Anti-choicers at a Catholic University have forced the local NPR station to quit accepting donations from Planned Parenthood. They apparently object to these broadcasts:
Support for DUQ comes from Planned Parenthood, offering healthcare services to men, including screenings for cancer and STDs. Planned Parenthood: Their mission is prevention.
Support for DUQ comes from Planned Parenthood, providing comprehensive sexuality education, including lessons on abstinence. Planned Parenthood: Their mission is prevention.
Support for DUQ comes from Planned Parenthood, whose community educators empower teens to make good choices by teaching self-esteem. Planned Parenthood: Their mission is prevention.
Support for DUQ comes from Planned Parenthood, offering cancer screenings for women and men. Planned Parenthood: Their mission is prevention.
Cancer screening? Health care? Clearly tools of Satan.
Unsurprisingly, Planned Parenthood is being targeted, while the station continues to accept donations from other organizations that don’t toe the Catholic line:
The administration’s stated rationale is that funding for WDUQ is actually “a gift to the university,” and that Planned Parenthood doesn’t jibe with every dot and tittle of Catholic doctrine. The Church actually objects to artificial assistance to help infertile couples conceive, as much as it objects to artificial methods of preventing conception, but, golly, DUQ accepts underwriting from IVF clinics.
The whole piece is good, and the author (who self-identifies as pro-life) makes the important point that contraception access is the best way to decrease the abortion rate — yet the Church continues to oppose it. But the strongest part of the post is her own story, which challenges the idea that the Church’s views are in any way “pro-life”:
Despite my strict Catholic upbringing, my father was openly disdainful of the Church. He rarely followed the fasting laws, never went to Mass or Confession. He didn’t explain this behavior to us kids. Of course, he didn’t have to, since he was the Man of the Family. I learned the truth only after my mother’s death.
She had long been in poor health, and had been since the birth of her first child, my elder brother, in 1947. Her doctors warned her not to get pregnant again too soon. She was 21, and a married woman. The Church said using contraception was a sin, and she confessed that sin when she went to Confession. The priest called her a “whore to her husband,” and sent her home in tears and without forgiveness. When her husband finally teased out the explanation for those tears, he stormed off to the church.
My future father was a devout Catholic, both a choir boy and an altar boy in his youth. His wartime love letters to my future mother were filled with references to God, and his wedding gift to her was a rosary, which I now cherish. Well, he loved God and he loved my mother, and saw no contradiction. He literally dragged the priest from his confessional and began to berate him. Before anything physical could happen, a friend pulled away my father, who would not re-enter a church for a long time.
My parents continued to use contraception until the doctors said a pregnancy might not be so life-threatening. Nine months later, I was born. It was a tricky birth, and the doctors told my mother she could not safely have another child. I had no other siblings, but I had two loving parents well into my adulthood. For that, my parents sinned?
Pretty much. The whole “you’re a whore to your husband” argument is one that’s regularly trotted out by anti-choice religious folks, who claim that if you use contraception because you don’t want to get pregnant, then you’re a mere sex toy for your male partner. The “if your mother had had an abortion, you’d never have been born” is a pretty standard anti-choice trope as well. Of course, they ignore the fact that a lot of us wouldn’t have existed if our mothers hadn’t planned their childbearing, be it through using contraception or terminating pregnancies that they weren’t ready for or that threatened their health.
Read her whole piece.