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May 25, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – American Life League President Judie Brown is encouraging Catholics to contact their bishops to urge them to act against billionaire Catholic Melinda Gates’ newly announced campaign to bring contraceptives to millions of poor women in the third world. Among other things Gates is providing Depo-Provera, an injectable drug that causes abortions, and is also linked to cancer and osteoporosis.

“Individual Catholics have to take this on as a personal challenge to the integrity of the Church,” Brown told LifeSiteNews.com “First of all they have to become well-versed on the Catholic teaching regarding contraception. Then they have to share that knowledge in very brief, one-line comments to the bishops, not only [Melinda Gates’] bishop in Washington state, but to every bishop, pleading with them to defend the poor.”

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The Catholic bishops, said Brown, are “always telling us that they are terribly concerned about poor people, immigrants, undocumented immigrants.”

“Now is the time for them to step up and teach, in a unified body, that what is going to happen in the third world is totally unacceptable to Christ, it is totally unacceptable to his Church, and the victimization of poor women will be beyond the pale, and therefore they must act in unison, calling on the Gates Foundation to stop this madness, and learn how to teach NFP, which is the proper answer to this.”

Although Gates claims to be a “practicing Catholic” who is opposed to abortion, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, of which she is co-chair, has given millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the world’s largest organization of abortion providers.

In a speech given at the April TEDxChange conference in Berlin, followed by an interview with Newsweek magazine, Gates said (https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/catholic-melinda-gates-announces-multi-billion-dollar-global-contraceptive) that she wanted to spend $4 billion to bring contraceptives to 120 million women in the third world.

Although she spoke of offering all types of contraceptives, she highlighted her apparent favorite: the injectable drug Depo-Provera, a controversial, abortion-inducing product whose detrimental effects on bone tissue have earned it a black box warning by the FDA, as well as other warnings about links to cancer.

Gates’ told Newsweek that her campaign is supported by Ursuline nuns at the Ursuline Academy of Dallas, a school she attended as a teen, which she now supports with millions of dollars in grants from her foundation.

Brown told LifeSiteNews.com that if Gates succeeds, her campaign will have a devastating, and even deadly effect on poor women.

“The cataclysm would be devastating to the health and well-being not only of the women being injected, but obviously their pre-born children who will die before then have an opportunity to implant,” said Brown.

“The history of Depo-Provera and other injectable contraceptives is bleak and morbid. The morbidity rate is horrible. The long-term side effects are awful. But if the goal of those paying for vaccines for poor women is simply to make sure that they don’t bear children, they will succeed: They will not only stop them from bearing children but in many cases stop them from living.”

“The confusion resides with the bishops, not with Melinda Gates”

Fundamentally, said Brown, the errors that Melinda Gates have imbibed are traceable to decades of inaction on the part of Catholic bishops, who have failed to teach the Catholic Church’s doctrines on the immorality of artificial birth control.

“The bishops spent the last forty years failing to catechize on contraception. And even though there have been some recent reminders to Catholics that in fact the Church does teach that contraception is evil , they have never reprimanded anyone, going all the way back to Charles Curran, who created the controversy in 1968, up to this present problem with Melinda Gates,” she said.

Although “some have argued that she is confused about the Catholic teaching on contraception,” said Brown, “the fact is that her bishop has had many, many opportunities to sit down and teach her. And the confusion resides with the bishops, not Melinda Gates.”

Brown told LifeSiteNews that she sent several letters to Gates’ prelate, Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, about Gates’ conduct, but has never received any response. However, she believes that if enough Catholics were to act, there is a possibility that the bishops would intervene.

“I think if Catholics, en masse, asked the bishops to do this sort of thing, and appealed to their hearts, because the poor are going to be affected by this and the bishops are always talking about the poor, there’s just the slightest possibility that the USCCB might say something meaningful about Melinda Gates, pleading with her to stop this,” said Brown.

“We’re not pleading, we’re not attacking, we’re asking bishops to come out and teach and preach the truth so that people like Melinda Gates understand where they stand, that they cannot in good conscience receive Holy Communion, so, they repent of their public advocacy of these sinful actions,” Brown noted.

Contact information:

Archdiocese of Seattle
710 9th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104
Phone: 206-382-4560
Fax: 206-382-4840
Chancellor’s office email: [email protected]

Note: The Artchidocese does not make a personal email address of the bishop available to the public, but notes that he reads “all” physical letters sent to him and “and attempts to reply personally whenever possible.”

United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops
3211 Fourth Street NE
Washington DC 20017
Phone: 202-541-3000
Email

Related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

* Catholic’ Melinda Gates announces multi-billion-dollar global contraceptive campaign
* EXCLUSIVE: Nuns issue statement defending billionaire contraceptive campaigner Melinda Gates
* Dallas bishop ‘communicating’ with nuns on their support for Gates’ global contraceptive campaign
* Supportive Ursuline nuns receiving millions in donations from contraceptive campaigner Melinda Gates