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.

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: 

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 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.).

“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.”

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.

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.

“I want to have children with you.”  These are the opening words of the U.S. Bishops’ new document on reproductive technology, Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology,
issued on November 17 (www.usccb.org/LifeGivingLove/lifegivinglovedocument.pdf ).  The document is addressed specifically to married couples suffering from infertility and considering their options.  It attempts to balance a sincere empathy for their bitter experience of loss with clear guidance on ethically legitimate alternatives: “The Church has compassion for couples suffering from infertility and wants to be of real
help to them.”  The text acknowledges the temptation they can experience to cut a ‘faustian bargain’ in order to secure the object of their desperate desires.  And it encourages them to hope in God even in the face of human disappointment.  Specifically, it asks whether certain forms of assisted reproduction are consistent with the flourishing of marriage and with the duties we owe to nascent human life.  In the words of the statement: “Some solutions offer real hope for restoring a couple’s natural, healthy ability to have children. Others pose serious moral problems by failing to respect the dignity of the couple’s marital relationship, of their sexuality, or of the child.”

The Church has identified herself as an “expert in humanity” [1].  But who has the temerity to claim to be an expert in the female half of humanity?  The complete identity of the female—call it the nature of ‘femaleness’—is hidden in the complex body-soul unity which constitutes the human person.  And so an understanding of the female body is one key to unlock this complex reality.  But an understanding of the body is not enough to understand the person.  Although human persons are always bodily and human bodies always personal, persons are not reducible to their bodies. They are their bodies, but they are more than their bodies, because the animating principle that makes their bodies to be living bodies is a non-material soul.  But is there such thing as a properly “female soul”?  Can spirit per se be engendered?  These are weighty questions.

When God made man, he did not make a conscious subject aware of itself as a self to which he then added a body as an afterthought. Rather, when he made man, "male and female he created them," and he blessed them, saying: "Be fertile and multiply" (Gen 1:27-28).

Here I examine Charles J. Reid, Jr’s “Marriage: Its Relationship to Religion, Law, and the State,” Douglas Laycock’s “Afterword,” and offer final comments.

I summarized pp. 157-176 of Reid’s chapter in Part I of this review; in them he showed that traditionally in Western civilization and particularly in Anglo-American history marriage was regarded as “a divine institution.” Here I focus on the section “Marriage and the State” (176-187) and on his “Conclusion” (187-188).

1.    Ms. O’Leary, can you begin by helping us understand what is meant by feminism, and whether there are particular distinctions among feminists that are important to recognize?

It is important to distinguish liberal feminism from radical feminism and these from the search for authentic womanhood based on the truth about the human person.

If you were looking for another indicator of the cultural malaise to which our young are subjected today, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) delivered last week.   At the 2008 National STD Prevention Conference in Chicago, March 11th, they issued results of a nationally representative survey which found that slightly more that one in four (26%), or 3.2 million, teenage girls between ages 14 and 19 have contracted a sexually transmitted disease (STD).  Among those infected, about 15% had more than one disease.  Some groups had about twice the national average – nearly half of young African American women or adolescents in the survey had an STD.