Courant’s 2007 Priorities: Redefine Marriage, Attack Religious Liberty
January 26th, 2007 by Peter
When I mentioned the Courant’s opposition to last year’s Plan B bill, one lefty correspondent, Semant Ick, responded dryly “I’m surprised that the wickedly liberal Courant framed the issue in such a way.”
Not to worry, Ick. The Courant has reverted to form:
There must be someone inside every hospital, whether secular or religious, who will offer, immediately, the compassionate help a distraught and wounded woman needs.
The Courant is saying that Plan B should, by force of law, be provided inside Catholic hospitals even in cases where it could induce an abortion. In response, Don Pesci offers another of his signature point-by-point rebuttals:
Plan B is effective when taken within 48 hours of a rape. In the case of a woman who is pregnant, has been raped and has been brought to a Catholic Hospital, the hospital will provide transportation to other facilities that provide Plan B well within that time period. The (four) Catholic hospitals in Connecticut are within a half hour drive of non-Catholic hospitals. If the Courant had mentioned this data, readily available, in its editorial, its readers might have paused a bit before considering forcing Catholics in a Catholic hospital to violate their conscience by providing Plan B to patients when it is readily available by other means. Remember, Catholic hospitals do not require Catholics to provide Plan B – an abortifacient if ovulation had occurred –only if the victim is pregnant. The editorial also does not mention that the Catholic Church reserves it most severe punishment – excommunication – for those Catholics who assist in the procuring of an abortion. The editorial also does not mention that the US Constitution provides that the governing authority can make no law “prohibition the free exercise” of religion, which would be the case if the state of Connecticut were to force Catholics to sin against their conscience by providing a medical remedy that is widely available and can be utilized by other means.
Our local paper of record also renewed its editorial push to change the definition of marriage. As part of their argument the editors mention the recent U.S. Census showing that married couple households are now a minority and that for the first time more American women live without husbands (the Courant says “spouses”) than with them.
But as Stanley Kurtz and others have shown, same-sex “marriage” leads to (and is the product of) an overall decline in marriage. And, as mentioned earlier today, it leads to still greater mutations in the very concept of the family.
It’s unfortunate that the Courant offers as a solution to the decline in our marriage culture something that will accelerate the problem because it is, indeed, a societal disaster. While the Courant chose to use the census data to push the paper’s usual agenda the Republican-American’s Jan. 21 editorial focused on the real effects of the decline in marriage:
Marriage may not immunize children from social ills, but children of divorce or unwed mothers are at much greater risk of poverty, welfare dependency, crime, academic underachievement and illegal drug abuse. Yet of the 4.1 million babies born in this country in 2004, more than a third were to unmarried women. But the illegitimacy rate is 69.5 percent for black children and 48 percent for Hispanic children. The poverty rate for children of married couples is 8 percent; among single-parent households it’s 35 percent. Cause and effect are unmistakable.
The Courant and the Connecticut Post seem to be in lockstep. Today they printed a letter to the editor by Audra Weisel, State Puclic Affairs Chair, and Judy Singer, National Council of Jewish Women-New Haven (the latter a collaborator with every major abortion provider/advocacy group in the nation). They were expressing their outrage too against Catholic hospitals accusing them of not giving rape victims “compassionate care.” (I’m sensing a prepared soundbite behing-the-scenes effort here, but I’ll let that go for now)
In their letter they do the standard accusation that Catholic hospitals are “imposing their religious beliefs on victims of rape.” The writers of course see nothing wrong with restricting freedom of religion on said hospitals. They also hide the facts that prove this claim to be a lie, as did The Courant and which Mr. Pesci above reminds us.
But rather than address their obvious call to “unseparate” government from religious beliefs or their other falsehood (that NY and MA Catholic hospitals provide Plan B “without objection”), I thought they ought to be outed for their other a) misinformed or b) hypocritical disinformation.
I actually agree with Weisel and Singer on two things: “rape victims do deserve compassionate care” and healthcare “must include providing medically accurate information about emergency contraception” to rape victims.
Surely Weisel and Singer read in The Connecticut Post or elsewhere last month that, because so fewer women used Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) after July 2002 [Footnote 1], scientsts believe that breast cancer fell “significant[ly],” that it’s the “type of cancer most affected by”, i.e., “fueled by estrogen.” They also would be expected to know that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Mayo Clinic and other scientists classified “oral estrogen-progestogen contraceptives as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1) in 2005, which is a higher classification than the 1999 IARC evaluation.” [2] They also should know that HRT, modern birth control pills (“The Pill” or OC) and emergency contraception or EC (“Morning After Pills,” Plan B) are all “Estrogen/progestin pills.”
But what they (and The Courant and other various and sundry commenters to this blog) apparently don’t know is that, based on the “gold standard” pharmacology desk reference for 65 years (now in its 11th edition), an international pharmacist group found that “…the average dose of hormone in the birth control pill is, conservatively, four [to] eight times stronger per dose than HRT.” [3] Weisel and Singer also don’t know that EC is “10-20 times the amount of progesterone” and “5 times” the estrogen [4] as the daily Pill.
OCs are four to eight times the HRT dosage, and emergency contraception’s estrogen is five times that of OC. Emergency contraception, then, is between 20 and 40 times the dosage of HRT (which “fuels breast cancer”).
Weisel, Singer, The Courant and others call this “compassionate care/help” for rape victims, and worse, completely avoid “providing this medically accurate information” to women?
[For those keeping score on the leftwing rag proofs: The Connecticut Post didn’t print my first letter describing all this in December 2006, although they had all my original, scientific sources with which to do their own public advocacy story, including the Mayo Clinic’s Journal and the IARC. Let’s see if they bat .0000 and don’t print this one.]
When are we going to demand better of our news media as well as our doctors, lawmakers, the FDA, and women’s health advocates including Weisel and Singer?
One last thing: this past November, a 41 year old rapist who forced his underage teen victim across state lines to an Illinois abortion clinic [5] was caught—not by the clinic workers who are legally obligated (in every state) to report such statutory rapists to the police—but by the pro-lifers on the sidewalk who got photos of his license plate and of him forcing her into the building. Don’t think it can’t happen here in Bridgeport: I personally have witnessed hysterically crying girls, as young as 12 or 13, resisting being coerced into the local abortion clinic against their wills by adults and by boyfriends. [6]
Now that emergency contraception is available to sexual-consent-aged people over the counter without a prescription, what is to stop rapists from buying it in advance at Walgreens and forcing their victims to take it? They’ve already thought of it; why won’t our leaders in media, healthcare and government plan against it?
And why didn’t Weisel, Singer, The Courant and the other outraged free-sex advocates write outraged letters then about how to guarantee that type of rape victim a truly “compassionate care [she] deserves”?
ORIGINAL SOURCES:
[1] The Connecticut Post (“Breast cancer rate falls,” Dec. 15, 2006)
[2] http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/inside.asp?AID=4181&UID ; MAYO CLINIC published study and editorial on it here http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/inside.asp?AID=4181&UID
http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/pdf%2F8110%2F8110e%2Epdf ;
http://www.cbc.ca/consumers/market/files/health/cancer/blame.html ; IARC reference on Canada’s CBC News.
http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Classification/crthgr01.php The Group 1 Carcinogens list from IARC itself.
http://www.ehs.iupui.edu/ehs/indus_hyg_carcinogen.asp another IARC reference from Indiana University website.
http://www.polycarp.org/statement_mayo_clinic_article_files/image002.gif Chart from Polycarp Institute summarizing Mayo Clinic journal-published paper.
[3] From the pharmacology gold standard desk reference for 65 years (now in its 11 edition in 2005) “Goodman and Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics”, more of that quote follows: “…the dose of estrogen used for postmenopausal hormone replacement therapy is substantially less than that used in oral contraception, taking into account the different potencies of the drugs normally employed in the two settings.”
http://www.amazon.com/Goodman-Gilmans-Pharmacological-Basis-Therapeutics/dp/0071422803/sr=8-1/qid=1169824494/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5335032-1156067?ie=UTF8&s=books
as quoted here, http://www.pfli.org/Wilks_HRT_OC_potencies.html , by an international group of pharmacists compared OC to HRT, finding this to be the actual dosage comparison.
This group is Pharmacists for Life International. John Wilks, who authored this paper and a book on this subject, already had his Bachelors of Pharmacology, Masters of Pharmaceutical Sciences, an M.A. in Clinical Pharmacy/Pharmacology, and a respectable pharmacology career including teaching at the University of Sydney-Australia. Folks may dismiss him and the PFLI if they want, but disbelief doesn’t make their credentials or their science any less valid.
[4] http://www.pfli.org/faq_oc.html PFLI white paper
[5] http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53013
[6] http://afterabortion.blogspot.com/2004/09/memory-was-triggered-by-emilys-post.html (13 year old girl being brought against her will)
and
http://afterabortion.blogspot.com/2004/12/just-read-emilys-post-about-all.html (boyfriends/husbands/abusers who exert pressure on their partners/victims to abort)
Thanks Annie. I really appreciate your knowledge on these issues. The regular drive-by lefty posters seem to disappear when you post. Facts are hard to refute.
By the way, I can confirm what you posted earlier about aborted children not being “unwanted.” For several years my spouse and I sought to adopt and had no luck. There are far more couples wanting to adopt babies in the United States than there are babies available. Many couples end up having to go overseas to adopt.
I’m still waiting to hear from chele, TrueBlueCt and Gabe on that earlier post’s comments, http://www.ctfamily.org/blog/2007/01/18/tr-rowes-pro-life-pro-woman-bill
Come on, chele, you can’t tell me you gave up on that thread after posting on it last on Jan.25 , when I posted the answer to your taunting question not two hours later?
Let’s hear what you have to say in response.
Sorry for all the multiple postings again. I’ll get the hang of this eventually!
Thanks, NaCN, for sharing your story.
I hope the drive-bys return. I won’t snark at you that “I told you so” or insult them as being dumb, stupid or any of the other unprintable things lefties have called me over the years. I can’t tell you though, how many times I’ve posted replies like these on the web in various places over the past 3 years to people who say the exact same misinformation as these have done.
Because that’s what you are: MISINFORMED.
I truly feel like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill over and over again. The day there are no more people such as this defending all the “wrong facts”, is the day I stop replying. Education is all I can do. One person at a time, if necessary.
Drive-by-ers, I really, honestly hope you are learning some things and that it’s getting you angry at the mass media for not bringing this to your attention, to all of us. We will never hear these things on the 6 o’clock news, or the front or even back pages of most of the newspapers in this state or nation. Unfortunately where you might hear them is from the mouths of overreaching big mouths like O’Reilly, Limbaugh and whoever else is out there trying to shock people and drive up their ratings.
I have no ratings to drive up, no money to make with more eyeballs. I do this research in my spare time, while holding down a day job. I have never sought payment or received it for all this research.
I promise you one thing: I will never put forth a statement without an objective, usually renowned-scientific original source you yourselves can check to verify if I’m telling you the truth or not.
I hope your silence means you ARE checking all those links and sources and realizing how you have been duped. And then I hope you change your hearts and your ways and do something about it.
Annie–
I’m not someone who is ordinarily scared to engage, but when you are spamming threads, repeatedly, good manners suggest I need to keep my mouth shut.
That is amusing! I’m not “spamming threads.” Spam is “to indiscriminately send unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate messages, especially commercial advertising in mass quantities.” I inadvertently multiple posted and apologized for my unfamiliarity with how this particular comments system works, but then you’d know that if you bothered to read any of it.
None of those adjectives above describe what I’ve written. I am a welcome commenter on this blog. I’m showing you folks what you don’t know in response to the posts. Or is it what you don’t want to know?
Either way, yours is kind of the convenient excuse not to read what I wrote and learn anything.
And if you had good manners, you wouldn’t wrongly accuse me of spamming.
NOTE TO BLOG MODERATORS: comments #2 through # 6 of mine here on this thread can be deleted if you are able to do that. They are merely the segments all contained in comment #1 (that I had thought didn’t get accepted at first due its length).