Contraception

Teaching abstinence outside marriage and fidelity within has been proved to be much more effective in decreasing the spread of HIV than simply distributing condoms, according to the special advisor on HIV for Caritas Internationalis. Monsignor Robert Vitillo, who will participate in the XVII International AIDS Conference, to be held Aug. 3-8 in Mexico City, adds that unfortunately, abstinence and infidelity are not given the attention they deserve among experts and researchers.

The Bush Administration is reviewing the draft of a regulation that would require hospitals receiving federal funds to respect the religious freedom of health care workers by ensuring that workers do not have to participate in medical procedures that they consider morally objectionable. The regulation is especially concerned with the performance of abortion and the administration of "Plan B" morning after pills, which are considered emergency contraception by some but an abortifacient by others.

For many liberal Catholics, July 25, 1968 was the day the music died. Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, published 40 years ago today, reaffirmed Catholicism's absolute ban on birth control. Coming on the heels of the Second Vatican Council's unprecedented opening of the Church to modernity three years earlier, the Vatican's decision to stand by a doctrine that ever fewer Catholics were obeying would reverberate far beyond the bedroom. This was also the year that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, began a long-running intellectual engagement with the atheist and secular forces he saw rising in the West.

Humanae Vitae was a sensitively written expression about the sanctity of marital love and the need to nurture life in marriage written in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But whatever else it stated, it has been remembered for only one thing: the upholding of the Catholic church's ban on birth control. Less than a decade after the encyclical's promulgation, polls showed it was overwhelmingly rejected by Catholics. Eight out of 10 adult U.S. Catholics simply disregarded it. While bishops were largely upholding the document, many priests in pastoral settings, including confessionals, were saying it was a matter for individual conscience.

When DMC Pharmacy opens this summer on Route 50 in Chantilly, the shelves will be stocked with allergy remedies, pain relievers, antiseptic ointments and almost everything else sold in any drugstore. But anyone who wants condoms, birth control pills or the Plan B emergency contraceptive will be turned away. That's because the drugstore, located in a typical shopping plaza featuring a Ruby Tuesday, a Papa John's and a Kmart, will be a "pro-life pharmacy" -- meaning, among other things, that it will eschew all contraceptives. The pharmacy is one of a small but growing number of drugstores around the country that have become the latest front in a conflict pitting patients' rights against those of health-care workers who assert a "right of conscience" to refuse to provide care or products that they find objectionable.