The Other Side

This article was written by Ann Furedi who is the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the leading provider of abortion services in the UK. She theorizes that the rise in abortion in the UK is a good thing. If you do not want children, choosing abortion is the responsible route and makes you a "good parent". Emphasis is mine.

The idea that you would become a parent because a condom split is something that people don’t generally find very acceptable; and in this context, abortion is seen by many people as a responsible decision. Wouldn't it be more responsible just to not have sex in the first place if you are not ready for the consequences of your actions?

A woman quoted in the article said of the abortion of her third child...

Moran’s own abortion was, she says, ‘one of the least difficult decisions of my life’: ‘I’m not being flippant when I say it took me longer to decide what work-tops to have in the kitchen than whether I was prepared to spend the rest of my life being responsible for a further human being

This is what I thought would be the worst of what I was reading...but I couldn't stop - the car wreck syndrome. You know, where you can't look away. I witnessed this personally last week when I had a wreck and the door of my van was hanging by a thread. Everyone passing by was just craning their necks to get a better view of the wreckage that was my family's lifeline to work, church, and play. But I digress...back to the article...the stomach churning begins.

This is where it gets REALLY bad...

There is a very easy way to make abortion rare, and that’s to ban it, or to take away services, or to stigmatize it so people don’t feel able to have recourse to it. Do we really want to go there, as a society? We have a choice to make: either we continue to see abortion as a problem, or we allow people their moments of intimacy, we allow them to enjoy sex, and we allow them to make use of abortion as a back-up to contraception.

WHAT?????? Is this a candid camera moment? This is so far the opposite of my viewpoint that I started to wonder if this was some sort of spoof article - a sick joke. But it is not funny.

Her answer to everything is...guess what??? Yep, contraception of course!

One obvious strategy is to increase contraceptive use among non-users. Hmmm....the obvious strategy to me is to practice self control through abstinence.

For people who are using contraception, those involved in family planning (not natural family planning mind you)may be able to help reduce their risk of unintended pregnancy by encouraging the use of LARCs, implants and IUDs, which don’t require that they remember to use a barrier method, or take a pill every day. Emergency contraception (EC) is also a very positive development, because it can be so forgiving, (Soooooo...why do you need forgiveness if you've done nothing wrong?) allowing women to use the contraception after they have had sex.

However, she contradicts herself because at the beginning of the article she notes that the abortions are rising despite the fact that:

a wider range of contraception is available, and that the authorities are actively encouraging the use of long-acting reversible methods of contraception (LARCs).

Do you think this would surprise Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI? Does it surprise anyone who has read Humanea Vitae or Theology of the Body?

Now contrast that article to Radical Catholic Mom who said this:

The last few months charting has been extremely difficult because the meds I am on have obscured the typical signs making it very difficult to tell when I am fertile and when I am not. The result has been, using Billings rules, that Chastity time has been extended for longer and longer periods of time. We finally had to sit down and talk and discuss what this was doing to our marriage, why we believed what we believe, what the Church had to say AGAIN, and for us, WHY it was so important that artificial contraception was not allowed in a Catholic marriage. We concluded that what we were going through was the Cross. It was a great sacrifice in the here and now and we had a choice when confronted with our Cross. We could go around it and avoid it-by using some barrier methods-or we could accept it and say "Yes, God, we accept your Cross knowing that there is no such thing as pain and sacrifice without the Resurrection around the corner."

Ahhhh....I feel so much better now. There is sanity in the world!