david f,
If you imagine a woman's choice will improve their health, then I see no evidence. I have worked amoung youth and find most teenagers engage in sex and use the pill. They suffer all types of VD as they choose to sleep around. These diseases were rare in my youth.

Philo wrote: david f,
If you imagine a woman's choice will improve their health, then I see no evidence. I have worked amoung youth and find most teenagers engage in sex and use the pill. They suffer all types of VD as they choose to sleep around. These diseases were rare in my youth.

Dear Philo,

Please cite your statistics to show those diseases were rare in your youth. I assume that in your youth you were not working with sexually active teenagers.

You aren’t looking in the right place for evidence. The pill has given women control of their reproductive capacities and freed women from the burden of being worn out from bearing too many children. That is what I wrote about. Your experience with teenagers does not negate that.

I have no doubt that the freedom the pill gives has been abused. However, I think of my beautiful cousin who was seventeen years in 1943. Apparently she said an emotional goodbye to her boyfriend as he went off to war. Two months later he was killed in action. Finding herself with a dead boyfriend and a family she apparently didn’t feel she could tell of her pregnancy she committed suicide. I still think of her. I wish she had the pill then. Diseases can be cured. Death can’t.

No doubt society will adjust to the social changes due to the pill. Samuel Noah Kramer translated ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets. One of them said something to the effect that children no longer listen to their teachers or obey their parents. People no longer respect the gods, and everybody wants to write a book.

Older people have been concerned with the improper behaviour of younger people since the beginning of recorded history.

Yabby is angry and angry. GK Chesterton wisely observed this as the result of moods. Moodyness isn't a reasoned rejection. It leads to a spiral of invective against reason and the elephant in the room ie the Catholic Church. Yabby moved on to something unreasoned and one manifestation of the rejection of the Church is the rejection of natural law and of denying the obvious about the existence of personhood for unborn human babies. Here are some quotes for a reality check:

"To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence" (Dr. Jerome Lejeune, "Father of Modern Genetics" and discoverer of the cause of Down's Syndrome). "By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception" (Dr. Hymie Gordon, Chairman, Department of Genetics at Mayo Clinic).

The widely used medical textbook The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology, 6th Edition, Moore, Persaud, Saunders, 1998, states at page 2 that "The intricate processes by which a baby develops from a single cell are miraculous.... This cell [the zygote] results from the union of an oocyte [egg] and sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being...." At page 18 this theme is repeated: "Human development begins at fertilization [emphasis in original]...."

Judge Michael J. Noonan ruled as follows in a New Jersey case based on a man's efforts to save his unborn child from being aborted: "?based upon the undisputed medical testimony by arguably the foremost authority in genetics in the world, I found that human life begins as conception; and that Roe vs. Wade permits a legal execution of that human being." (Municipal Court of New Jersey -- Law division, Morris County criminal action docket no. C1771, et seq. State of New Jersey v. Alexander Loce, et als., Defendants, April 29, 1991, Honorable Michael J. Noonan).

A few more good ones for a reality check on a priori rights for anti life poseurs out there who act out their moods via angry activism for a plethora of alleged other 'rights on the agenda today. Here, chew over these also:
Even the "pro-choice" feminist author Naomi Wolf has criticized the efforts of abortion-supporters to obscure the humanity of the unborn child. She asks, "So, what will it be: Wanted fetuses are charming, complex REM-dreaming little beings whose profile on the sonogram looks just like Daddy, but unwanted ones are mere 'uterine material'?" (Our Bodies, Our Souls, The New Republic, October 16,1995)

These people are not speaking about the Bible or some religious belief. They are speaking from the basis of scientific proof. Every medical text in the world, in fact, will confirm that a unique human life begins at fertilization. If science did not know that, how could it have produced test-tube babies?

http://www.priestsforlife.org/brochures/amatter.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032002415.html?hpid=sec-religion
“Vatican Official Defends Child's Abortion
By Francis X. Rocca
Religion News Service
Saturday, March 21, 2009; Page B07

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican's top bioethics official said the two Brazilian doctors who performed an abortion on a 9-year-old rape victim do not merit excommunication, because they acted to save her life.

The statement, by Archbishop Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, appeared as the lead article in last Sunday's issue of the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

"There are others who deserve excommunication and our forgiveness," Fisichella wrote, addressing the unidentified rape victim, "not those who permitted you to live and who will help you to regain hope and faith."

The case drew international attention earlier this month after the local Catholic archbishop excommunicated the doctors who aborted the girl's twin fetuses, as well as the girl's mother.

The child was 15 weeks pregnant, allegedly after being raped by her stepfather. Weighing only 80 pounds, she might have died if forced to carry the pregnancy to term, the doctors said.

While reiterating Catholic teaching that abortion is an "intrinsically wicked act," Fisichella suggested that under the circumstances, it might have been the lesser evil.”

"Her life was in serious danger because of the pregnancy in progress," Fisichella wrote. "How to act in these cases? An arduous decision for the physician and for the moral law itself."

In contrast with church authorities' typically uncompromising statements on abortion, Fisichella stressed the degree of moral discretion that the doctors were forced to exercise.
"The conscience of the physician finds itself alone when forced to decide the best thing to do," he wrote. "A choice like that of having to save a life, knowing that one puts a second at serious risk, never comes easily."

The above action by a Vatican official shows compassion, wisdom and more good sense than many Catholics show who automatically defend whatever their church does.

Fisichella sees abortion as evil but also sees not having an abortion in the case concerned as a greater evil. I can only approve of his reasoning.

Yabby is angry*

Hehe, is that so? I could have fooled me lol, for I knew nothing
about it. If I feel anything then it is sympathy for people like
you Webby, who are clearly such gullible suckers.

I remind you that human life does not begin, it simply continues.
The sperm and ova which you happily flush down the toilet, are
very much alive. That same dna is contained in the fetus, a copy
of each.

A child is a person, for it has a human brain. A fetus does
not have a human brain, so it is a being, as is an ova or a sperm.

Now either you have the intelligence to understand all that or
you don'