Right-to-Life Activists’ Backing of Rich Girard Begs Question: Who’s a Hypocrite?
Mayoral Candidate Queried Woman in Sexting Scandal About Condoms and I.U.D.— OPINION
MANCHESTER, NH — Rich Girard’s endorsement by the anti-abortion New Hampshire Right to Life organization elicits the question over whether his inquiries about the birth control options of a woman he was trying to seduce reveal him to be a hypocrite — and also whether NH Right to Life is hypocritical in endorsing a candidate who seemingly has no moral compunction over a potential lover using a birth control device the Catholic Church credits with aborting a fertilized egg/blastocyst.
Thomas Hardy wrote that a man’s character is his destiny. What does it say about Rich Girard’s character that he seemingly blew off nearly a half-century of church policy when he asked, “still got that IUD?”
Furthermore, it brings up the specter that the “Little Mel Sexting Scandal” will become part of the campaign, should Girard advance beyond the primary.
Is the IUD an Abortifacient?
Information about intrauterine devices have changed with time, as the devices have changed. Rather than being an abortion-inducing device, i.e., a device that prevents a blastocyst from implanting in the uterus, most of the literature claims an I.U.D. is a spermicide that prevents fertilization of eggs by spermazota.
The traditional copper I.U.D. is a highly effective spermicide and also can be used as “emergency contraception” five days after the sexual act. The maximum lifespan of sperm after ejaculation into a woman’s body is five days,with sperm living from 2–5 days.
A sperm cell can reach an egg within 30–45 minutes, but it then has to undergo the process of capacitation. That can take 10 hours, as it undergoes changes that allows it to fuse with the egg cell and achieve fertilization.
By that time, an egg will have been fertilized and developed into a blastocyst as it moved from the fallopian tube to the uterus.
Partially to avoid federal and state action against abortion and abortifacients, the I.U.D. is now sold as preventing fertilization by disrupting sperm, though there is the caveat that failing that, it affects the wall of the uterus in a way that an egg can’s implant.
The dope on the I.U.D. usually ends right there.
Many modern I.U.D.s also release a contraceptive. A generation and more ago, medical literature claimed that — in addition to the sperm-killing quality of the copper wire in that generation’s I.U.D.s — an I.U.D. prevented a fertilized egg or embryo from attaching itself to the uterus, or terminated one that did.
According to a 1983 research article published in Practitioner, S. Rowlands wrote:
An estrogen progestogen combination administered up to 72 hours or insertion of an IUD up to 120 hours after intercourse are both effective in preventing implantation of a fertilized egg.
The definition of embryo involves a time frame of seven to eight days.
Conception, Viability & Birth Control
EWTN Global Catholic Television’s website features content that considers the intrauterine device (IUD) an abortifacient, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an agent (such as a drug) that induces abortion.”
According to EWTN,
The IUD does little or nothing to interfere with sperm migration or fertilization (conception). It achieves its birth control effect primarily by preventing the newly conceived human life from implanting in the uterine lining (endometrium) and is thus an abortifacient.
The Cleveland Clinic reports that it takes three weeks for a blastocyte (the fertilized egg that has made its way from the Fallopian tube to the uterus where it implants itself to the endometrium) to develop into a fetus. An I.U.D. was designed to “take care” of the blastocyst before it develops into an embryo.
If the new “life” (life being a question open to debate involving the question of viability) proves successful and reaches its eight week, it is called a fetus. However, in embryonic research, the term “blastocyst stage embryo” is used.
This shows a certain arbitrariness of classification, taxonomy being one of the passions of Western Europeans. However, it is an attempt to make sense of when life is viable. Many stem-cell researchers are opposed to the destruction of a fetus but not of an embryo. Roe v. Wade and modern American abortion law is rooted in such determinations.
Is an I.U.D. an abortifacient? Does terminating a seemingly viable blastocyst constitute abortion, or destruction of life?
Personally, I don’t believe it does. In fact, my personal beliefs entail abortion on demand. It is the woman’s right to choose.
I may be wrong.
Catholic Activists and the I.U.D.
One would surmise that Richard H. Girard — as a Catholic activist who opposed the merger of Manchester’s Catholic Medical Center with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, an abortion-services provider — would likely subscribe to the position of an I.U.D. being an abortion-inducing device. This apparently is the mainstream of Catholic thought on the subject.
Birth control to the true believer Catholic is a sin.
But maybe Rich Girard isn’t a hypocrite.
Perhaps he and other Catholic anti-abortion activists have a more enlightened view of the use of the I.U.D. and condoms, another birth control method that Girard advocated to his attempted seductee on the wriggling path of his serendipitous journey towards becoming a better Christian.
If he does believe in the fair, unsinful use of rubbers and coil, as a True Believer in Holy Mother Church, he seemingly is wrong and a hypocrite.
As far as I know — and I’m a Protestant — the papal encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae, issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968, has not been repealed. Under papal guidance, an I.U.D. is considered an abortion-inducing device.
Which begs the question: in 2021: Just who or what is a hypocrite?
A Matter of Character
I guess it is a matter of character.
It also is a matter of why Richard H. Girard’s past is off-limits for discussion during the political campaign. One journalist told me that they did not intend to cover the Little Mel sex scandal as “that was the past.”
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the philosopher George Santayana wrote in his 1905 book, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense.
This is a relevant issue to raise — the past is a relevant issue to raise, what with Manchester Bishop Peter Libasci being accused of the sexual abuse of a boy. As the head of the Diocese of Manchester, Libasci oversees the Catholic Church in the state of New Hampshire,
Manchester, New Hampshire is no stranger to clergy sex scandals. Almost a generation ago, in 2003, a settlement of lawsuits brought against the Church for covering up the sexual abuse of children was reached. The state let the accused priests escape criminal prosecution.
The situation was allowed to go on for too long, due to the silence of both Catholics and non-Catholics who knew of ongoing clergy abuse but remained silent.
In 2019, Lisbasco oversaw the publication of the names of the predatory priests. The bishop released a statement at the time:
“This is meant as an act of ownership and accountability. It is my hope that by making this information available, we are holding ourselves accountable to the evils of the past…..”
Another philosopher, Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, chaired an ad hoc international tribune in 1967, that investigated alleged United States war crimes in Vietnam. A book about the International War Crimes Tribunal was called, Against the Crime of Silence.
In the face of injustice, silence is a moral crime abetting actual crimes.
Rich Girard’s attempted seduction of a woman he considered of loose morals hardly is a crime, let alone evil. However, as Girard believes he can be elected mayor, and — Greek philosopher Heraclitus said a man’s character is his destiny — the ongoing silence of Girard’s misadventure serves no one.
A public discussion is warranted, as perhaps there is another skeleton or two in Girard’s closet, rattling away but the lament of the bones silenced by closed doors.
As with Harvey Weinstein, when discussion is censored, or not engaged in, by the local press and powerful people, those who may have suffered humiliations by a Weinstein-like character cannot come forward as the forum to do so is denied.
Perhaps it is the Girard critics who hold their tongues that are the true hypocrites.
