Tag: Condom

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If Contraception Kills Life, Abstinence and Celibacy Do, Too! – 25 Nov 10

Pope Benedict XVI now allowed Catholics to use condoms in very special circumstances. These circumstances are very limited and don’t include using a condom only as a contraceptive. You can use it if you want to save life, if you have AIDS and don’t want to spread it. If you use it as a contraceptive, the Catholic Church believes that it is a sin because you actually kill a life in the process of creation, you are acting against God’s purpose – so they say. The problem thus is killing life before it happened.

With this explanation I had to wonder about the church’s general stand on sex. Sex is okay between a married man and woman as long as they don’t use contraceptives. But life can actually only really be created when the woman is ovulating, when she is in the fertile period of her cycle. Only then, the egg can be fertilized. If a married couple has sex on any of the other approximately 25 days of the month, all this precious sperm gets killed! Is that against God’s purpose, too? Should a couple that is strictly following the Pope’s suggestions only have sex five to six days a month?

Following this thought, it is a really bad thing that even if you have sex in ovulation time, only one of those millions of little guys has to reach the goal, all others are destined to die! Oh, but wait a second – didn’t God destine them to die? All except one who makes the run and actually starts the real creation of life.

Let’s stay with the idea that the Pope gave us for solving all problems – celibacy or abstinence. Okay, if someone is even abstinent from women but needs some relief and does hand-practice in the bathroom? Then, also all sperm will die. If someone very strictly follows the Pope’s rules and never masturbates but has wet dreams? Then, too, all the sperm comes out and dies. This happens naturally, you can ask any teenage boy. But maybe the solution for this would simply be to go to church and confess. What can you do about this anyway?

If this is the theory however, what should women do? If the egg that their body produces is not used, if conception does not take place, the egg will also die and it will be discarded. Even celibacy is not a solution then! Each nun kills one egg each month. She is doing this by not having sex and not getting pregnant. As a conclusion women should try to become pregnant each time they ovulate. Is this what the Catholic Church wants to tell us?

I think we leave this topic with these thoughts, everybody has his own opinion and I think I made mine clear.

If you had a close look at the picture already, you may have noticed that we are now in Germany. You may be surprised because I did not mention it before. This time it is going to be a short trip only and I will let you know the reason for this tomorrow.

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God is not against Condoms and Contraceptives – 24 Nov 10

While writing yesterday’s diary, I had another thought. Doctors here in India also let people know that a woman’s risk of cervical cancer gets higher with each birth. A woman with seven children is thus a lot more likely to get cervical cancer than a mother of one. It thus increases the risk of dying. The Holy Father said it is okay to use a condom to prevent spreading of HIV, it is okay if you use a condom in order to save life instead of preventing life from coming into existence. So would it be fine to use a condom to prevent cervical cancer, too?

Well, I guess not, if you think of his model solution for preventing AIDS infections altogether: celibacy! Yes, if you don’t want more children, just don’t have sex, don’t waste your sperm and don’t kill unborn – and un-conceived – life through birth control. As I said yesterday, this might also be the solution to India’s population problem wouldn’t it be such an impossible thing to do. You just cannot teach celibacy to people who sign with fingerprints and couldn’t care less about how many people there are in their country. What about the relation of an educated Western couple who got married, has two children and doesn’t want to have more? Again, the answer would be abstinence, right?

Apart from the fact that I see celibacy as a fully wrong concept that suppresses a very natural urge, I have to say that I strongly oppose the idea that God would not like us to use birth control. Do you really oppose God’s creation if you use condoms or the birth control pill? I don’t want to go into the discussion if those hormones are good for your body or which contraceptive is most natural. I want to ask the Pope, the Catholic Church or just everybody who is of that opinion, do you really think that you can oppose God’s creation? If He wants life to come to this world, do you think you can do anything against that? How powerful do you think you are?

Isn’t that an extreme over-estimation of yourself? God is the one who gives and takes life, not you. Even if you use a condom perfectly, it is only a 98% guarantee that you don’t get pregnant. Most people even only get a 85% guarantee because they don’t use it really properly. So what do you think, if God wanted a life to come, He would not find a way? After all He is the one who is behind the idea that we should reproduce. By the way, He is also the one behind the invention of birth control measurements, so don’t believe that He didn’t want people to start using them.

No, you cannot convince me in this way and you cannot convince millions of people who would like to enjoy the natural sexual urge of their body in a healthy and safe way.

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Population of India Blasts and Pope Bans Contraceptives – 23 Nov 10

I had to think a little bit more about the Pope’s idea of using condoms for preventing HIV from spreading but not as a contraceptive. The Catholic Church with the Pope as its head says that people should not use birth control. Anyway, sex before marriage is completely unthinkable and comes close to a mortal sin, so they are not talking about one-night-stands, single sex or partners who did not decide to unite in the holy bond of matrimony. That is anyway evil, so let’s keep discussing intercourse in a marriage, absolutely legal intercourse according to Catholicism.

Why exactly are you not supposed to use condoms? Their answer is that you are trying to prevent life, you are practically opposing creation. Each time that you have sex and each time that the man has an orgasm could be one more life on this earth and you practically kill that life before it even started if you use condoms or birth control pills.

If we follow this thought it means that the Catholic Church wants a couple to get married and as soon as possible have children. When one child is born, don’t control anything, let the second one happen! And another one, and another one… wait, is that really the idea? Living here in India we hear many doctors telling illiterate and uneducated families not to produce a lot of offspring, and that for several cogent reasons.

India is a country with a population growing so fast, that it could in 15 to 20 years outgrow the population of China. Five or more children in a family are not a rarity. Uneducated farmers like the thought of having many sons who can work on their fields. Additionally the business would stay in family, you can trust them and you don’t need to pay anybody from outside. They don’t realize that feeding seven children may be even more costly than paying salary to extra workers. In their eyes their children are the provision for their old age. Everybody wants to have many children although they sometimes don’t even have the money to feed themselves. What should their children live from?

There are many grievances in India and charity workers from India and all over the world try to tell people that they should only have one or two children. The government tried to lower the birth rate in many ways. They spent millions of Rupees educating people on family planning and paying money to those who have sterilizations and vasectomies done. This all for a reason: if India’s population keeps on growing, the poverty in the country will take overhand, there are not enough schools even today, there is a big shortage of doctors and so many people live and die in situations of extremely poor hygiene simply because they don’t have enough space.

So if it is a sin to use birth control methods such as condoms, India will just keep on growing. To educated people, the idea of not using birth control seems old-fashioned, outdated and simply irresponsible. The Holy Father’s answer to this would probably be celibacy again. Just don’t have sex if you don’t want to have children. But you cannot teach people abstinence if you have difficulties teaching them the alphabet! Is it really a sin to use condoms in this country? Would the Pope make an exception and allow Indian Christians to use artificial birth control? Or is India just not a place for Catholics?

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Pope allows Condoms to Prevent AIDS from Spreading – 22 Nov 10

After the child abuse scandals and sex scandals of the Catholic Church that have been uncovered in the last years, the world has been waiting for a reaction by Pope Benedict XVI. Something. An apology, a call to action against it, any reaction! But no, even on his Easter speech to the world it seemed like this topic was not enough of an issue to bother the Holy Father. Next week however the world will finally be able to read about how stunned he was about the scandals… better late than never?

Next week the Vatican will publish a book based on the first interview given face to face by a Pope and everybody can look forward to get some interesting new statements. One of the most surprising ones is that he finally accepts that condoms might be a good thing!

Well, he didn’t quite say it like that. He moved only a tiny little bit away from the conservative statement that condemns condom use overall: “In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality.” He right away makes clear that although you may use it to prevent AIDS from spreading, it is not the ‘proper way’ to deal with HIV and for sure you should not use contraceptives when you are married and both you and your partner do not suffer from AIDS.

So he actually only admits that men may use condoms if they know that they are HIV positive so that they don’t infect another person. He gives an example: “There may be justified individual cases, for example when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be … a first bit of responsibility, to redevelop the understanding that not everything is permitted and that one may not do everything one wishes.” He does not leave the opinion that you should not use birth control or that you should not have sex before marrying – God beware! No, but it seems that after decades of protests, debates and discussions, the pontiff finally realized that even the Catholic Church cannot stay that much backward to believe it is better to infect another person with a deadly virus than to use a condom! Many cardinals, bishops and priests who obviously live more in reality are already of the opinion that birth control may even be a good idea and much better than the solution of the pope who still suggests abstinence.

Nevertheless I guess we have to thank his holiness for granting all HIV infected men to have sex with their wives using condoms and all male prostitutes to use condoms in their profession. Should he himself ever get the joy of having sex, I think he should try it without a condom to be able to get full pleasure.

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