Life Issues: August 2008 Archives

The Global War Against Baby Girls

If you were asked to name the technologies whose proliferation inadvertently threatens the human race, what would you include? IEDS? Assault rifles? Nuclear warheads?

Add this one to your list: the sonogram machine...

Eberstadt explains that there is a "slight but constant and almost unvarying excess of baby boys over baby girls born in any population." The number of baby boys born for every hundred baby girls, which is so constant that it can "qualify as a rule of nature", falls along an extremely narrow range along the order of 103, 104, or 105. On rare occasions it even hovers around 106...

...Yet in a number of Chinese provinces--with populations of tens of millions of people--the reported sex ratio at birth ranges from over 120 boys for every 100 girls to over 130 boys for every 100 girls. Eberstadt notes that this is "a phenomenon utterly without natural precedent in human history."

One commenter to the article notes:

I've said it over and over again, those 30 million Chinese men WILL find mates. If they have to invade India, Iran or wherever.

HT:This One Goes to 11 by Margaret Cabaniss

Denver Archbishop: Planned Parenthood Offends Minorities

A new Planned Parenthood clinic in a minority neighborhood of Denver should be taken as an offense, affirmed the archbishop of the city.

Archbishop Charles Chaput said this at a prayer vigil and march at the site of Planned Parenthood's new clinic in a primarily Latino and African-American suburb of Denver...

"Planned Parenthood is the largest single provider of abortion and family suppression services in the United States," he explained. "This facility in this minority neighborhood should offend every African-American and Latino family, and all of us, because every child lost to abortion here subtracts one more life, one more universe of possibilities and talent, from the future of this community. […] The business of Planned Parenthood is the prevention of the future -- and business is good, and very profitable, at the expense of this community."

HT:The Curt Jester

Last year, when a woman in Berryville, Arkansas went into the hospital to deliver her baby by Cesarean section, she did not request or authorize her doctor to also perform a tubal ligation. But that minor detail didn't stop Dr. Shirolyn Ruth Moffett from doing just that. Dr. Moffett claims that she surgically ensured that this woman would never have another child because she feared that the patient's uterus would burst if she ever got pregnant again.

Not only did Dr. Moffett perform this procedure without permission, she failed to inform the woman after the fact and made no notation of what she had done on her medical chart.

I personally think this happens a great deal, but the doctors are able to convince the patient after-the-fact that it is what's best for them, so the patient just goes along with it. I have heard many stories if not where the doctor has succeeded, where they have made attempts.

Myself included.

I had one doctor who kept writing "tubal ligation" on my chart and never brought it to my attention until I saw another doctor in the practice and she asked me about it. I said that was a mistake. I saw my regular doctor later, and oddly, it was on my chart again. I told my doctor I was 22, and had two children, and didn't want a tubal. She told me I had too many children, and ordered me "don't you come back to this office again until you decide a method of birth control for after you have this baby!"

Oddly, I went back to that group with the next pregnancy (insurance, they were supposedly anti-abortion, I was young and stupid), and the same thing happened.

How many women did this tactic work with?

Danielle Bean has an excellent article over at Inside Catholic that I so needed today.

I read this and I started to cry:

When a battle-weary mother stands alone in her bathroom looking with disbelief at two tiny pink lines on a pregnancy test, it's too late for family-planning discussions of clinical effectiveness. We've got a baby to take care of. And his mother...

"Soon after I announced that we were (unexpectedly) pregnant with our eighth child," an older mom once wrote me, "I came out of Mass one day and found an NFP flyer tucked under the windshield wiper of my van. I even wondered if it was our pastor who put it there."

Shame on us.

Whether we love NFP or hate it, whether we choose to use it in our marriages or not, whether we have one child or 16 children, we Catholics have no business receiving new life with anything but charity and joy. We have no business labeling our fellow Catholics, in their time of need and vulnerability, as crazy or irresponsible.

It takes courage for many Catholic couples to continue to refuse contraception, to remain open to life in their marriages, even when their circumstances are already difficult and they are hoping to avoid another pregnancy. The "99 percent effective" number people like to throw around about NFP becomes a much smaller one when translated into "user effectiveness."

Thank you and God bless you.

I had my prenatal visit the other day and the PA mentioned that at 18 weeks, if I so choose, I could get genetic counseling, a level II ultrasound, and perhaps an amnio to look for birth defects-specifically Down Syndrome. I am now 35, therefore officially of "advanced maternal age" making the chances of having a Down Syndrome child go up substantially. The more advanced my age, the more "up" my chances go, and from what she described, it seems once I hit 40, well, don't even try reproducing (ha ha, I just made a funny..."try" ha ha).

She said this is just and offer (about 100 x's), and not necessary (I had the feeling the fact that i was pro-life showed somewhere). I said I would ask my husband and so I did. He said if it makes me feel comfortable, sure but in his estimation we do not need it. It's our baby, nothing they reveal would stop us from having the baby, end of story. Good answer. In my pregnancy brain, I flip flop back and forth over the dumbest details and I think were I asked this when I wasn't pregnant, it would be a cut and dry answer, but now I am emotional and I worry, and am indecisive and I need a partner in all this life stuff to tell me what to do until I'm sane again.

13 years ago, when I was 22 years old and pregnant with my Number 2, Posco, my AFP Triple screen came out "funny" (according to the doctor who left a message on my answering machine). So they sent us to genetic counseling, an ultrasound and an amnio. We of course opted to go because the doctor scared the living daylights out of us and gave me the impression that this was simply the next step after a Triple Screen. And I of course *thought* the idea was to give us a head's up to prepare for a child who might have special needs (I was actually thinking Spinabifida more so than Down's).

The genetic-screen-counselor person told me I had about the same chance of having a baby with Down Syndrome as a 35-year-old woman (oh, the irony) which was pretty high (according to them).Before I had a 1 in 1 million chance of having a child with Down's Syndrome, now it was like 1 in 200 (I don't remember the exact stats, but they were startling). We had the ultra sound, we had the amniocentesis and the doctor who did the procedure said "18 weeks is still early enough along to take care of it if we find out there is bad news today." I felt stupid and angry and felt that by participating, I unwittingly contributed somehow to the philosophy that children are disposable. I told my mother this story and she rolled her eyes at my melodrama (as par the course) and said her doctor told her these tests were to perhaps fix an anomaly that could be fixed or to prepare parents in advance.

I know the usual pro-life mom tagline is simply to reject these tests, and I don't think I had a Triple Screen again after that incident with my following 4 children. Like my husband said, I will most likely turn down the tests this time around. But it makes me wonder: preparing ahead if you have a child who needs special attention does not seem anti-life to me. I think if I had a pro-life, NFP only doctor, I might opt for the tests. Do women who are lucky enough to have NFP only docs, who feel confident that abortion is not an ulterior motive accept these tests? Or do these doctors simply not offer these tests? I guess the overall question is what would women's health care look like if the industry wasn't so obsessed with birth control and abortion and you had confidence that your doctor was genuinely trying to take care of you and not sterilize you.