WASHINGTON, D.C., AUG. 25, 2010 (Zenit.org).- On Aug. 13, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the approval of a new "emergency contraceptive" called "Ella." Its competitor, Plan B, is said to "prevent pregnancy" up to 72 hours (3 days) after intercourse. Ella boasts of 120 hours (5 days) of post-coital effectiveness. The drug is produced by the Paris-based pharmaceutical company HRA Pharma and will be marketed by Watson Pharmaceuticals based out of Morristown, New Jersey. The FDA advisors voted unanimously to approve the drug.

The “conventional wisdom” prevalent in the United States, European Nations, and the United Nations is that the best way to prevent HIV/AIDS in Africa (or anywhere, for that matter) is to practice “safe sex,” that is, to make use of condoms and other prophylactic devises. The Catholic Church is regularly criticized for its failure to urge the use of condoms and “safe sex” in Africa and is blamed for the AIDS “epidemic” in sub-Sahara Africa.

Culture of Life Foundation Senior Fellow William E. May receives United States Conference of Catholic Bishop’s

People of Life Award

Dr. William E. May, a Senior Fellow with the Culture of Life Foundation, was presented with the People of Life Award on August 9th, 2010 by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, at the annual Diocesan Pro-Life Leadership Conference.  To read more, please click here.

Recently my colleague E. Christian Brugger called attention to the threats to the Culture of Life posed by “Transhumanism.” After I read his thoughtful and thought-provoking article, I was reminded of the threats to “culture of life” issues and to the Christian faith by “Virtual Reality.”

WASHINGTON, D.C., JULY 28, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a question on bioethics asked by a ZENIT reader and answered by the fellows of the Culture of Life Foundation.

Q: Does a contraceptive act of sexual intercourse fulfill the Canon Law requirements for Consummation? Regards, SG. A. -- Cape Town, South Africa

E. Christian Brugger offers the following response:

WASHINGTON, D.C., JULY 14, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a question on bioethics asked by a ZENIT reader and answered by the fellows of the Culture of Life Foundation.

Q: Can you tell us what is the latest Church teaching about couples seeking a Catholic marriage, wherein one or both of the spouses are impeded from having children by a tubal ligation and/or vasectomy? Can a priest assist at such a marriage, if he were to know about the situation? Or is it enough that he ask them to consider a reversal? Seems like these cases are becoming an epidemic, and every priest seems to be handling this question differently. -- Fr. I.S. Belleville, New Jersey, USA

E. Christian Brugger and William E. May offer the following response: 

In May the Vatican announced that it was beginning a cooperative venture in adult stem cell (ASC) research with the international biotech firm NeoStem.  Although the Catholic Church has patronized the sciences for centuries, this is the first contractual foray into stem cell research with a for-profit secular corporation.  NeoStem (listed on the Amex) has pharmaceutical operations in the US and China.  The company is launching a development program in adult stem cell therapies in addition to building adult stem cell collection banks in the U.S. and China to allow people to harvest and store their own stem cells as a type of clinical insurance toward future medical need.  Its Chinese division, its website says, was established in order “to leverage the country’s progressive stem cell environment” (www.neostem.com).  NeoStem’s operations with the Vatican—specifically with the Pontifical Council for Culture (PCC)—will run through the corporation’s non-profit foundation “Stem for Life.”  The firm will bring to the relationship its considerable expertise in clinical ASC research; the PCC—extraordinarily—is bringing one million dollars and the “reach” of the Church’s influence.  The New York Daily News reported on May 25 that the money will come from two foundations, but the Vatican has not revealed their names [1].

Introduction
A short time ago my friend Mark Adler, a convert from Judaism to the Catholic Church and manager of the helpful Web site Christendom-awake.org, posted an essay “The Role of the Large Family” (http://www.christendom-awake.org). In his essay, originally written in 1987, revised in 1993 and again in June 2010, he noted that some fifty years ago relatively large families were not uncommon. I can bear witness to this myself; my older sister who was 21 years old when she married in 1947, had seven children, and after I married in 1957 my wife Patricia and I were blessed with seven children between 1958 and 1971. Today a family of 3 or 4 children is regarded as a pretty large family. There are many socioeconomic and cultural reasons for this, of which most of us are well aware. But the truth is that children are a blessing and not a burden; large families are needed for the good, socioeconomic and cultural, of our planet.  I will first debunk the falsehood spread by population controllers and then show the need for and blessings of a large family.

21st century Americans—and others, particularly in the “developed” nations—are deeply divided over issues central to the culture of life: contraception, the generation of human life, abortion, the care of seriously handicapped infants and of the dying, the meaning of sex, marriage, the family, and the kind of home best suited to help children grow into caring and responsible adults. There are many reasons supporting culture of life positions, but there is a need to show why these reasons are good and true and to help others see why. Moreover, sometimes advocates of the culture of life can and do disagree among themselves and/or find themselves perplexed about what is the right and good thing to do. Is there any way to resolve these disputes and overcome doubts?  

WASHINGTON, D.C., JUNE 16, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Here is a question on bioethics asked by a ZENIT reader and answered by the fellows of the Culture of Life Foundation.

Q: Are there any conditions to follow Natural Family Planning (NFP) by a married couple, or is there blanket approval by Catholic Church? Wouldn't NFP be against life if the intention of the couple involved in sexual act is just pleasure and not life, provided they don't have any valid reason to postpone pregnancy? In this case, can NFP be also considered similar to using condoms? Thanks and Regards -- D.R.P, Bangalore, India. 

E. Christian Brugger offers the following response:

In an attempt to keep pace with the advocacy journalism of Time magazine, its rival liberal weekly Newsweek recently published an unflattering piece on the Catholic Church entitled “Banned by the Pope.”  It was written by, of all people, Rev. Charles E. Curran, now 80 years old, the controversial leader of the 1968 dissent against Humanae Vitae.

In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved the oral contraceptive known as “The Pill.” To celebrate the Pill’s 50th birthday Elaine Tyler May, Regents Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, has published America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (New York: Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2010, 214 pp.).

Should we adopt euthanasia to maximize our supply of available organs for transplantation?

For several decades transplant medicine has suffered from a critical shortfall in the supply of organs needed for patients with organ failure.  As a result thousands of patients die each year on waiting lists.  Presently there are over 100,000 patients awaiting donor organs in the U.S.; in 2007 alone, 18 patients per day died waiting for deceased donor organs.  The problem has given rise to significant milestones in end-of-life medicine.  For example, the shift in the 1960s from diagnosing human death in terms of the cessation of heart and lung function (cardio-pulmonary death) to neurological criteria (whole brain death) was motivated by a desire to preserve more transplantable organs.  Another idea that’s been debated over the years is “organ conscription.”  This very month, lawmakers in New York introduced an “opt out” organ conscription bill that would presume that all patients are organ donors unless they explicitly opt out on their driver’s license. [1]  Those of us whose organs are more or less healthy may not appreciate the distress that patients and their families feel knowing that their lives could be saved if only their names reach the top of the wait list.

It is not uncommon for parents of children or the care-givers responsible for older but incompetent persons to be asked by their doctors to allow these “voiceless” [1] subjects to take part in “non-therapeutic” experiments, i.e., experiments that are not designed to be of benefit to the children or incompetent persons but rather to gain knowledge that may be of great benefit to others. Such permission is called “proxy” or “surrogate” consent.

“The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations” is a booklet, edited by Mary Eberstadt and Mary Ann Layden and published this year by the Witherspoon Institute. The booklet summarizes a consultation of 54 scholars held in Princeton, N.J. in December 2008 sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute and co-sponsored by the Institute for the Psychological Sciences. A sampling of participating scholars includes Hadley Arkes of Amherst University, Gerard V. Bradley of Notre Dame University’s Law School, J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas, Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Foundation, Jean Bethke Elshrain of the University of Chicago, John Finnis of Oxford University, Robert George of Princeton University, William Hurlbut, M.D., of Stanford University Medical School, Mary Ann Layden of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Psychiatry, Margarita Mooney of the University of North Carolina, David Novak of the University of Toronto, Roger Scruton of Oxford University, Gladys Sweeney of the Institute for the Psychological Studies, and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia.

Andrew Koppelman and others say “It certainly does!”
Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, and others claim that contraception definitely prevents abortion. This April (2010) Koppelman posted a commentary, “How the Religious Right Promotes Abortion,” [1] that was immediately attacked byspokespersons of the “Religious Right” (e.g., Michael New of the Witherspoon Institute). Koppelman judges it to be “astoundingly stupid and tragic” to argue over this. Continuing, he said, “One of the rare areas of common ground between opponents and supporters of abortion rights is that neither side thinks that unintended pregnancy is a good thing.  We should be able to come together on measures that would actually reduce the rate of unwanted pregnancy, and thus, inevitably, reduce the abortion rate.  That might even help the anti-abortion cause in the long run, because it would reduce the number of American women who have had abortions…. Yet instead, we are having this silly argument.  It is dispiriting.”

In this piece, we would like to define the condition to which the term "vegetative state" refers, discuss certain facts about the tragic condition, introduce key ethical principles for analyzing duties that we have to persons in it, and update our readers on the current state of Catholic teaching on providing food and water to patients in a persistent vegetative state.

The ideas of the young international movement known as "transhumanism" are beginning to characterize the thinking of an increasing number of clinicians and bioethicists. I thought therefore that our readers might profit from a brief introduction to them.

The April 10, 2010 bulletin of iMAPP Marriage News [1] highlighted this issue. It focused on the Witherspoon Foundation’s recent conference and book, The Social Costs of Pornography.[2]

After summing up Marriage News’s report of the Witherspoon Foundation’s conference and book on the social costs of pornography, I will present the masterful analysis of pornography and “pornovision” offered by a prominent philosopher/theologian during the last quarter of the 20th century, namely, Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II.

Introduction
My question is whether everyone has a unique, personal vocation. To prepare the way for answering this question I will first summarize what Christians believe about their personal vocation to follow Christ. It is likely that a majority of our readers are Christians, but I apologize to our non-Christian allies in the struggle to make ours a culture of life for some specifically Christian reflections at the beginning of this essay. I do so because as I hope then to show we can speak meaningfully of a unique personal vocation for everyone, including non-Christians.

Duke University Champions
Most Americans know that Duke University’s Men’s basketball team is the 2010 champion of college basketball. But few know that Dr. Monique Chireau, a Duke University expert in obstetrics and gynecology, is a champion of abstinence only programs as the way to help teenage girls forbear having sex, whether allegedly “safe” or “less unsafe,” and as a result avoid getting pregnant and at the same time avoid contracting an STD or sexually transmitted disease.

In 2006, Cardinal Carlo Martini, retired archbishop of Milan and a respected biblical scholar, expressed his opinion that it was morally permissible and prudent for married couples to use condoms when engaging in genital intercourse to prevent transmission of HIV. In doing so, he made his own the view of Dominican Cardinal Georges Cottier, the former theologian of the Pontifical Household, and a number of bishops.

Frequently elderly people like me (I will soon be 82 years old), some suffering from an assortment of health problems, are heard to say that they don’t want to be a burden on their families, especially their spouses and children. And there is surely some truth in this. But rightly understood—and I hope to make it so here—I want to be a burden to my loved ones.

In his eulogy for Karl Marx deceased on March 14, 1883, his friend and fellow revolutionary Friederich Engels wishfully prophesized that Marx’s name “will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.”  Hardly could he have imagined that his friend’s social vision would suffuse common political dynamics in the United States a little over a century later; that the eminent Speaker of the House would play his handmaid and the powerful President his dupe.  The disaster that played out last weekend set the high water mark of Marx’s influence on our great country.  If we don’t see this we won’t understand recent events.  His name wasn’t mentioned and his rhetoric wasn’t explicit.  But his vision was alive: a reckless mendacity in the pursuit of goals; an almost savage disregard for democracy; a savioristic reliance on politics to transform the social order; and a forceful use of naked power as the principle of social change. 

When I speak publically on bioethical issues, the topic I most frequently address is the problem of the terrible exploitation of human embryos.

In an earlier piece posted here I noted that many elderly people, when interviewed by the Chicago Tribune, were horrified at the thought of lingering unconsciousness. As one of them said, "My pleasure is in being part of the human race. If that's gone, if I can't interact with other people, even if they could give me nutrition and keep me hydrated, I'm not interested in being preserved." I also noted that for many years I shared this point of view and thought that using various tubes to feed and hydrate permanently unconscious persons, i.e., those in the “permanent vegetative state,” was morally repugnant and imposed cruel burdens on them and their families.

 Health Care Action Alert 

We have a pro-life statesman in Washington.

And he’s a Democrat.

Why burden persons in the “vegetative” state and their families by keeping them “alive” by force feeding them through various kinds of tubes?
On February 8 the Chicago Tribune interviewed elderly Catholics who were horrified at the thought of lingering unconsciousness. "My pleasure is in being part of the human race," said one of them. "If that's gone, if I can't interact with other people, even if they could give me nutrition and keep me hydrated, I'm not interested in being preserved." This reaction is quite common and reflects the views, I think, of most ordinary men and women. I believe that most ordinary persons think that it is ridiculous to keep persons in the “persistent vegetative state” alive by “force feeding” them through various kinds of tubes. They believe that doing so is futile and in addition imposes horrible burdens on those kept “alive” in this way and on their families. I fully appreciate why so many people think this way. I did so for many years myself. I will tell you why I did in a future piece for the Culture of Life Foundation. In this one I will summarize recent scientific studies that bear on some of the reasons why I changed my mind.

Working at home last week, I heard my son’s voice penetrating the French doors of my office shouting, “You IDIOT!”  I gently called out, “Son, please come here.”  Knowing he’s not allowed to call his sister an idiot, he dutifully and somewhat nervously entered my office.  I got down on my knees to look him in the eyes at his own height, took his little hands lightly in my own, and said to my three year old boy: “Son, did you call your sister an idiot?”  He looked at me with his perfectly round eyes perched atop two perfectly round cheeks and centered in his perfectly round head, and said with solemn confidence, “No.”  I said, “You didn’t just shout ‘idiot’ to her in the kitchen?”  Unblinking, he repeated his confident denial.  With my disciplinary back to the wall, I decided to repeat firmly the family’s negative norm—“No call Maymay,” (his sister, Mary) “an idiot… Yes, daddy?”  “Yes, daddy,” he replied.  And I excused him.

Pro-Abortion Health Care Bill is Not Dead.

Three troubling facts you should know about: