League Director Joe Scheidler and Communications Director Eric Scheidler are in Baltimore, MD and Washington, DC with Defend Life‘s annual Face the Truth tour. They reported from Frederick, MD that one hundred pro-life participants were lined up along Route 40, showing motorists and pedestrians the face of abortion.
Americans Resist the Truth
The majority of Americans are more than reluctant to know the truth about abortion. The recently completed Pro-Life Action League Truth tour reconfirmed that especially in comfortable, upper-middle class neighborhoods, our fellow citizens would like to remain blind to the reality of abortion.
The vast majority of Americans, including Christians and Catholics, would also like to remain ignorant of the insidious and disastrous effects of birth control on society. Summer 2003 marks the 35th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae. This encyclical on human life is possibly the most controversial and misunderstood papal letter ever proclaimed, and certainly the most prophetic.
Birth Control Prophesies Come True
In 1931, shortly after the Anglican Church relaxed its prohibition on birth control, an editorial in the Washington Post declared:
It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teaching of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific production” of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the [Lambeth] committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be ‘careful and restrained’ is preposterous.
The next 35 years saw the onslaught of anti-child policies and the rise of Planned Parenthood.
In 1968, with the popularity of the birth control pill and demands that the Catholic Church follow the example of most Protestant churches in approving of birth control, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, calling contraception “contrary to the nature of both man and woman and of their most intimate relationship.”
He predicted that birth control would lead to “conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.” And he expressed concern that men,
growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, and finally lose respect for the woman, and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.
Time to Face the Truth about Contraception
As we stand in the third millennium, 35 years after Paul VI spoke out, women are encouraged to consider men as available simply for their own gratification, and even no longer a necessary ingredient in procreation. Sexuality and reproduction have been effectively divorced from each other.
And the secular press, unlike the Washington Post in 1931, has wholeheartedly bought into the new definition of sexuality. America needs to face the truth, not just about abortion, but about the entire anti-life, anti-child culture spawned by embracing contraception.
