Wednesday, October 24, 2007
DEFENDING THE CATHOLIC POSITION
Just hours before the College of the Holy Cross hosted a conference on preventing teen pregnancy that includes workshops by organizations such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL and a presentation of an award to pro-abortion Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, The Cardinal Newman Society hosted a talk by Dawn Eden at the Worcester Cathedral in front of 150 people.
The event promoted the type of Catholic approach to the problem of teen pregnancy that Holy Cross might have chosen to remain faithful to its Catholic identity and was held in cooperation with the Worcester Diocese’s Respect Life Office and a broad coalition of Holy Cross alumni and supporters.
Miss Eden, Director of The Cardinal Newman Society’s Love & Responsibility program and author of The Thrill of the Chaste, delivered a speech entitled “Preventing Teen Pregnancy: The Catholic Approach.”
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One of the reasons I'm not more enthusiastic about efforts to stop abortion is that it looks to me like a band-aid solution--a large band-aid, I'll grant you.
Supporting efforts to encourage out-of-wedlock births does not address the larger picture of the breakdown of the culture to support those babies. The problem begins long before the pregnant teen arrives at the abortion clinic.
Telling our young people they should mess around and then should bear the consequences of that activity is a poor Catholic response to the crisis. The only thing that makes any sense is to live the Catholic morality right from the beginning.
The idea that sex is essential to happiness is the father of one tragedy after another. The crux of the matter is not keeping the babies alive once they are here, the crux is returning the activity that conceives them to a place where they can be nourished once they are here.
Sex is always about babies and family. You can't really separate it from its results. Every time we try to do that, somebody gets hurt.
