Please take a moment to read and sign this petition!
Wait a minute! This is a blog about ending abortion. Why am
I asking you to sign a petition for a reproductive health clinic?
Because this is no ordinary reproductive health clinic. The
top-of-his-field reproductive endocrinologist behind the St. Anne Center is a
pro-life, faithful Catholic who wants to make available to couples an approach to infertility that respects both them, the children they hope to have, and the laws of God.
Tomorrow morning, he will be proposing the establishment of the St. Anne Center and this petition will help demonstrate that Chicago needs a clinic to aid faithful couples who are facing the heartbreak of infertility but are not willing to sacrifice 30 children to gain one.
You think I’m exaggerating? According to data from Britain,
The figures, revealed by Britain’s Health Minister Lord Howe in response to a request from Lord Alton, show that over 30 embryos are created for every live birth through IVF.
Now, I've never seen the numbers for the entire US (though one study of one fertility clinic over four years showed 7.5% embryos made it to birth), but what I do know is that assisted reproductive technology in the US is less regulated than in Britain and the rest of Europe. The CDC reports 47,102 live births from IVF in 2010 (61,561 babies, since multiples are frequent). You do the math.
That's as least as many babies as there are dying from abortion each year.
And then remember that some of those 1.2 million abortions each year are the direct result of IVF.
“If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”
Meanwhile, science is advancing all the time...but you wouldn't know it by the way fertility "medicine" is practiced in this country. Actually diagnosing the problem and treating it directly, returning a woman (or man) to fertility (read: health), rather than pumping a woman full of hormones that can cause dangerous side effects? Allowing babies to be conceived in the safety of their mothers' wombs rather than conceiving them in a dish, tossing the "abnormal" ones (or ones of the wrong gender or genotype) in the trash and either freezing the rest (most never to be thawed, certainly not successfully) or dissecting them for their stem cells), and then maybe "reducing" a few as late as 24 weeks because you can't be bothered with twins? Nah...
It will likely be us pro-lifers who lead the way in showing that there's a better, healthier way to approach treating infertility, but we can't do it unless we have places to receive treatment and courageous doctors who are willing to buck the trends.
So please sign the petition to establish the St. Anne Center for Reproductive Health! In the short term, you'll be opening up a moral option for infertile couples with pro-life convictions, and in the long term, you'll be helping to build a stronger culture of life in Chicago!
Thanks and God bless!!!
