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Action Item: Check out the archives of the newly formed Catholic Radio of San Diego to find Dr. J on Chuck LiMandri’s program on April 4, and hosting her own show on April 11! Tell your friends to tune in!

Talking Point: Opponents of conscience protection for doctors want the government to give them what the market has steadfastly refused: widely dispersed sources for abortions provided in hygienic medical settings.

New York Times essay contest: "Modern Love" Dr. J appears on Issues, Etc., where she and Todd Wilken discuss the New York Times' essay contest on "modern love." They paint a gloomy picture of it. Aren't "revolutions" ostensibly meant to improve things? Why are we sticking with the tenets of the sexual revolution if they leave everyone so miserable? (Click the POD icon.)

Lutheran Public Radio: Dr. J is usually on live on Tuesdays from 2-2:15 p.m. Pacific Time (Click the link to listen live or find a station near you.)

April 6--Wheaton College near Chicago. "Same Sex Marriage Affects Everyone"

April 8--Texas A&M University College Station, TX – St. Mary’s Catholic Center "Natural Marriage: Lifelong, Exclusive Union - Woman and Man"

April 11--Hosting 1000 AM, KCEO in San Diego 6-7 p.m. Pacific

April 18--UC Davis Law School, lecture “Loved into Existence,” co-sponsored by the Christian Legal Society and the Federalist Society.

April 19--Stanford University, lecture on Natural Marriage, sponsored by the Stanford chapter of the Anscombe Society.

April 25--Hosting 1000 AM, KCEO in San Diego 6-7 p.m. Pacific

Miss an issue of the newsletter? Check out the archives here.

Do you need advice on how to improve your marriage or relationship, or on how to find the right person for you? Expert Dr. J is here for you. Click here to ask your question, which may be featured anonymously in this newsletter for the benefit of all.

Read past questions and answers here.

Need help with your marriage? You can also check out Dr. J's "101 Tips for a Happier Marriage!"

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My video was entitled “Joy and Sacrifice.” As I mention in my video, my husband and I were married recently, on July 3, 2010. We’ve had wonderful examples of life-long married love in our lives. Both of our parents are nearing their 30th anniversaries, and we both helped celebrated our grandparents’ 50th anniversaries. I have often been touched by the love shown by elderly couples at my church. Even when one spouse goes after 60 years of being married, it is inspiring to watch the sorrow and love with which the other spouse goes on, waiting to join their loved one.

I found out about the Ruth Institute from a friend via facebook. I don’t have experience with making videos or films, but I decided to give it a try with a slideshow and tried to share some of what I believe about how life-long love is possible. I feel strongly about life-long married love because true happiness, mental, spiritual, and psychological, can be found there, as well as security for the spouses and children. And as a couple married for 69 years told me the other day, it just takes some “give and take.” If both spouses are committed to life-long love, it IS possible. 
                           ~Amy Flamminio

by Helen Alvaré, Ruth Institute Board Member

A new bill is needed to fix the healthcare law’s failure to adequately safeguard conscience

There is no need to view the matter of conscience protection in health care as a zero-sum game between conscience-driven healthcare providers and the patients they serve, particularly the most vulnerable. Opponents of conscience protection often portray the situation this way, but the opposite is true. It is by protecting conscience, and thereby elevating the value of respect for life in health care, that we are likely as a nation to serve and reflect the values of most Americans, particularly the vulnerable. There are four primary points that underscore the compatibility of conscience and care.

First, less privileged women are less likely to support abortion or abortion funding than are more privileged women, or than men. They are also less likely to abort their nonmarital pregnancies than their more privileged sisters.[1] Yet even if one believed that abortion is properly considered health care—it is not—it is hard to claim that America faces a shortage of abortion providers. Over 1.2 million abortions occur each year in the United States. Notably, women who are poor or members of racial minorities, far from facing a lack of access, have a disproportionate number of abortions. Alternatives to abortions abound, but they will only be reduced if those who seek to drive conscientious medical practitioners from the field succeed.

Second, abortion has not mainstreamed into the American healthcare system. It remains rather, in the words of the New York Times, at the “margins of medical practice.”[2] This is very likely why opponents of conscience protections—which they call “refusal clauses”—are calling for the government and conscience-driven private providers to give them what the market has steadfastly refused: widely dispersed sources for abortions provided in hygienic medical settings. Instead, today—even after 38 years of legal abortion in the United States—we see: 87% of U.S. counties with no abortion provider; a relatively small percentage of doctors willing to provide abortions, due largely, according to the Guttmacher Institute, to the stigma associated with abortion among physicians and in the medical profession generally;[3] 95% of abortions delivered in free-standing clinics, not in hospitals or doctors’ offices; and a steady stream of reports of abortion providers violating the most basic standards of health care for vulnerable women, or even violating women’s human rights. Reports emerged just in the last few weeks, for example, about employees of several Planned Parenthood clinics offering to cooperate with a man posing as the leader of a sex trafficking ring of minor girls.

Third, there is an emerging scientific and cultural willingness to conclude that abortion is a form of killing, and not health care for women. A majority of our Supreme Court called abortion killing in Gonzales v. Carhart,[4] and many abortion providers and advocates of legal abortion do the same.[5]

Fourth, more broadly, there is evidence from a growing body of sociological as well as law and economics literature that more easily available abortion is associated with women’s “immiseration,” and not their flourishing. When Justice Sandra O’Connor wrote in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey opinion that women had “organized intimate relationships, and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail,”[6] she was even more right than she likely knew. According to leading scholars, it certainly appears that more easily available abortion has led to expectations of more uncommitted sexual encounters—a situation which itself contradicts women’s demonstrated preferences[7]—and thereby to more sexually transmitted infections, more nonmarital pregnancies and births, and more abortions. Women of color, poor women, and recent immigrants are suffering these consequences in disproportionate numbers.[8]

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