But really, I think Satan won.
When one side railed and complained that if a company refused to pay for its employees' abortafacients that a war was being waged upon women, Satan smiled. He likes that. He's the father of lies, and boy does he hate life. Jesus is the Life. Satan HATES life. He likes when you take life. He likes when you wouldn't do it personally, but wouldn't say that someone else shouldn't do it. He likes anything that advocates anything anti-life.
And so..
When the other side jumps up and down and says, "Oh no!! No!! We are PRO-woman! We aren't waging a war on women! See! Hobby Lobby is still providing 16 of the 20 approved contraceptives!! See we LOOOOOOOVE women!!" well, Satan smiles even more. Why?
He has framed the terms of the debate. He's actually won BOTH sides, who think they're fighting each other, but are very much on his team. Here are the terms:
Pro-abortion = "For women!"
Pro-abortafacients = "For women!"
Pro-artificial contraception = "For women!"
Against all of the above = "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
Silly rabbit! You cannot be in favor of women stuffing their bodies full of class-A carcinogens to prevent the horror of a baby and consider yourself pro-woman! What on earth are you thinking? Women are fertile. It's a fact. Our fertility is not something that is ANTI-US. Yes, fertility means we can get pregnant, and for some that can mean life or death. On the other hand, there is much more to the structure of our bodies and the balance of our hormones than just our ability to conceive. Have you ever seen Gloria Lemay's video on why you should keep your uterus?
It's no indictment on those who have had hysterectomies and by no means should you think my inclusion of this video means I think you're anti-woman. What my point is, is that yes, we have immense powers contained in our fertility, to give life, to nurture life, and so on. But even when we aren't bearing children, our hormonal balance does good things for us. We need our uterus, our ovaries, our hormones, and so on and so forth to be preserved and kept healthy, not attacked and broken because we wish to avoid a baby.
Say you don't want hormones, just barriers, and you want your barriers covered. I'm not sorry to say, barriers are still not pro-woman. They're not! Even if it doesn't affect your uterus, your ovaries, your hormones, etc, we forget there is still another component to our sexuality: the psychosocial component.
Dr. Janet Smith explains:
Paul VI also argued that "the man" will lose respect for "the woman" and "no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium" and will come to "the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as his respected and beloved companion." This concern reflects what has come to be known as a "personalist" understanding of morality. The personalist understanding of wrongdoing is based upon respect for the dignity of the human person. The Pope realized that the Church's teaching on contraception is designed to protect the good of conjugal love. When spouses violate this good, they do not act in accord with their innate dignity and thus they endanger their own happiness. Treating their bodies as mechanical instruments to be manipulated for their own purposes, they risk treating each other as objects of pleasure.Pope Paul VI also had other predictions about what would happen if contraception were to be declared morally permissible. Go ahead and read it. Does this sound pro-woman to you? Only one method of pregnancy prevention is pro-woman, and it's Natural Family Planning. That's it. Now under that title, there are many methods for women to choose from based on what works best for her body, her lifestyle, her marriage, etc. It's not easy, but nothing truly worth it ever is. Frankly, one could call it a blessed cross.
So back to my original premise: Satan has won this round. Yes, one side is going to fight to claim they are more "pro-woman" than the other side. But the other side is claiming to be "pro-woman" with "anti-woman" reasoning. "Just because we don't agree with ALL your evils doesn't mean we don't think SOME of them are okay! See! We love women too!" No. You just think you do. Your actions betray you.
No president, no law, no court, is going to win this battle for truth and goodness. We'll see a truly pro-woman USA when we see a culture who tosses out their BCP's because their women deserve better than the awful side effects, better than the cancer epidemic that is taking our women out way too young, when they toss out the abortafacients because they value the lives of the children conceived in our bodies, even before implantation, when men throw out their condoms because they realize the better way to respect their wives' desire to avoid pregnancy is to control themselves and wait until they can both enjoy themselves without worry, without wondering if the little piece of latex is going to keep them from being "punished with a baby."
Only by copious prayer, and by engaging the culture to win hearts and minds, by tapping into the spark of truth and goodness that lies in each others' hearts, by not being afraid or embarrassed to shout the Truth to the heavens...only by this will we win, and by win I mean will we achieve a truly pro-woman culture. When a culture venerates its women and respects its men, everybody wins. Our culture does neither. Frankly, with our culture of porn--they say 50-60% of men at least are addicted to it now?--and the pervasive notion that we should never have to control ourselves (nay, even that it is impossible!), the cards are really stacked against us. I refer you again to the predictions of Pope Paul VI regarding the general lowering of morality, treating women as objects, and what happens when we separate in our minds and hearts sex from procreation.
This is a spiritual battle. This is a moral battle. This is a battle that will be starkly real when it comes time for our sons and daughters to seek spouses and then it could possibly turn into a physical battle, not with guns and swords, but with bodies, and the bodies of our daughters most especially. I don't have to spell these issues out for you. I'm sure you can start listing off women who are suffering because of contraception: "Since he had his vasectomy he thinks I should be available all the time." "If I don't lie with him he'll turn back to the porn, or worse he'll find someone else." "She says if I don't get 'fixed' she won't be with me at all. I'm not broken...I love my wife...I'll help her NFP but she won't hear of it." "I'm sick, I'm depressed, I have no libido, but at least I won't get pregnant, right?" "I didn't know you could get pregnant on an IUD and now it's embedded in the baby and I'm miscarrying." "I think I'm having a heart attack..."
Put your children in those people's places. Put your children where your friends and acquaintances are, or have been. Are you sick yet? I am! And I'm sick for your children, too! How dare someone look at, or treat our precious children that way, and yet this is the culture we're sending them into. I suppose for a while if they've bought into the "safe sex" narrative and the "anything goes" mentality they'll be okay for a while, but you wait. They're going to get hurt, because what our culture accepts as "pro-woman" isn't pro-anybody.
Satan: 1 Truth: 0
For now.
