To Be Or Not To Be - That is the Choice

Last week, Obama took another step towards his apotheosis when he declared that private charities most provide birth control for their employees as part of their health care plans.  This especially upset the Catholic Church, which holds an immutable stance against abortion and abortifacient drugs such as RU-486, commonly known as “The Morning After Pill.”  (Too bad there isn’t a morning-after pill for sore losers of the Super Bowl, who riot in the streets because their team lost.)

The Catholic Church doesn’t believe in contraception but has looked the other way because The Pill has been so popular since its introduction in the 1960s.  Preventing a pregnancy is one thing; terminating one chemically is another, in the Church’s view.

The administration’s mandate that will force Catholic colleges, hospitals and charitable groups to cover contraceptives in the health insurance they provide for students or employees.  On the heels of this ruling comes the news that Susan Komen Foundation, which raises funds for breast cancer, has stricken Planned Parenthood from its donor list due to Congressional investigations.  The Pro-Choice movement banded together in a campaign to force Komen to apologize, which it did.

Choosing to have a family is a very personal choice.  The married woman who chooses to take The Pill should be no more guilty of sin than the woman who opts for a tubal ligation.  It’s none of anyone’s business.   The Lord wants happy families.

Still, the Church has the right of free association. It’s their club and their rules.  If you don’t like the way Catholics do things or don’t believe in their doctrine, go find another church that does.  Non-Catholics would say the Church has no business telling women whether to have children or not.  They should say the same of the government.  The government shouldn’t be telling women to have children or not have children.  But, whatever the decision, they also shouldn’t be sticking a church with a very strict pro-life doctrine with the bill for a morning-after pill, one whose purpose is without a doubt to induce abortion, albeit very early in the term and usually before a doctor can confirm a pregnancy.

The government is not supposed to make any law respecting religion, and initially, there was a conscience clause in this section of the bill.  Obama has decided to ignore it (we’re shocked – shocked to find Obama bypassing a law – his own law, at that!).  The Catholic Church and other Pro-Life organizations have every right to be upset.

Candidate Rick Santorum, an openly Christian Conservative, has taken heat for his Pro-Life stance.  Reporters have peppered with questions about whether, as President, he would ban The Pill (the traditional contraceptive pill).  Nervous moderate voters have swerved away from this otherwise perfectly viable candidate for that reason alone.  Average couples fear the heartache and  medical costs of possibly giving birth to a mentally or physically deformed child.  Not everyone is as brave (or wealthy) as Sarah Palin or Santorum and his wife. 

Yet, if we begin aborting babies for such reasons, where will the discrimination end?  We can rationalize aborting a deformed fetus.   Advanced technology has, or will have the power, to determine an unborn baby’s intelligence, physical features and any medical problems, treatable and non-treatable; doctors have been able to determine the baby’s gender for decades now.

The pro-choice door must be open to unfortunate parents and victims of rape who must make a wrenching choice.  Who will follow them through the doors remains the problem.  Callous couples seeking the ideal child (such people should not be parents at all)?  Careless teenagers whose lust was greater than their virtue or common sense?

Pro-life must have its voice, too, though.  In this day and age of The Pill, the question is beggared:  why is abortion even necessary? 300,000 abortions are performed every year on the premise that the fetus is not yet a life.  Pro-Choicers are horrified that the film, “The Silent Scream” was ever produced and vehemently protest its showing.

If life does begin at conception, it’s an inconvenient truth Pro-Choicers and most Moderates would rather not avow.  We’re not willing to err on the side of caution but rather convenience and prudence.  And to err is human.

One could go on about the social costs of that personal decision not to have children, whether by preventing through abstention, tubal ligation, The Pill, The Morning After Pill, or an abortion.  Do you notice how the choices become more dreadful the closer you come to the accepted definition of Life?  Yet millions of married women regularly take The Pill as the preferred and most convenient means of birth control.  Family sizes are smaller, and as they are reduced, so is our work force and our military, our means of defense against an increasingly tyrannical world. 

Oddly, women commonly state their desire to go to work as one of the reasons for not having more children; working is less work than raising children.  We will be like Norway in World War II, so sparsely populated that America won’t even be worth the cost of vanquishing.  No wonder they termed the American family the “nuclear family.”

Yet this is America, and freedom of choice is tantamount.  Once the government intervenes, as the Catholic Church has seen, there will be no more choices.  The same will happen, despite Liberal promises, with gay marriage.

It’s up to you how many children to have, if any at all.  Just be aware that the Liberals have traditionally regarded the traditional family as the enemy of the state.