Daleiden vs. Planned Parenthood: Who's the criminal?

I'm over on Catholic Mommy Blogs today, talking about Lenten fasting. Check it out!

This news is over a week old, but David Daleiden -- the activist behind the Center for Medical Progress videos exposing Planned Parenthood's grisly practices of selling aborted baby parts -- has been indicted by Harris County, TX on multiple charges, including a felony charge of tampering with governmental records, and a misdemeanor charge of buying human tissue.

{Note: according to this indictment, it's possible to criminally buy human tissue, while the seller on the other end of the transaction is judged to have done nothing wrong. Seems legit.}

It's long been known that some counties, even in Texas, would indict a ham sandwich, so long as said ham sandwich happened to be conservative (see: Travis County's politically-motivated indictment of Rick Perry over a veto threat). In this instance, one of the prosecutors is a Planned Parenthood board member.

Nothing about this passes the most cursory of sniff tests.

Here's the thing: David Daleiden may have done something criminal in the course of his investigation. I'm not sure one way or the other. If he did, I would bet he did so in the full knowledge that he may have to pay a price in the service of getting this information into the public consciousness.

We are not the ones occupying the "end justifies the means" side of this cultural divide, and as such I think that if there have been laws broken, then Daleiden should get his day in court. But let's be serious: it's not possible that Daleiden broke the law by buying the fetal issue if Planned Parenthood simultaneously did nothing wrong -- legally wrong, that is, because there's really no question whether Planned Parenthood's every action and instinct is morally wrong.

So! To that end, please consider signing this petition, which has over 108,000 signatures already, asking Harris County to reconsider their nakedly political witch hunt, and instead focus their investigative and prosecutorial efforts where they belong: on the ghouls of Planned Parenthood.

Natural Family Planning Awareness Week

When I was 23 or 24 years old and single, I went to a new gynecologist for an annual exam. She asked me the standard questions to get my history, and when she asked about my sexual activity I told her I was abstinent. She said, "Good for you. There is too much out there to catch."

Cleanliness was only the secondary reason for my abstinence.

The hierarchy was:
1) My deeply-held belief in the sacred nature of sexual union, and the fact that I did not yet have a husband;
2) My unwillingness to catch something that might stick around forever and/or compromise my future fertility; and
3) My unwillingness to bring a baby into the world without the proven benefit of a married mother and father.

We went on with the appointment and discussed some issues I had, specifically that my cycles were irregular and extremely painful. She didn't seem to be overly concerned, but she ordered some blood work and sent me to a radiology center to have a pelvic ultrasound. My results, it was reported, were normal.

In the following year or so, I met my now-husband and we got engaged. At my next appointment with the same gynecologist, again for an annual exam, I answered the sexual activity question in the same manner, and then later she noticed my engagement ring. She congratulated me and then said, "When you're married, what do you intend to do about birth control?" I said, "We're not using birth control, but instead we're going to learn NFP. We're practicing Catholics."

And she laughed.

She laughed in my face and said, "With your irregular cycles, that is not going to work for you."

Then she saw my stony face. She shrugged and told me she'd see me six weeks or so after the wedding to confirm my pregnancy. As if it were a threat.

I went home and Googled "pro-life ob/gyn Northern Virginia" and found out that Tepeyac Family Center, one of the largest pro-life practices in the country, was less than five miles from my fiancé's condo, which we would be sharing after our wedding. Even though I had just had an annual exam, I made an appointment.

The receptionist told me, "We are a pro-life practice and do not prescribe birth control, nor do we perform sterilizations." I said, "That's why I called."

I had lost all confidence in my old gynecologist. When she laughed in the face of my deeply-held religious convictions, I realized she wasn't to be trusted about anything else, either. I had my doubts about the results of my tests the previous year and wanted them to be run again.

Lo and behold, when the blood tests were run again, this time by a doctor who cared about the actual mechanisms by which fertility functions, the results were clear: I had polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). As I had suspected, my irregularity and pain were not normal, but were symptoms of an underlying pathology. The original gynecologist, in her astounding ignorance about the actual mechanisms at work in her chosen specialty, had seen the same severely out-of-whack hormone numbers and decided they were irrelevant.

The non-birth-control-pill medication protocol for PCOS turned out to be effective enough at sloooooowly bringing my hormones back in line without flipping the switch on my fertility to OFF; unfortunately I couldn't tolerate the medicine and had to stop taking it.

Soon enough I was married. My new husband and I learned the Creighton Method of NFP with the help of a retired OB/Gyn (the simpler Sympto-Thermal method is less effective when pathology exists). I took waaaaay too many negative pregnancy tests when my charts were unclear -- or more likely: my charts were clear but I didn't want to believe it. I endured all the delightful side-effects from fertility medications, especially as the doses were slowly increased to levels that made the pharmacist do a double-take. Between the Creighton lessons, the wasted pregnancy tests and the fertility medication my insurance refused to cover, it cost us a small fortune, all told.

I cried to my mother about the injustice of growing up in a large, endlessly and effortlessly fertile family and not being able to conceive, when I had been so careful to avoid compromising myself. I cried whenever I so much as thought about abortion -- what a personal insult it was to know women were throwing away something I wanted so badly! I tried to smile and make jokes when everyone I had ever known in high school and college, who knew about my commitment to my virginity, asked me constantly whether I was pregnant yet.

After three years or so, still not pregnant, I insisted on laparoscopic surgery to investigate the possibility that I also had endometriosis. On December 1, 2011, I had the surgery, which did indeed reveal (and remediate) endometriosis. I kept using Clomid. And in February 2012, I discovered I was at long last pregnant.

It never would have happened without NFP.

Without NFP, I would probably have wasted years on the Pill, convinced that I didn't want to be pregnant yet anyway. Without all that meticulous, excruciating charting, I never would have discovered that I was borderline anovulatory. I would not have been able to point to charted proof that the Clomid was working and I was now regularly ovulating but still not conceiving, thus sending me on the search for a further answer. I would not have been able to get pregnant almost immediately once the barrier of endometriosis was removed because my charts told me exactly what to do.

Most people writing about NFP awareness are writing about how it helped them space their pregnancies, or how they don't use it to space pregnancies but like knowing that they could, or how they support it but hate it personally. Everyone writing about NFP awareness mentions how good it was for their marriage.

Those aren't my experiences.

Infertility is a huge burden and it can be extremely hard on a marriage. The senses of inadequacy and helplessness, the depression that accompanies the arrival of every period, the feeling that sex has lost all fun and spontaneity: these things are real and they are heavy. Because our marriage was basically born into the crucible of infertility, we never had the chance to consider the benefit of using natural methods to space pregnancies.

This is the cross that God gave my husband and I to bear. We struggled to remind ourselves that faith in God includes having faith in His timing. We got a baby when He said it was time; we had to learn patience and forbearance and selflessness. I'm still learning to have patience and forbearance and be selfless.

But here's the reality of the situation: whether you feel burdened by your fertility because you have eight kids under the age of 11, or whether you are suffering because you just want a baby, natural family planning is a gift. Doctors who care about how your body is actually working or not working are a gift. My children are a gift. 

And thanks be to God for those gifts.

Giving until it hurts.

Mother Teresa, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. in 1994: 

I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. 

And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts. 

By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. 

And, by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. That father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion. 

Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion. 

Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on. Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States. These concerns are very good. But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are being killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today — abortion which brings people to such blindness. 

And for this I appeal in India and I appeal everywhere — “Let us bring the child back.” The child is God’s gift to the family. Each child is created in the special image and likeness of God for greater things — to love and to be loved. In this year of the family we must bring the child back to the center of our care and concern. This is the only way that our world can survive because our children are the only hope for the future. As older people are called to God, only their children can take their places. 

But what does God say to us? He says: “Even if a mother could forget her child, I will not forget you. I have carved you in the palm of my hand.” We are carved in the palm of His hand; that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God from conception and is called by God to love and to be loved, not only now in this life, but forever. God can never forget us. 

I will tell you something beautiful. We are fighting abortion by adoption — by care of the mother and adoption for her baby. We have saved thousands of lives. We have sent word to the clinics, to the hospitals and police stations: “Please don’t destroy the child; we will take the child.” So we always have someone tell the mothers in trouble: “Come, we will take care of you, we will get a home for your child.” And we have a tremendous demand from couples who cannot have a child — but I never give a child to a couple who have done something not to have a child. Jesus said. “Anyone who receives a child in my name, receives me.” By adopting a child, these couples receive Jesus but, by aborting a child, a couple refuses to receive Jesus. 

Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child. 

From our children’s home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortion. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents and have grown up so full of love and joy.

The (Probably Unintentional) Pro-Life Message of Doctor Who

I've been rewatching Doctor Who, and I've just gotten to Series 2 of the relaunch. Following the Christmas special, the first episode is called "New Earth." David Tennant's Doctor and Billie Piper's Rose Tyler are visiting a re-formed planet Earth in the year five billion and twenty-three.

(Whew. If you haven't watched Doctor Who, I imagine this is going to sound super silly. If you haven't watched it and intend to, then what are you waiting for? Spoiler alert, in that case. But I'm not going to let it stop me because this episode aired in 2006. You've had eight years.)

The Doctor and Rose visit a hospital in New New York, which is staffed by what Wikipedia describes as "humanoid feline nurses" called the Sisters of Plenitude. The Doctor is astounded by the medical advances that have been made by the Sisters, as they have cured diseases that he knows not to have been cured for a while yet.

Ca-reepy.

A lot goes on, as episodes of DW tend to go a bit manic sometimes, but it is revealed that the Sisters of Plenitude have been making their medical advances by breeding humans, intentionally infecting them, and then figuring out how to cure the diseases. When the Doctor finds out, he says of the patients, "They were born sick, they're meant to be sick. They exist to be sick: lab rats. No wonder the Sisters have got a cure for everything, they've built the ultimate research laboratory, a human farm."

One of the Sisters, Novice Hame, says by way of justification, "It's for the greater cause... They're not real people, they're specially grown. They have no proper existence." Furthermore, all they are is "flesh," and thousands of people are alive thanks to the cures developed using this method.

The Doctor is not having this: "These people are alive. If [the humans outside the hospital] live because of this, then life is worthless."

Every time I've seen this episode -- which is a lot, I'm kind of a Doctor Who junkie -- it has struck me anew that whether the producers meant it or not, this is a powerfully pro-life episode. How is the crime of the Sisters of Plenitude meaningfully different from fetal stem-cell research? Human embryos are harvested for medical research, and it is justified with the argument that it's all for the greater good, and that the quality of life is improved for "real" people, at the expense of farmed flesh which isn't really a person.

But that embryo is a person.

The bred humans of New Earth are regular humans who would lead regular human lives if given the chance. So too, embryos grow into fetuses (otherwise known as "babies"), which are born and grow into toddlers, children, tweens, teens, and eventually adults. Regular human adults who live regular human lives if given the chance. At no time during the development from fertilized ovum to adult is a person anything other than a person, and people are not test subjects (unless they give informed consent, as with legitimate medical trials).

Those harvested embryos are test subjects, stripped of their humanity except for what that humanity can do for our health.

And if we live because of this, then life is worthless.

"Facebook God" gives the kind of advice you'd expect, I guess.

Oh my gracious, this is SO SAD:

(Sorry about the picture quality. I took a screenshot from my phone. Click to enlarge.)

Everything about this just breaks my heart to pieces. I'm heartbroken that this girl was pressured into an abortion she didn't want. I'm heartbroken that her parents treated her so badly, instead of with love and forgiveness. I'm heartbroken that she had no one better in her life to turn to than Facebook God, who bears absolutely no resemblance to the God I know. I'm heartbroken that someone masquerading as our God and Father gave this girl such bad advice as, "Abortion is legal, therefore it can't be murder." And I'm heartbroken that over 4,600 people have "liked" this post on Facebook (at the time of this writing), and have posted many comments that if "this God" had a church, they'd be there.

So, so sad.

Sunday night politics.

We live in a contraceptive culture. As I write, there is a case under consideration by the Supreme Court (Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.) dealing with the question of whether an employer can be required to provide contraceptive and/or abortifacient devices and medications against his/her conscience. Proponents of the contraceptive mandate -- contained within the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare -- argue that contraception is a "women’s health issue"; that an employer’s refusal to provide a health insurance plan that includes free birth control is tantamount to said employer banning his employees from using birth control; that most women use contraception so everyone should just get over it.

Without going into why all of that is a load of steaming horse manure (for now), let me just say: I find it all to be somewhat of a personal insult.

I suffer from infertility. I have one child, miraculously conceived after almost five years of (never-contracepting) marriage, countless rounds of fertility medications and finally surgery to remediate endometriosis. Our daughter is delightful and we want her to have siblings. Despite the well-meaning assurances from everyone we know that after getting pregnant the first time we wouldn’t have trouble repeating the feat, my doctor has officially declared that the name of the game here is secondary infertility, and thus multiple rounds of Clomid are in my future.

I read a lot of blogs written by endlessly, effortlessly fertile Catholic women. They good-naturedly complain about the burden of a large number of children (and their laundry!), the open disbelief people display at the sight of their families, and the difficulty of enduring the abstinent periods of an NFP-charted menstrual cycle.

Meanwhile, I struggle to keep my heart and soul free of the crushing burden of bitter envy.

And let me tell you: the world does not understand a family that freely accepts children as a gift from God. I’m one of seven children myself; I heard the rude remarks that people made to my mother. But the world also does not understand the grief that comes with having a heart open to children who do not arrive.

Most of the time I’m fine, and happy, and delighted with my child and my husband and our life together. Sometimes I’m sad and fending off depression – mostly when a round of fertility medication has failed and I’m staring down the barrel of another month of hot flashes, irritability, nausea (just a delightful reminder that if I get pregnant, I'll be off food for nine months), and meticulous charting. Occasionally I’m relieved that I’m unlikely to ever find myself accidentally pregnant four months after having given birth to my sixth child.

And I often get SO MAD about the casualness with which so many contracept and abort in order to preserve their status quo. I get personally insulted when people see pregnancy as a disease to be prevented with the Pill or “cured” by abortion, and who see children as nothing more than a burden.

Some of us are filled with longing to be so burdened.

Current Events

I'm going to blurt out some quick thoughts about some things happening in the news right now. They're in order that I became aware of them over the last several days, not in order of importance.

1. The crowdsourcing campaign for the Gosnell Movie: Give to it. Kermit Gosnell has to be the worst mass murderer in United States history, and his trial was largely ignored by the media. Too many people have no idea of the scope and horror of this story, and that needs to change. Give whatever you can; no amount is too small. Even a $1 donation will be helpful and appreciated by the filmmakers.

2. Shooting at Fort Hood, TX: Yes, another one. Three people were killed and sixteen more wounded yesterday, on an Army base where soldiers are not allowed to carry guns. If anyone can explain to me why on Earth anyone thinks it's necessary or smart to disarm trained soldiers at their base of operations, I'm happy to hear it. (And then I shall refer you to psychiatric help, because that is insane.) If the SOLDIERS on the ARMY BASE had not had to call the LOCAL POLICE for help -- yes, I'm shouting in all-caps -- then the death/wounded toll would surely be lower. It's just suicidal. Furthermore, while the poor, frightened, disarmed citizens of the base at Fort Hood were still sheltering in place, there was a large outcry from opportunists calling for more gun control. They would actually disarm the military because of their personal fear of firearms. Think about that for a minute.

3. Brendan Eich ousted at Mozilla: The CEO of Mozilla, the software company who provides Firefox, a truly abysmal web browser, has been removed from his position. This move comes after the news was made public that Eich donated $1,000 to support Proposition 8 in California in 2008. So six years ago, a private citizen made a constitutionally-protected donation to support a cause, and now he has lost his job. He has been fired for supporting traditional marriage, which is surely his right. I don't care which side of the issue you come down on, this should outrage you. If you don't have the right to your opinions, if your boss can fire you because you think something different than he does, then no speech is safe. Basically, Mozilla is a real-life version of the novel 1984, and Eich has been fired for a thoughtcrime. Shame on you, Mozilla.