Infertility Online Discussion Group

August 13, 2009 at 10:29 pm (Blogroll, Infertility, NFP Friends, Physicians)
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I met a firebrand New Yorker at last year’s ENDOW Conference in Denver. Joan is the co-foundress of the John Paul II Center for Women in Manhattan. The John Paul II Center,

is an organization dedicated to advocating a deep understanding of the dignity of women, the meaning of human sexuality, and the nature of human relationships as expressed in the teachings of the Catholic Church. As part of this mission, it is committed to promoting natural family planning, pro-life reproductive health care, and pro-life medical ethics.

They recently reported on their blog their starting an online Infertility Discussion Group:

Finally, we have also started an outreach for pro-life and Catholic women struggling with infertility. This is an email listserv (a “Google Group”) called “Prolife Catholic Infertility.”

We created this in response to requests from Catholic and pro-life women from around the country for a common place to discuss those issues which pro-life women uniquely struggle with as they seek treatment for infertility.

What treatments are available? Which destroy embryos? What does the Catholic Church say about the various alternatives? Where can I turn for help?

Few have been the resources available to you – and many of you have expressed a sense of feeling abandoned by medicine if you do not want to go through with IVF or other artificial reproductive technologies.
At the JPII Center, we hope to eventually create an online resource where you can go to find answers to the common questions about infertility treatment, pro-life alternatives, ethical decision-making, and where you can go for help and support.

This will take some time. In the meantime, we have created this online email discussion group to allow you to network and dialogue with each other about the issues you are dealing with – many of you have already sought and found answers to these common questions and this group allows you to share these answers with others. It is a “closed” group, so only those people I add to the list will have access to the discussions in order to create a “safe space” for you to share your real concerns and questions.We are a Catholic organization, but any woman struggling with infertility who is looking for pro-life alternatives in infertility treatment is welcome to join, regardless of her faith tradition or beliefs.To be added to the list, please email me directly at amielnik@jpiicenterforwomen.org. I need only your name and email address and a brief description of why you are interested in the listserv.

I’m so glad they’ve jumped on the New Media/ Online Discussion train. While one always needs to be prudent about online memberships and discussions, they can also be of enormous help, as it seems with the NFP Facebook group, which is quite active. It’s commonplace for women to travel from Europe, Australia and all over the North America to travel to Omaha just to get their NaProTechnology consultation and treatment, so until we can have NaPro consultants in every parish and surgeons in every metropolitan area, online discussion forums must serve as a place for research and connection.

I only pray that more and more people will train as FertilityCare practitioners, medical consultants and especially as NaProTechnology surgeons. Could you be called to teach NFP or be an NFP-only health professional? Consider it, for the need is great.

Pray for the JP II Center for Women and their mission!

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Blessing for Newly Conceived

December 2, 2008 at 11:52 pm (Art, I Heart My Fertility, News)
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Henry Tanner, 1898.

Henry Tanner, 1898.

Zenit published a piece recently about the US Catholic Bishop’s approving a blessing for the newly conceived, to be prayed either at Mass or outside Mass. The next step is approval by the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship & Sacraments. Since conception is the real “birth day” of the person, it’s very appropriate to celebrate conception! The Annunciation is the liturgical solemnity in the Church, so why not make it extra special for the domestic church?

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Medocrity & Marketing NFP

October 15, 2008 at 11:13 pm (Humor/Wit, Ideas)
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I was trying to find some video of a dynamic Natural Family Planning, contra-contraception, or Humanae Vitae talk on YouTube, and I couldn’t find anything! (Yes, I know, the seminarians are there, but the novelty is wearing off.) There were a couple of decent homilies, but they weren’t the speed I was looking for for the blog.

So you know what I found instead? This jazzy cartoon:

Are you just so *sold* on World Contraception Day? Well, naturally, I was curious and checked out their web site, YOUR-LIFE.COM (note to self: future Humanae Vitae site will be HIS-LIFE.COM). There was the usual mis-information about natural methods of family planning , although it wasn’t as ridiculously incorrect as it usually is, and there weren’t any cartoons making fun of it. Overall, though, it was an all-around cool site, anti-fertility, anti-family messages notwithstanding. I really liked the FAMILY/TEACHERS/PRESS bars on the side, giving information to parents on how to talk to their kids about said travesty (“Listen Son, you’re beginning to have special feelings, so I want to teach you about something that has divided your mom and I so that you, too, can objectify and poison that special someone.”) teachers about how to give workshops (“Hey kids! Here’s women’s lib’s gift to you: poisoned relationships between the sexes, higher STI rates and a massive correlation to the world’s highest divorce rate. C’mon!”), and press all sorts of media-related goodies–videos, photos, press releases, etc.

WHAT A GREAT RESOURCE if you don’t believe that contraception is the greatest societal cancer to women, children and families, the fallout of which we’re just now experiencing!

But seriously, folks. This is great media presence here, particularly for the youth/ young adults and their parents/ mentors. The million dollar question (or mostly likely the ten thousand dollar question) here is: WHY DON’T WE HAVE THIS KIND OF MEDIA PRESENCE FOR HUMANAE VITAE, THEOLOGY OF THE BODY AND NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING!? Now, to give credit where it’s due, there is good web presence for Theology of the Body & Chastity (but it could be better) and a few good sites for Natural Family Planning and at least one fair site for Humanae Vitae. (I won’t name my personal taste here because there will be a firestorm of comments from such-and-such a group/NFP method/diocese/whomever complaining that I’m being unfair and they’ve gotten really good feedback from their favorite techie. Good for you, but sometimes, “Hey, it’s a great web site compared to all the lame churchy web sites” is not a qualifying statement for the great web site awards. As you know, the artistic bar in the Church is not set too high in most places.

Back to the question: Why does our media suck–especially for such vital evangelization efforts as marriage and sexuality–and what can we do about it? Do you know of an off-the-hook web site, brochure or media campaign? Let me know!

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Why Eve Ensler’s got nothing on John Paul II

September 26, 2008 at 3:23 pm (Art, Cognitive Dissonance)
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I maintain that John Paul II is the foremost feminist of our time, and here’s a little commentary on why:

Last year I forced myself to read Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues.” It was a distressing literary pilgrimage, and I would advise anyone thinking about reading it to proceed with prudence. It is not a work for the faint of heart, mind or soul. 

        I read it for the same reason I went to the feminist art lecture in my morally misguided town, and for the same reason I want to go a lecture on gender at a local college “in the tradition of” a certain Universal faith. I have been wounded in many ways by this postmodern, relativistic culture that we live in. I was starving for most of my life for truth: truth about God, truth about my existence and purpose, and truth about my dignity and sexuality, and I want to learn from this culture how we can communicate the gold of  John Paul II’s Theology of the Body with an edge.
         It is an interesting irony that Ms. Ensler’s first name should be Eve, don’t you think? While she is the progenitor of theatrical genital controversy of the last decade, it would be a real stretch to call her mother of the living. She is world-renowned for her brash creativity and shocking sexuality. Celebrities flock to her, support her, love her for what she stands for. But what does she stand for? An organ? More specifically, part of an organ? 
        Perhaps a sign of the fruitfulness of Ensler’s work is that it is not until the last chapter or so that she writes about child birth. She even expresses shock that she performed the one-woman play for over two years before she even thought to incorporate something about pregnancy and childbirth. If this is not a sign of the great divorce of fertility from fecundity and the triumph of a contraceptive mentality, I am not not quite sure what is. 
       I agree with Ensler that we should cherish our bodies. We should care for them, nourish them, protect them and love them. I agree that violence against women is gravely immoral. Women should, indeed, be feel happy, balanced and beautiful. 
       But we are not just our biology; we are integrated persons of body, mind and soul.  We were created not for our own pleasure, but for a divine destiny. This destiny is engraved into our very being as woman or man, and finds its fulfillment in spousal relationship, either with God or with a spouse of complimentary (read:opposite) sex. Susan Brinkman summed it up so well in Columbia magazine (fittingly a men’s magazine), “Men and women were not created to compete with each other but to complete one another. They were not meant for separation, but for union.” 
        The feminist art lecture I went to was replete with Ensler’s errors of creative narcissim and false dichotomies. I learned from the enlightened professoress sex has very little to do with our biology and inherent masculinity and femininity, and more to do with society’s imposed gender construction. She proceeded to describe a feminist dialectic, where woman is the thesis, man is the anti-thesis, and radical feminism is the synthesis. She used very Marxist terms, focusing on “access to resources” and “who has the authority,” talking very much in battlefield language about the relationship between woman and man.
        The exhibit she lectured on featured a number of pieces by a feminist art group called the Guerilla Girls. Founded in 1985 in New York City, these self-styled revolutionaries use tactless attack ads to bring to light the disparity between [white] men and women and people of color in the art world. One ad, featuring a lifelike naked statue, “Do women have to be naked to get [their work] into the Met?” and “Free the women artists!” 
       Equal dignity is where it’s at, and I like just compensation as much as the next person, but this sort of aggressive artistic affirmative action is antithetical to the grace, beauty and glory that is the feminine genius. Also, if the women artists are freed, to what or to whom are they freed? 
       To become truly free, we must discover God and who he has made us to be, including our sexuality according to the Divine Plan. God is calling us each to be artists of our own lives, so we have an obligation to find our vocation and the purpose of our life. God needs apostles now more than ever in a world grown dark and despairing.
        In order to heal the wrenching wounds of our culture, we have to abandon the instinct to be Guerilla Girls and Eve Enslers. We can be fiery, witty, intrepid, controversial or devastatingly original. But we cannot—absolutely cannot—initiate the great work that is to be ours of our own accord and hurl it into society like urbane savages. No, we must become the feminine principal in our relationship with God (yes, men too), receiving what He urgently wants to give us. When we overcome the spiritual obstacles, pronounce our yes, greatness is born for the salvation of the entire world.

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