You might think I am just trying to get attention with that headline, but unfortunately, it’s true.  Courtesy ABCNews comes this nugget of joy.  I know you’re shocked that such a thing would be said in a speech to none other than the evil Planned Parenthood.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood Tuesday that sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is “age-appropriate,” is “the right thing to do.”

…

Speaking to a young woman who asked a question about sex education, Obama said, “You, as a peer, can have enormous power over your age cohort but you’ve got to have some support from the schools. You certainly should not have to be fighting each and every instance by providing accurate information outside of the classroom because inside the classroom the only thing that can be talked about is abstinence.”

Then, similar to any pro-abort politician, Obama trotted out the classic “I’m personally opposed” line.  Here’s the windup…

 ”Keep in mind: I honor and respect young people who choose to delay sexual activity,” Obama continued. “I’ve got two daughters, and I want them to understand that sex is not something casual. That’s something that we definitely want to communicate and should be part of any curriculum.

And the big “BUT:”

But we also know that when the statistics tell us that nearly half of 15 to 19 year olds are engaging in sexual activity, that for us to leave them in ignorance is potentially consigning them to illness, pregnancy, poverty, and in some cases, death.”

In other words, it’s our fault if they have sex and get sick/pregnant/etc.  Predictably, Obama’s campaign went into damage control mode, with a spokesperson “clarifying,:”

he “does not support teaching explicit sex education to children in kindergarten. . . The legislation in question was a state Senate measure last year that aimed to update Illinois’ sex education standards with ‘medically accurate’ information . . . ‘Nobody’s suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it,’ [emphasis added] Obama said. ‘If they ask a teacher ‘where do babies come from,’ that providing information that the fact is that it’s not a stork is probably not an unhealthy thing. Although again, that’s going to be determined on a case by case basis by local communities and local school boards.’”

What do you think about that “the way that we think about it” line?  Apparently we all think about sex in explicit, graphic, hardcore, wham-bam-thankya-ma’am terms, and Obama’s trying to show us the light – that sex can be thought of in some other way.  Who knew?  Surely, of course, that other way doesn’t involve the beauty and sacredness of the marriage act as a dual-purpose activity, that of unifying and procreating.

Could be that PP needs some more business…gotta teach the kids how to have sex earlier so that they can perform more abortions!  After all, the earlier you get started having sex, the more abortions you can receive…

The Obama camp also pointed out that there was an opt-out provision in the legislation he had supported, so parents could keep their kids from having their innocence violated at such a young age.  One last tidbit:

[the legislation] also envisioned teaching kindergarteners about “inappropriate touching,”

Is there any such thing as inappropriate touching when kids are being taught pre-puberty about how much fun one can have with such touching?

Good news:

Despite Obama’s support, the legislation was not enacted.

Another good reason to homeschool.  Government schools can take over for mommy and daddy so they don’t have to do a thing (and too many of them aren’t doing anything but allowing the government to take over for them.)

Read it all.

Some months ago I posted on a couple of articles on how the environmental extremist movement was pushing the perpetual lie about overpopulation, tying it in with the idea that having too many children is environmentally irresponsible. Well, here we have another such article, once again praising the benevolent Chinese government for their “solution” to this problem (never mind that the put out more pollution that anyone else on the planet, and they have worked things so that environmental regulations don’t apply to them, and for that matter that they’re communists and therefore intrinsically evil.)

This one’s specifically about Britons:

The Optimum Population Trust, a UK-based think tank, made the call in a new report unveiled today, saying record growth in Britain’s birth rate was having an adverse impact on the environment.

The report’s author, Professor John Guillebaud, said the Government should introduce “stop at two children” or “have one less” policies.

“Each new UK birth, through the inevitable resource consumption and pollution that UK affluence generates, is responsible for about 160 times as much climate-related environmental damage as a new birth in Ethiopia, or 35 times as much as a new birth in Bangladesh,” Prof Guillebaud’s report says.

“A voluntary stop-at-two guideline should be adopted for couples in the UK who want to adopt greener lifestyles.”

“Optimum population trust” – what an interesting name. Also, note that the word “government” is capitalized?

What about the fear of underpopulation, as in Australia?

In Britain, the think tank argues, economic and political pressures to lift the birth rate “are hopelessly simplistic and should be resisted”.

“Far from panicking about baby shortages, almost every country can welcome fertility rates at or slightly below replacement level,” it said.

China introduced its strict one-child family planning policy in the late 1970s.

The policy is believed to have prevented millions of births.

“Believed to have prevented?”

More

Believe it?  A researcher says that your baby learns how to lie to you at 6 months old, initially by crying when nothing is wrong to see what will happen.  Then it evolves from there.  Certainly, I have seen my two-year-old being deliberately deceptive – if she goes into another room and is doing something she knows she shouldn’t be doing, she immediately changes activities when I walk into the room. Or, when she’s loading up a diaper but is too busy playing to have it changed, she denies having filled her pants.

For a baby of 6 months, though, I wonder if it’s so much being deceptive as it is checking to see if mommy’s still there even though baby can’t see her.  I have a hard time believing it’s deliberate deception at that early an age.

 More!

Gerald has a great little post up talking about his preconceptions about having kids…and then he asks several questions about how our lives changed when we had kids.  Go on by and read others’ comments and add some of your own!

Check it out! 

This is a crosspost of mine from over at Catholic Dads. I posted this last night and a couple of my fellow Catholic Dads as well as some moms for good measure have gotten started discussing the efficacy of nursing past toddlerhood. Not a direction I planned for the post to go, but if you’re interested, please check out the combox!

My lovely and gracious wife alerted me to this, so I decided to throw a post up about it.

For those of you whose kids were born in the hospital, and I know that’s most of us, you probably remember receiving a “free” sample bag from one of the major baby formula companies. Nice bag, equipped to carry bottles, and even came with a couple of free samples of formula.

Now, ignoring the point about Nestle’s repeated patently evil actions in 3rd world countries regarding formula, we all know that this is an economics game. The formula companies give hospitals monetary kickbacks as well as reduced price formula for use in the NICU, in return for the hospitals giving everyone one of these bags. I’m of the opinion (and science supports me) that breastmilk is the far superior food for newborns, and that physical and emotional health of both mom and baby are substantially enhanced by breastfeeding as long as possible (in my case, my 2-year-old continues to nurse, albeit briefly, even as my wife is pregnant with another.) Conversely, physical and mental health of mother and baby are compromised by the use of inferior product – formula – as the primary means of sustenance.

Still, the bags are being handed out, and you have to figure that their availability is influencing new moms, at least to some degree. The response to this is a website called banthebags.org, a new website set up by concerned moms citing evidence that there’s just too much evidence that moms are in fact being influenced by these “free” samples. They’ve even been featured on NPR.

Not to be outdone, there’s now momsfeedingfreedom.com, which advocates for not banning the bags. It was set up in direct response to the banthebags movement. It’s all about how important it is for the bags to be distributed because not distributing them denies new moms adequate information and education about their options. The site pays lip service to the “breast is best” concept, but it ignores all sorts of scientific evidence and you can just tell it’s a pro-formula site. In fact, it’s sponsored by the International Formula Council. And yes, that means it stinks worse than formula spit-up. Out the window goes any appearance of being objective. The cool thing is, there is a blog on the site, and the majority of the comments are pro-breast and anti-formula.

So, Catholic Dads, as we know, breastfeeding is a key part of natural child spacing and therefore NFP…so if any of your wives are militant breastfeeders as my wife is, have them check out the above sites and include their two cents.

Disclaimer: I am a La Leche League Dad – I am unabashed in my support of breastfeeding mothers. I believe breastfeeding is far superior to anything else for babies. That said, I do understand there are rare situations where it just doesn’t work for one reason or other. I do not condemn anyone for their personal decisions. Rather, I condemn the aggressive marketing of the formula industry as well as the cultural mentalities that have made formula feeding so mainstream. Don’t string me up, please!

The first birth-control pill meant to put a stop to women’s monthly periods indefinitely won federal approval Tuesday. Called Lybrel, it’s the first such pill to receive Food and Drug Administration approval for continuous use. When taken daily, the pill can halt women’s menstrual periods indefinitely and prevent pregnancies.

My position on such a drug would come as no surprise to my regular readers.  But even those who see nothing wrong with artificial contraception surely can look at this and see the folly in so totally short-circuiting the natural process inside the body.  Think about it – the uterine lining would just keep building up and building up.  Surely that can’t be a good thing as it must eventually come out.  Well, I don’t like to get too detailed on such things here on my blog, so why don’t you just read the full story for information on the great side-effects.

This is interesting.  Folks in the Chinese hinterlands are lashing out against the methods being used to force them to avoid having children:

The violence appeared to stem from a two-month-long crackdown in Guangxi to punish people who violated the country’s birth control policy. The policy limits the number of children families can have legally.

–

To limit the growth of its population of 1.3 billion, many parts of China rely more on financial penalties and incentives than on coercive measures, including forced abortions and sterilizations, that were common in the 1980s, when the so-called one-child policy was first strictly enforced.

It’s actually good to hear that they’re doing less abortions and sterilizations.  Still, of course, we must remember that there but for the grace of God go we in the US…when we have stories about how having kids is criminal, I fear we may someday have a vocal minority here in our own country suggesting fines for those who dare to litter the planet with little ones.

Full story 

I’m not normally one to toot my own horn, but it’s not every day that someone who is arguably a key voice for the culture of life, natural family planning, and natural family-raising, comments on a blog post by some schmoe in northwest Georgia.  So, to be brief, Sheila Kippley, of NFP International (author (or co author) of great books like The Art of NFP, Breastfeeding and Natural Child Spacing, and more) commented on my blog post from a few days ago.  In her comment she mentions that she’ll be speaking at the big La Leche League International Conference in Chicago this July.  This is something my wife is hoping to be able to attend, but I just can’t due to work obligations.

The problem with this sort of thing, of course, is that it might lead me to believe that this blog has some shred of significance…

With a ten-gallon CHT to Jimmy Akin’s author SDG, we find out about a study conducted in Germany that the sympto-thermal method of natural family planning (as previously discussed in this blog) is equally as effective as the pill under perfect use.

Since this is a “scientific” publication writing about it (Scientific American,) of course it’ll be disparaging of anything that is more an art than a science. It starts with the headline.

Modified Rhythm Method Shown to Be as Effective as the Pill—But Who Has That Kind of Self-Control?

<picks up bullhorn, leans close to the ears of author Christopher Mims, squeezes the trigger, and gently screams> STOP CALLING IT THE RHYTHM METHOD!!! If you would do any homework at all you’d see that the old calendar rhythm method is 90% ignored by the current sympto-thermal method (hereinafter referred to as STM).

Of course we have to work in a disparaging remark in the first line of the story following the inaccurate headline:

birth control methods collectively known as periodic abstinence have been jokingly referred to as “Vatican roulette,”

From there, we have 3 paragraphs of accurate information, including this nugget of joy:

As effective as STM can be, experts say it is not right for everyone. Whereas the method is cheap (read: free) and appeals to women who want a natural birth control method, it requires a strong commitment on the part of both partners.

Imagine that! The idea that having a sexual relationship should in any way involve strong commitment on anyone’s part is blasphemous. To expect both partners to have a strong commitment to their method of family planning is simply expecting too much. Moving along, a totally unbiased OB/GYN who of course would never push any means of artificial contraception on anyone brings clarity to the conversation:

“Naive readers see these results, and they think [STM] is the greatest thing since laptop computers. The researchers on this paper went back and cherry-picked this data from an ongoing study from the past 20 years. They chose the users who were the best users for this method.”

Hmm. And I am sure that manufacturers of condoms, the pill, norplant, IUD, sponges, diaphragms, and so on, never give out their effectiveness stats based only upon those people who use their products according to the actual included instructions. News flash: all such products quote their effectiveness based on perfect use, just like proponents of NFP (note that there is no “NFP industry,” but that’s a whole other post.) To their credit, SA follows this up with another accurate statement:

“That means half the month you can’t have sex. That’s very difficult for young couples.” (It’s worth noting that STM actually requires only 7-10 days of abstinence, but related methods of birth control still practiced in the U.S. do require up to two weeks of abstinence every month.)

And here’s something that is not surprising

“Many of the authors of these studies have religious orientations,” he says, “and that clouds the motivations.” Some 74 percent of the women who participated in Frank-Herrmann’s study, which will be published in the journal Human Reproduction, listed their religion as Roman Catholic,

From an organization that teaches NFP,

She says that although religion was the early impetus, couples who practice STM are now seeking “natural” birth control. “Now it’s more and more from a natural motivation; to be closer to nature,” she says. “We often say it’s people who like camping, bicycling, outdoor exercise—people who want healthy food and healthy natural family planning.”

Our unbiased OB/GYN from above chimes in,

“I chafe at the term ‘natural family planning,’” he says. “For many couples this is highly unnatural. ‘Natural’ is methods that you don’t have to think about, that allow you to be spontaneous…. STM is very unpopular, hard to use, and has a poor success rate in average couples. Most people aren’t willing to put up with it.”

Never tried it with a latex barrier, but I have a feeling I’d notice it’s there. And somehow I just don’t see how you “don’t have to think about” putting on a barrier or making sure you take that pill at the same time every day. And I don’t see how loading your body up with artificial hormones could ever be considered more natural than not doing so. The article closes with one final flourish from our unbiased OB/GYN buddy:

“the best method for a couple to use is whatever they want. It’s counterproductive to try to steer people to one thing or another.”

To this, I simply ask him, do you teach your patients about all their options, including the STM of NFP? If not, sounds like you might be steering them to one thing or another…perhaps the one thing that lines your pockets the most.

H/T to The Curt Jester.

According to the AP, John Billings, a pioneer in the world of reproductive fertility, has passed away in Australia. Billings is known for the Billings Ovulation Method, which is a method of natural family planning that focuses on empirical observation of cervical mucus to determine when a woman is most fertile – thus it is pretty effective for both aiding those wanting to avoid pregnancy and those wanting to achieve pregnancy, both without drugs (or immoral procedures.)

The AP, of course, can’t help themselves. First, they give us this headline…

Founder of contraceptive method dies

Then a few paragraphs down they give us this…

Billings, a staunch Catholic and father of nine, always had the support of his church, which opposes contraceptive devises such as condoms and the pill that revolutionized birth control a decade later.

Obvious logical problem here – he had the support of his Church which opposes contraception yet he was the founder of a “contraceptive method.” AP = dumb as rock? I prefer to think it’s ignorance as opposed to an outright attempt to smear the man’s name posthumously. Of course, being the AP, they can’t resist also mentioning

Critics of the Billings method argue the church supported it because of its relatively high failure rate, which earned it the nickname “Vatican Roulette.”

Mukesh Haikerwal, president of the Australian Medical Association, said the method’s failure rate was three in 100, compared to one in 100 for condoms, one in 1,000 for the pill and one in 10,000 for implanted devices.

Planned Parenthood (and no, I won’t link to them) report the breakage rate of the condom is 2/100 – but that’s a perfect use rate. Billings’ method can’t theoretically have a “perfect use” because it’s more art than science. Then you get into the pill and the IUD, and yes, those are quite effective, but they have substantial peripheral health risks ranging from infertility to strokes to hemorrhaging. I do wonder where old Mukesh got his information on the failure rate of condoms.

One final note – I advocate and my wife and I use the Sympto-Thermal Method of NFP, which is a hybrid, using components of Billings’ and others’ methods to determine times of greater and lesser fertility. This method is taught beautifully by Couple to Couple League.

Get the Story!