No role for church in birth control policy

This is concerning the recent newspaper article where Bishop Terry LaValley is asking the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ogdensburg’s parishioners to oppose a federal law requiring employers to provide health insurance to workers that covers the cost of birth control. Since this is the law of the land, no religious order should be exempt.

The church must not dictate to the government, since we are not living in the Middle Ages in Europe where every aspect of life from how people felt to how they were governed was shaped by Catholicism.

In the Ten Commandments there is no canon on birth control, but there is the Fifth Commandment, “Thou shall not kill/murder.” The killing/murdering of an unborn fetus would be more of an offense than the practice of birth control. Abortion is usually the end result of not practicing birth control.

In preventing pregnancy, most likely it would eliminate an abortion ending a fetus’s life, and in the Third World countries birth control would prevent countless children from being born and facing death by starvation.

The Catholic Church is not totally against birth control providing the use of natural method, chiefly by having sex only when the wife is at a low fertility part of her cycle rather than with the pill or physical barrier; (but many pregnancies do occur with women who are not married).

Although the method is dissimilar, in essence it is still birth control.

In the book of Moses there are a total of 613 commands, 248 positive (can do) and 315 negative (not to do). Moses received this written and orally from God, including the Ten Commandments for the Jews, the children of Israel. As for birth control?

As if to add greater encumbrance to the worshippers, the Catholic Church in the 12th century listed seven deadly sins. In 2005, the church published a “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,”the social sins of the 21st century.

By adding more items to the list of sins, it becomes more difficult to live a righteous life by being a Catholic. Too often a branded sinner feels that the road to redemption can be gained by digging deeper into one’s pocket for the church.

Since members of the Catholic clergy are celibate, sex and childbirth are not part of their life; thus they cannot talk the talk since they did not walk the walk. The decision of whether to practice birth control should be between the individual and God rather than with the church’s man-made laws.

John H. Drewes

Copenhagen