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Women’s health and HHS

March 13th, 2012 Comments off

by Sheila Liaugminas

How oddly sci-fi that perceived connection has become.

There’s both science and fiction in the rendering of HHS policy by the Obama administration and its complicit media allies.

The ‘where are the women?‘ cry that resounded when a House oversight committee heard testimony from the first panel, which happened to cover religious leaders of various professions, was one dramatic moment. Fortunately, it’s been answered.

Then there’s the fact that the Obama adminstration and HHS Secretary Sebelius mandated the particular contraceptive drugs and sterilization procedures they did in the first place. Let’s take a look at that.

This column by Jenn Giroux is loaded with facts and resources, refuting pop culture notions that evolved into widely accepted truth without anyone ever proving or being asked to prove that they’re true.

The Birth Control Mandate has forced the issue of contraception to move from being the elephant in the room to center stage. Perhaps in time we will see that it was a hidden blessing for our country. For years pro-life organizations refused to discuss or take on this topic despite the fact that free access to birth control increases the number of surgical abortions[1][2]. Most people repeat over and over that birth control decreases the number of abortions. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, today for every child born in the US, there are an estimated 2 children killed in the womb from both surgical and chemical, abortifacient drug abortions [3]. What isn’t being talked about is that the new mandate also pre-disposes women to serious long term and permanent health problems. In conjunction with the defense of both religious liberty and the spiritual well-being of women, we must also refute the absurd and deceptive statement that “women are healthier on birth control.”

Providing free hormonal birth control to women under the guise of ‘preventative services’ and ‘women’s health’ is a lie and women of all faiths deserve to know the truth.

So read on. She lays out a strong and substantiated case.

Perhaps HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should inform her President of the following before he makes additional statements to the press like “it is cheaper to prevent than to treat.” Consider this:

— Since 1975 there has been a 400% increase in “in situ” breast cancer among pre-menopausal women under 50 years old. This mirrors the increased use of birth control over these same years. (“In situ” is a medical term which means “at the location” [4].

— A Mayo Clinic study confirms that any young girl or woman who is on hormonal birth control for 4 years prior to their first full term pregnancy increases their breast cancer risk by 52%. [5]

— Women who use hormonal birth control for more than 5 years are four times more likely to develop cervical cancer. [6]

— The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a research arm of the World Health Organization, classifies all forms of hormonal contraception as a Group 1 carcinogen. This group of cancer causing agents also includes cigarettes and asbestos. [7] Why is it that the FDA can require cigarette manufacturers to place warning labels and real life photos of corpses on cigarette packages to warn consumers of the health dangers yet they, in turn, take an equally harmful substance (hormonal birth control) and force companies to give it away free to young girls without parental consent and woman of all ages?

— For high school boys and men to take steroid drugs, it is a crime. Whereas girls and women taking steroid drugs (i.e. hormonal birth control) are now treated as if they are taking a sacred, life preserving vitamin that women cannot live without. [8]

— In October 2010 the NY Times carried an article about Hormone Replacement Therapy drugs. It quoted the America Medical Association (AMA) as warning women that these post-menopausal drugs which were originally marketed as keeping a women “young and sexy” were discovered instead to be more likely to cause advanced and deadly breast cancer.[9] It stopped short of making one other startling revelation: The only difference between hormone replacement therapy drugs which cause deadly breast cancer and the hormonal birth control drugs (now mandated by the Obama administration) is that the birth control drugs are six times the dosage — and are the very same drug!

Keep reading.

The Secret Lives of Women (Who Don’t Use Contraception)

March 12th, 2012 Comments off

by Jennifer Fulwiler

If you’ve been on the internet in the past month, you’ve heard the accusation: Only men are opposed to contraception. No woman in her right mind would reject this blessing of modern technology, therefore, the only people against it must be men with nefarious motives. AlterNet editor Sara Robinson did an excellent job of articulating the worldview that fuels these ideas, in a piece titled Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control: Read more…

The Biggest Beneficiary of the Contraception Mandate? Drug Companies

March 8th, 2012 Comments off

by Avik S. A. Roy

There have been, of course, a lot of pixels spilt in the Great Contraception Debate of 2012. But I want to talk about an underappreciated aspect of the story: how the new federal rule forcing all insurers to cover birth control will dramatically inflate the price of contraceptives. Read more…

Religious Liberty Homily

March 8th, 2012 Comments off

Powerful stuff!

View From The Right: How Democrats Are Using Women As Pawns

March 8th, 2012 Comments off

by Teri Christoph

The most heated political rhetoric of late is not taking place on the campaign trail, but rather is being debated in the media and on social media networks in the wake of the testimony of Sandra Fluke in front of an unofficial Congressional hearing. The hearing was in response to the recent Obama/Health and Human Services mandate that religious institutions provide or subsidize contraception despite their religious and moral objections. Read more…

Obama mandate’s resistance coalition

March 2nd, 2012 Comments off

by Sheila Liaugminas

The president may have been surprised by the unusual and overwhelming unity among Catholic Americans after he issued an unprecedented threat to religious liberty most directly aimed at Catholic institutions. But he probably didn’t expect a whole movement across America to rise in solidarity with the common cause of resisting his unchecked tyranny. Read more…

Religious liberty lost a critical vote today in the Senate

March 1st, 2012 Comments off
Friends,

As always, we sincerely thank you for your partnership in this fight for religious liberty. The National Petition to StopHHS remains committed to bringing you the truth about the HHS Mandate controversy even as the mainstream media falls silent. Read more…

Obama’s ‘collision course with freedom’

March 1st, 2012 Comments off

by Russ Jones

A leading conservative think tank is out to prove that a majority of women are outraged at President Barack Obama’s anti-conscience mandate requiring employers provide insurance that includes free birth control and abortifacients. Read more…

Cardinal George: All Catholic hospitals will close in two years under HHS mandate

February 29th, 2012 Comments off

by Ben Johnson

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, February 27, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Chicago’s Francis Cardinal George is warning the HHS contraception/abortifacient mandate will close Catholic hospitals and universities or force them to secularize, a process he calls “a form of theft.” Read more…

ObamaCare legal challenges — the more the better

February 29th, 2012 Comments off

by Bob Kellogg

Hannah Smith, senior counsel at The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, reports that Ave Maria University is “seeking a declaratory and injunctive relief from a federal court in Florida, because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services demands the university to offer health plan services that undermine its firmly-held religious convictions.” This makes the fourth plaintiff The Becket Fund is representing in lawsuits against the mandate (see earlier story). Read more…

Student Group at The Catholic University of America Opposes HHS Mandate

February 27th, 2012 Comments off

Washington, DC, February 22, 2012

As students and members of Vita Familiae at The Catholic University of America, we oppose the HHS contraceptive mandate. A society that insists that contraceptives be distributed for free is a society that values pleasure over the dignity of the human person. Contraception is not necessary for women’s health. In fact, there is abundant evidence that contraception can be harmful to women’s physical and psychological health. It turns the woman into an object to be used rather than a person to be valued and makes it easier for women to do the same to men. Read more…

A good solution or a quick fix?

February 27th, 2012 Comments off

by Anne Morse

This article was first published February 22, 2012, at Mercatornet.com.

Should women suffering from anorexia take pills to suppress hunger? Should women suffering from fertility take pills to suppress babies?

I am anorexic. I don’t want to be emaciated; I want to be healthy. But eating makes me really uncomfortable, anxious, and even nauseous. I eat because I have to. I eat to survive. So I’ve come up with a novel idea to have my cake and eat it, too. Read more…

Thousands More Oppose Obamacare Mandate’s Religious Liberty Violations

February 27th, 2012 Comments off

by Sarah Torre

More than 2,500 Christian leaders have signed a letter opposing Obamcare’s anti-conscience mandate. The letter’s release adds to the most recent furor over the rule’s blatant violation of religious liberty and decries the mandate’s coercion of religious employers to subsidize abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization regardless of moral or religious objections to such services. Read more…

ERLC releases ‘fact sheet’ on Obama mandate

February 27th, 2012 Comments off

WASHINGTON (BP) — The Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics entity has issued both a fact sheet about the Obama administration’s contraceptive/abortion mandate and a call for support of a bill to restore conscience protections missing from the controversial requirement. Read more…

U.S. evangelical college seizes contraception fight with gusto

February 27th, 2012 Comments off

LAKEWOOD, Colo. (Reuters) – There was ambivalence, and a fair bit of bewilderment, here on the cozy campus of Colorado Christian University when school administrators sued the federal government just before Christmas to block an obscure insurance regulation. Read more…

Grand Canyon State working for protection from Obama mandate

February 27th, 2012 Comments off

by Charlie Butts

Arizona is one of several states working to provide conscience protections in light of President Barack Obama’s mandate forcing insurance companies to provide free contraception, regardless of the religious views of the person or institution they sell insurance to. Read more…

Father, We’re Ready for that Homily on Contraception Now

February 27th, 2012 Comments off

by Jennifer Fulwiler

A couple of weeks ago, our priest gave a homily about contraception. While speaking about the Health and Human Services mandate, our associate pastor, Fr. Jonathan Raia, made a few allusions to the fact that the Church believes that contraception is bad. There were over a thousand people packed into the building, and a slight but noticeable tension developed as he inched closer and closer to the subject. This most controversial of Catholic teachings had been splashed all over the news in recent days, ridiculed and denounced throughout popular culture, and the question hung in the air: “Is he going to go there?”

He did. Read more…

HHS mandate ‘for the women’

February 24th, 2012 Comments off

by Sheila Liaugminas

Some audacious claims have been made in Washington lately on behalf of women. They clearly speak for Planned Parenthood and women in league with their cause. Where are all the women for whom they do not speak?

Here. Read more…

Where’s the Protestant Support for Catholic Bishops?

February 23rd, 2012 Comments off

Protestants can no longer buy into the notion that the church is subordinate to the state.

By Frederick Schmidt, February 20, 2012

Cue the Protestant applause for Catholic Bishops? Not so fast. Not in progressive Protestant circles, anyway. Read more…

A legal victory for conscience

February 23rd, 2012 Comments off

by Charlie Butts

A pro-family group in the state of Washington hopes the rest of the nation is taking note of Wednesday’s ruling by a federal judge that pharmacists can’t be forced to dispense contraceptives that violate their religious beliefs. Read more…