Lies, Statistics, and Death

1. The Temple of Moloch (er, I mean Planned Parenthood's research shop, the Guttmacher Institute) has produced an in-house study that concludes that federally-funded contraception programs have prevented millions of abortions and teen pregnancies. The numbers are produced by using sophisticated statistical models generated by themselves, from data collected by themselves, and peer-reviewed by themselves. In other words, they're just making them up and dressing them in fancy scientific-sounding terms. Their favored solution, of course, is to give them boatloads more money, so they can continue their mission to destroy the normal sexual development of teens and kill their babies when the contraceptives fail. Pro-abortion "Catholics" will no doubt jump on this bandwagon soon, to justify their support of "abortion reduction (without actually doing anything to reduce abortion)" policies.

2. The indispensible Fr. Thomas Berg, LC, says plainly what everyone, especially our legislators, should be thinking -- the "Octomom" case makes it perfectly clear that the IVF industry is out of control, cannot be trusted to regulate itself, and must be subjected to close supervision by public health authorities.

3. Bishop Martino of Scranton is not the kind of guy who shilly-shallies around. Here he is, speaking slowly and plainly regarding pro-abortion politicians participating in the St. Patrick's Day parade. Short version -- don't even think about it.

4. Amazing story of a fetal cardiologist, healing babies whose hearts are smaller than a pea. Miracles every day.

5. A nice symposium on National Review Online about the meaning of Ash Wednesday and Lent. Somehow I don't see this kind of thing in the Times.

6. Scientists, plumbing the depths of human existence, have answered one of the burning questions about the meaning of life -- why women can't read maps and men can't find their keys. I hope this wasn't paid for by the stimulus package, because it's sure going to stimulate some arguments.

7. Fr. Edward McNamara, the liturgy answer man on the Zenit news service, responds to questions about Lent issues -- is it correct to remove holy water during Lent, how serious is the requirement of abstinence from meat on Fridays, and whether mimes (!!!!!!) and drama can be used during the Passion Gospels. The short answers, in order: "no", "very", and "what planet are you from and when is your flight back there?" (Fr. McNamara was a little more charitable on that last one, I have to admit)

8. Blogged yesterday about the Times' coverage of Catholic issues in the last few days. Blogging today about the divorce from reason among the same sex "marriage" proponents. Check it out at my ArchNY blog.