Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Outrageous Statement of the Day

Gloria Steinem: Abstinence Only Education Increases Abortions - the "price of abstinence"

2 comments:

  1. Abortifactients are the HUGE elephant in the room in the Catholic political debate that go virtually IGNORED by the USCCB. Even if one could balance the evil of direct surgical abortions against other perceived atrocities like denial of education, unjust war, murdering of non-combatants, torture of detainees, or denying children healthcare (all claims I have heard used to balance out the insurmountable injustice of surgical abortion) I don't see how one could ever balance the millions of unknown lives lost to federal funding of abortifacients, but the problem is this subject never enters the equation.

    For me as an engineer the contraceptive issue boils down to this. Condoms have an ideal success rate of 98%(2% failure rate). Morality aside can one promote something with such a known failure rate even when used ideally? If I give a talk to 100 teen girls telling them to engage in sex but use a condom, doing exactly as I say 2 of them get pregnant or more realistically 1 in 10 gets pregnant. Wow. Would we promote flying on an airline whose flights only crash 1 out of 50 flights for our best pilots and for most of the pilots they crash 1 out of 10 times? Would we drink water that is only poisonous 1 out of 50 times? Would we feel confident mixing 50 glasses of that water in bottles for our babies? Even worse would we label such things as safe flying or safe water? Maybe if the US did better at Math and Probability we would dump the whole "safe-sex" idea, but sadly I think we all agree the problem is far more complicated than poor arithmetic. If this were water or planes those places would be sued to kingdom come, but since it's sex it goes un-noticed and unmentioned by most in moral authority in the Catholic church.

    There is a GIGANTIC blindspot for Catholics in direct relation to the blindspot by the Bishops and priests teaching in this area that dates back to acceptance of Humane Vitea. The politics of contraceptives and it's evil fruits (e.g. abortion, fornication, infidelity & divorce) need to find at least the smallest of airtime in Catholic voter guides.

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  2. Too true. The problem you point to is real. But what legal action would you propose to reverse the contraceptive mentality? After all, if it is to be part of the political debate, then some legislation should be in view.

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