Category: Life Issues

I’m a Pro-Life Catholic and I’m with Her

On By Leslie ShollyIn Abortion, Catholicism, Deep Thoughts, Life Issues, Politics1 Comment

A few days ago I was invited to join a secret Facebook group.  I posted what follows by way of introduction and was overwhelmed by the support, understanding, and acceptance I received, even from people whose beliefs are very different.  Because so many people wanted a way to share what I had written, I decided to post it here with some slight editing to account for the potential wider audience.

As a devout pro-life Catholic, this election season has been a very trying time for me. Never in my lifetime has there been a candidate for President who aligned perfectly with my religious beliefs, and I have dealt with this in various ways in each election.

I wrote for the local Catholic press for many years, including writing a column specifically on life issues. I was the chair of our Diocesan Respect Life Committee and have 25 years of pro-life activism to my credit. I blog about life issues frequently and post publicly about them on Facebook. And I’m the mother of five children!

Yet none of this has stopped my being the target of vitriol from right-wing Catholics, many of whom will clearly do ANYTHING to justify the fact that they really just want to vote Republican. I’ve been talked down to, threatened with excommunication, and attacked, even as I have tried to create space for discussion on my Facebook wall and explained the Church teachings on voting and conscience which support my actions.

This year, I am voting for Hillary with a clear conscience. Despite my deep disagreement with her views on abortion it is quite clear to me that her other positions and her proposed policies are more in keeping with the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life and social justice (not to mention the fact that she is way more qualified, not dangerous, and won’t bring disgrace to the office!). I am not holding my nose while I vote either–I am excited to be with Her!im_with_her

For more of my writing about Catholicism, voting, and politics, see the partial list below:

What’s a Catholic Voter to Do?

What’s a Catholic Voter to Do? (Part 2)

What’s a Catholic Voter to Do? (Part 3)

Catholic to my Toes

VOTING:  Not Toeing the Party Line

Talking to Kids about Politics

It’s Just Not Fun Anymore

Catholic Voting 101: A Guide for the Confused

Why Is This Election Different?

See Planned Parenthood Top Doctor Talk Fetal Tissue Harvest over Lunch

On By Leslie ShollyIn Abortion, Life IssuesLeave a comment

The video below is not for the faint of heart–although it contains no graphic images. But there’s something stomach-turning in watching a doctor discuss the harvesting of fetal body parts over lunch as she takes bites of her salad and sips her red wine.

I couldn’t help thinking about this scene from The Return of the King showing Denethor, Steward of Gondor, munching away as his son goes to fight to his (almost) death at this father’s command.

I’ve always been horrified by that scene but this is REAL LIFE, y’all.  Dr. Deborah Nucatola is Planned Parenthood’s Senior Director of Medical Services, and she was caught on tape thanks to an undercover investigation by this organization.

If any of my pro-choice friends are still reading, what do you think about this? If you are a Planned Parenthood fan, does the possibility of their profiting by the donation of fetal tissue affect your opinion? What do you think of “doctors” who would change the way they practice medicine in order to procure the tissue that is most in demand?

If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here are some choice excerpts:
So then you’re just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.

[A] lot of people want intact hearts these days, they’re looking for specific nodes. AV nodes, yesterday I was like wow, I didn’t even know, good for them. Yesterday was the first time she said people wanted lungs. And then, like I said, always as many intact livers as possible.

And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex . . .. So I mean there are certainly steps that can be taken . . . Under ultrasound guidance, they can just change the presentation . . . So the preparation would be exactly the same, it’s just the order of the removal of the products is different.

I don’t have the stomach to read or watch any more, but if you wish to, the links are available here.

UPDATE: America Magazine has published a balanced review of the unedited footage from which the above video came, which I would encourage you to read.  My own outrage is less over the question of the sale of the parts than over the successful dehumanization of the unborn evidenced by the doctor’s demeanor.

UPDATE 2:  While standing by my observations on the dehumanization of the unborn depicted in the video above, I am providing a link into the investigations into the allegations, many of which are complete and did not find any irregularities.  Thank you to Molly McMahon Martin for pointing this out and providing the citation.

Brave New World: Gender Selection

On By Leslie ShollyIn Abortion, Babies, Deep Thoughts, Life Issues, rants, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I haven’t tackled a topic like this in a while.  But, y’all, I can’t write about pretty graveyards and fall hikes all the time.

Today I read this story  about an Australian woman who traveled to the United States to undergo in vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to achieve her desired goal:  a baby girl.  “The process involves harvesting a woman’s eggs, injecting each one individually with sperm, then growing the embryo from a single cell to around 130 cells, at which point it’s possible to tell whether the chromosomes are XX or XY. Only embryos of the desired sex are transferred to the uterus.”

Here’s just one example of a facility in our country that provides this service.  From their website: “While the desire to choose whether a baby would be a boy or a girl has been present throughout human existence, it is only recently that the technology to do so has become clinically possible and available. With improvements in gender selection technology, demand for gender selection has also been growing steadily.”

There’s that slippery slope that I’m always being told is a logical fallacy! It goes on to say, “Sometimes gender selection can be “non-medical” or “elective.” In such cases, a child of a specific gender is desired without obvious medical indications. The most frequent indication for such gender selection is “family balancing,” when one gender is already represented in the family unit and the other gender is desired.”

Which makes me say, WHY IS THIS LEGAL AND WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

Y’all, please understand, after three boys in a row I was very much hoping #5 would be a girl.  I also was hoping #4 would be a girl!  Instead we got William, and unlike the lady from Down Under, I did not “[sob] with disappointment to discover I was having a second son … and then a third.”

Anyway, I understand the DESIRE for a daughter.  But most of us just suck it up and appreciate the children we have.  Maybe we accept that God knows what He is doing and set about parenting the kids we were lucky enough to get.  Maybe we realize we should be grateful for conceiving in the first place and for producing a healthy baby of any gender.  Remember when our mothers were having kids, and there was no way to know in advance what they were having, what they said when people asked if they wanted a boy or a girl? “I don’t care what it is as long as it’s healthy.”  I haven’t heard that in a long time; have you?

Five Kids
“I know that, to a childless woman struggling with infertility, I might seem ungrateful because I already have three healthy sons. But unless you’ve experienced “gender disappointment”, you can’t understand how crippling it can be. My desire for a daughter caused me to spiral into depression and left me virtually housebound. Every time I went out, toddlers in pink seemed to taunt me.”

If “gender disappointment” was so “crippling” to her, what she needed was not a daughter; it was therapy and lots of it.  She doesn’t just SEEM ungrateful, she IS ungrateful.  One can only imagine what her sons will think of all this when they come across this article online in the future–if they don’t already sense her feelings toward them now.

And what about that little girl, who has a lot of expectations heaped upon her already?  My Facebook post on this topic has generated some indignant comments.  One person said, “I hope the little girl likes karate instead of ballet!”  Well, you know, since ALL KIDS tend to do the unexpected, and since they are, you know, INDIVIDUALS, that’s just as likely as not.  There’s no one kind of “girl” and no one kind of “boy,” which is why I always find these stories about “gender balance” so ridiculous, and why I always think it’s funny when people think one boy and one girl is the ideal complete family.  My three boys are NOTHING alike.  My girls are not much alike either, and their gender is only one part of what makes them unique and special.

There is so much about this story that is disgusting.  The fact that she paid $50,000 for this procedure.  That could have been used to send one of her boys to college.  Or to fund the adoption of a daughter. The fact that this is a for-profit venture in the first place. From an article in Slate:

“Just over a decade ago, some doctors saw the potential profits that could be made. . . They coined the phrase “family balancing” to make sex selection more palatable. They marketed their clinics by giving away free promotional DVDs and setting up slick websites.  These fertility doctors have turned a procedure originally designed to prevent genetic diseases into a luxury purchase akin to plastic surgery. Gender selection now rakes in revenues of at least $100 million every year. The average cost of a gender selection procedure at high-profile clinics is about $18,000, and an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 procedures are performed every year. Fertility doctors foresee an explosion in sex-selection procedures on the horizon, as couples become accustomed to the idea that they can pay to beget children of the gender they prefer.”
Then there is the immorality of the procedure itself.  What happened to all those little boy embryos, after all?  They were discarded.  Her own children, and she threw them away BECAUSE THEY WERE BOYS.  And where is all this headed?  Do you really believe that selecting for other desired qualities won’t be a thing in the future?  From the Slate article: “In 2009, [Dr.]Steinberg came under a worldwide media firestorm when he announced on his website that couples could also choose their baby’s eye and hair color, in addition to gender. He revoked the offer after receiving a letter from the Vatican.” Thank God for the Vatican, is all I can say.
Says the happy mother/satisfied client:  “It’s not about playing God, it’s about giving women reproductive freedom.”  Um, no.  It IS about playing God. And it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

Not Your Parents' Rhythm Method

On By Leslie ShollyIn Babies, Catholicism, Contraception, Deep Thoughts, family, health, Life Issues, Parenting, pregnancyLeave a comment

I’m late to the party, but thought I should do my bit to promote NFP Awareness Week.
If you aren’t Catholic (and in a sad commentary on . . . lots of things, maybe even if you are) you may have no idea what NFP even is.  The doctor I went to see right after I was married didn’t.  Of course, that’s been a while back, so maybe the situation has improved.
NFP stands for Natural Family Planning, and it’s not your parents’ Rhythm Method, which didn’t work.  Learned properly and followed exactly, it’s just about as effective as the Pill.  Only it’s permitted by the Church and non-abortifacient, and if you don’t care about that stuff, maybe being able to avoid pregnancy AND possible blood clots and other unsavory consequences of bombarding your body with unnatural hormones for extended periods of time might pique your interest.
I remember my first exposure to NFP.  I was a Senior at Knoxville Catholic High School, in a co-ed class taught by a priest, and he showed us some goofy movie.  We heard the words “cervical mucus,” became disgusted and/or embarrassed, and quickly tuned out.  Now, I give him props for at least trying, but I can think of better ways to introduce the topic.  And because no groundwork had been laid beforehand (at least, not that I remember) to explain exactly WHY artificial contraceptives were wrong, other than “because the Church said so,” none of us understood the importance of what he was trying to teach us.
I was engaged to be married before I heard about NFP again, not in a marriage preparation class, but rather in a Christian Marriage class at Georgetown, which I took voluntarily as one of the classes I needed to get a minor in Theology.  This priest had us read Certain Declarations Concerning Sexual Ethics, Familiaris Consortio, and Humanae Vitae before we read The Art of Natural Family Planning.  These books changed my attitude and shaped my future life (and John’s, which he didn’t much appreciate since he was not a Catholic at the time!).
I’m not going to go into the details and the science because if you are truly interested and want to know you can Google the links as well as I can.  I can only share with you the freedom of knowing that you  are 1) following the law of the Church; 2) not polluting your body with chemicals; 3) not interfering with intimacy by the use of unpleasant and inconvenient devices.  Given today’s value for doing things naturally, I’m surprised that more people don’t embrace NFP for purely ecological reasons.
Well, you say, but it doesn’t work.  You have five children and everyone I know who writes about NFP has at least that many if not more.  I don’t want five children.
I didn’t want five children either.  I wanted ten.  See how I don’t have ten?  John didn’t want ten.  That’s called compromise.  I’ve been married for not quite 25 years.  If NFP doesn’t work, why do I only have five children?  Do you think that six-year space between Teddy and William was just luck?
Teddy's Graduation

A Story Unfinished: A Review

On By Leslie ShollyIn Babies, books, death, Life Issues, sponsoredLeave a comment

A few months ago, I was honored to be chosen as an “Off the Shelf” reviewer for Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City.  Y’all may have noticed by now that I love books.  So why wouldn’t I be thrilled to have the opportunity to read quality books (for free!) and talk about them here?  My first review follows.  My only compensation was the book itself, and the opinion is my own.
book cover
A Story Unfinished:  99 Days with Eliot is the story of every parent’s worse nightmare–the death of a child.  And even more tragically,  about knowing that death is inevitable before in the eyes of the world that child’s life has even begun.  It sounds sad, and of course it is.  But reading it will lift you up, not drag you down.
At a 30-week prenatal appointment, Matt and Ginny Mooney learned that their unborn child had a genetic condition–Trisomy 18–that would result in his death within hours or days of birth, if not before.  But baby Eliot defied the doctors’ expectations and lived for 99 precious days.  His parents chronicled his brief life in their blog, and those entries make up a portion of the book.
Knowing only that their time with their son would be brief, the Mooneys took full advantage of it, cherishing every moment.  The shortness of Eliot’s life seems like a tragedy, but having feared he would die in the womb, each of those 99 days felt like a gift to the Mooneys and was treated as such.
This isn’t your typical biography.  For one thing, you know in advance how the story ends–or at least how THIS part of the story ends.  You know going in that Eliot dies in 99 days.   And the story isn’t told in a linear fashion.  Matt mixes the story of Eliot’s life with flashbacks and previews, and adds his insights.  This was a little disconcerting to me at first because I didn’t expect it, but I think it works well for what he is hoping to accomplish with this book.
Because it’s ultimately not just the story of a baby’s life; it’s about what his parents took away from the experience, and what we all can learn from it.  Yet I don’t want to make it sound preachy, because it isn’t.  Matt believes in the goodness of God and the redemptive value of suffering, but he doesn’t sugarcoat the pain:  “We do not get to pick the ways in which God chooses to reveal himself.  Please understand what I am not saying.  The loss of Eliot is bad, big-bucket Bad, and I make no attempt to tie a bow on our own experience nor the immense pain I come across in the lives of others.  I miss him every day.”
People debate whether God causes bad things to happen, or ask why He doesn’t prevent them, or say that is He doesn’t prevent them, it’s just as bad as if He causes them.  Some people believe that every death and every tragedy is part of God’s plan, and directly willed by Him with a purpose that we cannot hope to understand.  Certainly all of us know that sometimes good things come out of bad things.  Matt writes about this toward the end of the book, in talking about his journey to pick up his adopted daughter, abandoned in a Ukrainian orphanage because she was disabled.  This was for me the most profound moment in a book that is overflowing with profound moments: “But for losing my son, I would not be in this car.  I would not be in Ukraine. . . . If Eliot were here, I would not be here.  The absolute worst thing in each of our lives was the thing that brought us together.  Without walking a road of pain and misery, our paths would never have crossed.  But they did.  Lena is my daughter.”
Off The Shelf-V3

Thinking outside the Box: Ten Pro-Life Groups That May Surprise You

On By Leslie ShollyIn Abortion, Deep Thoughts, Life Issues, rantsLeave a comment

So I kind of went on a tear on Facebook the other day.   I flipped out just a little bit.  Here’s what I said:  “When certain people assume that “women” all believe the same things and support the same issues I get really, really irritated. It’s patronizing and ANTI-FEMINIST to act like all women think the same way and have the same opinions.”

What brought this on?  The sanctifying of the latest liberal media darling, Wendy Davis.  As Kirsten Powers stated, I don’t stand with Wendy Davis.  She does not speak for me, nor does she speak for a majority of women, and I am tired of reading articles that assert that women as a group embrace all of the same interests and convictions.

Kirsten Powers cites a recent National Journal poll in which 50% of women FAVORED a ban on abortions after 20 weeks.  According to Nate Silver, more women than men support such a ban!  Even 33% of Democrats support it–a sizable minority that Democratic leadership would do well to note.

Seventeen of my friends liked my Facebook status–several of them liberal women, I am pleased to report–indicating that I’m not the only one who doesn’t like being told what I think or what I should think.

I didn’t stop with the Facebook status, though.  Since clearly there is a lot of misinformation out there about who is against abortion (hint:  it’s not exclusively old white Republican men) I started posting information about surprising (that is, if you are close-minded and like to put people in boxes according to categories) groups that oppose abortion.  And I would like to share some of those groups with you.

1.  Feminists for Life:  “Women deserve better than abortion.”

2.  Democrats for Life:  “We believe in the fundamental worth, dignity, and equality of all people.  We believe that the protection of human life is the foundation of human right  authentic freedom, and good government.”

3.  National Black Pro-life Coalition:  “The National Black ProLife Coalition is a network of prolife and pro-family organizations committed to restoring a culture that celebrates Life and Family cultivating Hope in the black community.”

4.  Pro-life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians:  “To challenge the notion of abortion as acceptable, to bear witness to the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Trangendered (GLBT) community that abortion rights and GLBT rights are not one and the same, and to work towards those alternatives that are life-affirming as well as pro-woman.”

5.  Atheistic and Agnostic Pro-lifers:  “… because life is all there is and all that matters, and abortion destroys the life of an innocent human being.“

6.  New Wave Feminists:  “New Wave Feminists are here to take feminism back from those who have corrupted it.  Sometime before we were born our womanhood was traded in for a handful of birth control pills, the “privilege” to pose for playboy, and the “right” to abort our children so we could work a desk job.  We embrace the early American feminism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was righteous, virtuous, intelligent and moral.”

7.  Secular Pro-life:  “If you are pro-life because abortion violates the Constitutional right to life, science shows that human life begins at conception, abortion hurts women, or for any other non-religious reason: make yourself at home! Here you will meet like-minded atheists, theists, and agnostics who are eager to save lives and fight the media portrayal of pro-lifers as “religious extremists.””

8.  Libertarians for Life:   “Libertarianism’s basic principle is that each of us has the obligation not to aggress against (violate the rights of) anyone else — for any reason (personal, social, or political), however worthy.  That is a clearly pro-life principle.  Recognizing that, and seeing the abortion-choice drift within the libertarian movement, Libertarians for Life was founded in 1976 to show why abortion is a wrong under justice,  not a right.”

9. Students for Life:  “Our mission:  abolish abortion in our lifetime.”

10.  Pro-life Pagans:  “If the Life of a single tree, flower, or frog, is to be respected then why not our own? If fertility is sacred and to be celebrated in 3 festivals a year then why would we commit the opposite of life and fertility?”

I’ll stop with ten, because it’s a nice round number.  I’m sure I’d find more, if I looked.

UPDATE: I didn’t exactly look, but I’ve stumbled across a few more I’m going to add to the list.

11.  Pro-life Liberals:  “We support the right to life and quality of life both before and after birth.”

12.  The New Pro-Life Movement:  “The mission of the The New Pro-Life Movement (NPLM) is to reexamine what it means to be pro-life in the 21st century.”

13.  The Jewish Pro-Life Foundation: “We seek to save Jewish lives by promoting alternatives to abortion in the Jewish community.“

If you are pro-choice, I hope you will stop and think the next time you assume that all women agree with you, or should agree with you just because of their gender.  If you are a conventionally conservative religious pro-lifer, I hope you will find some new allies in this list and realize that it’s just as bad for YOU to assume that no one could possibly be [fill in the blank] and be against abortion.

prolife kids

Not This Woman’s Issue

On By Leslie ShollyIn Abortion, Deep Thoughts, Life Issues, PoliticsLeave a comment

If you’re on Facebook you can’t escape knowing that today’s the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  If you have a diverse group of Facebook friends like I do you’ll have seen a bewildering array of contradictory posts, some commemorating the day as a tragedy, others as a triumph.

Well, I’m assuming by now you know how I view this anniversary.  And I’m here to speak for the women, who, like me, don’t think the unlimited right to abortion is something to celebrate, and who are tired of hearing that “reproductive rights” is the number one women’s issue.

For want of a better way to describe myself, I’ll say I am a pro-life Democrat.  I’m intelligent and well-educated, neither a religious fanatic nor a “right wing nut-job.”  And I don’t call abortion a women’s issue–I call it a civil rights issue.  Which means that it should be of concern to EVERYONE, not just women.

It’s a constant source of amazement (and distress) to me that people who agree with me about almost EVERYTHING else–attachment parenting, gun control, social programs, all that “bleeding heart liberal” stuff–part ways when it comes to protecting the unborn, the most helpless and voiceless of all.

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Who Are the Uninsured?

On By Leslie ShollyIn Deep Thoughts, Life Issues, Politics23 Comments

So the other day I was looking at this sort of small boil thing on my leg (I know, I know, TMI but necessary to the story).  “Do you think this could be a staph infection?” I asked Teddy, figuring he would be the expert since things like that tend to lurk in locker rooms.  “Could be,” he answered.  “Well, if I start to see some necrotizing flesh I guess I will go see a doctor,” I said, and I was only kidding a little bit.
I went with John to his doctor yesterday.  There was no more putting it off.  He hadn’t seen a doctor for any sort of follow up since being diagnosed with diabetes in February.  They called him over the phone to let him know.  They didn’t tell him how to check his blood sugar, or what he should be eating, or anything.  And now he was out of his medicine.  He’d been out of five or so other medications for several months, but knowing so little about diabetes we didn’t know what would happen if he stopped taking that one.  So off we went.
We left $150 poorer, with a lab bill to follow, with a handful or prescriptions that will cost us over $500 every month IF we fill them all every month, and that’s after prescription club card discounts.
The last time I wanted to see the doctor, earlier this year, because my leg was swollen and I was worried about a blood clot, I went to the emergency room.  Yes, I am one of those people.  Why?  Because when I called the doctor’s office where I go when I am sick (which is thankfully never) they said I hadn’t been there in over three years, so I would be a new patient, and they would have to charge me for a check up first, and they wouldn’t be able to see me right away.  And I would have had to pay the whole bill right then.  This also happened to me the last time I got sick enough to need a doctor.  That time (I had walking pneumonia) I ended up at the Walgreens walk-in clinic (I recommend them, by the way.). See, healthy uninsured people don’t get annual physicals.  So they don’t have a relationship with a doctor.  When they get sick, they wait a few days.  Tough it out.  See if it won’t get better on its own.
Emily has student insurance because Spring Hill requires it.  She graduates in May and will enter the ranks of the uninsured unless she finds a job that provides insurance.  Luckily for her she is astonishingly healthy–no antibiotics or doctor visits for illness since the age of two.  The other kids are on TennCare but I’m pretty sure Jake gets kicked to the curb at 19–bad news, since he does take medications that it fully covers.  Teddy will have coverage in college, I suppose, and even if we lose TennCare for the little ones as we have fewer dependents, there is a program called CoverKids for them.
I could write several columns about the failures of TennCare but I won’t because despite all of them I am grateful that my kids have had insurance of any sort.  There were years when they didn’t, when I sucked it up and asked for a bill at the doctor’s office while staring at the sign stating that all accounts needed to be paid in full at the time of service, when we waited a day or two longer than other people might to see the doctor, hoping things would improve on their own, when we paid $100 for eyedrops for a corneal abrasion and used them on pinkeye outbreaks for years in order to get our money’s worth.
So how did we end up here?  Where did we go wrong?  Aren’t those uninsured people, those people who think they are entitled to healthcare, people who don’t work, or who are deadbeats, or who just don’t bother to purchase insurance?
Well no, they are people just like us, which is why I am writing about this very personal topic.  Because I think people ought to know that.
I’m not going to go through the last twenty-plus years and tell the whole sorry saga of our health insurance blues, because it would take too long and probably be boring.  I’ll just hit the high (the low?) points.
Growing up, I never thought about health insurance, and I’m sure you didn’t either.  I went straight from my father’s plan to my husband’s–I got married less than three months after I graduated from college.  I remember how fun it was reading about the plans and deciding which one we should pick.  That was right at the beginning of HMOs, and the Federal Government (where John worked then) offered Kaiser Permanente, which was free but kind of sucked, actually.  But it was a lot better than nothing.
The only problem was that when we moved to Knoxville, Cobra notwithstanding, we were screwed, because there was no Kaiser here.  So with a baby on the way, we entered the ranks of the uninsured.  I got a job at UT that had great benefits, but not for pre-existing conditions!  So Emily was an out-of-pocket purchase, paid off over many long years, as were two of our other babies.
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I was also writing for the Tennessee Register then, and I wrote a long article about the burgeoning health care crisis in this country–something I had never heard of at that time.  All the experts I interviewed said it was only going to get worse.  When I was seeking a position with the East Tennessee Catholic, I showed that article to the then-editor, and he wanted to know what it had to do with Catholicism.  Ah, hindsight.
That was my last full-time job, so I never was offered insurance again.  John was, at his first post-law-school position, but the family plan was so expensive that we couldn’t afford it, plus I was pregnant already and it wouldn’t cover that pre-existing condition–that didn’t stop TennCare from kicking me off though–because I was OFFERED insurance, even though we DIDN’T get it and it wouldn’t have covered me if we had!
Several years later, after John began practicing law on his own (that means no group coverage, people), he found a nice insurance agent who said he could get us affordable private-pay coverage.  He came out to the house and we picked a plan.  A few weeks later, we got the bad news:  because of his pre-existing health conditions, and the medications he was already taking, John had been declared officially uninsurable.
That’s right, folks:  that’s how insurance companies hold their costs down.  They weed out the people who need the coverage most.
After awhile, we did the math.  Paying monthly premiums, the deductible, and the co-pays for people who rarely if ever got sick made it impossible for us to afford the care and medications for the one person in the house who needed it.  We had to drop that insurance and it’s only become less affordable since.
In the ensuing years, there have been times (pregnancies, extended illnesses, excessive medical bills) that we’ve been able to qualify for TennCare in one form or another.  I was able to get my gall bladder removed during one of those times, happily.  In between, John only goes to the doctor for medication refills and we look for patient assistance programs and samples to cover the costs of his medications, or else he goes without “less important” medications.
Something has to be done about the state of health care in this country.  My European friends laugh at our resistance to “socialized medicine.”  They can’t understand why we wouldn’t want what they have.  The Affordable Health Care Act is not perfect, but it’s a start.  I trust the pro-life Democrats’ assurances that they are satisfied with the concessions that were made to them before they voted for the bill.  I may yet read the whole thing (900+ pages) to see what all it includes for myself.   My feelings about the HHS mandate are already on the record but I am still hopeful that it will be overturned or modified.
Reform has to come, one way or another, sooner or later.  It’s coming too late for some people.

What’s a Catholic Voter to Do Part Three

On By Leslie ShollyIn Catholicism, Life Issues, PoliticsLeave a comment

A couple of people posted on my last entry that the reaction to what I had written showed the power of my words.  It was nice to think of it that way.  But the fact that the reaction was the exact OPPOSITE of what I was looking for when I wrote the original column doesn’t make me feel powerful–it makes me feel impotent against the rising tide of politically-inspired ill will–even hatred–among Christians with opposing political views.  Here’s the last installment of my story.

As if having the hierarchy oh-so-gently suggesting that I what I had written was not authentically Catholic was not enough, soon the newspaper was inundated with letters to the editor, some of which did not just attack my arguments, but went after me personally.  I was obviously just a liberal looking for any excuse to vote for John Kerry, said one.  (Come on–was anyone THAT enthusiastic about voting for John Kerry?)  The truth is that I have AGONIZED during every election season from 2000 on over what vote to cast.  That fellow Catholics would presume to judge me in print–essentially proving my original point, although that was cold comfort–was painful.  If my files weren’t ashes now I would share more of the comments with you.

By the time the letters appeared in the paper, I was on bedrest awaiting the imminent arrival of Baby #5.  I couldn’t leave my bed to vote in the election–how hysterical is that?  As one of the few–but much appreciated–supporters wrote in, how many of my detractors were pro-life enough to have given birth to five children?

Yes, there were supporters.  That was perhaps the one positive result of the experience at the time–I heard from (not often in writing though!) several people who I never would have guessed felt the same way I did–people who thanked me for speaking out and encouraged me in my belief that I hadn’t done anything wrong–people who admitted they were afraid to let the rest of the Catholic community know how they felt for fear of judgment.  Some of them literally WHISPERED their thanks in my ear!

THAT’s what I was writing about.  THAT is what I wanted to speak out against, what I naively thought my words might change.

credit: http://www.religionlink.com/tip_060717.php

What’s a Catholic Voter to Do Part Two

On By Leslie ShollyIn Abortion, Catholicism, Deep Thoughts, Life Issues, Politics, WarLeave a comment

This is Part 2 of a story which begins here.  It chronicles the unforeseen results of my having had the temerity to publish a column on voting in the local Catholic press just before the 2004 elections.

I felt good about what I had written.   I thought I had expressed myself well.  I sat back and naively expected peace and goodwill to ensue.

That isn’t what happened.

I was working in my kitchen one morning when the phone rang.  This was way before iPhones so the identity of the caller came as a complete shock.  It was the Chancellor of my Diocese calling to tell me that the Bishop!! wanted me to know that he could not support everything I had written.

I am not going to try to recount that whole conversation.  It was eight long years ago after all.  But some parts I remember quite clearly.  As I stood in my pantry staring at the shelves, the Chancellor told me that Pope John Paul’s condemnation of the Iraq war was merely his “prudential judgment.”  He said that the Pope had not declared it an infallible, ex cathedra teaching.   I think he might have been a bit surprised that I was able to fire back the names of the TWO (yes, only two) such pronouncements on which all theologians agree.

U.S. President George W. Bush greets Pope John Paul II during their meeting at the Vatican June 4, 2004. http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040606/wd1.jpg

What I remember very clearly is the impression I was left with–that I had just been ARGUED with by a Church official about whether there might be a “Catholic” way to vote in the coming election.  And I remember wondering, if it all comes down to prudential judgment, shouldn’t I, as a Catholic, give more weight to the judgment of the Holy Father than to that of any elected secular official?

Before it got better, it got a lot worse.  Shortly thereafter I got another call.  This time it was the Bishop himself on the other end of the line!  I got the sense that he knew the first call hadn’t gone well and that he felt bad about it.  His call had more of a pastoral tone. I  honestly cannot remember WHAT he said, but I could tell he wanted me to feel better about the whole thing.  I recall that he stated that he would be publishing something himself later to clarify the issues involved.

In those days my husband was an active Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus, and I saw the Bishop frequently at KOC events.  He had always been friendly and kind and complimentary about my column in the past.  So I felt bad.  Very bad.
See, I consider myself to be orthodox, more so than most people I know.  I take the teachings of the Church very seriously.  I am not a “cafeteria Catholic.”  And before I wrote that column I made sure to read the relevant parts of the Catechism and the Gospel of Life and the document the Bishops put out every election year.  I had my husband read it over too.  I wanted to make ABSOLUTELY sure that it reflected Church teaching.

To have someone in the hierarchy suggest differently was DEEPLY painful. (I am sorry for all the capital letters.  It’s how I am feeling as I write this.)  It’s still painful.  I don’t feel completely comfortable publishing this, and probably would not if either of the people involved were still in the Diocese of Knoxville.

Was I wrong?  And if I was wrong, was I going to have to believe that the Church could back certain voting choices?  If so, would I have to follow those directions to remain a faithful Catholic?  Or was I going to have to become a dissenter in order to follow my own conscience?

I didn’t like any of those options.  I was in spiritual agony.  I was also about eight months pregnant.  Not a good combination.

I went back and reread what I had written.  I read the documents again.  I still couldn’t find anything wrong with what I had said.  Nor could other people I trusted.  Could this mean that it was the “prudential judgments” of the Bishop and the Chancellor that were  in error?  That was a scary thought.

In the end, though, that’s what I’ve come to believe.  I stand today by what I wrote eight years ago.

But there’s more to the story.  Stay tuned.