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When Mother Teresa visited New Bedford, Mass., in June 1995, she told those of us gathered at St. Lawrence Martyr Church: “Abortion is the greatest evil of today.”
Never one to mince words, Mother Teresa’s courage, truthfulness, and charity were palpable. Parents today need similar fortitude, honesty, and love to be able to discuss the hard topic of unplanned pregnancies and abortion with their children.
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Couples who struggle to get pregnant are turning with greater frequency to the in vitro fertilization (IVF) industry for assistance.
In some cases, they can end up feeling they are “too pregnant” when twins, triplets, or quads arise. This occurs from the practice of implanting more than one embryo at a time to improve pregnancy success rates.
A multiplet pregnancy can involve significant risk, both for the children in utero, and for the mother. Because of these risks, the pregnant mother will sometimes be advised to opt for a “selective reduction,” where potassium chloride is injected into one or two of the growing babies, to cause their hearts to seize, followed by death and the gradual re-absorption of their bodies during the remainder of the pregnancy.
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Patients who face serious illnesses are sometimes attracted to alternative medicines, also referred to as “holistic” or “new-age” medicines.
These can include treatments like homeopathy, hypnosis, “energy therapies” like Reiki, acupuncture, and herbal remedies, to name just a few.
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Patients who face serious illnesses are sometimes attracted to alternative medicines, also referred to as “holistic” or “new-age” medicines.
These can include treatments like homeopathy, hypnosis, “energy therapies” like Reiki, acupuncture, and herbal remedies, to name just a few.
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Men and women clearly need each other and naturally gravitate towards arrangements of mutual support and lives of shared intimacy.
Because women are frequently the immediate guardians of the next generation, they have a particular need to ascertain if there will be steady support from a man prior to giving themselves sexually to him. The bond of marriage is ordered towards securing this critical element of ongoing commitment and support.
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Sometimes when there is infertility in marriage, couples make the decision to seek out the services of a surrogate in order to have a child.
A surrogate is a woman who agrees to be implanted with an embryo produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) and to hand over the newborn baby to the couple upon completion of the gestation and birth.
In recent years, gestational surrogacy has become a multi-million dollar industry, attracting a broad clientele ranging from married couples to single women, gay couples to anyone else with the desire for a baby and the ability to finance the undertaking.
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Some humanitarian tragedies occur quietly and “in the background,” only gradually coming to light years or decades after serious harm has already occurred, like nerve damage in infants exposed to lead paint or cancers in patients who were exposed to asbestos.
More recently, the humanitarian tragedy of hundreds of thousands of embryonic human beings frozen and abandoned in fertility clinics has come to light — “orphans in ice” arising from the decades-long practice of in vitro fertilization (IVF).
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A growing concern today involves the role of pornography as the next generation’s instructor in human sexuality.
For many young people, pornography has become the only guide to sexuality they have ever known. For Catholic parents, this raises the critical challenge of how best to approach these matters with their children, given that kids as young as eight or nine may already be acquiring information and viewpoints about human sexual behaviors from internet pornography.
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In the famous story of David and Goliath, Goliath boasts to the young David that after he kills him, he will give his flesh “to the birds of the sky and beasts of the field.” He conveys his profound disdain for David by speaking this way, deprecating even his corpse.
This offends our sensibility that dead bodies should not be desecrated, but should instead be respectfully buried. Proper disposition and care of another’s body also manifests our Christian faith in the resurrection of that body on the Last Day.
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Arguments in favor of research on human embryos typically play off our unfamiliarity with the way that we ourselves once appeared and existed as embryos.
Humans in their tiniest stages are indeed unfamiliar to us, and they hardly look anything like “one of us.” Yet the undeniable conclusion, that every one of us was once an embryo, remains an indisputable scientific dogma, causing a “fingernails on the chalkboard” phenomenon for researchers every time they choose to experiment on embryos or destroy them for research.
To enable scientists to get beyond the knowledge that they’re experimenting on or destroying fellow humans, clever stratagems and justifications have had to be devised.
