We occasionally hear about this – in fact you can look at my recent post on a story from right here in Rome, GA, where a pharmacist wouldn’t obtain Plan B for a local woman and caused the Kroger Co. to have to clarify its position on protecting the rights of pharmacists to their conscience. This story is very similar, it’s about doctors, though.

Although a proposal to protect the conscience rights of health care providers and institutions that don’t want to participate in certain medical procedures isn’t getting much action in Congress, the issue of conscience protection is a hot topic in several states and within the medical community.

The Abortion Nondiscrimination Act of 2007, sponsored by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., has gotten no co-sponsors since its Jan. 22 introduction and no hearings have been scheduled on it by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Both the AMA and the New England Journal of Medicine have been making statements on behalf of doctors’ conscience rights. Yet,

Connecticut legislators are considering a proposal that would require all hospitals receiving public funds — including the state’s four Catholic hospitals — to offer emergency contraception to rape victims, without performing a test to ascertain whether the woman is already pregnant.

…

Across the country, the Oregon Catholic Conference was fighting a similar battle over a bill that would require all health plans paying for prescription drugs to also cover prescription birth control.

That means a health insurance plan for Catholic school teachers could be forced to provide for gravely evil services as well as drugs.

Get the full story.

Christopher West, aka “Mr. Theology of the Body,” has a commentary out from a couple of weeks ago on a new U2 song called Window in the Skies which appears to have much imagery related to “sexual redemption” talked about by JPII. In West’s commentary he mentions meeting Bono and talking with him about TOTB in late 2005; now the new song is out in late 2006.

So, has Bono been reading up on the theology of the body? Perhaps. Or, maybe as John Paul II himself emphasized, these are simply truths that find an echo in every human heart and Bono has tapped into it.

Here are the complete lyrics.

Guess I need to get my ears on the song, and I also need to read up on TOTB so I will know some context about this sexual redemption thing.

My sister passed along this CNN story to me about one of our local Rome, GA, citizens who got mad when a Kroger pharmacist wouldn’t order the “Plan B” “morning after” pill and stock it at the store. The story is rife with inaccuracies, stating that Plan B is not an abortion pill, that it’s a contraceptive, and so on. I say kudos to the pharmacist for sticking to their morals even in the face of reprimand from the company.

The article

Once again, the cold, hard facts: Plan B contains a high dosage of one of the artificial hormones found in “regular” birth control Pills. That hormone prevents a fertilized ovum (read tiny baby) from implanting in the uterine wall. “Regular” birth control pills typically contain two artificial hormones, one that supresses ovulation, and one that prevents a fertilized ovum (read tiny baby) from implanting in the uterine wall. In other words, if supression of ovulation fails, the failover is this hormone that prevents implantation (granted, this happens rarely). No implantation means that tiny baby dies. Plan B is an abortion pill, plain and simple. I hope and pray we can be delivered from such cavalier attitudes about such evil being so widely accepted in our society.

B16 said some pretty offensive stuff at the conference on natural law…

“No law made by man can overturn that of the Creator without dramatically affecting society in its very foundation,” said the pope, according to the I-Media news agency, which reports on Vatican affairs in French.

“Weakening the family is punishing society,” he told the delegation. Natural law “has rules that supersede all human laws (and) does not allow for derogations by anyone.”

Read the rest of the story

B16 is driving the pro-choice and pro-homosexual “Catholics” nuts with things like this. I like it.