Don't forget to take your medicine.

"Birth control is preventive medicine that should be fully covered by insurance companies, a panel advising the government recommended Tuesday," is the first like of a story in today's St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Preventive medicine? Preventive, yes. But medicine? Well, if you consider pregnancy a disease and fertility a sickness, then, yes, birth control is medicine for what ails ya.

Then again, pregnancy and children can have a cancerous effect on organs like independence, self-importance, financial well being, and immaturity.

Just in Time for Father's Day

Birth control for men.

Finally.

And--good news for the pro-choice crowd--you have choices. There are two male contraceptives coming to the market soon. The first is a gel that blocks passage of sperm (and physically disables those who pass through the gel), 100% effective for 10-15 years at keeping you from being a father. The other is a pill for men that stops production of sperm that has "aced tests in mouse testes" (try saying that five times fast).

My favorite part of these stories is what may become the effective marketing tagline for the BCP for men: "One company's toxin may be another person's contraceptive." There you have it, folks.

Pornography

Two of the best pieces about pornography in the Church:

Russell Moore in the newest issue of Touchstone

John Kleinig on Issues Etc.

Read. Listen. Yes, you.

Kermit Gosnell: A Man for Our Times

The story about Kermit Gosnell, the late-term abortion provider, arrested and charged with 8 counts of murder, is troubling, to say the least. Seven of those 8 counts of murder are children whom Gosnell delivered before snipping their spinal cords to kill them. The other is a woman who chose to end her unborn child's life, but who herself died under Gosnell's "care."

Gosnell is a man who embodies our Zeitgeist. When choice is the idol, who are we to restrict that choice to the first 6 months of pregnancy, or to the time that a child is living inside the womb? In what scarce media coverage Gosnell's case has received, the focus is usually on the deplorable conditions of his clinic and the fact that he aborted these children ex utero, not on whether (not when) it's okay to end a child's life.

At First Things, Elizabeth Scalia asks

So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?

"Choice" is just a name given to the idol "me." It's a refusal to have any authority except one's self. It's little different from the child who protests, "You're not the boss of me." It's my body/life/time/whatever; I can do what I want with it.

That's why a man like Gosnell exists. He's a means to an end, a way to worship your self, a way to buck any authority that might tell you what to do with your body (or the body of the child growing within you). What's the solution?

In his book Republocrat, Carl Trueman reflects on the failure of politicians to solve the problem:

A number of thoughts come to mind when reflecting on the abortion debate. First, given the pro-life rhetoric, what is the actual Republican record on abortion like? Not very impressive. The Roe v. Wade ruling came down in 1973. Since that time, Republicans have enjoyed the lion's share of the presidency, and have also had periods of significant control of Congress. Yet, Roe still stands and rates of abortion are catastrophically high, to the extent that the pro-life movement is currently divided over the real pro-life credentials of a conservative president such as George W. Bust, now that he has left office (the rhetoric being somewhat less equivocal in 2000 and 2004). It seems clear that the democratic legislative path to erducing or even outlawing abortions is proving remarkably unfruitful, a fact that may connect to the complexity of getting legislation passed in the American system of checks and balances. Or, more cynically, this may be due to the fact that a majority of Americans are, sadly, in favor of abortion and politicians need their votes to get elected.

Maybe the solution is in the Church? Yes, but not is more and more opposition to abortion. Like having Republican leaders, having a strongly anti-abortion voice seems to have little effect. Why? Perhaps because most American Christians give license to Gosnell and the radical pro-choice movement by insisting that they must have some freedom to choose. In the mindset of contraception is the insistence that "You're not the boss of me," a stubborn refusal to submit to God's design for creation.

The solution is in repentance. Before she can proclaim "you're not the boss of you," the Church needs to acknowledge that for herself: "I'm not the boss of me. I have a Head; to Him I submit." Before Christians can resoundingly denounce Kermit Gosnell, they must altogether give up the freedom to choose. Anyone can call Gosnell a monster and a murderer, but only the Church can embrace the alternative; only she can extol God's gift of children and rejoice that He--not she--is free to choose when to give children.

The Idol of Choice

Contraception affords people the ability to choose against children, against God-given fertility. This pro-choice mentality is the same that drives those who are pro-abortion, even if the pro-choice, pro-contraception crowd stops short of choosing to kill pre-born babies.

I was struck by the sheer bankruptcy of this thinking while hearing people recently describe themselves as “accidents,” “whoopses,” and “mistakes.” While the conversation was largely in jest, as no one of these participants in the conversation probably sees himself as still a “whoops” in the eyes of his parents, and even unintended children can be loved by their parents, it nevertheless belies the pervasiveness of this kind of thinking.

We want to be our own gods. We want the authority to choose how many children we will have. And when a child is born against our planning and desires, when we have to face the reality that there is another God who controls fertility and who gives children as gifts, we call our children “mistakes” to avoid relinquishing control of our own lives to Him who is the Author of Life.

I’m thinking about all this as my wife and I yesterday marked the 7^th anniversary of being joined together by God in marriage. Anniversaries are always bittersweet for us as the age of our marriage and the age of our children remind us of our real mistakes, of our years of choosing against God’s gift of children.

No child is ever a mistake or an accident. Every child is always a gift. That such a conversation can happen among Christians, even Christians who rejoice in God’s gift of children, whether such gifts are in concert with our plans or not, exposes the shallowness of our thinking and the pervasiveness of our culture’s anti-child, pro-self mentality even in the church. Yuck.

ATP: Suicide

If you take your own life, can you still be forgiven of your sin?

If you remember a few weeks ago, the topic for the Ask the Pastor was intentional sin. (You can find that ATP here.) In short, Christians do not sin intentionally. Willful, intentional, persistent sin is incompatible with faith. In fact, it wars against faith. Christians do still sin, but they always hate their sin. They do not intentionally persist in it.

So what about suicide? Isn’t suicide an intentional breaking of the 5^th commandment? Yes, suicide breaks the 5^th commandment (as well as the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th, and maybe more). But how intentional is it?

A Lutheran understanding of repentance, unlike the Roman Catholic understanding, is not something that we do for each and every sin. Rather, a Christian is always repentant, always sorry for his sin, always trusting Jesus for full forgiveness. To illustrate how much this divides Rome and Wittenburg, note the first of Luther’s 95 Theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He meant the whole Christian life to be one of repentance.”

So the problem with suicide is not that you don’t have the chance to repent. Repentant faith is the way of life for the Christian.

Moreover, it’s incorrect to oversimplify suicide and to call it an intentional sin. Depression, which is almost always the disease that motivates a person to commit suicide, is an illness. Just like other diseases have symptoms and effects, so does depression. Among the effects of depression are despair and hopelessness. A depressed mind does not think clearly; the chemical pathways are biologically altered because of the disease. So a person does not exactly intend to sin who commits suicide.

Those suffering from depression should seek both pastoral help and medical help, even if they have not had any suicidal thoughts.

A Christian lives in forgiveness. If a person who commits suicide retains God’s gift of faith until death, he remains in that forgiveness. Nevertheless, Christians seek to avoid suicide as they seek to avoid any other sins that are contrary to their new identities in Christ. As Christians, we humbly acknowledge and give thanks to God that our whole lives are in His hands. The death of Jesus and His resurrection redeem our suffering and enable us to endure our crosses, praying for the day of His return, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”

Product Placement

During an emergency run for diapers this morning, I noticed the proximity of two items across the aisle from each other in Wal-Mart that brought to mind this song from 80s band The Fixx. Across from the rack of diapers is the rack of ladies' unmentionables. That's right, kids. One day you're shopping for pink and black thongs. The next it's diapers. One thing leads to another.

End of Life Care: It's OK to be a Burden

A conversation about funerals among the Blackbirds led me to search for this article by Lutheran ethicist Gilbert Meilander.

In contending against advance directives for end-of-life care, Meilander argues that it's okay to be a burden to your family members when you're dying. That's the nature of human relationshipw: they're interconnected. We bear one another's burdens all the time. It's how we live as families and as Christians.

At the end of the article, Meilander distinguishes between two questions. "What would he have wanted?" is futile. We can never know the answer. Asking that question is an unnecessary burden. Loved ones should rather ask, "What is best for him now?" or "What can we do to benefit the life he still has?" Answering those questions is a necessary and good burden.

And the Winner is...

No, not of the Best Christmas Cookies in the World Contest. I got exactly one entry in that contest who told me, upon delivering the cookies, "I'm not entering your contest." So the title is up for grabs.

This is the winner of the "Best Prolife Commercial of the Superbowl." Man-bashing commercials abounded again this year as last. Yes, yes, we get it. Men are apish, self-interested, sex-and-food-crazed, and altogether fun to laugh at. Even as infants, they are quite infantile.

The pre-game controversy was over the Tim Tebow ad paid for by Focus on the Family. So, when the commercial came on, I perked up. Then what? Little Timmy almost didn't make it. Then he tackled his mom. And you needed to go to Focus's website to figure out what it's all about. Not a strong contender for best pro-life message unless you follow through and go watch the rest of the videos.

I thought Google's commercial was more pro-life at face value. Man meets woman, courts her, leaves his father and mother (at least his fatherland) to cleave to her, has baby, needs to assemble crib. An impressive link between marriage, sex, and babies.

Pr. Baker also notes the Dove for Dudes commercial has an implied "life begins at conception" message, as the guy's life begins when the sperm meet the egg. At first I thought the picture a little shocking, but it does imply a rather impressive, however unintended, pro-life message.

So, props to Dove and Google for bucking the anti-family, anti-life mentality of society. FotF? Not so much.

The Manhattan Declaration

A CALL OF CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Go here. Read it. Sign it. I did.

Cameron Todd Willingham

I heard of this story on NPR a week or so ago. Then, yesterday, driving home from Pastors' Roundtable on Issues Etc., I heard an update on the story. So I looked for the New Yorker article. Here it is.

The update yesterday is Texas Gov. Perry removed three of the members of the board reviewing Willingham's case, replacing the chairman with one of Texas' most notorious pro-death-penalty prosecutors. Whether the investigation will even continue remains to be seen.

Read the whole New Yorker article. Did Texas execute an innocent man? It seems like it.

Consistent Life Ethic

This post from Anthony Esolen got me thinking about the Consistent Life Ethic. The idea is largely attributed to Cardinal Bernadin, who argued that life issues are to be considered and treated as a "seamless garment." That is, if you tear one piece of the garment out, you've irreparably damaged the entire garment. If you're pro-life when it comes to abortion but not when it comes to other life issues (euthanasia, war, poverty, death penalty, contraception, etc.) your pro-life garment is ruined.

The criticism of Bernadin is that his approach has been misused by pro-abortion politicians to justify their support of abortion. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, for instance, can justify spending federal dollars on "family planning services" because reducing the number of poor people (by keeping them from being born, presumably) has an economic payoff.

But that approach is indefensible using Bernadin's logic (and, no matter what Pelosi says, not Catholic). If you tear opposition to abortion out of the "seamless garment," your position on poverty, global warning, or whatever is ruined. If you don't care about the life of an unborn child, your defense of the lives of the poor is diminished at best, destroyed at worst.

The Jerseyville Ministerial Alliance has a book club. We were exiled from the monthly meeting because not everyone wanted to allot part of our 2 hour meeting to discussing a book. Nevertheless, a few of us continue to meet to discuss an agreed upon book between regular meetings. Most recently, we read Pope Benedict's encyclical Caritas in Veritate.

The encyclical deals with the global economic crisis, but it does so with what seems to be a "seamless" approach to life. Central to any discussion about human development, economic recovery, environmental protection, business ethics, etc. has to be an openness to life. "Openness to life is at the center of human development," argues the pope.

While Esolen's warning about missed opportunities is well heard, the misuse of a consistent life ethic doesn't make it invalid. It only makes those who misuse it look foolish.

What is Marriage?

This article from Touchstone is incisive, cutting like a surgeon's scalpel through the cultural mileu surrounding marriage to expose the cancer beneath.

The premise of the article is that marriage, in addition to being the union between a man and a woman, is two other things that have largely been forgotten today: procreative and indissoluble. Because the church has forgotten these things--that marriage is life-long and that it ought to be fruitful--and has instead allowed couples to marry who hold onto the option of divorce (even if looked at diaspprovingly) and who use contraception so as to avoid God's gift of life through their one-flesh union, she has already lost the debate on same-sex "marriage."

If Christian couples can separate marriage from having children, there is no socially defensible reason to exclude same-sex couples from having a culturally recognized marriage.

Is the Church willing to say that divorce is just as sinful as adultery or that contraception is as sinful as divorce? Is she willing to admit that divorce and cohabitation are cut from the same cloth, just as contraception and and abortion hail from the same anti-birth, anti-child mindset?

The article concludes:

If we are truly to defend marriage in this country, and not the contractual couplehood that has for some time now been disguising itself as “marriage,” then it is imperative for us to recover the full meaning of that beautiful covenant whose embodiment is now clandestine and highly countercultural. This will, I think, have to be done from the ground up, and it will take generations to succeed, if in fact it succeeds at all. It will have to be lived out first in small communities that embrace and support the self-giving, procreative, and indissoluble nature of that union, and who do so not as an unjustifiable exclusion, but as a positive commitment to protect such an important, difficult, and beautiful undertaking.

Don't take my word for it, go read the whole thing.

James Kushiner on Government Health Care

"I do not wish to empower any government to manage health care that thinks Roe v. Wade is justice, that Terri Schiavo is where she belongs, that embryos should be harvested for stem cells, or aborted babies farmed for organs."

From Mere Comments

We Must Obey God Rather than Men

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (superceded only by the Supreme Court) upheld a Washington law requiring all state-licensed pharmacists to dispense the Plan B or "morning after" pill. According to makers of this pill, it functions, in part, by preventing implantation of a fertilized egg. In other words, if you believe life begins at conception (and not at implantation), the morning after pill is an abortificient. And now pharmacists are required to provide abortions.

May God grant them the strength and courage to refuse to traffic in death and to oppose this evil legislation.

Here's an LA Times article. And here's a discussion at Touchstone.

Founding Member of NARAL Speaks out Against Abortion

To your list of insightful Lutheran bloggers, you may add the Rev. Robert Baker. His blog, Bioethike, is as thought-provoking as it is well written.

Today, he posted this, along with the following video.

"While Dr. Bernard Nathanson’s confession about abortion (Dr. Nathanson was a founding member of what is know today as NARAL Pro-choice America) is not new, I believe the following video is powerful and effective. Dr. Nathanson converted to Catholicism in 1996 and I rejoice that he has found forgiveness in Absolution and the Sacrament of the Altar. May God bless Dr. Nathanson."

Happy Mothers' Day

Some insight from Fr. Hollywood on the popular denigration of motherhood.

Annunciation & Miscarried Babies

Tomorrow, the Annunciation of Our Lord, marks the annual celebration of our Lord’s incarnation, when He joined Himself to human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary. As such, the Annunciation also serves as an appropriate time to remember in our prayers Christian parents of miscarried or stillborn children. We will pray for parents during the prayers of the church. The Church of God rejoices together and weeps together. Our only hope is in Him who was neither miscarried in the womb nor stillborn in the grave, the Firstborn of the Virgin and the Firstborn from the Dead.

This fits well with our meditations on Holy Baptism. If Baptism saves (which it does), what of children who die without having the opportunity to be brought into the Lord’s Kingdom through the waters of Baptism? Lutheran father Martin Chemnitz wrote:
“Are, then, the children of believers who die before birth or in birth damned?
By no means, but since our children, brought to the light by divine blessing, are, as it were, given into our hands and at the same time means are offered, or it is made possible for the covenant of grace to be applied to them,t here indeed that very solemn divine statement applies: The man-child, the flesh of whose foreskin is not circumcised on the eighth day, his soul shall be blotted out from [his] people (Gen. 17:14). Hence the Lord met Moses on his way and wanted to kill him, because he had neglected to circumcise [his] son (Ex. 4:24-26). But when those means are not given us—as when in the Old Testament a male died before the eighth day of circumcision—likewise when they, who, born in the desert in the interval of 40 years, could not be circumcised because of daily harassment by enemies and constant wanderings, died uncircumcised, Josh. 5:5-6, and when today infants die before they are born—in such cases, the grace of God is not bound to the Sacraments, but those infants are to be brought and commended to Christ in prayers. And one should not doubt that those prayers are heard, for they are made in the name of Christ. Jn 16:23; Gen. 17:7; Matt. 19:14. Since, then, we cannot bring infants as yet unborn to Christ through Baptism, therefore we should do it through pious prayers. Parents are to be put in mind of this, and if perhaps such a case should occur, they are to be encouraged with this comfort.” (Ministry, Word, and Sacraments: An Enchiridion, 119-120)

While neglecting Baptism or needlessly postponing it are different matters, Christian parents have this comfort: before babies can be brought to the Lord in Holy Baptism, they are brought to Him even while still in the womb through prayer and through the hearing of the Word at the Divine Service and at family devotions.

The Two Sides of the Debate on Contraception

Two pastors from the Southern Illinois District of the LCMS square off in a spirited, yet charitable, debate on the Christian's use of contraception on Issues, Etc. You'll be surprised at how close these two pastors come in their viewpoints.

Listen to the whole thing. It's solid gold.

Oh Where, Oh Where have the Democrats Gone?

The always-worth-your-time-to-read Albert Mohler:
Democrats used to be Pro-Life.

Evidently, some still are:
Democrats for Life

HT: Veith