TOB Tuesday: What's new in Austin

Over the summer I shared an airport shuttle ride with a woman from the a special kind of pro-life center. The John Paul II Life Center is a kind of all-round women's health center, focusing not only on helping women through and beyond crisis pregnancies with a full range of obstetric care, but also treating infertility (with NaPro TECHNOLOGY, which is completely consistent with the Catholic Church's values). Women from adolescence to menopause come for routine gyn screenings. You know, women's health the way it is meant to be.

But wait, there's more! The center offers NFP training, birthing classes, even an infertility support group.

If you're in the Austin area, you probably already know about the fundraiser on December 5; if not, you might want to support what is hopefully only the first full-service center of its kind.

Catholics and Biotech

I learned from my mother how to put off ironing, but eventually it just has to be done. I tend to wait until there's a good hour's worth of ironing waiting for me so I can tackle it while listening to an audio conference and thus make the effort doubly worth my while. And so I did today.

The conference I listened to had a pretty intimidating title ("Theology of the Body and Dignitatis Personae: Reflections on Christian Anthropology as the Foundation of the Culture of Life: Transforming the Culture of Death from the Roots Up")--but don't let that scare you. The talk covers just the sort of issues you find in the newspaper every day: issues in which Catholic Church teaching seems to be summed up as "just say no" and to be represented as totally out of touch with the needs, concerns and rights of people today. The presenter, Dr. Peter Colosi, looks especially at questions related to in-vitro fertilization and why the Church teaches that this technological "answer" to infertility violates the rights of the very children who are brought into being by means of it.

I found the presentation very helpful; the Q&A after the prepared talk also addressed some of the conundrums society presents us with, giving Catholics a different lens from which to analyze the different issues that are contained in a single question or challenge. In fact, I found the whole thing so helpful that I will be looking for similar presentations that I can share with you from time to time. (Save your ironing!)