“A defender of the church,” proclaimed the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline for an extensive story about the new Archbishop-designate, Jerome Listecki. The subtitle for the article was: “Archbishop designate Listecki vows collaboration, but unafraid of debate.” The subtitle was probably derived from the bishop’s description of how he planned to participate in the political process. He said: “If we don’t challenge one another’s statements, then we’re relinquishing our responsibility to the common good.”
The following month, young Catholics for Choice (yCFC – a Washington D.C. based organization) and Family Planning Health Services (FPHS – an agency with family planning clinics in eight Wisconsin counties) formed a unique sectarian-secular advertising partnership, produced informational ads for broadcast, and then embarked on a two-day Wisconsin “road-trip” to draw media attention to their campaign and to build public (including the Catholic public) awareness and knowledge about emergency contraception.
The purpose of the joint media campaign was two-fold; 1) to inform the public about how Plan B works so they would have it on hand in advance of need and, 2) to inform Catholic women of reproductive age that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops health care directives permit the use of emergency contraception to prevent pregnancies resulting from rape.
In the January 2010 issue of the Journal of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, Ron Hamel, Ph.D., makes it very clear that the ethics of access to emergency contraception for Catholics needs to be fully examined and explained. Professor Hamel’s article and the YCFC/FPHS EC campaign are an effort to fulfill that responsibility when there is significant resistance.
The campaign succeeded in getting a response from the Archbishop-designate and thus succeeded in its secondary purpose. The headline on the Christmas Eve edition of the La Crosse Diocesan newspaper is: “Bishop Rejects Young Catholics for Choice Message.” The front page column ran adjacent to the departing bishop’s message. But what he rejected so prominently: “ . . . that Catholics can disregard Church teaching on contraception, abortion, and human sexuality in general and remain Catholics in good standing,” was only weakly connected to the message that yCFC and Family Planning Health Services (FPHS) were promoting.
Bishop Listecki, like most of the Catholic protestors in front of the FPHS clinic, will allow “no room for interpretation,” once the bishop’s authority has been invoked. Many within the church see the bishop’s pattern of authoritarian rebukes, condemnations, and admonitions as futile efforts to suppress dissent and they understand they are not the views of other Catholics or even the other American bishops. Just as importantly, the denials and condemnations are not solely inflicted on the faithful. The prayer vigil protestors’ and Bishop Listecki’s efforts to eliminate access to emergency contraception, if they succeed, would apply to women regardless of their faith.
Erik Cieslewicz and Brooke Sperry have produced a documentary about the joint campaign that will be released February 17th, 2010. The web-posting will occur on the same day that another Lenten prayer vigil outside an FPHS clinic (which does not provide abortion services) begins in central Wisconsin. The video shows the challenge as well as the fun of the effort to educate the public in the face of consistent efforts to suppress and to misinform. Earlier, “40 Days for Life” prayer vigils played a large part in motivating FPHS and yCFC to cooperate in the advertising effort to correct misinformation being spread by their opponents.
Wisconsin has taken steps to advance the scope of the sex education our students will receive with the recently passed Healthy Youth Act. Wisconsin State Representative Donna Seidel talks with Dino Corvino in the attached podcast outlining the reasons behind this legislation. Across the nation, the rates of teen pregnancy have increased. The accompanying article from the Washington Post, January 1-26-2010, outlines what has happened and the increases in teen pregnancies in the last few years. Representative Seidel clarifies just why that is a concern for all of us
The belief that contraception is intrinsically evil, though sincere, does not make it true. The belief that it is “written in everyone’s heart as “natural law” is no more persuasive.If true, it seems there would be no disagreement.
Catholic leaders know they have not persuaded one another, the public, or their own laity, to agree that contraception is evil. So when it comes to public policy, rather than engage in dialogue and debate, they seem to make a statement and end it with a “Dixi” (Latin for “I have spoken”) as though that is all that should be necessary.
So many young women who have a teen pregnancy find it daunting to think of completing their education. There seem to be many barriers – time, support, money, good child care, etc. But completing their education is the second most important thing they can do for themselves and their children. (The first most important issue is to obtain adequate health and medical care for mom and for baby.)This book supports, encourages and identifies young women who met the challenge and obtained higher education after experiencing a teen pregnancy.Education breaks the cycle of poverty; it enhances the potential for adequate income, health insurance, job security and a better life for her and for her child.
BEING a baby mama is no excuse for not finishing your education.Many women, though, use motherhood as an excuse to quit school. Only 40 percent of teen mothers who give birth before age 18 graduate from high school and less than 2 percent earn college degrees before age 30, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
Low levels of contraceptive use in the Philippines result in high rates of unintended pregnancy and a broad range of negative consequences for women, their families and the national health care system. “Meeting Women’s Contraceptive Needs in the Philippines,” a new report from the Guttmacher Institute and the University of the Philippines Population Institute, documents the considerable social and financial benefits that would accrue from investing in contraceptive services to enable women to avoid unintended pregnancies.
Patrick McIlheran, a conservative columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, startled me with a ‘quick hit’ that was printed in the Easter Sunday edition. The columnist trumpets a letter to the Washington Post by Harvard School of Public Health HIV/Aids researcher, Edward Green, where, according to McIlheran, Green said: “The pope is correct.” Katherine Kersten, blogging for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune also is amplifying Green’s assertion that current evidence on condom use in Africa supports the Pope’s position. My thoughts are: “Get ready, there’s a whole lot more where that came from and there will be a lot more for a long time.”
My friend Anne, who is a family planning educator in Oneida County, sent me this article. We at FPHS were already noting a request for long-term, low maintenance methods. This was a post on the Huffington Post on Friday, March 27th, written by Christina Page the author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America.
The article below which we spied on RH Reality Check gives a college woman’s perspective on the increase
in costs for contraceptives on college campuses that occurred as a result of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005.
As the article states, the costs of contraceptives increased dramatically to college health departments as well as to safety-net providers (contraceptive providers for low-income women). The affordability problems women encountered made for hard choices for them…do I buy gas for the car to get to work or school or do I pay for my now-much-more- expensive birth control?
