Brown Bagging it at Planned Parenthood
Crimes against the unborn are not the only human wreckage accomplished at Planned Parenthood Abortuaries. No. Human and societal damage blossoms out of the doors of Planned Parenthood locations everywhere.
We usually protest abortion is also applied, though less properly, to cases in which the child is become viable, but does not survive the delivery. In this article we shall take the word in its widest meaning, and treat of abortion as occurring at any time between conception and safe delivery. The word miscarriageis taken in the same wide sense. Yet medical writers often use these words in special meanings, restricting abortion to the time when the embryo has not yet assumed specific features, that is, in the human embryo, before the third month of gestation; miscarriage occurs later, but before viability; while the birth of a viable child before the completed term of nine months is styled premature birth. Viability may exist in the seventh month of gestation, but it cannot safely be presumed before the eighth month. If the child survives its premature birth, there is no abortion -- for this word always denotes the loss of fetal life.
It was long debated among the learned at what period of gestation the human embryo begins to be animated by the rational, spiritual soul, which elevates man above all other species of the animal creation and survives the body to live forever. The keenest mind among the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, had conjectured that the future child was endowed at conception with a principle of only vegetative life, which was exchanged after a few days for an animal soul, and was not succeeded by a rational soul till later; his followers said on the fortieth day for a male, and the eightieth for a female, child. The authority of his great name and the want of definite knowledge to the contrary caused this theory to be generally accepted up to recent times. Yet, as early as the fourth century of the Christian era, St. Gregory of Nyssa had advocated the view which modern science has confirmed almost to a certainty, namely, that the same life principle quickens the organism from the first moment of its individual existence until its death (Eschbach, Disp. Phys., Disp., iii). Now it is at the very time of conception, or fecundation, that the embryo begins to live a distinct individual life. For life does not result from an organism when it has been built up, but the vital principle builds up the organism of its own body. In virtue of the one eternal act of the Will of the Creator, Who is of course ever present at every portion of His creation, the soul of every new human being begins to exist when the cell which generation has provided is ready to receive it as its principle of life. In the normal course of nature the living embryo carries on its work of, self-evolution within the maternal womb, deriving its nourishment from the placenta through the vital cord, till, on reaching maturity, it is by the contraction of the uterus issued to lead its separate life. Abortion is a fatal termination of this process. It may result from various causes, which may be classed under two heads, accidental and intentional.
Accidental causes may be of many different kinds. There may be remote predispositions in the mother to contract diseases fatal to her offspring. Heredity, malformation, advanced age, excessive weakness, effects of former sicknesses, etc. may be causes of danger; even the climate may exercise an unfavorable influence. More immediate causes of abortion may be found in cruel treatment of the mother by her husband or in starvation, or any kind of hardship. Her own indiscretion may to blame; as when she undertakes excessive labors or uses intoxicating drinks too freely. Anything in fact that causes a severe shock to the bodily frame or the nervous system of the mother may be fatal to the child in her womb.
Intentional abortions are distinguished by medical writers into two classes. When they are brought about for social reasons, they are called criminal abortions; and they are rightly condemned under any circumstances whatsoever. \"Often, very often,\" said Dr. Hodge, of the University of Pennsylvania, \"must all the eloquence and all the authority of the practitioner be employed; often he must, as it were, grasp the conscience of his weak and erring patient, and let her know, in language not to be misunderstood, that she is responsible to the Creator for the life of the being within her\" (Wharton and Stille\'s Med. Jurispr., Vol. on Abortion, 11). The name of obstetrical abortionis given by physicians to such as is performed to save the life of the mother. Whether this practice is ever morally lawful we shall consider below.
It is evident that the determination of what is right or wrong in human conduct belongs to the science of ethics and the teaching of religious authority. Both of these declare the Divine law, \"Thou shalt not kill\". The embryonic child, as seen above, has a human soul; and therefore is a man from the time of its conception; therefore it has an equal right to its life with its mother; therefore neither the mother, nor medical practitioner, nor any human being whatever can lawfully take that life away. The State cannot give such right to the physician; for it has not itself the right to put an innocent person to death. No matter how desirable it might seem to be at times to save the life of the mother, common sense teaches and all nations accept the maxim, that \"evil is never to be done that good may come of it\"; or, which is the same thing, that \"a good end cannot justify a bad means\". Now it is an evil means to destroy the life of an innocent child. The plea cannot be made that the child is an unjust aggressor. It is simply where nature and its own parents have put it. Therefore, Natural Law forbids any attempt at destroying fetal life.
The teachings of the Catholic Church admit of no doubt on the subject. Such moral questions, when they are submitted, are decided by the Tribunal of the Holy Office. Now this authority decreed, 28 May, 1884, and again, 18 August, 1889, that \"it cannot be safely taught in Catholic schools that it is lawful to perform . . . any surgical operation which is directly destructive of the life of the fetus or the mother.\" Abortion was condemned by name, 24 July, 1895, in answer to the question whether when the mother is in immediate danger of death and there is no other means of saving her life, a physician can with a safe conscience cause abortion not by destroying the child in the womb (which was explicitly condemned in the former decree), but by giving it a chance to be born alive, though not being yet viable, it would soon expire. The answer was that he cannot. After these and other similar decisions had been given, some moralists thought they saw reasons to doubt whether an exception might not be allowed in the case of ectopic gestations. Therefore the question was submitted: \"Is it ever allowed to extract from the body of the mother ectopic embryos still immature, before the sixth month after conception is completed?\" The answer given, 20 March, 1902, was: \"No; according to the decree of 4 May, 1898; according to which, as far as possible, earnest and opportune provision is to be made to safeguard the life of the child and of the mother. As to the time, let the questioner remember that no acceleration of birth is licit unless it be done at a time, and in ways in which, according to the usual course of things, the life of the mother and the child be provided for\". Ethics, then, and the Church agree in teaching that no action is lawful which directly destroys fetal life. It is also clear that extracting the living fetus before it is viable, is destroying its life as directly as it would be killing a grown man directly to plunge him into a medium in which he cannot live, and hold him there till he expires.
However, if medical treatment or surgical operation, necessary to save a mother\'s life, is applied to her organism (though the child\'s death would, or at least might, follow as a regretted but unavoidable consequence), it should not be maintained that the fetal life is thereby directly attacked. Moralists agree that we are not always prohibited from doing what is lawful in itself, though evil consequences may follow which we do not desire. The good effects of our acts are then directly intended, and the regretted evil consequences are reluctantly permitted to follow because we cannot avoid them. The evil thus permitted is said to be indirectly intended. It is not imputed to us provided four conditions are verified, namely:
Nunc uterum vitiat quae vult formosa videri,
Raraque, in hoc aevo, est quae velit esse parens.
Three centuries later we meet with the first record of laws enacted by the State to check this crime. Exile was decreed against mothers guilty of it; while those who administered the potion to procure it were if nobles, sent to certain islands, if plebeians, condemned to work in the metal mines. Still the Romans in their legislation appear to have aimed at punishing the wrong done by abortion to the father or the mother, rather than the wrong done to the unborn child. The early Christians are the first on record as having pronounced abortion to be the murder of human beings, for their public apologists, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Minutius Felix (Eschbach, \"Disp. Phys.\", Disp. iii), to refute the slander that a child was slain, and its flesh eaten, by the guests at the Agapae, appealed to their laws as forbidding all manner of murder, even that of children in the womb. The Fathers of the Church unanimously maintained the same doctrine. In the fourth century the Council of Eliberis decreed that Holy Communion should be refused all the rest of her life, even on her deathbed, to an adulteress who had procured the abortion of her child. The Sixth Ecumenical Council determined for the whole Church that anyone who procured abortion should bear all the punishments inflicted on murderers. In all these teachings and enactments no distinction is made between the earlier and the later stages of gestation. For, though the opinion of Aristotle, or similar speculations, regarding the time when the rational soul is infused into the embryo, were practically accepted for many centuries still it was always held by the Church that he who destroyed what was to be a man was guilty of destroying a human life. The great prevalence of criminal abortion ceased wherever Christianity became established. It was a crime of comparatively rare occurrence in the Middle Ages. Like its companion crime, divorce, it did not again become a danger to society till of late years. Except at times and in places influenced by Catholic principles, what medical writers call \"obstetric\" abortion, as distinct from \"criminal\" (though both are indefensible on moral grounds), has always been a common practice. It was usually performed by means of craniotomy, or the crushing of the child\'s head to save the mother\'s life. Hippocrates, Celsus, Avicenna, and the Arabian school generally invented a number of vulnerating instruments to enter and crush the child\'s cranium. In more recent times, with the advance of the obsteric science, more conservative measures have gradually prevailed. By use of the forceps, by skill acquired in version, by procuring premature labor, and especially by asepticism in the Caesarean section and other equivalent operations, medical science has found much improved means of saving both the child and its mother. Of late years such progress has been made in this matter, that craniotomy on the living child has passed out of reputable practice. But abortion proper, before the fetus is viable, is still often employed, especially in ectopic gestation; and there are many men and women who may be called professional abortionists.
In former times civil laws against all kinds of abortion were very severe among Christian nations. Among the Visigoths, the penalty was death, or privation of sight, for the mother who allowed it and for the father who consented to it, and death for the abortionist. In Spain, the woman guilty of it was buried alive. An edict of the French King Henry II in 1555, renewed by Louis XIV in 1708, inflicted capital punishment for adultery and abortion combined. Later French law (i.e., early twentieth century) punished the abortionist with imprisonment, and physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists, who prescribe or furnish the means, with the penalty of forced labor. For England, Blackstone stated the law as follows:
The Catholic Church has not relaxed her strict prohibition of all abortion; but, as we have seen above, she has made it more definite. As to the penalties she inflicts upon the guilty parties, her present legislation was fixed by the Bull of Pius IX \"Apostolicae Sedis\". It decrees excommunication -- that is, deprivation of the Sacraments and of the Prayers of the Church in the case of any of her members, and other privations besides in the case of clergymen -- against all who seek to procure abortion, if their action produces the effect. Penalties must always be strictly interpreted. Therefore, while anyone who voluntarily aids in procuring abortion, in any way whatever, does morally wrong, only those incur the excommunication who themselves actually and efficaciously procure the abortion. And the abortion here meant is that which is strictly so called, namely, that performed before the child is viable. For no one but the lawgiver has the right to extend the law beyond the terms in which it is expressed. On the other hand, no one can restrict its meaning by private authority, so as to make it less than the received terms of Church language really signify. Now Gregory XIV had enacted the penalty of excommunication for abortion of a \"quickened\" child but the present law makes no such distinction, and therefore it must be differently understood.
That distinction, however, applies to another effect which may result from the procuring of abortion; namely, he who does so for a child after quickening incurs an irregularity, or hindrance to his receiving or exercising Orders in the Church. But he would not incur such irregularity if the embryo were not yet quickened. The terms \"quickened\" and \"animation\" in present usage are applied to the child after the mother can perceive its motion, which usually happens about the one hundred and sixteenth day after conception. But in the old canon law, which established the irregularity here referred to the \"animation\" of the embryo was supposed to occur on the fortieth day for a male child, and on the eightieth day for a female child. In such matters of canon law, just as in civil law, many technicalities and intricacies occur, which it often takes the professional student to understand fully. In regard to the decisions of the Roman tribunal quoted above it is proper to remark that while they claim the respect and loyal adhesion of Catholics, they are not irreformable, since they are not definitive judgments, nor do they proceed directly from the Supreme Pontiff, who alone has the prerogative of infallibility. If ever reasons should arise, which is most improbable, to change these pronouncements those reasons would receive due consideration.');" onmouseout="tooltip.hide();">abortion at a nearby Planned Parenthood on Saturday mornings. So often, we witness young women stopping by Planned Parenthood for a short visit. They stop in quickly, walk out with a small brown paper bag and check off one more item on their list of Saturday morning errands. What is in these little brown bags?
What is in these little brown paper bags? Thirty tablets, conveniently packaged to re-regulate and confound young women in many ways. Birth Control Pills.
Many medical articles have been written about the problematic side effects Birth Control Pills have on the human body. Nausea, Acne, Bleeding, Leg Pain, Bloating, Contact Lens Eye Pain, Weight Gain, Migraines, Blood Clots and High Blood Pressure. Forty years of medical studies point to long term health problems including increased risk of cancer and heart problems.
But what about the emotional wreckage? So many young women are ruined by giving themselves to selfish opportunistic partners that have no interest in anything other than short term gratification. The emotional trauma of being used, and then discarded has life long consequences for such young women. This is especially true of young women who are facing a vulnerable time in their lives as they grow through teenage years. The desire for attention, affection, approval and acceptance can make them cave in to early “all out,” but temporary emotional commitments. The subsequent “break-up,” rejection and emotional withdrawal is often catastrophic on a young woman.
As young women suffer through the emotional damage of being used, many rebound into other shorter term and less meaningful relationships. They hope the results of their efforts to obtain happiness will be different next time. The cycle of being used and rejected only deepens the emotional scars. Health problems, disease and pregnancy can result, driving a woman to despair.
The ability for a young woman to form a trusting, meaningful long term relationship is impaired. Marriage and the ability to confidently raise children can be hampered. The ideals of love, self sacrifice and the strengthening grace of the Sacrament of Marriage can be lost.
The marriage privilege reflects a deep and long term natural commitment that benefits the married couple. It results in the establishment of a family unit that can result in new life and can strengthen society and its culture. However, Planned Parenthood has worked hard to upturn this in the name of freedom, illicit and meaningless gratification and “women’s health.”
In reality, Women’s physical and emotional health is usually the first casualty. Damage to the integrity of family life, Society and the future of our country are usually other casualties.
Let Planned Parenthood keep their Birth Control Pills and false promise of happiness. Overcome our culture’s pressure to be used and set your sights on a rewarding vocation as a wife and mother.