Via SPUC, we have Professor David Paton, professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School, who told the media on Tuesday:

"The fall in conception rates to minors is to be welcomed. The decrease in the rate of conceptions ending in abortion for under-16s over the past three years is particularly good news, although it is still higher than in 1999, when the last government introduced its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy. Since that time, there appears to be no correlation at all between changes to contraceptive services for young people and changes in the conception rate. For example, the number of contraceptive clinic sessions offered specifically for young people was static in 2010 following increases in previous years. Despite this, the teenage conception rate continued to fall in 2010.

Indeed, Anne Milton, the health minister, just last week stated the following when questioned about recent cuts to contraception services: 'Statistics on conceptions ... and abortions ... do not suggest that any recent changes to contraception provision offered by PCTs has had an impact on the number or rate of conceptions or abortions.' This bears out studies in the peer-reviewed literature which show that access to birth control (and in particular the morning-after pill) has little or no causal effect in reducing teenage pregnancy rates."

[link]

With no contraceptive services teenagers are hesitant to engage in sexual activity but some do and there is a resulting rate of conception.

Introduce contraceptive services and sexual activity becomes 'safer' so we might expect to see a fall in the rate of conception but we don't. Why? Because promotion of 'safe' sex means that more teenagers take the risk and the resulting rate of conception is almost identical.

In fact - for those teenagers who wouldn't have had sex if contraception were not promoted, the risk has actually increased.

I personally owe a great debt of gratitude to the Scout movement and all the adults and helpers who worked hard to organise everything from simple games in a church hall, cooking competitions and swimming on a tuesday night through to archery competitions and camping trips. I even found myself flying over Hull in an aeroplane!

As much as I enjoyed the activities and learned loads about camping, hiking, and setting fire to stuff... what I really gained from the experience was a lifelong appreciation of the importance of friendship, teamwork and leadership. Scouting throws teenagers in to all kinds of interesting dynamics such as "the guy leading this group is totally lost and I don't really want to walk five miles the wrong way, what am I going to do about that?"

Anyway... scouting suffers from a problem very common in the modern world - that of thinking that because a thing is easier, therefore it is better. For example, we used to use big old icelandic tents but then somebody had the idea of getting smaller modern tents. Yes, they were easier to put up, easier to put away, easier to keep dry inside... but something of the camping experience was lost. When I was about seventeen I remember one leader saying how lucky we were to be the older group because "now we don't have to go camping, we can stay in a hotel". Was he mad?

So - I'm not entirely suprised to hear that the scouting association has decided to start offering sex education...

“Be prepared” is the motto of the Scout movement, but it is unlikely that Robert Baden-Powell intended it to mean that Boy Scouts should know how to procure and use condoms.

They should now, though. After more than a century of teaching boys how to tie knots, sing campfire songs and help old ladies across the road, the Scout Association today starts teaching its young charges about sex, with sexual health advice and even visits to sexual health clinics.

[link]

"Sexual health clinics" hand out emergency contraception and refer young girls for abortion without parental knowledge or consent.

Who is making this material for the Scouts?

Titled “My Body; My Choice,” after one of the most popular slogans of the pro-abortion movement, the Scout program includes contact information for abortionists, contraception providing groups and detailed information on how to use condoms. It was developed for the Scouts by Brook, one of the country’s leading pro-abortion “sexual health” organizations, which advises the government.

One section says, “Young people should be able to feel what a condom is like,” and says that they should know “how to put on a male condom correctly” and how to recognize if the condom is too old for use.

[link]

So... what do the Catholic Bishops have to say about all this? Presumably they are horrified right? I expect they are making it very clear that any Scout group who meet in church halls belonging to Catholic churches are not to hand out condoms or use this programme...

Right?

Wrong. Instead they have they just issued some useless drivel about how parts of the document are 'welcome'...

“The recognition given in the document to the place of abstinence in combating the problems of STIs and teenage pregnancy is welcomed. We also appreciate that Scouting recognises the importance of the religious beliefs of young people and the wishes of their parents regarding the formation being offered. The Scout Association, along with the publication of My Body My Choice, is also making available a teaching document, Cherishing Human Sexuality which sets out Catholic teaching in this area, and draws on the Bishops’ Conference document Cherishing Life. Cherishing Human Sexuality will further an appreciation of the Gospel of life, which is at the heart of the Church’s understanding of human relationships.”

Bishop Richard Moth, Bishop of the Forces.

[link]

This is the bog standard boilerplate response of the Catholic Bishops to every attack on my family. They say something about the good bits being 'welcome' and say nothing about the problems.

I can't help thinking that if the scouts had decided to shoot children in the head at the age of sixteen, the Bishops would be saying "we welcome the recognition of the importance of children being allowed to bring a teddy".

So long as the Bishops continue like this, so long as they have nothing to say about handing out condoms and advertising abortion providers to fourteen year olds then the message to parents is clear: you are on your own.

The Bishops do not care about your children.

The propaganda wall is pretty well guarded, contraception is amazing and if you use it you won't get STD's and you won't get pregnant. Honest.

Every now and then there is a leak, like BBC Radio 4's "More or Less" programme on January 7th where they compared the failure rate of different forms of contraception.

"A million women for a year using other contraceptives, do we have any data on that?"

"Typical use of the pill is much higher it's 8%"

"Condoms, if you go for the typical use the failure rate is 15% which means there are 150,000 unwanted pregnancies in the first year of use for every million women"

[source: BBC iPlayer (around 2min 30sec)]

It's not the most pro-family radio show in the world, they don't question the morality of contraception, but that's the point. You can't accuse the Radio 4 More or Less team of being biased towards religious people.

The incredible failure rate is why I call comdoms a lie - condoms are advertised as something that will stop unwanted pregnancies but it doesn't. From the school nurses' point of view, if she hands out condoms to one hundred girls, she knows that fifteen of those girls will have unexpected pregnancies in the first year! Fifteen of those girls have been lied to.

Okay, okay, so the small print says that no form of contraception is 100% effective, but the impression given is always "Use a condom and everything will be fine..." when they should be saying "if all the girls in this school have sex using condoms, some of them will get pregnant, do you want it to be you?"

Would you get in to a plane with a 15% failure rate?

I don't understand. Surely everybody knows that "no form of contraception is 100% effective"? I mean, obviously we naive Catholic types don't know anything about contraception, but real people, out there... the ones who know all about how to do sex properly. Honest.

So even if it's 99% effective (and none of them are except under the strictest laboratory conditions) then once you have a few thousand users, you have a few guaranteed pregnancies.

From the point of view of your doctor/school nurse/family planning clinic/connexions advisor/sex education teacher... whoever it is that says to themselves "hey, let's promote contraception to a few thousand users" there are going to be guaranteed unwanted pregnancies. Which, if your name is Marie Stopes International roughly translates as "Kerching!"

What they could do is be honest and say "If I tell you all to use contraception then some of you are going to have babies - perhaps you should wait until you are ready for babies before having sex" but that would be ludicrous and unrealistic. Smokers have to stop smoking, alcoholics have to stop drinking, everybody in the world has to stop eating salt but hold off on the sex? Are you mad? Sex is what makes life worth living...

Anyway, so the NHS have told "thousands of women over the past 11 years" that if they use this "fit and forget" contraception then they won't have a baby. Now it turns out that at least 600 of them became pregnant.

That's what happens guys. So why is it all over the news?

If you don't know what I'm on about, Laurence England has done all the proper work and written some excellent blog entries on this here and here.

A Polish couple once asked our parish priest who teaches NFP in the parish? Um... How about nobody? What about at a diocesan level? Um... Does he know anybody who can teach them? Um...

Anyway, this article isn't really about how to do NFP but it should be really interesting for anybody who does want to explain the Church's teaching on human sexuality...

Each month, to test our courage, my wife Lisa and I stand before an auditorium full of couples about to marry in the Catholic Church and explain to them the Church's teachings about sexuality. The crowd is generally not happy to be there. Many are not Catholic and few, needless to say, want to hear what the Church has to say about sex and contraception. They've heard it already on the afternoon talk shows from renegade nuns.

...

The last thing you do with a crowd of post-baby boom Catholics is argue from the top down. What we have to do is persuade them that getting rid of their pills and diaphragms will actually make them happier. Then, gently, we can slip in a few natural law arguments about sex and babies.

...

The challenge is to put the cultural coordinates back to where they were seventy years ago. Until 1930, not only did every Christian denomination teach that contraception is wrong, but even the mainstream of media and politics did not approve of it. The ubiquitous state laws against selling birth control devices were the work of Protestant, not Catholic, legislatures. When, at the Lambeth Conference in 1930, the Anglican Church became the first Christian body to change its mind about contraception, the Washington Post was as indignant as Pope Pius XI. It seemed self-evident to at least a plurality of Christians that the deliberate obstruction of the life-making potential of sex is a gravely disordered act.

...

Our culture has been able to turn sex into a casual activity because it has separated personhood from the human body. Most people have the idea that their real self is somewhere inside the proverbial ghost in the machine and that what they do with their bodies doesn't make much difference. But this has never been the view of the Church, which teaches that the body is not a mere appendage, but is as much a part of us as our soul. After all, we don't say in the Nicene Creed that we believe in the immortality of the soul, but in the resurrection of the body. In a very significant way, we are what we do with our bodies.

...

Much of the official Catholic apparatus also goes flopping along with the contraceptive culture. Many pre-cana programs actually promote artificial birth control, which means that they indirectly promote abortion. The pope, as usual, has a deeper insight than his middle management into the centrality of contraception in the array of life issues. In Evangelium Vitae, the first institutional step he proposes in the battle against the culture of death is the establishment of teaching centers for natural methods of regulating fertility. Unfortunately, the laity get little encouragement in this area. This is partly because the progressive wing of the Church, which controls most of the chanceries and seminaries, has never focused on Natural Family Planning. They consider it part of the baggage of Humanae Vitae, a document they shun like a vampire avoids sunlight.

...

Still, there are reasons to be optimistic that contraceptives will someday go away. At the end of each of our marriage preparation sessions, couples who seem to have little use for most Church teachings come up and say that NFP actually sounds like a good idea. Women, in particular, may decide on purely feminist grounds that artificially thwarting their fertility is demeaning. And, so far as the intellectual debate goes, Chesterton, our guide and mentor, made the amusing observation that "the more my opponents practice Birth Control, the fewer there will be of them to fight us."

There's loooads more and you can read the full thing here.

Update: Oops... link was broken. Fixed now.

Fr Longenecker has an interesting article up today about the relationship between our contracepting culture and the vocations crisis.

His thoughts on this are very close to mine...

We have experienced a radical change in the deeper understanding and expectations of marriage. Before the sexual revolution, a young Catholic boy or girl experienced a family context in which being a husband or wife, father or mother, would have demanded a natural kind of self sacrifice.

...

It was within this context of self-sacrificial family life that a young man or woman's vocation to the priesthood or religious life would have been formed. The young person therefore did not question the demand for a life of self-sacrifice; it was assumed that this was the foundation of a good life. The question, then, was which manner of sacrifice is best for the individual: Dying to self through marriage and family, or dying to self through a religious vocation?

Now, because of artificial contraception, the whole underlying assumptions and expectations about marriage have shifted. Marriage is no longer a way to give all, but a way to have it all. Therefore, when a young person today considers a religious vocation, they are not choosing between different paths of self-sacrifice; they are choosing between a life that seems to have it all and a life that seems to have nothing. They must choose between a home in the suburbs, 2.5 nice children, and a double income or total self denial. The choice is between a familiar form of hedonism or an inexplicable form of heroism.

[link]

The priestly vocation crisis is a natural consequence of the marriage crisis because like it or not, the priesthood depends on marriage. Priests come from families.

It is difficult to think of anything that could more seriously undermine the sacrament of marriage than contraception. In marriage two people give themselves physically and spiritually to one another, the physical act of having sex is a sacramental. It is a sign and a symbol of this union.

Contraception physically breaks the sign and symbol of the sacrament. This is the equivalent of baptism without the water, or spitting out the communion host. I am fairly sure that if you spat out the body of Christ your priest would have something to say about it, yet if you treat the body of your spouse in a similar way he will probably have nothing to say about it.

Bishop Drainey has spoken extensively about the way everybody seems to think that priests are going to come from other families in other parishes.

Perhaps the time has come for him to start speaking about the way that everybody seems to think that people are going to come from other families.

My Story

I know quite a few people who work at St Mary's College in Hull so I can tell this story and the person concerned can remain anonymous.

They were in school one day when somebody enters the room and says they are from Connexions. For anybody who isn't familiar, Connexions is the UK Governments careers advice service. Anyway, person from Connexions starts to put posters in the room. My friend looks at the posters. There are a few about jobs but there is also one about always using a condom. In a Catholic school. Great. My friend takes it down.

Jackie Parkes Story

So I go into parent's evening last night. Comment on the fabulous Newman display in the entrance hall apparently borrowed from the Oratory. As I go in the hall notice a Connexions stand with 2 women seated & various booklets. Make a mental plan to check on way out.

So out we go & I stop by & ask ' Excuse me can you tell me if yr Connexions service is adapted to the needs of this being a Catholic School?' Well they were dumbstruck.. 'what do you mean?'.

So I pick up the main Connexions booklet.. 'your daughter should have had one of these' I said she did & we sent it back to school because of the information contained in it & the school apologised saying it shouldn't have been sent out!'. I asked could I keep their copy...'err no!'. So I pick up another booklet..I don't think this was Connexions..so I flip to the back & read in a very LOUD voice ( by this time Mary & Rosie had legged it!)..' Marie Stopes, Brook Adivsory, Family Planning Association..descs of abortion & contraceptive services..etc'

The 2 women didn't know where to put themselves..went pale in fact..so I walk off with that one..catch the Head Teacher on way out ' can I have a minute? ' sure..' can u just take a look at this?' HT ' Oh I'm really sorry...that's the NEW girl'. Yeah right!!

Conclusion

Connextions are the UK Governments 'careers advice service'. As part of this careers advice they hand out free condoms and promote contraception. UK Catholic schools welcome them in with open arms - Connextions promise not to promote contraception in the school but then, oh, sorry, oops, they keep forgetting.

Even if Connexions had a perfect track record for never accidentally promoting Contraception in Catholic Schools, what the Schools are doing is allowing Connexions to promote themselves to students as a great place to turn for all kinds of advice. They give them a national free phone number to call (where I am quite sure they don't ask if you were referred by a Catholic school) and there is a website to visit.

The Connexions website has links through to the lovely Sexperience website from Channel 4 and r u thinking? featuring this lovely page.

If we have a proper Catholic school I expect that the governers will mention this and the school will bend over backwards to provide an alternative careers service, perhaps in partnership with the Diocesan Vocations people.

Don't count on it.

Consequences of Artificial Methods:

Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

Remember to Sign the LiveChastely Promise

Recourse to Infertile Periods:

If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained.

Neither the Church nor her doctrine is inconsistent when she considers it lawful for married people to take advantage of the infertile period but condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the later practice may appear to be upright and serious. In reality, these two cases are completely different. In the former the married couple rightly use a faculty provided them by nature. In the later they obstruct the natural development of the generative process. It cannot be denied that in each case the married couple, for acceptable reasons, are both perfectly clear in their intention to avoid children and wish to make sure that none will result. But it is equally true that it is exclusively in the former case that husband and wife are ready to abstain from intercourse during the fertile period as often as for reasonable motives the birth of another child is not desirable. And when the infertile period recurs, they use their married intimacy to express their mutual love and safeguard their fidelity toward one another. In doing this they certainly give proof of a true and authentic love.

Remember to Sign the LiveChastely Promise

Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good," it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it - in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

Remember to Sign the LiveChastely Promise