Elizabeth Arnold travels to the Vatican to explore the Holy See's foreign policy machinery.  Joining Jon O'Brien, President of Catholics for Choice, were guests Mary Ann Glendon, US Ambassador to the Holy See; Francis Campbell, British Ambassador to the Holy See; Father Thomas Reese, Senior Research Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University; and Massimo Franco, political columnist for the Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera.

May 2008

This is the fourth and final podcast in a series of four podcasts from a telephone conference call launching a new Catholics for Choice publication.  Truth and Consequence—A Look behind the Vatican's Ban on Contraception reflects on 40 years of Humanae Vitae, the Vatican document that cemented the ban on contraception.

This week's speaker is Mary Hunt, feminist theologian and co-director of Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual.

This is the third in a series of four podcasts of a telephone conference call launching a new Catholics for Choice publication.Truth and Consequence—A Look behind the Vatican's Ban on Contraception reflects on 40 years of Humanae Vitae, the Vatican document that cemented the ban on contraception. This week Daniel Maguire, Professor of Moral Theological Ethics at Marquette University, speaks on the difference between Catholic theology and Vatican theology.

This is the second installment of four podcasts from a telephone conference call launching a new Catholics for Choice publication. Truth and Consequence—A Look behind the Vatican's Ban on Contraception reflects on 40 years of Humanae Vitae, the Vatican document that cemented the ban on contraception.

Today, we feature noted feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, a professor at the Graduate Theological Union at the Pacific School of Religion.

On the eve of the pope's visit to the United States, Catholics for Choice organized a telephone conference call with four noted Catholic theologians to launch a new publication examining the impact of 40 years of Humanae Vitae, the Vatican document that cemented the ban on contraception. Truth and Consequence—A look behind the Vatican's ban on contraception reflects on a defining moment in modern church history.

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting podcasts of the four theologians’ contributions. We start with Anthony Padovano, a distinguished professor and author of twenty-eight books.

For World AIDS Day 2007, Catholics for Choice commissioned the Washington, DC, polling firm, Belden Russonello & Stewart, to carry out polls in five countries on four continents about Catholic attitudes towards the use of condoms. The polls were done in the United States, Ireland, Ghana, Mexico and the Philippines.

Condoms4Life is an unprecedented worldwide public education effort to raise public awareness about the devastating effect of the bishops’ ban on condoms. The campaign was launched on World AIDS Day 2001 with the display of billboards and ads in subways and newspapers saying, “Banning Condoms Kills.� The campaign is sponsored by Catholics for Choice, our partners in Europe and Latin America and colleagues in Africa and Asia.

Nancy Belden, a pollster from Belden Russonello & Stewart, talks here about the survey results with the Condoms4Life campaign coordinator, Marissa Valeri.

For more information, please visit www.CatholicsforChoice.org.

"Whether or not they are fully informed about its intricacies, almost everyone in the United States seems to have an opinion about stem-cell research...Opponents claim that to destroy an embryo, even for a good purpose such as curing Alzheimer's disease, is as wrong as killing an adult so that his or her organs can be distributed to six or seven other adults who might otherwise die. But is the wrong done in each of these cases really of the same magnitude?"

Dr. Rosemarie Tong, a distinguished professor of health care ethics and director of the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, tackles the moral questions surrounding stem cell research and puts forth an approach that asserts the positive potential--and moral correctness--of such research. 

For more information, or to read Dr. Tong's original article, please visit www.CatholicsforChoice.org/Conscience.

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy estimates that 51 percent of Latina teens get pregnant at least once before age 20—nearly twice the national average.  Moreover, the Latina teen pregnancy rate is declining at half the pace of the overall national rate, and some states are reporting rising rates of Latina teen pregnancy and childbearing.

Listen as Bill Albert, the deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and the author of “51%: Latinas and Teen Pregnancyâ€? in the latest issue of Conscience, describes recent trends in the Latina teen pregnancy rate and the barriers to reducing that rate in the future.

To read the article available online, please visit the Conscience homepage.
To subscribe to the magazine, click here.

 

"As the World Congress of Families packs up its tents and leaves its fantasy world in Warsaw, participants will now have to face the harsh reality of the real world in which we all live. There will be far fewer subservient women, there will be gays living on the same block, and there will be people having premarital sex and using contraception to boot..."

Listen as Catholics for a Free Choice analyzes the World Congress of Families (May 11-13, 2007), an international gathering of extreme--and extremely out-of-touch--anti-choice groups in Warsaw, Poland.  A Catholics for a Free Choice associate attended the conference and provided first hand reports and analysis of what turned out to be an underwhelming event. 

For full coverage of the event and to read daily reports, visit Catholics for a Free Choice Opposition Watch: World Congress on Families.

Abortion has been at the eye of a terrible storm in recent years. Clinic bombings, Supreme Court decisions, shootings, violent protests and venomous rhetoric have not brought the country any closer to a resolution. Both sides in the debate have generated more heat than light...

Listen as Jon O'Brien, President of Catholics for a Free Choice, discusses the importance of preventing unwanted pregnancies as the best means of reducing the need for abortion--something that the majority of Americans and American Catholics, regardless of where they identify themselves on the issue of abortion, support. 

His remarks are from an OpEd published in the May 4, 2007 issue of the National Catholic Reporter.