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.
Similar Posts:
- It’s Only “New” If You Haven’t Been Paying Attention by Jill April 5, 2006
- Playing Politics With Cancer Screening by Jill March 26, 2007
- House votes to block all funding from Planned Parenthood by Jill February 18, 2011
- Limiting Birth Control – Even at Planned Parenthood by Jill February 27, 2006
- PBA Ban Unconstitutional. Again. by Jill January 31, 2006
Yeah, the whole idea that it is somehow wrong to give sexual pleasure to your husband — and much more so, to receive it — is just fucked up beyond belief.
Obviously, I’m not surprised. Just sad.
I’ve always hated those bumper stickers that say: “Aren’t you glad your mom was pro-life?”
No, I’m glad my mom was pro-choice because she chose me.
So, is Duquesne gonna pony up the bucks that Planned Parenthood was contributing, or in the spirit of bossy, nose-butinski, conservative Catholics everywhere, not really going to help the situation?
I’ll be interested to see, but I’m guessing the latter will be most likely.
PS-Forgive me, I’m a bitter, liberal Catholic.
PPS-I’m so thankful I got out of Western PA when I had the chance.
Something that struck me as odd from an early age about this argument, that I wouldn’t have been born if my mom had had an abortion/that God has written out the story of our lives and the lives of aborted fetuses don’t get to be lived, was that I always hear people consoling the relatives of victims of sudden death by saying that it was somehow “God’s plan” and that “God worked in mysterious ways.”
When I was four, my little sister Angel died of SIDS. Before she did, I made my tiny life around her schedule. She was the centre of my universe. I have always resented that she was taken away from me. My mother always told me growing up, though, that we had to trust that God had had a plan for her, and that she’d lived as long as he’d meant her to.
When pregnancies are terminated, by the very same logic, is that not part of God’s plan? This doesn’t make sense even in the fabric of the trite “free will” argument. Maybe these inconsistencies in the faith laid the foundation for my ardent atheism.
I’m less resentful thinking that my sister was simply the victim of a random, common affliction than if she’d been taken back by God. My Atheism isn’t a “rebellion”, and it’s not born out of bitterness, but the ability to cope with the tragedy that composes the first cognisant memories of my life is a happy byproduct.
(I have to cynically wonder if the real reason they objected to those “thanks to our sponsor” broadcasts was because they were evidence that Planned Parenthood != Eating Babies.)
Regarding the hypocrisy, I just talked with a Duquesne Law School graduate, and he says that technically they’re not exactly Catholic, but rather “Spiritan”, a group that broke away from the Jesuits because they tend to support things like IVF. So as obnoxious as their decision regarding rejecting PP funding, it’s not necessarily hypocritical for them to accept funding from IVF clinics.
The Vatican is so out of touch with the real lives of ordinary people that I will not be surprised if they end up dying out in the next hundred years, that is if this planet survives the next hundred years. Unfortunately, I won’t be around to see it happen.
My mother is pro-life. And no, I am not glad that she is. I never know if I was really wanted; she insists I was, but wouldn’t she, now that I’m here?
Not to quibble, Jill, but the station in question wasn’t forced to stop accepting donations. A private institution (which, for whatever reason, was in charge of a public broadcasting entity) decided that they didn’t want to accept money from an organization which they felt did not share their values. Was the decision stupid, short sighted, and hypocritical? Yeah, of course. Do the values the college is trying to uphold suck? I’m comfortable saying yes. Are the implications of the decision creepy and repugnant? Certainly.
Still, it isn’t like NPR was beaten down by some big evil interest group. They got into bed with a Catholic organization and they either were too stupid to read the fine print, too naive to believe that it might be used against them, or too desperate to pay attention to who they were getting their access from.
You lay down with pigs, you wake up in shit.
The Church survived Gailleo, Luther, Darwin, and Einstein; they’ll keep trucking along just fine.
I think churches are like casinos: you give them money, and in return you get false hope. Casinos I think are better though; you at least get pretty lights.
This is why I trust blogs like Feministe, instead of far-right outlets like NPR and PBS.
I wonder what the outrage would be like if NPR and PBS was ordered by feminists or LGBT groups to refuse funding from the far right Catholic lunatic fringes?
WDUQ is having a fundraiser right now, too. While I was never going to give them any money–I listen to the station under protest because it’s what my partner likes, and I thoroughly detest the tone of NPR fundraising spiels (Ira Glass can kiss my ass)–I now have an iron-clad reason to present. After all, I support PP; if their money’s not good enough for Duquesne, neither is mine.
Hey, churches give you pretty lights! You get candles and pretty stained glass and everything.
Casinos are better because the drinks are all comped.