September 2, 2010 (wellsphere.com)

Dr. Berger has been a innovator in creating sterilization reversal surgery as a safe, effective and affordable alternative to the more costly treatment of in-vitro fertilization. His success and the contributions of his staff at Chapel Hill Tubal Reversal Center are the focus of a recent featured article in The Triangle Physician magazine.

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August 26, 2010 (virtueonline.org)

“There is…a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing” Eccelesiastes 3:1-5

We live in a culture that has separated sex from procreation. That’s the major result of “The Pill,” introduced 50 years ago.

Many assumed The Pill would decrease out-of-wedlock births, which were 5 percent of the total in 1960. In fact, it spurred promiscuity, an 8-fold growth of unwed births to 41 percent. Widespread premarital sex also led to a 16-fold growth of cohabitation, jumping from 430,000 couples living together to 6.8 million in 2008.

There is an alternative to The Pill to plan one’s family, to have no more children than the couple wants, and to avoid contraception altogether. It is called Natural Family Planning, or NFP. Many Protestants never heard of it, and millions of Catholics who learn about it as part of marriage preparation, reject it as too difficult to practice.

Women cannot conceive during two-thirds of every month. If a couple limits sexual relations to that period, she will never get pregnant. However, from 8 to 12 days each month, before and during ovulation, she can conceive.

Natural Family Planning is a scientific technique indicating with certainty the days when to have sex and avoid pregnancy, and when they should abstain should they wish to defer child-bearing.

The Couple to Couple League (www.ccli.org) has volunteers who have trained 200,000 couples in this Sympto-Thermal Method. Women are taught a two-step process to observe their signs of fertility each month:

1. Each morning they take their temperature and record it. When they can conceive, their temperature rises one half of a degree. Then it falls during weeks of infertility.

2. During her fertile period, a woman’s body creates a natural mucus secretion. When it is present, sperm can survive 3-5 days, and conception is possible.

A 2007 study published in “Human Reproduction” reports that 900 NFP women who went through 17,000 cycles were 99.4 percent effective in preventing pregnancy.

I asked Mike Manhart, Executive Director of the League, to explain the benefits of Natural Family Planning: “NFP is completely safe. There are no side effects, no health risks. It treats us with full dignity and respect. By contrast, contraceptives communicate a message, ‘I love you completely except your ovaries. I want them not to function.’

“NFP works in accordance with God’s plan. He made us this way, to give time for fertility and times of infertility. And it gives us a deep sense of appreciation and awe of children,” he explained.

“Each and every month, we have to decide: Should we or should we not have a child? If you know you are fertile, you are armed with an important piece of information. It is important to have a conversation about whether to have a child, which contraceptive couples never talk about. They say they will think about it down the road, but down the road never comes.”

J. Budziszewski, a Catholic convert, wrote a Foreword to a book, “Open Embrace” by Sam and Bethany Torode, in which he made this eloquent statement:

“Conjugal sex serves not just one great good, but three, and they need marriage to come into their own. First, among these goods is procreation: God told Adam and Eve to ‘be fruitful and multiply.’

“Second is union. When Adam was lonely, God didn’t give him a man, an animal or a crowd of people, but a woman – different from him, yet made with God’s image. When he saw her, he was so astonished that he cried, ‘This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh’ (Genesis 2:23).

“The third, or sacramental, good of conjugal sex becomes real only when the spouses are united to Christ, for they become a living emblem of his sacrificial love for the Church… Paul is so awed by this that he calls matrimony one of God’s secrets. ‘This mystery is a profound one,’ he says. ‘and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:32).’”

These three goods: procreative, unitive and sacramental – are all present in Natural Family Planning. Contraception deliberately closes the door to new life, which Budziszewski calls “merely a collaboration in selfishness. Children change us in a way we desperately need to be changed. They wake us up, they wet their diapers…they knock us out of our selfish habits and force us to live sacrificially for others.”

Consider the wisdom of Natural Family Planning.

—- Mike McManus is co-author of “Living Together: Myths, Risks & Answers,” and President of Marriage Savers. www.marriagesavers.org 301-469-5873

WASHINGTON — A U.S. district court issued a preliminary injunction Monday stopping federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research in a slap to the Obama administration’s new guidelines on the sensitive issue.

The court ruled in favor of a suit filed in June by researchers who said human embryonic stem cell research involves the destruction of human embryos.

Judge Royce Lamberth granted the injunction after finding that the lawsuit would likely succeed because the guidelines violated law banning the use of federal funds to destroy human embryos.

“(Embryonic stem cell) research is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed,” Lamberth wrote in a 15-page ruling. The Obama administration could appeal his decision or try to rewrite the guidelines to comply with U.S. law.

The unusual suit against the National Institutes of Health, backed by some Christian groups opposed to embryo research, argued that the NIH policy violates U.S. law and takes funds from researchers seeking to work with adult stem cells.

The U.S. Department of Justice and NIH had no immediate comment.

RULING:
https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2009cv1575-44

August 25, 2010 (4marks.com)

Having seen an inordinate number of eloquent commentaries delineating the moral evils of the recent United States District Court decision  nullifying the will of California voters on Proposition 8 ,  which banned same-sex marriage, I am nonetheless left wondering why none of the commentators was able to connect the dots.

Obviously, same-sex “marriage” or even same-sex “civil unions” are a bad idea, particularly if legitimized by a court system that previously put its stamp of approval on contraception  and abortion . But why isn’t anyone pointing out the obvious root cause of this latest moral and legal debacle? Why isn’t anyone hammering on contraception?

In April of this year, months before this decision, Jenn Giroux , executive director of HLI America, explained to readers that the public acceptance of contraception has led to (among other things) “[s]maller and more broken families, rampant homosexuality, pornography, and China’s coercive one-child policy.” 

Earlier, wise teachers such as Professor Janet Smith emphatically linked a rejection of Pope Paul VI’s profoundly wise encyclical Humanae Vitae to a wide acceptance of homosexuality . In her 2003 comments, she pointed out what I believe is the real problem—one that very few will admit: “Rather than holding to the Christian and common sense view that sex belongs within marriage between a male and a female committed to each other for life and open to children, our culture thinks that sex is quite simply for pleasure—and that almost any combination of consenting individuals may morally seek that pleasure without any commitment, without an openness to children.”

In 1998, Father John Hardon, SJ, who is sorely missed by many of us who were his students, pointed out in “Contraception: Fatal to the Faith and to Eternal Life,” “The spectacle of broken families, broken homes, divorce and annulments, abortion and the mania of homosexuality—all of this has its roots in the acceptance of contraception on a wide scale in what only two generations ago was a professed Catholic population.”

Clearly, many wise people have understood—and warned us about —the cost of contraception. But not everyone is on this page.

For example, rather than setting forth facts regarding the nature of sexual sin and its tragic consequences, many members of the Catholic clergy have either been totally silent or have said things that not only confuse fact with fiction but further marginalize Catholic teaching. This, in turn, makes Church doctrine less palatable to a sexually saturated culture, even though Catholic teaching is now and always will be worthy of belief and obedience—because it contains the fullness of truth.

During their November 2006 meeting, for example, the U.S. Catholic bishops  “acknowledged that most married Catholics—96 percent, according to their own estimate—use birth control, and the bishops said they recognize that the [C]hurch’s teachings on homosexuality are contested in American society.”

Excuse me, but those percentages do not change truth. In fact, they should drive more bishops back to boldly teaching their people instead of gauging the content of their message on public acceptance of what they have to say. It’s the type of posturing that perhaps led to Cardinal Francis George, current U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops president, saying (in response to the judge’s decision allowing same-sex marriage), “ Marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of any society. The misuse of law to change the nature of marriage undermines the common good.”

He did not say nor did he make reference to the obvious fact that this very sad state of affairs would not exist in the first place if contraception had been rejected long ago. He was simply silent on the point.

This is why I recommend that rather than dialoguing, as a whole, every Catholic bishop and every Catholic priest should be teaching, preaching and exhorting. Nobody really knows what America or its court decisions would look like today if the Catholics of this nation had been properly catechized for the past 42 years on matters pertaining to human sexuality. 

What we do know is that today America and, most importantly, Catholics, are sliding toward a moral hell.

It’s high time many more Catholic leaders in the U.S. stood up and clarified the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, sinfulness and sinlessness. Why? Because the only treatment for the deadly bacteria raging through the veins of this society is a very strong dose of the same message Christ gave to His disciples a very long time ago: “Try your hardest to enter by the narrow door, because, I tell you, many will try to enter and will not succeed” ( Luke 13: 24 ). 

The narrow door is always open, and frankly, anything less than fighting tooth and nail to get there will not heal this ailing body politic we know as America.

August 25, 2010

Adiana is a permanent form of female sterilization which is made to be irreversible. Chapel Hill Tubal Reversal Center surgeons, Dr. Gary S. Berger and Dr. Charles Monteith, have successfully reversed the procedure and the first baby after reversal has been born.

The staff at Chapel Hill Tubal Reversal Center are happy to report that the first baby born after Adiana reversal was born on August 20, 2010.

Adiana is known as a permanent form of female sterilization that uses radio waves to form scar tissue in the fallopian tubes. Adiana was approved by the FDA for use in the United States in United States in

the year 2009. The placement of the Adiana is done through the cervix into the fallopian tubes. This procedure is generally performed using light sedation. Scar tissue is then formed blocking off the fallopian tubes thus preventing pregnancy. The manufacturer of Adiana has labeled this procedure as irreversible.

Chapel Hill Tubal Reversal Center surgeons, Dr. Gary S. Berger and Dr. Charles Monteith, performed the first ever Adiana reversal on February 6, 2009. The surgery took approximately one-hour and ten minutes.

The type of procedure used to reverse the Adiana is an outpatient tubouterine implantation. This type of procedure consists of repairing the fallopian tubes and attaching them back to the uterus.This form of reversal takes both expertise and experience on the surgeons part. The pregnancy rate after this type of procedure is about 50%.

Chapel Hill Tubal Reversal Center has long been known as the leading tubal reversal center in the world. Patients travel from all over the world to have tubal ligation reversal in order to restore fertility or for the relief of Post Tubal Ligation Syndrome.

With the low-cost outpatient procedure, Dr. Berger and Dr. Monteith have helped over 8000 couples realize their dreams of becoming parents after tubal ligation can come true. Both the Adiana and the Essure procedures are successfully reversed by surgeons with excellent results.

For the latest information on Adiana reversal please visit: testimonials.tubal-reversal.net/2010/adiana-reversal-complete-su ..

August 18, 2010 (The Record)

The majority of Australians believe the lie that cohabitation will improve their chances of a good marriage, the national Catholic Society for Marriage Education president said.
Over 70 per cent of Australians believe that cohabitation is likely to improve their chances of having a good marriage, Derek Boylen, who is also the Perth Archdiocesan director of Catholic Marriage Education Services (CMES), told local Billings educators on 16 July at the Doubleview Catholic pastoral centre.

This social trend exists despite Australian Government statistics released in Australian Families 2008 showing that de facto couples are three times as likely to end their relationship within a five-year period as those who are married.

More disturbing, he said, was the fact that between 76 and 80 per cent of couples marrying in the Catholic Church are cohabiting, and many more than that, he says, would already be sexually active.

Coupled with this, 80 per cent of natural family planning users are non-Catholic. However, through NFP promotion around the Archdiocese that ratio is now 60 per cent non-Cathoics – doubling the number of Catholics that Natural Fertility Services (the Archdiocesan agency of which Mr Boylen is also director) are seeing. Catholics are also encouraged to promote NFP themselves.

“It’s disturbing that it’s such a trend and sad that, in many ways, being Catholic hasn’t made a difference on their choice; (the rate) is on par with the general community. Choosing to get married in Catholic Church clearly hasn’t impacted their decision,” Mr Boylen later told The Record.

Mr Boylen said that the percentage of CMES clients already cohabiting reflects the societal trend that has seen the number of couples cohabiting before marriage rising sharply from five per cent in 1960 to 78 per cent in 2009.

“Couples just aren’t aware of the constraints they put on their relationships by cohabiting, and that often in these circumstances, when they get married it’s not for the right reasons,” he said.

These constraints are reflected in Australian and US data showing that premarital cohabitation is associated with more negative communication in marriage, as issues like shared finances are often not discussed as de facto couples often find themselves “sliding into” the live-together scenario, having slept together already.

Cohabiting couples on average score lower on a wide range of indices of marital quality compared to those who only lived together after marriage. These associated risks have not abated over the last 20 years, Mr Boylen said.

Premarital cohabitation is also linked to lower levels of marriage satisfaction, while higher numbers of premarital partners are associated with higher risks of divorce.

Through his own experience at CMES and data reflected in Australian and US studies, Mr Boylen has found that couples experience “wedding day blues”, as nothing has changed in their lives after the big day when they’ve already lived together, as opposed to higher satisfaction levels among couples who did not cohabit prior to marriage.

Such evidence of the link between premarital cohabitation and poorer marital outcomes has become known in the social science fraternity as “the cohabitation effect”, he said.
Premarital cohabitation is also associated with lower levels of dedication to one’s spouse for men, but not for women, who often had a high level of commitment prior to the marriage.
The very poor, he said, also tend to believe it’s better to have financial security before getting married, “so they tend to cohabit longer before possibly entering marriage”.
Understanding commitment

Understanding the nature of commitment and the crucial difference between ‘deciding’ and ‘sliding’ in relationships is key to understanding the ‘cohabitation effect’, Mr Boylen said.
He addressed Billings educators on 16 July about ‘commitment theory’, an emerging area of marriage and relationship study that differentiates between factors that motivate connection (called dedication) and factors that increase the costs of living (called constraints).

The talk was organised by Billings LIFE  WA – an education service assisting couples to achieve or avoid pregnancy using the Billings Ovulation Method of Natural Family Planning.
“Researchers are now asking questions about the difference dedication and constraint makes,” he said. Couples who share a higher level of dedication tend to have a strong sense of ‘couple identity’, or a ‘we-ness’ that pervades how they approach life, he added.

Constraints, meanwhile, help explain why some people remain in unhappy relationships.

Men, however, on average see marriage as a bigger decision than women as it requires a greater change in their identity and way of living. Studies show, he said, that, after marriage, cohabiting men rate their level of commitment well below women and non-cohabiting men, whose commitment level shoots up after marriage compared to before.

The concept of ‘relationship inertia’ is also key to understanding the phenomenon of the ‘cohabitation effect’, he said – the idea that some couples who otherwise would not have married end up married partly because they cohabit and have much to lose, as Australian law says they can still lose half their possessions after living just six months as de facto.

“Cohabitation, however, may not cause risks for the relationship as much as make it harder to terminate a riskier union, thus constraining the search for a better partner fit,” he said.
“Many couples do not consider the effect of increasing constraints prior to a more dedication-based relationship being formed.”

Derek’s tips for young lovers:
l Get to know the person very well before deciding to marry. Think about it and discuss your core expectations to see how compatible you are
l Do not make this crucial decision in a period of emotional infatuation
l Observe how the person treats not only you but his or her friends
l Learn as much as you can about the person’s priorities and values
l Give more weight than your heart may want to how closely the person shares your most essential values in life
l Wait until you are 22 or older to make such an important decision. What you think you are looking for can change a lot through post-school university time and starting in the workforce
l Get the opinion of friends and family who are not likely to tell you only what you want to hear.