Soon Barbie will come with Plan B
The Chilean government recently decided that contraception will be publicly available for all women over the age of 14. According to IPS, all public health centers must dispense birth control, including emergency contraception (EC), free of charge. The decree also ensures that younger women can without authorization from their parents obtain a prescription for birth control pills.
The Catholic Church and conservative politicians are already criticizing the decision that aims to give women of all ages and incomes control over their sexual and reproductive lives. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a pediatrician, responded, saying to the Santiago Times, "The obligation of the state is to provide alternatives, and the obligation of families, of each one of us, is to communicate with our children, explain things to them, and to teach them." Government Spokesperson Ricardo Weber expanded on the real need for Chile to provide these services, telling IPS that 14 of every 100 young people are sexually active by the age of 14.
Yes it is the parents job to educate the children and the governments job to go behind their back.
Here is one really dumb medical explanation I found on a blog referring to this story. "Just so we all know what we're talking about here, the morning after pill is virtually a condom in terms of its function. It prevents pregnancy from occurring and has NOTHING to do with the cessation of cell division...:"
I didn't kill the man I just caused the cessation of his cell division. Of course cell divisions occur immediately after conception and even Plan B's instructions says it can works prior to implantation. So this was a plain dumb statement no deserving of LARGES CAPS.
The World Health Organization is also holding the same line that pregnancy doesn't start till implantation.
Known as 
The World Health Organization is also holding the same line that pregnancy doesn't start till implantation.
For once they're consistent. Personhood is determined by where the baby is--within or without the womb. Why not define pregnancy the same way? Is the child implanted in the uterine wall, or floating around somewhere else?
(I knew there was a deeper reason Jimmy Aikin didn't like defining planets by their orbits!)
(Okay, I'm speculating wildly)
"The obligation of the state is to provide alternatives"
No, it's not. The obligation of the state is to protect its citizens. I suppose I just need reprogrammin-- I mean, sensitivity training.
WHO sounds more like World (to) Hell Organization.
I'm still trying to noodle out that "'women' over the age of 14" line.
Yes, Chris. Nasty way to put it. 'Free choice' for little girls.
And people wonder why Sodom and Gommorrah and Nazi Germany got so bad. It's a slow process of a dying of conscience.
The funny thing is, Modern man thinks he has nothing to learn from history. He htinks it is archaic and outdated. He looks at earlier generations and sees them as inferior. In point of fact, we are making all the same mistakes over and over again.
Isn't it awful? Apparently even some Catholic moral theologians are making the same distinction between pregnancy and conception. This allows them to call the death of the child an "indirect" killing rather than a "direct" one, and therefore allowable.
I think it's almost exactly like calling your brother names while keeping your fingers crossed behind your back. Except in this case, somebody dies.
An old teacher of mine has recently published an article in Ave Maria's journal Nova et Vetera, in the fall of 2005. Fr. Basil Cole, OP's article examines the problem of intention in moral theology. He insists that the intention is not just a state of mind, but includes what you really do, what the effect is of your action. The article is ostensibly about craniotomy (collapsing the skull of a baby who is too big to be born), not done too often in this country but still done in Eastern Europe. But I think it is seminal in the way it provides for an alternate way of thinking about the effects of medical procedures, specifically regarding the "double effect" loophole.
I wasn't clear enough in my previous comment, I think. What I mostly wanted to say is that Fr. Cole's article provides a way to frame the debate that improves our thinking about these cases in biomedical ethics/ moral theology. It's worth reading. (Unfortunately it is not online.)