Book "Infant Homicides Through Contraceptives"

I got the book today.  No chance to read it yet, but judging from these pages, and the commission members and endorsements, I can recommend it wholeheartedly.  Father John Hardon, Abbot Edmund McCaffrey, James Hitchcock, John Kippley, Thomas Monaghan, Charles Rice... pretty hard to go wrong there.  And James Likoudis, whom I have actually met (as I have also met James Hitchcock and Charles Rice), wrote as impassioned of a defense of the Novus Ordo and the Church's actions to obrogate the Traditional Latin Mass, as I've ever read, so this book can't be condemned as something bubbling up from the fever swamps of Latin Mass traditionalism.

As I said, give it to couples contemplating marriage, give it to penitents in the confessional struggling with the issue, leave it in vestibules...

Here are the pages:

This has been argued back and forth for years, and I could only say to read the book. As far as prevention of implantation, that most certainly is an abortion, in that the fertilized egg is a newly formed human life, and if it cannot implant, due to some artificial intervention, it will die.  "Most medical professionals" agreeing on something doesn't make it true, if nothing else, they are conveniently redefining abortion as "ending of a pregnancy after implantation".  The newly conceived entity is human and alive in that window between fertilization and implantation.

As far as speculating on what is probably going on when a couple only has one or two children, I have my own thoughts, but I do need to warn you that I once caused a near-riot and got a thorough shellacking on another forum when I expressed similar thoughts.  (Not like that matters, other people's responses are "on them" --- you know what they say about opinions, everybody has one --- and I remain unperturbed, unbowed, and unchanged in my mind.)  I got all kinds of pushback on "you can't know whether people are using ABC unless you ask them individually", "polls are meaningless and cannot be relied upon", "they could have fertility problems" (and, I will grant, many do), or "what makes you think those people have sex?" (rolling of the eyes here...), as well as "maybe they're using NFP".  Please, people.  92 percent of American Catholics, according to the most recent polls, dissent from Humanae vitae.  I'm not naive enough to think that use of ABC isn't the overwhelming cause of such small, efficiently-planned and efficiently-sized families.  I know better. 

People do what they want to do, and one way or another, they convince themselves that it's not wrong.  Cognitive dissonance can drive you crazy.

Keeping an egg from implanting is not an abortion, because without implantation the fetus/zygote isn't viable.   It can't grow into a baby without proper implantation in the uterus.

Yes, the Church says any type of artificial birth control is contrary to Gods Law, but not because it is killing a life like abortion, but that it may prevent what otherwise might be a successful pregnancy which God might have allowed.

If the failure of a fertilized egg to implant is an abortion, then God himself allows for a bunch of abortions.   

Trying to convince a country that abortion is murder is hard enough.   Trying to convince them that birth control which prevents fertilization or implantation of an egg is not going to happen.   

No, denial of implantation is an abortion.  The zygote is alive, and if allowed to implant, will continue to grow and thrive.  If that living zygote --- a human life, just not having gotten to its destination (the uterine wall) yet still just as much a human life (I am not going to try to parse questions of ensoulment here) --- is denied that chance to implant, then it will die.  If that denial takes place through deliberate artificial prevention, then that is an abortion, just at an earlier stage in the pregnancy.  It is the same as if a newborn baby were left out in the cold of winter to freeze to death.

And, yes, Almighty God does allow a lot of newly conceived children to die before implantation, and that is part of His creation (and, very possibly, part of the "downstream effect" of Original Sin and that creation having been damaged and inclined towards death).  That is His Will and we do not question it, any more than we question it when He allows an unborn child to die after implantation but before birth.

You do correctly note that convincing Americans to abandon methods of artificial birth control, that also act as an early abortifacient, is going to be quite the hat-trick.  Contraception is, as the ad slogan goes, "as American as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet", and simply put, it makes our economy, indeed our whole society, what it is.  Very few non-Catholics shun contraception, and to narrow their options... well, that wouldn't be well-received.  If the public debate ever gets to that point, there will probably be some hair-splitting to create a false dichotomy of "well, conception doesn't really mean 'conception', it means implantation, or ability to detect the pregnancy with a test..." and so on.  Then the fair question will be "why?".

Some non-Catholics see the problem.  The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), one group of Protestants who are people after my own heart (not thinking of converting, but I do respect them), produced this manuscript some time back:

homeschooldad.info/killpill.html

I am very sorry to know about your dear son's problems.  I hope and pray he, and all of you, are well.

I would just have to wonder if the FDA and peer review are all that concerned about whether implantation is prevented or not, just so long as the result is suppression of pregnancy (or, rather, preventing it from taking place, or ending in a non-traumatic fashion, non-traumatic for the mother, that is).  Even though there is much talk in evangelical and other circles, as well as obviously Catholic ones, about "life beginning at conception", I have to think that BCP developers are more concerned with preventing obvious pregnancy, rather than being concerned about the possibility of denial of implantation if, in fact, conception does take place.

It would be good, if the evangelicals and others to whom I referred above, would have someone sit them down (figuratively speaking) and say "okay, life begins at conception, you do realize what that means, don't you, and are you willing to take that concept to its logical conclusion, that anything --- be it a BCP or be it some other ABC method --- which prevents implantation also causes an abortion, something you surely oppose as well?".  It might take another Protestant telling them, but as long as they understand the reality of the matter, and acknowledge that they must change their thinking and behavior accordingly, I don't really care how they come to the realization.  Some people can be reached by one person, where another person can't reach them.

We do not know the exact point when the soul enters the body.  As I said, there are strong reasons to believe that it enters the body at the moment of conception, and as a matter of prudence (that is, as a matter of not committing murder, which is the killing of a person with a body and soul), we have to go on the assumption that it does indeed do that.  Again, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception strongly points towards that assumption.  Indeed, the most recent Catechism has been used as support for ensoulment at conception, but the use of the word "immediately" has confused many an English-speaker, because while the common vernacular meaning of "immediately" is "right that very second", in the Catechism, this use of the word "immediately" means "without mediation from anyone other than Almighty God", i.e., He infuses the soul without the mediation of the parents.  That is a confusing use of "immediately" for the average reader, and it would be an honest mistake to make.

As far as a woman's activity during her pregnancy (indeed, during any time in which she is fertile, sexually active, and could be pregnant), you might well be able to make a case for her refraining from activity which might threaten an unborn child --- but aside from the obvious (drugs, licit or otherwise, which could be harmful or deadly to the child, tobacco, alcohol, and there is honest debate about the latter in moderation), how would one know?  If it could be proven empirically (just to use absurd examples) that playing Parcheesi, doing Pilates, or eating pepperoni pizza could endanger the life or health of the child, then, yes, you'd have a case.  But in the absence of such knowledge, then the only thing to do, is to live one's life normally.

You make an excellent point by proposing that, in the case of ectopic pregnancy, the presence of the embryo is the "disease", but even if one were to grant this, that would not mean that the embryo ceases to be human --- using this reasoning, it could be seen as both.   This is not terribly far removed from Dr Bernard Nathanson's example of the sane man and the madman tied together at sea, with the madman thrashing and taking both down to drown, but the sane man having a knife with which he can cut the rope, let the madman thrash and drown, free himself, and be able to swim to safety.  May he cut the rope, or may he not?  I'm not sure anyone has ever thought of this, but does it become a function of "the embryo being where it has a right to be"?  Does the embryo have the right to be lodged in the fallopian tube?  What if, hypothetically --- stay with me on this, it'll make sense when I'm done (I hope)  --- the embryo were lodged in the mother's lung?  Her heart?  If you remove the lung, the embryo dies, but the mother may live.  But could you just remove the embryo and leave the lung intact?  Removing the heart is not an option, both mother and embryo would die.  You would either have to remove the embryo, let it die, or leave it be, and both mother and child would certainly die as the child grows.  Does the embryo have the right to be in the lung or the heart?   Yes, it's impossible, but follow the reasoning.  Can the fallopian tube be compared to the lung?  The heart?  If the fallopian tube is not the appropriate place for the embryo to be, does it have a right to be there?  Many questions, and many more beyond that.  Ectopic pregnancies are the ultimate abortion conundrum.

This is an excellent discussion, and I appreciate your willingness to be the advocatus diaboli or the "tenth man".  Truly, iron sharpens iron.