Pro-life 'no' to family planners

by Joanna Moorhead CHURCH teaching on contraception and abortion is grounded in the same principles as its socio-economic and human rights teaching, a group of 28 prominent pro-lifers around the world said this week in a letter to the president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
Dr Fred Sai sent an open letter to the Pope earlier this year praising the church's social teaching but urging the church to think again on its attitude to family planning.
No reply has emerged from the Vatican, but the letter published this week by the heads of 28 pro-life organisations around the world probably sums up the Catholic response to Dr Sai's suggestion that the church could enter into dialogue with his organisation.
The pro-lifers, who include Britons Professor Jack Scarisbrick of Life and Denis Riches of Family and Youth Concern, say they do not think this would be possible.
"Working in our movements for life, we cannot see how the church can enter into a fruitful dialogue as long as the International Planned Parenthood Federation continues, all around
the world, to campaign for and to provide abortion," they say.
Dr Sai had called the church "an obstacle rather than an ally" in the struggle for women's rights with respect to procreation, says the letter. But, they contend, abortion is "a grave offence against the dignity of the woman, whose vocation to motherhood is natural", and contraception "easily reduces the woman to being an instrument of satisfaction".
"As many studies show, contraceptive 'side effects' cause grave harm to the health of some women," the letter continues. "So when you propose contraception for poor women, you are only making their plight worse which is why so many people in developing countries bitterly resent efforts to promote contraception and the effects this has on the morals and health of their young people."
Fears of over-population which prompt calls for better contraceptive advice in the third world are deceptive, the group continues. "It is monstrous to depict babies as the 'pollution' of the earth...a doubt is being raised that the doomsday theories...really conceal an attempt by developed nations to exercise control over developing nations," they say.