pro life – Page 2 – Mama Needs Coffee

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, guest post, infertility, IVF, pregnancy, Pro Life

IVF regrets: one mother’s story

March 27, 2017

Today I have the distinct privilege of bringing a unique voice to the discussion about in vitro fertilization (IVF). Katy* is a wife, mother, Catholic, and a regular blog reader who emailed me a few months ago with a story to share. As I read the email, I was humbled and rocked to the core that she would entrust me with a part of her story, and I knew immediately that it deserved a wider audience. She was gracious – and brave – enough to agree to share it with you here today.

I am requiring that all comments and discussion on this piece, both here in the combox and on social media, be of the highest caliber of respect and civility. This is an emotionally fraught topic, and this is a charged political and moral landscape we are navigating. And … this is a real family’s journey, and a real woman’s story. She deserves our attention and our respect. To that end, I will be moderating.

Now I’d like to invite Katy to tell you her story, in her own words:

“Hello, my name is guilty”

I truly wish I had read your posts about IVF four years ago.

For a few months now, I’ve been reading/following/loving your blog.

I feel compelled to share my story, because even though you don’t know me, I feel that certain kinship that can only come from reading someone else’s blog and becoming somewhat acquainted with their life. So here it goes.

I was raised Catholic and my family is devout, but not in a forceful way, so I never even got to go through the typical teenage rebellion. Religion was always just part of who we were, and I was glad to carry on the Catholic tradition in adulthood.

I had a boyfriend whose family was VERY religious to the point of homeschooling and rejecting the Novus Ordo mass entirely, nightly rosaries, etc. That time of my life helped my faith develop, but then after we broke up and I met my now-husband, a mostly disinterested Methodist, I drifted into a much less strict version of practicing Catholic. I still attended church, but I wasn’t involved.

Fast forward to finding out we were infertile. Of course, I knew the Church’s stance on IVF, but I chose to willfully ignore it.

A control freak at heart, I refused to believe that God had my best interest in mind.

I have felt called to motherhood since I was a little girl and I absolutely could not fathom a world in which I was not a mother.

I didn’t want to wait. I didn’t want to have faith. I wanted my way, and I wanted it then, because I was 27 years old and my biological clock was ticking so loudly it kept me up nights.

Only now do I see how ridiculous I was being.

Thanks to the severity of our infertility issues, we were giving a 1% chance of conceiving naturally (who comes up with those stats, anyway?) and were advised against wasting time and money on IUI. The doctor recommended that we immediately pursue IVF.

Now, I did sort of try to be sensible…you know, to “sin a little less.” I inquired about only fertilizing a small number of embryos so that there wouldn’t be “leftovers.” The doctor thought I was crazy, just another wacko religious person, but she agreed to work with me. Then the estimated cost made it so the whole thing had to be put on hold anyway.

A few years later I stumbled upon a clinical trial which provided IVF to participants for free. The big catch: you had to play by their rules, so no requesting a limited number of embryos be created. Blinded by my manic need to become a mother, I signed my name on the dotted line and entered the study.

I felt both elated and guilty.

It’s a guilt I’m still lugging around today.

As part of the study, we ended up with 8 embryos. I did one round of IVF and transferred two embryos. I was pregnant with twins for 8 amazing weeks before my first miscarriage. The second embryo transfer (2 embryos again) resulted in another pregnancy, but a single that time. I miscarried at 7 weeks. Of course I felt like I was being punished. I know it doesn’t work like that, but still, that’s how it felt.

I waited two months and then did a third embryo transfer with a single embryo. After the two miscarriages I was kicked out of the clinical trial and no longer forced to abide by the study protocol of transferring two at a time (a note for your article: most fertility doctors refuse to do more than two, and my current doctor along with many others strongly advises against more than one. The cases you hear like Octomom are thankfully not the norm. And those doctors usually have their medical licenses revoked. What they’re doing is still not OK… but it’s not like they’re all just throwing in ten embryos at once and then resorting to selective reduction, at least not usually).

I once again become pregnant. That one stuck. My beautiful daughter was born in June of 2014.

Motherhood has been everything I dreamed it would be. My daughter brought so much light, love, and happiness to this world that it’s impossible to put into words. Family members fight over who gets to babysit her. She is so smart, so kind, so good.

She is by far the best thing that ever happened to me, and it absolutely kills me that she was conceived in sin.

I struggle with this every day. The line I read equating the children of IVF to victims, like children of rape? Oh, that one stung, but it was so necessary. You’re right, of course, but the truth hurts. (She is referring to an older piece of mine where I was emphasizing that the dignity of the human person is immutable, that no matter the circumstances of one’s conception, the child is only and always the innocent victim.)

I’m sure you already know about God’s fantastic sense of humor, right? Right. So I had 3 embryos left after my daughter was born (3 miscarried, 1 never took, and she was the 5th one).

I knew I would need to have them all because despite my egregious disregard of Church law in doing IVF at all, I still fervently believe that life begins at conception and that those three little souls would absolutely not be destroyed or donated to science.

But then when my daughter was 8 months old, a surprise happened – a spontaneous unplanned pregnancy. That 1% chance of conceiving the doctors gave us? Yeah. About that…

My son joined our family 17 months after his sister. Sometimes the craziest things are true.

Now I am pregnant once again, but this time with the 6th embryo, while the other two wait in storage until we’re ready for another go-round.

No one will be left behind in the freezer, but I admit it’s so hard.

There are the storage fees, the constant worry… how will we be able to afford another round of IVF? (I had insurance coverage for a brief shining moment, which I used to get pregnant with this one, but now I’ve lost my job and that insurance lapses in February). How will we afford five kids? Am I getting too old? (I’m 32 now). Can I even have that many c-sections? (Both my kids were emergency c-sections, and this one will be scheduled).

I wish I had never done IVF.

I wish it so badly. When my faith was tested, I failed, and yet I was still given the most beautiful and miraculous gift that I surely don’t deserve.

I used to keep a diary but I don’t anymore, which is why I’m pouring this all out on you. I do have a blog, but since my readership is mostly fellow IVF veterans, they’re all left-leaning and would never understand my regret.

I’m terrified to write about any of this publically.

I don’t regret my daughter for a second, but I do regret the methods.

I wish I had known.

I wish I could rewind and redo all of this knowing what I know now.

I just hope that you’ll pray for me. It’s very early in this third pregnancy and I’m so nervous (especially with my history), plus I’m constantly worrying about how we will survive the future we’ve created for ourselves.

I am trying so hard to put my faith in God but like I said…I’m a control freak! It’s so hard to let go. I always feel like I’m the one who needs to keep this ship sailing.

Also, if you have any excellent reading or resources for “Woman who Regrets Doing IVF But is Also Joyous to Have Become a Mother”… please send it my way.

*(Katy, whose real name was changed for privacy purposes – is a brave and beautiful mother, and her courage in sharing this story is a testimony and a gift to us all. Please join me in accompanying her family and her current pregnancy with your prayers.)

(UPDATE 3/28/17: *update: FYI, our beautiful author Katy has been to Confession, thanks be to God. And y’all are wonderful missionaries of mercy to suggest it so enthusiastically. Pope Francis would be proud.)

Abortion, Catholic Spirituality, Contraception, Culture of Death, politics, pregnancy, Pro Life, Theology of the Body, Women's Health, Women's Rights

To my sisters who marched on Washington

January 23, 2017

I wanted to write something snarky. I wanted to dash off line after line of statistics and data supporting the appalling abuse committed against women and children in the name of “progress” and “equality.” I wanted to drop blistering one-liners about losing our bearings, rejecting our feminist roots and blowing past all the other pertinent issues surrounding women’s freedoms that don’t originate in the pelvic region.

But then I watched some of the coverage of the marches – the big one in Washington and the smaller ones around the country and the world. And I read real women’s stories and saw their tear-streaked faces and I recognized myself in each of them, pink hats notwithstanding.

Because we are all of us desperate for love.

The fire that burns in the eyes of a million demonstrators is not something to be dismissed or derided. However wrong I believe their cause, however appalling I find their tactics, I cannot dismiss the humanity of these angry, hurting people.

For 43 years we have lived a national nightmare. For a hundred years before that, the planks were being diabolically slid into place, building a foundation on rotted, wrong-headed principles that had little to do with true human freedom and everything to do with a new kind of enslavement, to an “enlightened” social order which utterly subjugates the least of these to the caprices of the ones in power.

It is the most clever and effective tactic hell has coughed up since that business in Eden, to turn a mother against her child, and to turn women against their own femininity. And of course, – of course – the Enemy would seek to desiccate the very source of our salvation, the openness of spirit and the willingness of heart and the heroic bravery of a young woman to step boldly into the plan of salvation history, opening her womb to receive the gift of Life itself.

Mary is the most feared creature in the history of all humanity. And the most powerful.

Her yes to God altered reality itself. And her willingness to set aside her own plans and to offer God her very life was key to His achieving our salvation. He could have asked anyone, in any time. He could have asked a man. He could have zapped Himself down to earth and appeared as a 30 year old carpenter, fully equipped to build tables and preach the Gospel without the pesky three decades of life in a dull little family unit in a dirty, backwater town in the Middle East.

But He did not.

He choose to come into our world through the womb of a woman, His mother. And as I scrolled through picture after picture of angry, frightened women wearing vaginas on their heads, carrying signs pledging allegiance to Planned Parenthood and swearing that any lecherous old white man who wanted to deprive them of their contraceptives would have to pry them from their cold, dead hands, my heart broke for the satanic effectiveness of this whole campaign.

As it ever was, from the beginning, the Enemy seeks to divide and conquer, pitting man against woman, mother against child. This modern iteration of “feminism” is anything but; a warped perversion of the profound and beautiful truth of the unique and earth-shattering dignity of femininity.

The culture deafens us with shouts about freedom and equality. What it means by that is that we are all reducible to the sum of our reproductive parts, that we are packages of pregnancy-vulnerable organ systems that must be shuttered at all cost, that our worth lies in our ability to forcibly extract financial support from society at large to keep us carefully sterile, effectively barren.

The modern argument for feminism is intimately tied up with abortion rights. The right for a woman to control her own destiny by killing her child is the highest held sacrament in this pseudo religion. The vow that no woman will ever be made bereft by the sexual caprices of a man who would ruin her life by impregnating her and then abandoning her, is paramount.

“NO” you might be shouting, a card-carrying feminist yourself. “It isn’t that at all! Women deserve equal opportunities that men have by birthright. We will not be enslaved by our reproductive systems, punished by a monthly cycle which persists with the damning threat of new life. Science has freed us from this drudgery, and the law and the culture must follow!”

But this entire system is predicated upon the belief, unspoken or unacknowledged for many though it may be, that something is fundamentally wrong with being a woman.

That women, as they are and as they were created and as they forever shall be recognized, are fatally flawed. And that achieving equality with the “dominant” sex requires the suppression and mutilation and utter rejection of our capacity to conceive and bear new life.

“NO!” I can hear the shouting revving up again. “IT’S THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHEN THAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR!”

And to that I say, we aren’t that powerful. And I don’t mean we as women, but we as human beings.

The freedom to choose whether and when you will take the life of another human being is no freedom at all; it is slavery of the basest sort. To proclaim that the rights of women are founded on the trampled rights of the child is no achievement of civil progress, it is a redistribution of pain and abuse, trickled down to the smallest and meekest ones. MLK would never have advocated for a freedom for blacks predicated upon the subjection of yellows or whites. His understanding cut to the heart of what it means to be human: that we are each of us created equal, in the image and likeness of God.

Each of us.

No matter whether we possess a penis or ovaries. No matter if our bodies are tiny and underdeveloped or wizened with age. No matter if we are beautiful and perfectly pulled together or disgusting and matted with the dirt and the grime of a lifetime of abuse and neglect.

Non of us can take away the dignity of another human being, given by God who sees in each of us the image of His Beloved son.

When we reduce our rights to a laundry list of procedures we ought to have access to, a list of medications which can protect us from becoming mothers, or can clean out the contents of our wombs should the timing or circumstances be tragic, we lose sight of what it means to be human, to be a person created to be in relationship with others, orienting us ultimately toward that greatest Other.

Abortion is not feminism. Sexual socialism, whereby the government subsidizes, with the funds of the populace, a preferred lifestyle of license and debauched freedom, is not feminism. Marching in the streets with self-defacing placards and self-abusing slogans of the vilest and crudest sort is not feminism.

I understand that there is fear. Fear of what a future unplanned and unexpected and unsafe could look like. But that fear is rooted in forgetfulness. We have forgotten who we are, and Whose we are. We have traded the truth for a lie: that we can be like God, choosing who lives and dies, utterly controlling our destinies during our lives on earth.

But perfect love casts out all fear. Perfect love raises up the lowly and the frightened and looks us dead in the eye and says, “you matter. You were created out of love, and for love, and I love you madly. I died for you, and I still suffer for love of you. Look at me and let me tell you who you are, and what you were made for.”

Don’t let Planned Parenthood tell you what it means to be a woman. Don’t let any NGO or government agency or corporation or worldview or popular cultural movement tell you what it means to be female. They didn’t write the manual on you, and they can never show you the depth of your dignity or the fullness of what you are worth.

It is a lie. And we have let our trust in our Creator die and have chosen it, time and again.

The truth is terrifying, but that’s because freedom – true freedom – is the most radical thing the world has ever seen.

You were made for more than this. You were made for greatness. You were made by love, for love. And so long as we rage against love, our hearts will ever be restless, angry, unsatisfied and afraid.

But we have a God who tells us constantly, untiringly,

Be Not Afraid.

You were made for more than what your body is, or what your body can do. You were made for more than casual sex, for more than abortion, for more than mutual masturbation. You are more than a receptacle into which sperm should be deposited and than evacuated. And anyone and anything that has ever convinced you otherwise has been a lie.

If you have never known God, or have only known a broken image of Him, I beg you to reconsider in light of this one question only: what does it mean to have been created a woman? What was I created for?

And let Him whisper the answer to you. Scream at Him if you must. He can take it.

But don’t settle for what this world wants to give you in terms of freedom, of feminism. It’s a counterfeit, and a cheap one at that. Walk past the knockoffs – they’re garbage, poorly made, and unethically-sourced anyway. But you already know that. Keep your chin up and your head held high, and do not settle for anything less than that for which you were made.

You are a daughter of the King, and His plans for your life far surpass those of any of the angry, agitated leaders whose screams echo from podiums or ring out into the vast echo chamber of social media.

You were made for more.

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Homosexuality, politics, Pro Life, reality check, relativism, sin, Suffering

The power of language and the witness of words

August 9, 2016

It is a curious time to be a Catholic Christian. (Is it ever not, though? I think maybe we all fall prey to a little good old fashioned chronological snobbery, whether or not we care to admit it.)

On the one hand, I live in America and for the most part, shuttered adoption agencies and defunct bakeries and cancelled after-school Bible clubs aside, the persecution that Christians face here is still on the lightish side. And many would shrug off the aforementioned incidences not as persecution at all, but as the rightful assertion of a collective morality over defiant and wrong-headed individual dissenters.

On the other hand, it is gravely concerning how very much the pace of things has accelerated, for society to embrace, wholesale, things that a decade and a half ago would have registered clearly on our collective consciences as “wrong.” There are now plenty of Christians who wouldn’t bat an eye at a 12-week abortion, embryonic stem cell research performed “for a good cause” to fight the horrors of ALS, of helping an elderly parent or terminal cancer patient end his or her life with a prescription written by the hand of their own physician.

In Colorado this last piece is coming to the ballot this November, under the tidy euphemism “physician-assisted suicide,” but more popularly nicknamed “death with dignity.” So as you exit your favorite natural grocery store you might be intercepted by a cheerful, clipboard-wielding volunteer in a neon green t-shirt earnestly inquiring into your concern that sick and elderly people have “dignified end of life choices.” Which is a whole lot harder to answer “no thanks” to than, say, “should Coloradans vote to let people who want to die kill themselves with a prescription written by a doctor?”

Language carries the day. As it always has. And it becomes essential for those of us who believe in a God Who is the Author of life to reclaim these conversations on a linguistic level.

It seems a small thing, a popular word or commonly-accepted term here, a turn of phrase there. Look how much traction gay “marriage” has gotten in a few short years.

When the phrase first came into existence, Christians and other people who recognized the impossibility of two same-sex individuals, however sincere their love, contracting what we all commonly understood to be marriage, had no problem throwing quotes around the term, because it was an imprecise and incorrect application of a recognized reality. But repeated loudly and often enough, we’ve now all but lost that point.

There’s no longer any room in the national conversation to point out “actually, marriage is a covenant contracted between two consenting opposite-sex adults, for the purpose of creating and raising a family and contributing to the development and continuation of civilization.”

I guarantee if you bust out that last sentence at the neighborhood block party, you’d either get a drink tossed in your face or find yourself with a semi-circle of bewildered acquaintances backing away from you in a hurry.

Because we’ve conceded that point on a linguist level and on a legal level. And now we must hide behind our “personal beliefs” or “chosen religious faith” when making the point, which, in a secular society governed almost exclusively by the court of public opinion, is a weak position to operate from indeed.

By forcing religious belief and morality into a corner, meant now to be tucked handily into one’s pocket and not revealed in polite company, the secular Left have employed a chillingly effective strategy, with hardly any real persecution necessary. We zip our own lips instead, avoiding tough topics with friends and coworkers, afraid of causing a scene, afraid of professional fallout, not looking to start a fight.

Guess what? That isn’t going to work much longer.

Every inch that Christians give over as a forgone conclusion: that children don’t deserve to be protected by their parents, that religious belief is a private matter that must be exorcised from the public square, that the government dictates morality to the people, and not vice versa…every one of these small skirmishes that we offer up in embarrassed silence, not wanting to muddy the waters, brings us closer and closer to a civilization in which we have no voice.

Because we stopped using our words.

Because we stopped having conversations at the only level that truly matters: personal, one-on-one, and rooted in trust and authentic relationship.

How on earth can we expect our gay neighbor to ever understand our position, however rooted in love and respect, if she does not hear it from our lips, but relies instead on Rachel Maddow’s punditry to inform her how we – Me! Her friend next door! – really see “them.”

How can our children defend their position on abortion to a school bus full of teammates if they’ve never participated in compassionate and nuanced conversations around the dinner table about human dignity and real feminism and authentic healthcare?

How can we expect our leaders to legislate based on objective morality rather than creating morality based on subjective legislation if all of our voices fall silent, all at once, afraid to break the peace, afraid to ruffle feathers, afraid to look foolish.

It is time to look foolish.

It is past time.

It is time to answer truthfully to the question “do you plan to have more children?” Or “have you thought about scheduling a vasectomy” with His truth, not the truth of the day. It is time to explain to a curious coworker that no, you couldn’t vote for a woman who holds up abortion as a fundamental human right, no matter how compelling the circumstances might seem. To defend your position on the intrinsic evil of torture around the campfire at a guy’s fishing weekend. To explain to a friend with an aging parent that some things are worse than suffering, and that some choices are always wrong.

It is time to struggle with hard topics and harder choices out loud, in a way that is authentic and vulnerable and worthwhile, so that someone else who is searching for the truth might see a glimpse of it reflected in your life, however much you might be screwing it up and failing.

Because that is what it means to be a Christian. It means to wrestle with God, accommodating ourselves to His reality, humbly admitting that we don’t understand, that we aren’t doing it perfectly, and that we’ll get back up again and try – with His grace – to do better next time.

But it does not mean falling silent while evil is perpetrated all around us. It doesn’t mean (guilty here!) sliding into a comfortable, surface-level relationship devoid of authenticity with your neighbors so that nothing unpleasant ever comes up to muddy the waters.

We must use our voices while we still have them, because our words have power, power given to us by the One in whose image and likeness we are created.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Christians, it is time to speak up.

“The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over, the days of comfortable Catholicism are past…It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian, a good Catholic, an authentic witness to the truths of the Gospel. A price is demanded and must be paid.”

– Professor Robert P. George, Princeton

Bioethics, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, infertility, IVF, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, pregnancy, Pro Life, Sex, sin, Women's Health

Why not just use birth control? {some possible “right” answers}

June 8, 2016

I field a good number of questions along the lines of “how do I explain to my boss/neighbor/mother-in-law/college bff why we don’t use contraception?”

This tends to be an especially sticky conversation when the questioner in the scenario happens to also be Catholic. That being said, with fewer and fewer Catholics (and Christians of most denominational stripes) actively practicing their faith, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to toss out the simple “Because we’re Catholic” line out there, period, no matter who’s doing the asking.

You’re Catholic? So what? So’s my brother/hairdresser/uncle/pastor, and they all have no problem with the Pill.

And then there’s that persistently-pesky misappropriation of Pope Francis’ own take on the matter. (And no amount of pointing people to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even Francis’ own latest encyclical, will do the trick. Because they read something on CNN he reportedly said on an airplane, so boom, 2,000+ years of Magisterial teaching, torched.)

In my own experience, my best conversations about how and why we have so many kids have been more personal than “because we’re Catholic.” But of course, that is one reason: We have more than a couple kids because we believe, with the Church, that marriage and babies are tied together in a sanctifying, delightful, and often overwhelming way. And for our marriage, that belief and the resultant openness to life has yielded a larger than average family size in a modest amount of time.

Remember though, this openness to life and docility to God’s will can look vastly different for different marriages. I have friends whose heroism far exceeds what I can hope to offer with my life, even if afforded several more decades of time on earth. Their “yeses” have yielded tiny caskets, months of painful longing, and years of frustrated hopes and dreams. We should never assume that a family with fewer than 5 children “must be using contraception,” or isn’t “open” to what God has for them. He gives and takes away.

We don’t actually get to call those shots, which is utterly confounding to the modern concept of omnipotence-by-science, where fertility is concerned.

Another possible good answer for inquiring minds can be a quick crash course in Theology of the Body, no advanced degree required: God’s plan for sex is better than ours.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what we hope for in our marriage, and about what marriage is. We want to be consistent with our actions and our words, and for our love to be holistic. It seems unhealthy to separate the potential for creating new life from the potential for deep communion through sex. So we don’t try to. And enough conversations with friends and acquaintances who do have convinced us that using contraception isn’t going to bring more pleasure or more unity into our marriage.

If anything, the anecdotal accounts we hear from couples who are using birth control seem to point to more strain, more sexual frustration, and more opportunities for miscommunication and conflict.

Another big reason for us, personally, is simply the casual observation that our culture sucks at sex.

Divorce, estrangement, frigidity, sexual assault, disease, abortion, adultery…all this stuff was supposed to be solvable via contraception. Or at least tamped way down. It’s gone the opposite direction, though. And what’s toxic for the culture at large isn’t something we want in our master bedroom.

Finally, there’s something to be said about wanting what you can’t have. Abstinence is not, it turns out, the end of the world.

And I will admit, after almost 7 years of practicing NFP, there is an inherent element of healthy self denial (not to be confused with the mind numbing insanity of the postpartum period) that I’m throwing in the “W” column. It can be good to have to wait. It’s good to sometimes want what you can’t have, or at least, what you can’t have without rolling the dice on another butt in diapers 10 months down the road. It’s good for our marriage, and for our development as adult Christians who are capable of suffering out of love for God and for one another.

So, in summary, there are reasons beyond “the Church told me no,” “I don’t know where babies come from,” or “I don’t want to put more hormones/chemicals in my body.”

(Though those are all perfectly sufficient answers, too. Particularly in line at the grocery store.)

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Pro Life, relativism

The unsexiness of death (or what ‘Me Before You’ is missing)

June 3, 2016

One of these days I’m going to write a nice, fluffy post aaaaaaall about my favorite organic non-hormone disrupting eco-friendly non-GMO spray sunscreen. Or something like that.

Today is not that day.

This weekend marks the opening of Hollywood’s latest offering in the relatively new genre of “death porn,” and it’s a doozie.

I haven’t (and probably won’t) see the movie, because I prefer to remember Finnick losing his life in a heroic act of self sacrifice in the fetid sewers beneath the Capitol, not (spoiler alert) committing suicide while his approving-yet-heartbroken girlfriend holds his hand, and the bottle of pills.

But I did read the book.

And this story, this little love-story-that-actually-wasn’t, is, I think, more dangerous than some of Hollywood’s earlier attempts. Million Dollar Baby sent a depressing message about the value of an elite athlete’s life post-major-trauma, but the confused message of “loving someone enough to kill them” at least wasn’t mixed in with romantic love. It’s a small “at least,” but a notable one, I think, for our culture which has sexual love on a perilous pedestal indeed.

This story is a little different, because the main character is already paralyzed and clinically depressed when he meets his would-be lover and eventual suicide accomplice. It wasn’t a tale of knowing the man before the profoundly life-altering trauma, but knowing – and falling in love with – only the man he was afterwards: the crippled man in the power chair.

So it’s possible, then, to fall in love with a human being who has been profoundly damaged by disease or accident. Because his essence, his intrinsic value, is unchanged. But what this movie gets so wrong is it’s seminal manifestation of love. The climax in this love story isn’t a sex scene, but a suicide scene.

Hollywood has sex pretty backwards, as it is, but things take a complicated cultural turn when we move from letting our feelings be the sole barometer for our sexuality (check) to letting our feelings be the criterion against which we measure the goodness of our continued existence.

Do I feel like I’d be better off dead? Do I have a plan for how I’d like to make this happen? Could I get my loved ones to endorse and even participate in this plan? (This used to be called clinical depression with suicidal ideation, and I’m pretty sure it’s still in the DSM. For now.) Great! Cue next major Social Movement of Great Significance, which you’d better get behind or else you might be a Bigot with a capital-B.

Eons ago, the year before last, Brittany Maynard was catapulted into global fame for her own battle for “death with dignity.” Physician-assisted suicide enthusiasts “Compassion and Choices” jumped onto her bandwagon and road it hard and fast to her eventual suicide death, on November 1st, 2014. It was, by that point, such a Truman Show-esque spectacle, one wonders whether she was able to exercise complete freedom, in the end, or if the intensity of nearly worldwide scrutiny and a nasty public debate signed her death certificate months before the actual event. It was a tragedy.

Telling clinically depressed, chronically ill, and paralyzed people that their lives are not worth living is a tragedy.

Inviting millions of viewers into the complicated, imaginary love triangle between Lou, Will, and his quadriplegia and driving home the message the the charitable, noble, and humane solution to his suffering is death, is a tragedy.

I hope this movie’s legacy is that it gets people talking about the chilling double standard which exists between disabled people – cripples, as one feisty wheelchair-user prefers we call her – as opposed to us able bodied “regular” folks.

Is a human life only as valuable as the sum of a body’s working parts? To the extent that it’s wanted? The right color? The preferred age, weight and gender?

Either all human life is valuable, or none of our lives have value. Not yours, not mine, not Barack Obama’s or Pope Francis’ or Taylor Swift’s.

Our value does not fluctuate with age. Ability. Wealth. Employment status. Health.

Stand up for life this weekend by having a conversation with someone about this movie, and about the idea that a person with a disability is somehow exempt from being assessed against the same mental health criterion as an able-bodied being. Be prepared for some discomfort. But don’t be surprised if, 5 years from now, we’re not watching romantic dramas about euthanasia between consenting adults, but about parents dispatching terminally ill children “out of love.”

Ever read The Giver?

Things always sounds crazy and far-fetched until suddenly they start to sound a little more like common sense. Maybe because we’ve heard them repeated loudly, and frequently, enough.

Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Pro Life, relativism, sin

Gorillas, internet mobs, and the culture of the living dead

May 31, 2016

“The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual . . . what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”

So reads an excerpt from a 2012 study from the Journal of Medical Ethics, edited by Prof Julian Savulescu, (the director of Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, who will presumably have his ass kicked by CS Lewis at the moment of his death. But I digress.)

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons,” the study explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Simcha Fisher wrote a piece last month that resonated deep, and wiped the last vestiges of hope from my brain that Western civilization could be rehabilitated, wholesale. We’re beyond that. Once death becomes an option, Simcha reasoned, then it becomes the only option. For there will always be a perfectly reasonable explanation for culling the herd of humanity for someone else’s sake.

When our lives cease to be acknowledged as divine in origin, the claim to any sort of inalienable right falls on deaf, progressively aloof ears.

How can a clump of cells be valuable, except to the host who carries it in her womb, and even then, only to the extent that she desires it?

How can a tangled, palsied mess of stiff limbs and a vacant stare be valuable to parents who signed up for a baby, doesn’t matter boy or girl, “as long as it’s healthy,”?

How can a defiant, aggressive, self or sibling-harming 2 year-0ld (most of whom are borderline feral, as any honest parent will admit) be anything other than a mistake we could perhaps scrub from the roster and make another go at?

How could an ailing, demented parent with glaucoma and the first stirrings of Alzheimer’s be worth keeping, to the tune of $20,000 a month, in an assistant living facility, fading in and out of twilight and burning through the grandchildren’s inheritance?

How, indeed.

How, any of us?

Who among us is universally convenient. Useful. Pleasant. Smart. Sweet-smelling.

Who among us has never been a burden to another human soul, and can solemnly swear to avoid the near occasion of burden for all their days, so long as they live?

People have become so very disposable. And real love, the 21st century reasons, means learning to say “I’d kill you” should the circumstances demanded it.

(Oddly enough, real, live disabled people – or differently abled, as it were – don’t seem to share that opinion.)

A 4 year-old falls into a gorilla enclosure because his reckless, negligent mother had the audacity to lose him in a crowded zoo, and the world falls to pieces over the death of, wait for it … the ape. The mother of the nasty little boy who I presume ought to have been left to face the consequences of his own poor choices, Hunger Games style, is now receiving death threats by the hundreds and angry, internet-fueled hate missives by the thousands.

The two leading presidential candidates for the United States of America have either tacitly or explicitly endorsed the wonderful work done by Planned Parenthood, that behemoth of death, again and again.

We’re not sure if we want to live any longer.

We’re not sure if it’s worth living any longer.

Welcome to the dictatorship of relativism. Welcome to an existence so tentatively fixed in reality that one rough semester of junior high could determine whether you live to see your high school graduation, and which locker room you’ll use to change into your cap and gown, should you begin as Brad but end up as Brittany.

Everything is fluid, nothing is certain, and a subjective emotionalism seems to have swept into the vacuum left by our collectively-vacated common sense. Can a society survive the complete abdication of reason? And is it possible to maintain peace without an objective standard of goodness to which we all of us citizens aspire and cling?

I’m not talking about multiculturalism or pluralism, because of course, civilizations have flourished in their diversity, and precisely because of their diversity. But even pluralistic societies tended to be composed of citizens who hold to objective moral truths and adhered to a shared moral order, something along the lines of “don’t kill, don’t cheat, don’t steal.”

We’re beyond that, now. We’ve thresholded to a new echelon of humanity, where the old stodgy moral norms of the Abrahamic religious traditions can at last be swept away like so much patriarchal tartar, built up over millennia of brainwashing.

We have new gods: convenience and technology. All the rest can be jettisoned.

This is depressing as hell to read, isn’t it?

Because it is hell. This is actually what hell is like: an utter disregard for the good of the other, a complete rejection of God, and profound, terminal selfishness. So when you look up, bewildered, from another spiraling news cycle and wonder what in the hell is going on in the world, you’re on the right track.

Hell is precisely what is going on, in the world.

And that is why He came. That is why He’ll come again.

Jesus is the only possible solution to a world as broken as ours. And whether or not it’s broken any worse than Nazareth circa 2 BC is up for debate. But He is and has always been The Only Possible Solution.

It’s not a nice story. He’s not a happy, aspirational character from the annuls of history. He came so that we might have life, and life in abundance.

Because without Him? There is only death.

Look around.

birth story, Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Pope Francis, Pro Life

Is having kids “sustainable?”

May 10, 2016

(Perhaps I could have called this one “does green sex = green babies?” but older, wiser Jenny is actually a little embarrassed to have gotten that term rolling.)

A couple months back a reader messaged me with a good – and weird – question. Like the great blogger and expert time juggler that I am, I promptly never answered her message and lost it in the bowels of Facebook. But! I remembered the inquiry all these months, and I wanted to take a stab at it today.

Her trouble was with a friend of a more progressive stripe who’d been bending her ear on how profoundly “unsustainable” children are, and for this reason, that no one could possibly justify having more than 1 of them.

My reader, troubled though she was by her acquaintance’s apparent disdain for the continuation of the human race, was hard pressed for an appropriate response.

My initial response was to snort laugh through my nose. But then I sobered up, because hadn’t I just driven my gas guzzling mini van to Whole Foods just that past week in search of the cheapest organic formula this side of the internet?

Granted, I had the vehicle filled nearly to capacity and was therefore a candidate for the HOV lane. But I did see her point.

From a purely secular and ecological perspective, things have gotten so crazily out of focus that I suppose it is possible to make the case that HUMAN LIFE ITSELF IS NOT SUSTAINABLE OR RESPONSIBLE.

But what does that mean? Have we come to such a profound depth of self-loathing as a species that we’ve begun to philosophically self destruct over the very meaning and purpose of existence?

Is this the inheritance of relativism and materialistic humanism?

I think (for now) no, to the first, but yes to the second.

I don’t believe that most people are hellbent on human destruction in the name of good stewardship of creation. That rather flies in the face of the essence of creation, at any rate, does it not?

Can’t have a creation without creatures, and creatures gonna imitate their Creator.

But therein lies the bigger problem, a very real fruit of the harvest of a relativistic and materialistic worldview: people are no longer uniquely paramount in the created order, and people are no longer valued based on who they are, but instead are measured increasingly by what they do.

In plainer terms, people only have as much worth as what they can offer back to the world.

Which is why we abort babies with Down Syndrome.

Which is why elderly Canadians are waitlisted for basic medical services in the name of “conservation of resources.”

Which is why babies born out of wedlock to poor, single, black women are targeted more ruthlessly by Planned Parenthood than any other subset of humanity.

If you don’t have something readily apparent to offer in the marketplace, you may excuse yourself from society.

Babies, of course, are about the most useless of all humans. They consume endlessly. Milk, diapers, energy, affection. They produce nothing but waste, quite literally. And so, by the standards outlined above, they are in no way “sustainable.”

Crazy thing is, they’re also who every one of us once was.

It is a foolish bias for the here and now that drives an adult population to utterly devalue the past and the future for the sake of the almighty present.

If there’s one way to easily sum up most of our cultural woes in the year 2016, selfishness might be it.

My body, my free time, my best life now; my convenience and my prosperity and my mental health and my infinite disposable income and leisure.

Children threaten all of those, sometimes terminally. And so children have become one of the enemies of the hip new economy of self realization and fun.

For fear of missing out, we’ve traded away the one thing that really matters: relationship with the other, and that uniquely human capacity to love exponentially into the future, willing the good for a society that does not yet exist, but which will one day utterly replace your own.

(Presumably, that society will still be comprised of people, not just dogs and iPhones.)

Relationships are tricky, though. And they’re often costly. They’re unpredictable and the benefits do not, emphatically, always outweigh the costs.

But if new life coming into this sad, old world isn’t the very essence of what we’re doing here…then what else matters?

Yolo, indeed. Emphasis on the “you.”

But if it does matter? If the future is not some faceless wasteland of McDonald’s wrappers and water bottles and overcrowded parking lots with double parked hovercrafts, but a continuation of the human story? Then it matters very much indeed what we’re spending our time and money and yes, our non-renewable resources into.

Investments wisely made yield dividends into the future.

I could go into the myriad ways that children can be “sustainable” and “green” because hand me downs, carpools, shared toy economies and limited carbon footprints from expensive air travel. But those essays already exist, and the more fundamental problem in my mind isn’t demonstrating whether having a small or medium or large family can be super socially conscious, but rather the fact that the question itself is being raised: are human beings themselves, sustainable?

Without an eternal worldview and an end game sunk deep into immortality, I don’t know how one answers that question.

Which is perhaps precisely why we’re asking it in the first place.

Lose sight of the Creator, lose sight of the dignity of the creature. And the rest of creation, along with it. Which is what Pope Francis has been telling us all along.

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Culture of Death, pregnancy, Pro Life, Uncategorized

Zika, abortion, and contraceptive imperialism

January 29, 2016

You knew I was going to write about this, right?

I can’t help myself. My newsfeed is filling up with blustering outrage and hand wringing over the Zika virus – a heinous incurable disease with dire consequences for the most defenseless innocents – and the talking heads of the West are trotting out the same tired standard schtick about “protection” and “family planning services.”

To briefly summarize: there is a hideous mosquito-transmitted (and less frequently, sexually-transmitted) blood borne virus that has the potential to cause profound birth defects in babies who are exposed in utero. There is no known treatment or inoculation, and the recommendation for travelers abroad is to avoid conception for 30-120 (or more, sources vary) days after potential exposure.

The news for the unfortunate inhabitants of the infected lands is much more grim: 2 or 3 years of postponing baby making. A harrowing prognosis for couples and families, many of whom, unlike many of their wealthier global neighbors, take great joy in welcoming new life into their homes.

Many poverty stricken societies, in a posture which is startlingly alien to the affluent and individualistic West, are far more welcoming to and desirous of children. (And when their children – no less loved or valuable than our own – do fall ill? We throw condoms at them, more often than not, failing to address the dignity of the human person.)

A Facebook friend pointed out the hypocrisy of holding developing countries to higher standards than our own, suggesting that allowing them to use DDT, an insecticide problematic in it’s own right, but for sure a lesser of two evils, could go a long way towards eradicating the virus itself.

The problem is, we’ve become so inoculated by the drumbeat of the catastrophic (and deeply xenophobic) myth of overpopulation, the actual lives of the persons affected are often second or even third fiddle to the Very Important Goal of getting condoms in the hands of every poor indigenous savage who couldn’t possibly be capable of abstinence in the face of lethal risks. Or clandestinely spaying women in hospitals and field clinics without knowledge or consent when they are at their most vulnerable, giving birth.

If I sound angry, it’s because I am angry.

We treat our brothers and sisters in the hotter, poorer parts of the world like the animals we believe them to be, and increasingly like the animals we ourselves behave as.

And when a gruesome virus builds to a pandemic level, we start moaning about the grim prognosis for those unfortunate, backwards countries without sufficient access to contraception and abortion.

Not about how to cure the virus.

Not about how to stop the spread of the disease.

Not about how to kill off the particular species of mosquito transmitting it.

No, we jump straight to the real enemy: the deformed, microcephalic baby. And that must be avoided at all costs.

But if that were really true, surely the prevailing message would be a universal plea for abstinence and respect for the human body – particularly for the female body. Surely a couple wanting to avoid parenting a child with profound special needs in an impoverished environment would be advised to avoid sexual contact at all costs, lest the inevitable method failure or human error in contraceptive use result in conception.

But no. We can solve that little problem with abortion, can’t we?

Better to have dead babies in stricken wombs then living, suffering babies whose parents were not properly vetted on the risks the virus posed to their prospective progeny.

I wish this story had a happier ending, but it doesn’t. Because at the end of the day, we’re exporting more than food and medicine to the developing world: we’re exporting an ideology. And our ideology here in the West is fundamentally rooted in the view of child-as-burden, and pregnancy as disaster.

Zika just allows us to draw clearer enemy lines.

St. Rose of Lima, Nossa Senhora Aparecida, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

And Lord, have mercy.

Abortion, Pro Life

Supporting Mary’s Shelter

December 15, 2015

*Update: now with a working Paypal link. (hashtag technology idiot)

If you all remember last year around this time we did a little fundraiser/charitable giving effort on behalf of Mary’s Shelter – a home for women in crisis pregnancy situations/moms with newborns. Their organization is truly the fullest expression of what it means to be pro life: material assistance, spiritual support, medical and emotional care, and physical shelter. It’s the total package.

One of my best friends, Karen Cruess, sells Arbonne, and last year she had the beautiful idea to create baskets filled with botanical skin care products to give to the mamas who call Mary’s Shelter home.

I LOVE the idea of incorporating quality and beauty into charitable giving. I think it’s easy enough to give leftovers, or to troll the Target dollar spot (um, guilty as charged) loading up on sparkly body wash and crappy nail polish. When Karen and I were brainstorming about how we could promote her giving baskets here on the blog again this year, I was really struck by the idea that these moms deserved the same level of quality that I have at home in my own medicine cabinet (and in my makeup bag).

It’s natural (and I’m looking in the mirror here) to go for the biggest bang for your buck when you’re doing charitable giving. But I think there’s something to be said for giving something a little nicer and a little higher quality than, say, Kroger brand body wash. Even if the store brand is what you’d buy for your own family.

It’s our prayer that these moms feel a little pampered when they receive their gift baskets, and from what I heard back last year, they truly did.

It’s easy enough to be pro life when all eyes are on baby. It’s a further step to love and support the mama who did turn away from the clinic, who left the abusive relationship, who put school on hold to give her child a shot at life.

If this resonates with you at all, would you consider sponsoring a basket for one of these mamas this Christmas? It’s a suggested donation of just $35 (Karen is selling everything at cost and donating the packaging and shipping), and it could be a really sweet part of your family’s holiday this year. Generous love for an unwed mother in a crisis pregnancy? Sounds very seasonally appropriate.

You can donate two ways. The first (and probably easiest), is by clicking here and giving directly via Paypal.

The cost per basket is $35, but any amount you can spare is so very appreciated.

(And don’t worry, if you don’t parle Paypal but you still want to give, please drop me an email with “Mary’s Shelter” in the subject line, and I’ll connect you directly with Karen to give via CC or checking account.)

Please pray for these mamas and their babies, if nothing else. It’s a tough time of year to be alone in any circumstances, and they’ve each made a heroic choice in a culture that screams at them to do the easy thing, the thing that’s no big deal and gives them back their “freedom.”

Praise God for brave mothers and sweet babies who don’t know how lucky they are.

(p.s. Karen’s husband is the name associated with the Paypal account: “Scott Cruess” will appear on your gift receipt. Don’t worry, he’s a firefighter and an okay guy – he won’t embezzle the funds 😉

About Me, Contraception, Evangelization, Family Life, motherhood, NFP, Parenting, Pro Life

If the worst thing that happens to my kids

November 13, 2015

… is that they have to work harder and share more than the average middle class child of the 21st century, then I’m okay with that.

I’m more than okay, in fact.

A couple days ago I wrote about the curious phenomena of parenting and motherhood, in particular, getting a little less intense as the number of children increases. Maybe that’s not exactly the right turn of phrase. It’s still incredibly intense, but I no longer feel like I’m drowning in plain sight. More like in hidden sight. Kidding. Mostly.

But truly, for our family, four has been easier than two, and three was definitely easier than one. It doesn’t make sense from a (human) logical perspective, it’s true, but nonetheless it has been my experience. And it seems to be the case for many of us:

“Motherhood at any level is physically, emotionally and mentally exhausting. It takes everything you have, whether you’re mothering one child or (I suspect), seven.”{new post}

Posted by Mama Needs Coffee

An interesting side discussion sprang up in the midst of the conversation though, and it’s one that at first had me laughing but then had me thinking more deeply about the reader’s concerns, but also about what exactly we’re trying to do with these kids of ours. Or, more to the point, what their telos, their intended end, is.

The question was raised that wasn’t it a little unfair for my older kids who were clearly being burdened with helping the younger ones, and wasn’t that why my life was so much easier now with four little people on deck? I basically cackled when I read that because honestly? My eldest was still yelling for me to wipe up until this latest baby was born and, at 9 months pregnant last summer, I was still lumbering to the bathroom to do it.

Because hashtag idiot, hashtag inexperienced mother. So no, not terribly helpful … yet.

He has, in all fairness, stepped up considerably since Luke was born, and he’s now dressing himself, brushing his own teeth, putting away his own laundry, and setting and clearing the table. Sometimes he empties all the trash cans in the house into the main trash, and that’s awesome. Last week I bought him a little snow shovel and he likes “clearing” the driveway. Which is about as effective as one might imagine, if one were to imagine using a teaspoon to scoop a banana split.

So he’s learning to be helpful, for sure. And he has definitely fetched more than a few diapers in his day, as have his two younger mobile siblings. But I would not say we’re operating with a crack team of teen girls conscripted to hold babies and change diapers and cut up fruit for snack time. And I think that’s what my reader was alluding to.

It sounds dreamy.

Or maybe it sounds dreary, for the teens in question.

But I’ve thought good and hard about it for the past couple days, and I’ve spent some time observing the teens in my life and thinking back on my own adolescence, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if a child’s greatest complaint upon arriving at adulthood is that they were too put upon with the care of their own siblings, well…I think that’s a pretty decent outcome.

Let me explain.

First, I don’t think anyone would argue that we’re facing an epidemic of adolescent altruism in this society. Far from it. Now there are good – really good – young people in my community. Their parents have done an incredible job with them, and they’re just good people, period. But I’d venture to say that they’re the exception.

I think it’s really, really difficult to raise unselfish, confidant young men and women in this culture of ours. Because it goes against literally everything they’re programmed to believe, almost from birth: you are special, you are uniquely gifted, you deserve the best, and we are going to make sure your life is really fun, because fun is the greatest good.

Show me one example of media or current pop culture that doesn’t cater to those messages and I’ll recant. But I can’t think of a single one myself.

So when I meet teens and young adults who are kind, unselfish, confidant, and hard working in spite of having been raised in middle class America…I know it’s in spite of the culture, not because of it.

And you know what’s a really, really effective inoculation against entitlement, selfishness, and terminal naval gazing?

Family. Family in general, and siblings in particular.

It’s awfully hard to imagine you’re the most special snowflake in the blizzard when you’ve got 4 people who look a whole lot like you vying for resources and sharing closest space and a schedule with.

And in the school of life, the family is the primary curriculum for how to be human. It’s where we learn to love, to be loved, and, quite honestly, to suffer.

Not for suffering’s sake, but because to dwell on this planet is to experience suffering, and to persist in joy in spite of it.

And it’s also where we learn to wipe down the bathroom sink, start the dryer, and empty the dishwasher.

Having grown up with 6 siblings and 1.5 bathrooms between us, I can personally attest to having learned that lesson firsthand.

And what a small suffering it was. What a gentle primer on delayed gratification, on frustration, on the cost of selfishness (no hot water for #’s 4,5, and 6…you monster), on the reality that this life is not all about me.

Because this life? It’s not all about me.

There is a fine line that parents must walk when it comes to instructing in selflessness and industriousness and generosity and relying overly much on/taking advantage of their older kids, in particular. But if the worst thing that happens to a teen is that they’re missing out on some Friday night football games and Saturday night keggers because they’re being roped into babysitting?

That’s a big “W” in my play book.

Believe me, I lived that life. And even though I’m the eldest of seven kids, I was mostly a selfish, bratty monster for years 12 through twenty…something. When my mom announced her pregnancy with my youngest brother Patrick, I burst into tears and screamed (I am not proud of this) “How could you do this to me???!!” in the driveway, so yeah, not dramatic at all. And no, family size is not an inoculation against teenage drama. But. But.

I grew up. We all did. Only one of us remains at home, and it’s only for another year or so. The rest of us have all launched, a few have married and now with children of our own, we’re once again sharing space. But here’s what it looks like on the other side:

All those Friday nights (and truthfully? It wasn’t all that many) that I spent babysitting? Those same exact small people are now baby-sitting my kids on the weekends so Dave and I can grab a date night. They’re dropping by to read a story or take someone to the park for an hour of catch. They’re offering to pull the sled and shoot nerf guns when we bring the crew together for family events.

It’s full circle.

And my children, despite everything that I do wrong in raising them, will at the very least carry a kind of natural immunity to selfishness by their sheer closeness and volume. And I pray that when they’re grown they’ll look at each other the way my siblings and I do, and they’ll thank God that their crazy parents said yes. And while I don’t think “WhatsApp” will be a thing by then, I hope they’re all on a group hologram text of some kind, and that they talk every day and are each other’s best friends and greatest champions.

That’s not the worst thing that could happen.

(P.s. my two eldest cherubs emptied an entire bag of craft feathers that!I!bought!myself!why! and 150 pipe cleaners onto the family room rug while I tapped this out and a few are wispily stuck to the baby’s bald head and now they’re both “cleaning” up their mess and writhing on the floor like despairing, spawning salmon by turns. Just, you know, in the spirit of full disclosure.)

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