If you are like me, and you run across an article entitled “Contraception gave us divorce and gay ‘marriage’ and will destroy us: here’s how“… you have to click.
Like the apple in the Garden of Eden, it’s just too tempting to walk away from; and, also like the apple, you inevitably regret it afterward.
Granted, it’s not a “damning mankind” level of regret. On the other hand, the article — alas — is actually real (and really bad). It’s from the anti-abortion site, Life Site News, and provides a fascinating window into the some of the darker corners of the pro-life world.
The article’s author, David F. Prentis, begins by emphasizing the impact on society of the advent of modern reproductive medicine. Barrier methods were the beginning, but
… with the advent of the hormonal contraceptive pill in the 1960s the contraceptive era, ushering in the sexual revolution, really took off.
And in case you are wondering, that was terrible — the beginning of the end, as it were.
With the pill, people thought, nothing can happen, i.e. no child could be conceived. Inhibitions broke down, so that there was an increase in adultery, living together before marriage and living together with no thought of marriage. Amoral sex education with the message, “You can do anything you like so long as your partner agrees and you use contraception. If there is an accident, have an abortion,” promoted sexual promiscuity from puberty onwards. Sexual activity has been degraded into a form of entertainment.
It’s “degrading,” he said, if sex takes place between consenting people interested only in intimacy and/or pleasure instead of potential parenthood.
But then the article gets weirder because Prentis argues it’s not always wrong to try to prevent pregnancy.
It’s terrible, he argues, to be interested in sex if you take effective steps against reproduction like birth control pills. But it’s totally cool to employ ineffective “natural” methods. Why? Because they’re more likely to fail; and constantly worrying about unexpected pregnancy makes Jesus smile.
The situation of couples practising NFP [natural family planning] however is quite different. They are aware every day of the state of their fertility, asking themselves whether the marriage act on that day would result in conception; they do not lose sight of the child who could be conceived. They do not forget the fundamental purpose of the act. An unplanned child is therefore usually accepted.
…
The pill “culture” leads to the rejection of children, small families, and a demographic winter. In the long-term it will be impossible to pay pensions. For couples practising NFP however, the child is neither an error nor a threat. Their natural love of children is not destroyed. They have larger families. The 15 teaching couples in our organisation, for example, have 62 children so far, an average of 4.1 per family.
In the real world, when something doesn’t work, that means it, well, didn’t work. To Mr. Prentis, when people attempting to prevent pregnancy wind up pregnant, well, praise the Lord!
Throughout his article, he warns of the failure rates of birth control… and then cites the large families of those using the church-approved method as evidence of how great it is. That is to say, they’re not good at actual family planning, but rather at creating big families.
Put another way, natural family planning is a great tool because it fails. A lot. (Let’s hope Mr. Prentis is not an engineer…)
But aside from selling NFP on its failures, Prentis has more to say about the dangers of contraception and abortion. Lots more. Like how fertility treatments are a form of slavery.
The separation of sexual activity from child-bearing leads to the acceptance of the production of children through assisted reproduction without recourse to the marital act in the case of infertility. Through IVF society is being led, inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, to the acceptance of controlled reproduction. Human beings are reduced to products. They are mass produced, selected, rejected, frozen or used in experiments. They are treated as material goods, in short, as slaves.
Slavery has been formally reintroduced into society. A doctor, whether mixing sperm and eggs in a Petri dish or injecting a sperm into an egg, is playing God. The arrogance of it! Surely this modern sin should be listed amongst those which cry to heaven.
Like a pro-life version of Godwin’s Law (something else Prentis invokes), comparing the freezing of a fertilized human egg to enslaving people is not just absurd; it is extraordinarily callous to liken the suffering of sentient beings to the “suffering” of a fertilized egg in a Petri dish.
It’s worth pointing out the obvious double standard here. When medical personnel remove a patient’s organ and replace it with someone else’s, you’ll rarely hear anything except commentary on what a miracle the successful procedure has been. When a physician takes to a vein from a patient’s leg and uses it to bypass a blockage by the patient’s heart, we don’t hear from the anti-abortion crowd that the physician is second-guessing God. If there is no “arrogance” to re-purposing our body parts for another person’s use or for use in a different part of our own body, how can fertility treatments that mirror natural processes like fertilization be “playing God”?
But I’m forgetting how this works… we can subvert “God’s plan” right up until the moment that it helps women control their fertility. Only then do you risk unleashing all manner of horrors.
When the practice of sterilised sexual intercourse is accepted, it leads logically to the acceptance of all practices leading to orgasm: oral, anal, homosexual acts, etc.
Goodness, how scandalous! Don’t people realize that sex isn’t about enjoyment? It’s all about the babies! And have they stopped to think about the impact on married heterosexuals?
No, really… Prentis believes non-procreative sex is simply going to destroy marriage. Because love is about sacrifice; and, apparently, unwanted pregnancy and parenthood are just married peoples’ crosses to bear. To do anything else is to reject your partner — or at least his or her fertility — and imperil your marriage.
When this act of rejection is systematically and continually repeated, love dies. The marriage is at least burdened. Many marriages break down.
And wait — there’s an even darker force at play here.
After explaining that contraception use “is destroying society” through depopulation, abortion, and promiscuity, we get to fertility treatments. (Grab the tinfoil for this one, we’re entering a strange and fascinating realm of paranoia).
The long-term purpose of this policy [“assisted reproduction which bypasses the normal process of transmission of life through the marriage act”] could well be the desire to subject reproduction to state control, which would allow only those children to be born who pass quality control. At present this is illusory, but the tendency can be seen. It would appear that an elite group wishes to create a society of virtual slaves obedient to their desires. A new totalitarianism is being formed.
To this end it is necessary to destroy or at least weaken marriage and the family. For this purpose contraception, especially the convenient hormonal forms, is eminently suitable. And those who pour their millions into the homosexual movement and the gender ideology are not concerned with helping homosexuals and those with problems of sexual identity. Rather they are using these people to extend the concept of marriage and ultimately to widen its meaning so much as to make it meaningless.
And who are these elite birth-control pushers and gay marriage advocates intent on destroying us all? Who are “they,” that shadowy group that wants to ruin marriage and enslave humanity with reproductive choice and tolerance?
Prentis never says it outright, but let’s be clear: that group includes plenty of religious women.
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