life threatening?” Her mind raced with obnoxious anxiety as the doctor paused for what felt like an eternity. “Does he know and is afraid to tell me?” she wondered. “Is the problem worse than I had originally thought?”

The doctor leaned forward, relaxed his clipboard, paused, and then confidently explained, “We removed the tumor, and I am sorry to tell you that it is indeed cancerous, but there are ways to help.” “How bad is it?” She quickly interjected, as a tidal wave of emotions poured through her body. “What do I need to do to overcome this? Please, doctor, tell me what the next steps are and what I need to do to live healthy again.”

After a clear and thorough explanation from the doctor, Sarah sighed, “I understand, and thanks for telling me what I needed to know…my life now depends on it.” The doctor spoke back softly, “This is not a fun part of what I do, but I am here for you and will do everything in my power to help save your life.”

This sensitive situation is a common occurrence that many doctors face when telling patients their fate. They are often burdened with the difficult task of handling the serious life issues of many individuals. In the same measure, what difficulty and intimidation the priest must feel in being a doctor of souls; a mission from God to explain the teachings of the Catholic Church to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. In some respects, this mission would be extremely rewarding to see the hearts that are touched and souls that are saved; while at other times, emotionally draining, watching many leave the church for various reasons.

From the seats of the pews, we, the Catholic body, wait on our “doctors”, our “moral specialists”, to lead a clarion call on serious moral issues, especially in regards to the difficult moral teachings of contraception. We need a thorough, clear, un-vague, tell–it-like-it-is message--- from the pulpit. Please teach us about NFP, explain to us why contraception is gravely immoral. Show us the beauty of the Church’s teaching on this matter and how it correlates to the spiritual life. Please tell us how contraception is an abortifacient and what to make of the staggering statistics that indicate roughly 94% of our Catholic flock currently use artificial contraception. Please educate us often about the theology of our bodies and be with us every step of the way. We need your guidance. We are praying for you.

For Those of us "In Diapers"...

I follow the blog Frugal Wife=Wealthy Life and it gives some very savvy money saving tips and strategies that I was never really concerned about until having kids...or having a husband rather ; )  

I thought I'd share this post because she lists ways to cut cost of diapers drastically! I'm still considering buying cloth since those have improved and can save tons as well...we'll see.


A Very Long Post About Diapers
You know those horrendous baby calculators where they estimate that you'll probably need to sell your corneas in order to afford the first year of having a baby? I hate those. Mainly because seeing the $10,000 for the first year about gave me heart attack.

Also, because it
estimates $72 per month for diapers. I cannot say for certain because my records are, sadly, not this good, but I would venture to say I have not $72 PERIOD on diapers. And my baby is six months old. Besides this, I have a good 350 diapers in her room right now in her current size, plus an additional 600 diapers in the next size up. (And, no, I don't change her diaper only twice a day or something horrifying like that).

I am firmly convinced  that diapers do not have to cost you a fortune. Last spring, Merrick compared the cost of diapers at different stores and said that the cheapest diapers were to be found at Costco or Sam's Club. And that's true if you just want to buy a box of diapers and be done with it. Those diapers were priced at $0.14 per diaper (and that's for the newborn size, which is generally the least expensive).

I try to spend less than $0.10 per diaper and I really am happy if I can get them for more like $0.05 or less.

This is totally possible if you follow deals at drugstores and stock up when there are killer sales. I keep an eye out and have some friends who alert me when they find good deals and so I've been able to do quite well.

Let tell you about one such good deal that you can probably do right now (I got 228 Pampers Size 2 diapers for around $7 - I paid less than $0.03 per diaper).

Amazon sells diapers for around the same price as big box store (around twenty to thirty cents per diaper, depending on the size and brand). But if you sign up for Amazon Mom, you get 15% off. Then when you choose your diapers, sign up for "Subscribe and Save" (the option is on the right, just below the regular "Add to my Cart" button) and you get another 15% off. Now you're talking more like fourteen to twenty cents per diaper.

And then, here's where you can really rack up your savings. Right now, many parenting magazines (Parents, Parenting, American Baby) have coupon inserts for either $10 off any Amazon Mom order or 20% off any diaper order (and this is 20% off the full list price, not your discounted price). Best of all, you can combine them, so I used both a $10 off coupon and a 20% off one. And Amazon had a bonus coupon for Pampers last week that brought my price down even more.

Plus it all ships for free. One of my friends bought Pampers Newborn Diapers yesterday for $10, making hers about five cents a diaper. Another pregnant friend of mine (expecting twins!) ordered Huggies Diapers for around eight cents apiece. 

As if my mega-cheap diapers weren't enough, every time you order something through Amazon Mom and do Subscribe and Save, you get a month of free Amazon Prime (which means all Amazon products ship for free with no minimum purchase).

My box of diapers arrived today at my front door. It was a glorious moment.

Check your pediatrician's office or your own stack of magazines for these coupons. Or ask a friend (I got my 20% off coupon two days before it expired from a friend who wasn't going to use it).

And then bask in the cheapness of the diapers (and don't forget to cancel your diaper subscription before the next batch ships, if you're so inclined - although even without a coupon, many of the diapers are only about $0.12 each. Not bad).

What Abby Johnson Saw at Planned Parenthood

via National Catholic Register
Former Planned Parenthood Director Reveals the Lies

Share by Tim Drake Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Abby Johnson
Last night, on the eve of the release of former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson’s book Unplanned, she revealed during a webcast what she had witnessed during her eight years of volunteering and working with Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas. Over 21,000 people listened to that webcast. In 2009, after witnessing an ultrasound-guided abortion, Johnson resigned her position and became pro-life. She is planning to come into the Catholic Church this coming Easter.


What was it that you saw that October day that caused your change of heart?
I had never seen an ultrasound-guided abortion before. They’re not standard procedure because they take a few extra minutes. To the best of my knowledgeit was the first time it had happened at our facility.
I was called in to help. My job was to hold the ultrasound probe on the woman’s abdomen so that the physician could get a view inside the uterus. I got everything ready. When I looked at the screen and heard them say that she was 13 weeks pregnant, on the screen I saw the profile of a 13-week-old baby in the womb. I had seen thousands of ultrasounds before, including ultrasounds of my own daughter Grace, who is now four. In that instant, I had a flashback to my own ultrasound of my daughter when I was 12 weeks pregnant. In that instant, I realized what was about to happen and what I was about to witness.
As I was trying to get it together and talk myself back into it, I recalled all of the things I had said for so many years to justify abortion – all the things that I thought I believed deep down in my core.
When the abortion procedure started, I saw the child begin to move away from the abortion instrument and recoil. The child knew that it’s life was in danger. Before that moment, I had never even considered that the child in the womb felt pain or felt anything for that matter. Planned Parenthood had always told us that the fetus had no sensory development until 28 weeks.
I needed to believe that to continue to justify abortion. I was surprised, shocked, appalled and disgusted at what I was watching. I felt betrayed because I couldn’t believe that this company that I had believed and trusted in had lied. I didn’t want to believe it, but was looking at it so clearly. The evidence was in front of my face. The abortion started and in just a few moments, the screen was black, and the abortion was complete. In that moment, I knew that my life was going to have to change. I knew that I couldn’t walk out of there the same way that I had walked in.


How did you end up working at Planned Parenthood?
I grew up in a wonderful, conservative, pro-life family. We were in church every time the doors were open. I was involved in the youth group and was a good kid in high school. I remember in high school saying that I was pro-life, but if you would have put me up to a debate on abortion, I would have lost because it wasn’t something we frequently discussed.
When I went to college, during my junior year, I attended a volunteer fair. What caught my attention at the Planned Parenthood booth was the hot pink. It was my favorite color, and the Planned Parenthood booth was drowning in hot pink. I went over to the booth and there was a sweet woman there. She asked me what I knew about Planned Parenthood. I honestly didn’t know a thing.
When she told me that Planned Parenthood offers free testing and exams for men and women, I thought that was sweet. Who wouldn’t love Planed Parenthood? When I started volunteering, she later told me that they offered abortion services. I told her I came from a prolife family. She said she understood that tradition, but that if abortion were made illegal, thousands of women would die from back-alley abortions. She said that their goal was to make the need for abortion rare. Since I had never considered both sides of the issue, I was pretty easily taken in.


As you moved into a paid position and later management, you began to see another side to Planned Parenthood, didn’t you?
When I was volunteering, I had gotten hooked in because Planned Parenthood said that they wanted to reduce the number of abortions. Yet, through my own experience contracepting, having two unplanned pregnancies, and twice having an abortion, this didn’t make sense. When I started working there in 2005 as a paid employee, almost all of the women who I counseled were contracepting, yet were having abortions. It didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t seem like their goal of expanding the use of contraception was reducing the number of abortions.
They wanted us to increase the quota of surgical abortions that we were providing, so that we had a certain number of abortion clients every month. They were increasing that number.
They also wanted to, and were going to offer, medically-induced (RU-486) abortions many times a week by offering something similar to tele-medicine. In true tele-medicine, the patient has a conference with the physician, but in what they were doing, the patient had no contact with a physician.
This was disturbing to me because there are many possible complications. I had lived through nearly every complication with my second abortion, so I was nervous about these women who were choosing this without any physician counsel.
We had no physician on-staff to help them. If something went wrong, the women would either have to go to the emergency room, or drive two hours away to Houston. If they were septic or hemorrhaging, two hours could be too late.
Yet, Planned Parenthood wanted to increase abortion by this method.
It was disturbing that they wanted to constantly up the abortion numbers at our facility, when I had originally been told that it was all about decreasing the numbers. Now that I was in management, I could see their real intentions.
Planned Parenthood receives a lot of government funding. Last year, it received more than $350 million in tax money. They are willing to take a loss in their family planning business because of the profit they make in abortion. We could see that in our budget every year. Our family planning budget was in the red, but the abortion business was way in the black. That was troubling because I thought we were a non-profit. When I asked about that in our management meetings I was told over and over again that non-profit is a tax status, not a business status.
I was involved in the Consortium of Abortion Providers, a sub-group under Planned Parenthood. They would use a map of the U.S. with dots to show all of the Planned Parenthood facilities. Let’s say that all of the non-abortion providing Planned Parenthood centers had green dots, and all of those that provided abortion had red dots. Their specific goal was to turn every green dot into a red dot. They wanted to expand every non-abortion providing Planned Parenthood into an abortion providing Planned Parenthood.


What do you have to say to those who are currently working in the abortion industry?
I want you to know that there is a peace and a joy that you can have too. Right now, you don’t have it and don’t know what it feels like. I thought I had that. I thought I was a happy person, but I was a conflicted person. I thought I had joy, but I was a person living a dysfunctional life who was constantly on the defensive.
You’re probably embarrassed to tell others what you really do. You don’t have to be embarrassed any more. It’s shameful to take the lives of other human beings. You don’t have to be in that shameful environment any more. You can come to a side of the fence where there is compassion, love, and healing. That’s what we want to help you find – that peace and that joy.

New York Times: The Unborn Paradox

Op-Ed Columnist


The Unborn Paradox
By ROSS DOUTHAT

Published: January 2, 2011

The American entertainment industry has never been comfortable with the act of abortion. Film or television characters might consider the procedure, but even on the most libertine programs (a “Mad Men,” a “Sex and the City”), they’re more likely to have a change of heart than actually go through with it. Reality TV thrives on shocking scenes and subjects — extreme pregnancies and surgeries, suburban polygamists and the gay housewives of New York — but abortion remains a little too controversial, and a little bit too real.



This omission is often cited as a victory for the pro-life movement, and in some cases that’s plainly true. (Recent unplanned-pregnancy movies like “Juno” and “Knocked Up” made abortion seem not only unnecessary but repellent.) But it can also be a form of cultural denial: a way of reassuring the public that abortion in America is — in Bill Clinton’s famous phrase — safe and legal, but also rare.



Rare it isn’t: not when one in five pregnancies ends at the abortion clinic. So it was a victory for realism, at least, when MTV decided to supplement its hit reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” with last week’s special, “No Easy Decision,” which followed Markai Durham, a teen mother who got pregnant a second time and chose abortion.



MTV being MTV, the special’s attitude was resolutely pro-choice. But it was a heartbreaking spectacle, whatever your perspective. Durham and her boyfriend are the kind of young people our culture sets adrift — working-class and undereducated, with weak support networks, few authority figures, and no script for sexual maturity beyond the easily neglected admonition to always use a condom. Their televised agony was a case study in how abortion can simultaneously seem like a moral wrong and the only possible solution — because it promised to keep them out of poverty, and to let them give their first daughter opportunities they never had.



The show was particularly wrenching, though, when juxtaposed with two recent dispatches from the world of midlife, upper-middle-class infertility. Last month there was Vanessa Grigoriadis’s provocative New York Magazine story “Waking Up From the Pill,” which suggested that a lifetime on chemical birth control has encouraged women “to forget about the biological realities of being female ... inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.” Then on Sunday, The Times Magazine provided a more intimate look at the same issue, in which a midlife parent, the journalist Melanie Thernstrom, chronicled what it took to bring her children into the world: six failed in vitro cycles, an egg donor and two surrogate mothers, and an untold fortune in expenses.



In every era, there’s been a tragic contrast between the burden of unwanted pregnancies and the burden of infertility. But this gap used to be bridged by adoption far more frequently than it is today. Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.



Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.



And lives are what they are. On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just “pregnancy tissue.” After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: “If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.” Instead, “think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.”



It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she begins to cry when he calls the embryo a “thing.” Gesturing to their infant daughter, she says, “A ‘thing’ can turn out like that. That’s what I remember ... ‘Nothing but a bunch of cells’ can be her.”



When we want to know this, we know this. Last week’s New Yorker carried a poem by Kevin Young about expectant parents, early in pregnancy, probing the mother’s womb for a heartbeat:



The doctor trying again to find you, fragile,



fern, snowflake. Nothing.



After, my wife will say, in fear,



impatient, she went beyond her body,



this tiny room, into the ether—



... And there



it is: faint, an echo, faster and further



away than mother’s, all beat box



and fuzzy feedback. ...



This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

Read article NY Times Article here.

The Doctor's Office...

Have you ever been in your doctor’s office and the topic of birth control comes up? If you mention that you practice Natural Family Planning do they look at you like you are speaking a foreign language and you have something in your teeth? The purpose of this post is to hopefully give you a little insight into why that may be and possible hope for ways it can change.

As the spouse of someone in medical school, I have gotten a bit of a glimpse behind the curtain to how doctors can be trained. Maybe my husband’s experience is unique, but I doubt it. I remember when he was having his lectures during the “Sexuality and Reproduction” module that he came home pretty upset after the lecture on contraceptive methods was 89.5 minutes long about pills, IUDs, condoms, foams, etc, with the last 0.5 dedicated to the comment “oh—and some people use NFP but that doesn’t really work.”


Later, he heard the perennial joke about “What do you call people who practice NFP?”the answer, of course being: “Parents.”

This theme has continued and even worsened after he decided he wanted to practice ob/gyn and spent more time around some of the people who have ostensibly dedicated their lives to “women’s health.” On a daily basis, comments have been made about how they couldn’t conceive (pun intended) how doctors would choose to not do tubal ligations or prescribe birth control. One person talked about how with birth control every child is a wanted child, while another discussed the public health benefits and cost control achieved by contraception and sterilizations.

He reports that at the hospital he is currently working at that at least one out of every three c-sections ends with a tubal ligation. He regularly hears, “Oh, this is her fourth pregnancy? Are we tying her tubes?” as if they cannot begin to fathom the possibility of a fifth, sixth, seventh, etc. child.


In looking for residency programs, my husband has fortunately found a few hospitals that still practice medicine in line with the Church’s teachings. But the vast majority of programs are very unfriendly to NFP-only physicians. Residency programs run clinics where many women request birth control and an NFP-only doctor that is unwilling and unable to prescribe birth control would only slow business down and not be viewed as a team player.



However, there is hope. In the few programs that are friendly towards doctors that want to practice medicine in line with the Church’s teachings my husband has found that there are many residents that feel the same way he does. They have stood up for their beliefs, explained their position to their colleagues and are looking very much forward to providing care to women wanting to be taken seriously when talking about NFP.

Having had a baby a few months ago myself I have heard countless remarks from doctors about how I couldn’t possibly want another one anytime soon. Even as we were leaving the hospital to bring our new baby home, the nurse reminded us about taking precautions with spermicides and condoms immediately, implying and assuming that it would be devastating to have another one of those cute little babies anytime in the near future. I am saddened by this attitude but am hopeful and thankful for all of the practicing NFP-only doctors out there now and those to come in the future.
 
by Grace at Camp Patton

You're Not Alone

I friend of mine showed me this and I thought it was well done. Sometimes, it is just good to hear from a normal couple going through the same things most marriages go through. Bare with it....they are honest and refreshing. I like to have on hand good resources to show other couples just learning about NFP, but also as a reminder for myself...we aren't alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFaIDMeb_GE

Coffee Talk: NFP

So I came across a great practial resource for more elaborate and method based talk on Natural Family Planning I thought I'd share.

The Magazine, Faith and Family, runs a blog and every Wednesday is devoted to NFP discussion.

Today's discussion involved nursing, wanting to wait a little to conceive, constant show of mucus and solving the problem of knowing when you ovulate...."peek" your interest?  ; )

Check it out! Faith and Family Blog