credit: planetgreen

The New York Times reported last week that young mother/history teacher Anne Marie Eakins is suing Bayer, charging that she developed blood clots in her lungs after taking their product, Yaz, the highest-selling birth control pill in the United States and by far Bayer’s highest margin and fastest-growing brand.

I was reminded, reading this, of a young couple living upstairs from me in one of the 1904 Central West End townhouses converted into apartments in the ’sixties. The young marrieds had been to windy Chicago and sure enough the bride had come down with pleurisy — or so they thought.

What she actually had were blood clots on her lungs. Her doctor immediately took her off the new, progressive, no-more-problems birth control pill. It was 1969.

There were so many similar problems with that high-dosage pill back then that soon manufacturers started fiddling with the ingredients, lowering some dosages and/or substituting new ingredients —…

Dignity of Man ourfatherswillcommunications.com

Setting the scene: It began with a fall and a slightly sprained ankle: my better half got up and steady again — with the help of the local fire department — and went to bed.

Then came the back pain, followed by severe sciatica, alleviated by heavy- duty pain pills.

The next few days brought more falls, more  fire department rescues and then an accidental overdose of pills — no one person’s fault, just old-fashioned miscommunication.

Then pneumonia, an ambulance, a hospital and suddenly talk of end-of-life decisions.

With the help of numerous prayers (thanks in great part to Noreen McCann’s e-prayer tree) and the right medicine (Thanks to Dr. Jennifer Delaney) , within 24 hours the patient turned himself around and was, in the words of his doctor, “progressing on all fronts.”

A week at a skilled nursing center followed, then home before Christmas into a new world of 24/7 nursing-aides…

One of the reasons Humanae Vitae was resisted in 1968 is that women’s reproductive cycles were far less understood than today. The only natural method available then, the much derided rhythm method of spacing children, was a one-size-fits-all template that didn’t take into account the differences between one woman and another or one woman from month to month.

This is why Pope Paul VI, in writing Humanae Vitae, made an appeal to scientists:

Our next appeal is to men of science. These can “considerably advance the welfare of marriage and the family and also peace of conscience, if by pooling their efforts they strive to elucidate more thoroughly the conditions favorable to a proper regulation of births.” (28) It is supremely desirable, and this was also the mind of Pius XII, that medical science should by the study of natural rhythms succeed in determining a sufficiently secure basis for the chaste limitation of…