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Source: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/04/05/pope.contraception.reut/index.html [This on-line article is more than two years old. The link is dead, meaning the article has been taken off-line.] World Pope's ban on contraception caused rift Tuesday, April 5, 2005 Posted: 6:46 PM EDT (2246 GMT) RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) -- Rosa Maria Domingos Soares, a 52-year-old Brazilian housemaid and passionate Catholic, fondly remembers her grandparents' family. They had 12 children and never used contraception, she said. But that is out of the question nowadays. "A big family is beautiful, but today one must use some sort of contraception due to the high costs of education and food, as well as violence. I have three children, but now I think I should not have had that many," Soares said. From Latin America to Asia and Africa, Catholics struggling to care for large families amid grinding poverty and an AIDS pandemic faced a dilemma over Pope John Paul II's opposition to contraception. Some hope that will change under his successor. Many Catholics simply chose to ignore Rome's teaching. But the Vatican ban on any artificial birth controls also caused people to abandon Catholic rites, because they no longer felt comfortable in the church while using condoms or other "safe sex" methods. Brazil, the world's largest Catholic country, saw a decline of 15 percent in the number of people following the faith during the 26 years of John Paul's papacy. "Rural Catholicism is very rigid. And many people in these areas now declare themselves non-religious, not because they are agnostic, but because they disagree with some religious principles, among them no contraception," said Cesar Romero Jacob, a political science professor at Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University. Unlike in some other countries, the church does not create obstacles against the Brazilian government's campaign for greater condom use, including free distribution. "The Brazilian bishops' official position remains the same: that sexual abstinence is the remedy. But they generally recognize that the condom is a lesser evil than AIDS," Jacob said. In Africa, one of the few areas where the church is expanding but where 25 million people live with HIV, some pressure groups say the church's continued opposition to condoms threatens the fight against AIDS. "Where there are extreme forms of poverty, people rely on the Roman Catholic Church for handouts, and when those handouts come with advice on not using condoms then that has a very big impact," said Nadira Omarjee, a researcher at People Opposing Women, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. "The next pope should be someone who understands the reality of the developing world." Current African contenders for the papacy -- including Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze -- say the promotion of condoms has done nothing to halt the spread of AIDS and has instead encouraged promiscuity. Contraception activists like Frances Kissling, president of Washington-based Catholics for a Free Choice, believe the Vatican will take a more tolerant stance on contraception in the next few years due to AIDS and overpopulation. She says the Vatican's current position is dangerous since Catholic health agencies provide treatment to about a quarter of all HIV victims and are major recipients of aid. "The problem is, the longer these people survive thanks to the good treatment by the church, the more opportunities they have to infect others. It's a losing situation," she said. The Catholic Church points to Uganda as an example where it says an "abstinence-only" policy has reduced the HIV rate. But U.N. officials contend Uganda's success was as much due to promotion of condom use as to abstinence. As more Catholics disobey the Vatican, birth rates have fallen sharply in Latin America. A woman in Brazil had 2.3 children on average in 2004 compared with 6 children in 1960. According to a 2003 poll commissioned by Catholics for a Free Choice, 91 percent of Catholics in Mexico and Colombia, and 79 percent in Bolivia, thought adults should have access to condoms and contraception pills. "Where the church controls the services, availability is more difficult," Kissling said. In Chile birth rates have dropped in the same way as in Brazil thanks to government family planning campaigns. Veronica Schiappacasse, a researcher with Chile's Reproductive Health Institute, said church attacks on sex education in schools and making birth control available to young people have contributed to a jump in teen pregnancies. As activists await the views of a new pope on contraception, Rosario Ramirez, a 54-year-old woman who sells potato chips in hot sauce outside the Mexico City Cathedral, looks at it simply. "It's one's own decision. I have nine children because I never used any birth control. God gives them to us, he decides, and we do our part," she said. Copyright 2005 Reuters. **************************** Below are some few raw facts about American Roman Catholics and their disagreement with their religion. Source: http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/reform/documents/2006catholicsandcontraception.pdf [availabe for download] Today, the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the United States disagree with the hierarchy�s ban and use contraception � Sexually active Catholic women above the age of 18 are just as likely (97%) to have used some form of contraception banned by the Catholic church as women in the general population (97%). � 85% of sexually active Catholic women report that they have had their partners use condoms during intercourse. � 78% of sexually active Catholic women report having used birth control pills. � Married sexually active Catholic women who attend church once a week or more are as likely (88%) to use a form of contraception that is prohibited as those who attend services less frequently (88%). Catholics have rejected churchapproved family planning methods (the cervical mucus and symptothermal methods) in favor of reliable, modern methods of contraception. � Less than 3% of sexually active Catholic women use church-approved methods as their primary form of family planning. � Even among married Catholic women who attend church every week, only 5% rely primarily on church-approved methods for preventing pregnancy. National Survey of Family Growth, 2002 Hispanic Catholic women use birth control. � 94% of sexually active Hispanic Catholic women in the US have used a contraceptive method banned by the church. � The percentage of married Hispanic Catholic women who use a modern contraceptive method is comparable to that of non-Hispanic married Catholic women�90% vs. 87%. National Survey of Family Growth, 2002 Catholic women and their doctors believe that health care providers should make a variety of contraceptive methods available and accessible to their patients. � 90% of Catholic women want their community hospitals to offer birth control, 77% want them to offer voluntary sterilization and 76% want them to offer emergency contraception (EC) to women who have been raped. Belden Russonello and Stewart, 2000 � 88% of Catholic physicians say they would prescribe birth control to any adult patient that requested it. RNS/Charlotte Observer, 2005 Catholics disagree with the Vatican�s stance on birth control and tend to trust their conscience more than the church hierarchy when making decisions about family planning. � 78% of adults surveyed believe that the pope should allow Catholics to use birth control. CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 2005 � 75% percent of Catholics believe that you can be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy�s teaching on birth control and only 13% believe that the church hierarchy should have the final say on contraception. Life Cycle Institute/National Catholic Reporter Poll, 2005 **************************** Source: http://www.bupipedream.com/112103/opinion/o4.htm The Catholic church and the lies they tell about contraception Nell Becker Columnist Another campaign of the war against sexual freedom has begun by the Catholic Church. This November, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops met to address certain issues of the church, one of the main issues being Catholics' neglect to follow the church's anti-contraception laws. The solution the Conference came up with? An easy-to-read booklet preaching the fundamentals behind the church's stand on the ban on contraception, as well as other topics, including the "evils" of same-sex unions. Excellent. Just what the adolescents of our country need: more religious propaganda extolling the effectiveness of "natural family planning" and the faultiness of contraception. One highlight of the book is that it links the instability of artificial birth control --condoms, birth control pills, the birth control patch, diaphragms, etc. -- to the constant demand for abortion, because, as the booklet says, usually the people who need abortions are the ones who use birth control, right? Well, I wonder, since if taken correctly, birth control pills are ideally 99.5 percent effective and realistically 95 percent effective and condoms are around 70 to 85 percent effective, whereas "natural family planning" -- not using any form of birth control but having sex at the times when you are least likely to get pregnant during a woman's menstrual cycle -- has no such statistic. Granted, the church advocates abstinence until marriage, but when you look at the country pragmatically, abstinence is not always practiced. So why would the church want to construct an easy-to-read pamphlet telling those who practice Catholicism to make the unstable and less safe choice? Oh yeah, because then, those same impressionable, dumb Catholics will head over to the abortion clinic when natural family planning fails. Then the number of abortions go up, and then the Catholic Church can twist that into the belief that the number of abortions is going up because the non-Catholic youths of America are using condoms and birth control pills and still getting pregnant. This booklet is the twisting of truth. When I attended Catholic high school I was forced to take a religion class that was called "Women of Prayer." But the class basically became a debate between my religion teacher and me over the legitimacy of advocating this "rhythm method" of contraception. The teacher literally lied and told the girls in my class that this method was 99 percent effective, impossible since without protection one has at least an 8 percent chance of getting pregnant no matter how far along they are in their cycle. So why are the Catholics advocating natural family planning? It all comes back to the war on abortion. Contraception is evil, abortion is just another form of contraception and so if the bishops can link the two, they kill two birds with one stone. In the beginning, contraception was taboo in the church because of abstinence, yet now the church is saying that sex is frowned upon, but as long as you don't use protection it's okay. The church is no longer recommending the right thing, but the dangerous thing. So this is my propaganda to throw back at them. It's not even a whole pamphlet, but just a simple question: If the church wants abortion to end, why not advocate the contraception that will prevent it? OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |