A group of Seminarians made some really nifty videos exemplifying the differences between Natural Family Planning (NFP) and Contraception. They're quite neat! Check them out on YouTube here:

Intro video

NFP V. Contraception 2

NFP v. Contraception 3

NFP V. Contraception 4

A friend of a friend recently got back from a mission trip in Africa and she had this story to tell.

While she was there, she went to visit a local health clinic. She was taken on a tour of the facilities by a member of the staff, and was brought back into the supply room. There her guide showed her the supplies that this small village had to work with. She opened one cabinet marked first aid and found a few small boxes of bandaids, and a few other gauze stripes, but a basically bare cubbord. She then opened the medical refridgerator, used to keep antibiotics and other medicine at the proper temperature, and found no supplies whatsoever. However, that was just 2 doors, there were still several more to go. She opened the last three with the guide and was stunned.

All three cabinets were FILLED completely with American Condoms.

Her guide looked at her and said "Please, when you get back to America, tell your country we need band aids, no more condoms!"

I knew that the African people were being shipped boat loads of condoms but I had absolutely no idea the insanity! So i decided to do a little break down of funds.

I tried to do research to find out exactly how many condoms were sent to Africa each year. Unfortunately, there is absolutely NO way to figure this out. Nobody knows, not even the US government. There are just that many.

So I went to International Planned Parenthood Federation, and this is what I learned.

In 2005 alone, IPPF sent some 103.4 million condoms to Africa. At a meer 50 cents a condom (a very conservative estimate) that is about $51.7 million spent on condoms to Africa.

Seeing as the more prevalent problem in Africa seems to be lack of food, not lack of condoms, (according to my friend of a friend) I decided to figure out just how much food those 103.4 million condoms COULD have bought.

(I figured my prices based on the American market, again a conservative estimate since food prices are MUCH lower in developing countries.)

An average meal (1/4 cup beans, 1/4 cup rice and 1 piece of flat bread) would cost only 25 cents to prepare.

Since my estimate for condoms is about 50 cents each, that means each condom sent could have provided 2 meals for starving people.

With IPPF's funds alone, that's 206.8 MILLION meals that could have been purchased in just 1 year for the price of those condom.

And then comes the matter of the homefront. Certainly, this is a great case for not sending condoms to starving people- but what about here.

Well, the same rule applies. For every dollar (about how much a condom retails for in the States) spent on a condom here, you could feed 4 starving people. Basically, if you didn't have sex that one time, 4 people could have had dinner. If that doesn't make the decision to have promiscuous sex a little more difficult, iIcan't think of what would!

Beyond that, the average price for the Birth Control Pill, after Insurance, is approximately $25. At 25 cents per meal, that means each month's worth of pills is worth the same as 100 meals. Break that down by days, and each individual pill is worth 3.3 meals.

That means, if you gave up your birth control pills for just 1 month, and sent the money you saved to feed the poor, you could feed 1 person 3 square meals a day for that entire month, and have leftovers.

So the decision is yours- have 'responsibility free' sex and let that person die of starvation, or take responsibility for your role as a memeber of the global community- live without birth control pills for just 1 month- and save a fellow human from a gruesome, slow death due to starvation.

To me, that's a no-brainer.

I'd just like to say a few things about a logical flaw our country has when it comes to the differences between Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) drugs and Contraceptive drugs.

The Natural amount of normal female hormones (estrogen and progesterone) found in an adult female ranges from between 40 and 500 picograms per day depending on the point she is at in her monthly cycle.

Scientists
found that because of the above average amount of synthetic hormone
that was being used in HRT, women were at a higher risk for Breast cancer and other cancers, as well as heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems.

The average level of hormone in HRT is between 300,000 and 625,000 Picograms per day, well over 1000 times the normal amount.

However,
doctors and scientists have consistently sworn that hormonal birth
control has no such side effects, regardless of the data on hormonal
treatment of women for reasons other than contraception. But how could
it not?

Hormonal Birth Control contains 20 to 50 MILLION picograms in EACH daily pill.

Not only is that 75 times the amount of hormones found in HRT drugs, but it is nearly 400 thousand times more than what is normally found in a woman's body, even at the peak moments of her cycle!

Somehow
the scientific logic does not flow here. One drug that contains 2
synthetic hormones at one dose is severely dangerous for all women and
should be discontinued, but the same 2 synthetic hormones found in
another drug at an astronomically higher rate is supposed to be good for you?

(sources: the Physician's Desk Reference and the American Cancer Society)

Yesterday, on hundreds of college campuses nationwide,
students were handed a Hershey’s kiss with a free condom. This “Condom and a Kiss” campaign has been
going on for several years and is a way for students who practice contraception
or support it to spread their message and their products.

But yesterday
Project Plus, the group of college kids I work with who have been actively spreading a message opposed to this mentality via
posters and articles in the school newspaper, gave my alma mater a run for their contraception.
Contradictory to the normally sexually spurred activities of Valentine’s
Day, we reached out to our peers with a message that “True Love
is worth more than Contraception”. We had
full sized Hershey’s Chocolate Bars with that message on the front, and we handed them all
out (360 bars) in less than 2 hours, even on a snow day for my small school
which had canceled classes. Perhaps because
of the snow, the “Condom and a Kiss” campaign that we hoped would be
present did not show up. Butthere was still plenty of good conversations, and both
positive and negative responses. As
students entered the popular student café, we asked them
if they would like a free chocolate bar. At first they thought we were trying to sell the chocolate for fundraising, so they would respond“No… wait, you said free?” The students were astonished that anyone
would be handing out so much chocolate for free! And very grateful as well.

The theme of the chocolate bar give-away was “Without
Contraception, You get so much more”, an analogy pertaining to the tiny
Hershey’s Kisses that the “Condom and a Kiss” campaign hands out with their product,
compared to full sized Hershey’s bars we had. Inside
the candy wrapper we explained this briefly, saying, “It makes sense that condoms are handed out today
with nothing more than a tiny chocolate kiss.
This reflects how little love you can express while using one. Using contraception tells your lover, ‘I
don’t want to share every part of myself with you.’”

The Great Chocolate Giveaway was a
complete success! The "Eagle's Nest" Cafe was buzzing with talk about contraception, and we had several people sign up for our (soon to come) newsletter, even people who didn't agree with our message. Girls (and guys) who disagreed with us, upon reading the front of the bar, would politely hand the chocolate back, or slip it back on the table, saying they couldn't take our free candy because they disagreed. There was only 1 girl who took the chocolate, read the pamphlet over her lunch, and then brought it back to use crumpled and torn as her way of saying that she disagreed. All in all, it was a wonderfully positive event!

Because of the massive ice storm that hit our portion of the east coast the night before, we were unable to poster campus with our "10 reasons why chocolate is better than contraception" until Valentine's night. However, all reports I've heard have been positive, so we'll call that one a complete sucess as well! Not to mention the nearly 100 hits to our little website in less than 3 hours!

Next year we hope that all the campuses involved with Project Plus will be participate in this Valentine's event.

This week, a group of lobbyists, worried about a woman’s
health and safety, recommended to the FDA that a certain type of birth control
be banned from sale in the US. The consumer group “Public Citizen” is
petitioning to ban pills that include the synthetic hormone desogestrel, which
is found in the newest forms of birth control because of they significantly
increase the chance that a woman will develop (and possibly die from) blood
clots, specifically blood clots in the legs, a condition called pulmonary embolism.

An article on the petition from Forbes magazine stated:

“[These] third-generation birth-control pills were developed
in the 1980s in an attempt to create an oral contraceptive that caused fewer
side effects than earlier versions. In December 1995, three independent studies
concluded that third-generation pills were about twice as likely as
second-generation versions to cause blood clots. Since then, more studies have
confirmed that finding, according to Public Citizen.”

As a consumer, even if I weren’t opposed to contraception,
my thought process goes something like this:

1) There’s
someone out there besides the birth control companies doing research on the
effects of birth control on our bodies: Wonderful!

2) We
have found out through extensive research that one specific drug is dangerous
and should not be used.

3) Therefore,
there is no reason why this drug should remain on the market.

However, Planned Parenthood immediately released a statement
of their opposition of the petition. How
oxymoronic can you get? A business that
promotes itself as a women’s health care organization is speaking out against
research that says that one of their products might be harming women’s health! You can read their comments on the petition
in this
article on their website. In it, Dr.Vanessa
Cullins, Planned Parenthood's vice president for medical affairs, states,

"You have to put it into context. For women who aren't using any form of hormonal birth control and who aren't pregnant, the risk is four out of 100,000. For all birth-control pills, the risk is 10 to 30 in 100,000, while in pregnancy the risk of blood clots is 60 in 100,000."

Pardon me, Dr. Cullens, but a 30 out of 100,000 risk is 7 and a half times greater than a risk of 4 out of 100,000. That's a whole lot more, and I'll shoot for less of a risk of death whenever I'm given the chance.

By the way, pulmonary embolism is what killed at least 2 dozen girls, the youngest 14, who were on the contraceptive patch, and injured thousands more. There's a massive lawsuit pending as we speak.

A new study was released Wednesday that discloses the role
that estrogen plays in breast cancer.
Through the University of Illinois,
researchers announced that not only does estrogen speed up the process of
breast cancer once it has started and help to transport the disease to other
cells, but it actually can block our immune cells from being able to kill these
cancerous cells. It does this by
inducing the expression of an inhibitor enzyme, much like similar inhibitors
that can cause depression by blocking the release of serotonin. This study, which is the first of its kind,
reports that

“when estrogen binds with an estrogen
receptor the complex promotes production of a granzyme inhibitor, proteinase
inhibitor 9 (PI-9). That inhibitor binds the granzyme, preventing it from
initiating the molecular cascade that kills tumor cells.”

That’s a fancy way of saying that an excess of
estrogen won’t let our white blood cells do their job. The scientists go on to point out that it
wasn’t previously known that estrogen played this specific role in breast
cancer, and that "the amounts of estrogen required to do this are quite
small" (David Shapiro, a UI professor of biochemistry who conducted the
study).

Most birth control pills report
levels of synthetic estrogen between 20 micrograms (mcgm) and 50 mcgm. The level that most women naturally have in
their system is 50-400 picograms (pgm). (for those who don’t feel like pulling
out the calculator, 1 microgram is equal to 1 million picograms.) Also, birth
control pills sends a constant stream of synthetic hormones (estrogen and
progesterone) through the body, whereas the natural cycle of a woman has
significantly lower levels during much of the month, with a peak right before
and after ovulation. What doesn’t make
sense to me then is why Planned Parenthood and other health organizations
refuse to admit what has been known by many for years: that birth control leads
to breast cancer. For a long time we’ve
known that there is a correlation between levels of estrogen and a woman’s risk
of getting breast cancer, but there was no conclusive scientific evidence that
showed us why. This new research points
right to the heart of the problem and gives us a first hand look at exactly
what excess estrogen does to a woman’s immune system that prevents her from
killing off cancerous cells from the start.

For years, Planned Parenthood and
others have responded to our argument that birth control is causing an increase
in breast cancer by saying that it helps to prevent other kinds of cancers,
such as ovarian and endometrial cancers. I hope now that Planned Parenthood
will stop advertising that taking birth control will reduce your risk of
cancer, when the evidence is so obviously contrary. With Breast Cancer as the second leading
cause of death of women, even the possibility that it might increase a woman’s
chances of contracting the deadly disease is just too much.

The Full study can be found at the Oncogene journal website. Oncogene is one of the world's leading cancer journals and is published weekly.

As I promised, here's a short synopsis of how Project Plus came to be, and what we're doing now.

Like I said earlier, we are a group of college students who were all concerned about the Women's Clinic re-opening on our campus after nearly 4 years without a physician who would do the necessary physical
exams to prescribe Birth Control. Within the past 4 years, the Health clinic
had routinely dispensed BC to all female students who had an active prescription at
their discounted price, but they could not provide new students with prescriptions,
so their customer base had decreased exponentially each year. In fact, when
they started back up, they had so few students still on the plan, that they
weren't even keeping the pill stocked at our school, but giving the
students discounts if they went across the street to the grocery store pharmacy
to buy it. Within the first few weeks of school starting back up, though, the
"Peer Wellness" group had recruited nearly 50 new "Peer
Educators" who would be trained to teach the class on birth control and
STD's that is required before a girl can obtain an appointment at the Women's
Clinic, even if she does not wish to recieve Birth Control. Appalled, and slightly embarrassed, at our school's reaction, we set to
work.

We knew that on a college campus, especially a small, liberal one like ours,
the best way to attract a student’s attention is to be fast and loud. There are
a million ways to be seen and heard on campus, but we picked the one that we
felt would be the most apparent: a postering campaign.

If you've ever been in college, or even to a college campus, you've seen the
students, groggily trekking to class in sweats or pajamas, flip-flops and team
sweat shirts. Sometimes there's breakfast or a coffee cup in one hand, while a
cell phone or iPod packs the other. They barely look up as they hike the well
known path to each of their daily courses. In fact, as a student, I could
pass the same person every day for a semester, and then meet them at a social
come exam time and not even recognize their face! But the one thing that has
always drawn the attention of the morning zombies has been posters. I remember
barely being able to put my shoes on the right feet, but if a bright colored
poster promised information on a new club, a campus event, or a hilarious photo
of one of my classmates doing something equally hilarious (most commonly
followed by the words "Happy Birthday"), you had my attention.

The first poster we put up went out the night before the first "Peer
Wellness education class". It was pink, and donned a horrified looking
1950's era lady holding a pamphlet. The text read like the byline to a B rated
movie: "She Couldn't Believe Her Eyes.... Her Birth Control Was Making Her
Sick!!!" We followed this statement with a
well documented source from Dr. Lloyd J DuPlantis, PD of Pharmacists for Life.
The article, entitled "Nutrient
Depletions Caused by the Pill", was simply a listing of all the different
possible vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients which the pill's chemical
makeup causes the body to slough off instead of retain like it should.
Because of this nutrient depletion of vitamins B and C, calcium and
folic acid as well as others, Dr. DuPlantis logically follows that the pill lowers
one's immune system, making it easier for a girl to contract a cold, the flu,
and even STD's. But more on that later.

I attended the Peer Wellness class, and was not surprised to find that these
"Peer Educators" (who seemed to be very uneducated, especially in the
area of STD's.... I had to correct them surreptitiously on several accounts)
completely dismissed the posters, and actually recommended that students tear
them down (which, since we had had them approved for posting, is actually
against the school's honor code).

It was mainly because of that meeting that I decided that our campaign
needed to continue. My peers were being brainwashed into believing whatever
came out of the pharmaceutical companies mouth, who simply wanted these
unsuspecting young people to invest themselves fully in their product, thereby
securing the companies income well into the CEO's retirement. Not a word was
being said about the possible side effects of these potent drugs! We were
going to have to be the ones to say it.

This immediately made me the most unpopular person on campus that nobody
knew (because no names were associated with the posters in order to prevent
students on my small campus from brushing them off as being from "those
crazy conservative nut job Catholic anti-choicers"). There was at least
one article each week about our campaign in the school newspaper for almost the
entire semester, sometimes more than one! Even the faculty got in on the
action. But our posters kept coming, and kept getting torn down within the
first 24 hours.

We kept hearing word that the opposition was going to do a response poster,
but it wasn't until the 3rd day of final exams that one went up. Even then, we
were prepared. A member of our group had gotten a hold of their poster ahead of
time, and we created a response poster mimicking it that went up not even
half an hour after their poster. We only wished they had gotten on the ball sooner so
that more students could have seen their effort next to ours!

I've received requests from several schools to copy our project at their
schools, which I've been happy to help them out with. We named the campaign Project Plus, because we want to add goodness and
truth, as well as health and fulfillment to our generation... we don't want to
end up just breaking even. A friend of mine helped me put together a website,
and so far I believe 4 schools have signed on. My own alma mater is continuing
this semester as well.

So there you have it. Project Plus in a nutshell.