Affirmations of life

Real health, full health, means life. The following was originally posted 23 July 2008 on my personal blog. I reposted it here on Skeptical Healthcare Consumer on 25 July 2011.

My son pointed me in the direction of Jennifer F, a woman who says she was a contented atheist until 2005 but became a Christian and joined the Roman Catholic church in spring 2007.

I'm not Roman Catholic and I have no interest, honestly, in becoming Roman Catholic. But I sure feel a common bond with Jennifer as I watched and listened to and read the following items from her Jennifer's Favorite Links blog!

First, a video that I expect will bring you to tears from the beauty and the challenge--whether you are a religious person or not. --You'll need to read the subtitles quickly at points:



And a pro-family "public service" message from Germany. (Read quickly on this one, too!)



And then, on Jennifer's thought-provoking "Et Tu?" blog: "How I became pro-life," especially her series of "four key memories that give a glimpse into how my understanding of sex was formed":

• When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends who had baby brothers or sisters in their households. One friend's mom was pregnant when we were twelve, but I moved before the baby was born. To the extent that I ever heard any of our parents talk about pregnancy and babies, it was to say that they were happy that they were "done," the impression being that they could finally start living now that that pregnancy/baby unpleasantness was over.
   
• In sex ed class we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. After we were done putting condoms on bananas, our teacher counseled us that we should carefully decide when we might be ready to have sex based on important concerns like whether or not we were in committed relationships, whether or not we had access to contraception, how our girlfriends or boyfriends treated us, whether we wanted to wait until marriage, etc. I do not recall hearing readiness to have a baby being part of a single discussion about deciding when to have sex, whether it was from teachers or parents or society in general. Not once.
   
• On multiple occasions when I was a young teen I recall hearing girls make the comment that they would readily risk dangerous back-alley abortions or even consider suicide if they were to face unplanned pregnancies and abortion wasn't legal. Though I was not sexually active, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me -- that is how much we desired not to have babies before we were ready. Yet the concept of just not having sex if we weren't ready to have babies was never discussed. It's not that we had considered the idea and rejected it; it simply never occurred to us.
   
• Even recently, before our marriage was validated in the Catholic Church my husband and I had to take a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and in the segment called "Good Sex" they did not mention children or babies once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest they came to connecting sex to the creation of life was to briefly say that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.

"Sex could not have been more disconnected from the concept of creating life," she concludes.

I'd have to say I agree with her.

Quite strange, isn't it, when you think about it?