birth control – The View from a Drawbridge

Contraceptive Implants and Reproductive Rights

I had no idea what a can of worms I was opening up.

Today is International Women’s Day. It’s nice to know we deserve a day, but there are so many women’s issues that are still yet to be resolved that it boggles the mind. When casting about to find a topic for this blog post, I was quickly overwhelmed. I could have easily written about gender bias, sexism, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, female genital mutilation, and that’s just scratching the surface. (Heck, I could give you chapter and verse on mansplaining. A coworker once tried to explain to me how to flush a toilet. The email was 3 pages long.) But at a time when reproductive rights are being attacked at every angle, I felt that this particular topic was appropriate. I hope you agree.

From 1992 to 1998, I worked at a county public health department in an inner city in Florida. To be clear, I did not work in the clinic. I have no medical training. I was in administration, so I was more focused on policies and procedures. I interacted with all the departments, and based on my observations, the medical staff had the best interests of the patients at heart. Unfortunately, they were forced to make some questionable choices due to budget restrictions and the political environment in which they were forced to operate.

They gave out condoms for free, and that was admirable, but they went for the least expensive condoms they could find, and they had the highest failure rate. I suspect that many of the people who helped themselves to these condoms might not have had as much confidence in them had they known. It could be argued that a substandard condom is better than no condom at all, but I believe that giving people the opportunity to make informed choices is even more important than that.

Birth control was one of the primary functions of that clinic, as it should be. Every woman should have access to all the information and services she needs to maintain her health in general, and her reproductive health specifically. She should be able to decide how many children she wishes to have, if any, and how she’d like those children to be spaced in age based on her own individual circumstances.

I know that during the 90’s, many women walked out the door of that clinic having chosen Norplant as their primary source of birth control. Implantable contraceptives such as this are 99 percent effective, and they can last up to 5 years. The only birth control method that comes close to that level of effectiveness is the IUD.

During my long commute to work the other day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard a word about Norplant in a long, long time. Granted, I’m no longer connected to the health industry in any way, but surely I’d still have heard something about Norplant, if only in passing. So out of curiosity, I decided to do some research on the subject.

I had no idea what a can of worms I was opening up for myself. (Why, oh why do I always say to myself, “This should be an easy topic to blog about,” only to discover that there’s so much more to it that it requires days of research? Once I figure that out, though, I’m already hooked on telling you everything I’ve learned. Anyway…)

First of all, I should explain that Norplant is a Levonorgestrel-releasing implant that came in tiny little rods that were inserted under the skin of your upper arm. They were extremely low maintenance, highly effective, and easily reversible. They were also easily concealed, so the choice to use this method rested squarely with the woman. (As it should, in my opinion, because she is the one whose body and life are most impacted by pregnancy.)

Needless to say, there are certain elements of society that would rather not see women having that much power and control over their own lives. So much so, that even though contraceptive implants are endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control, the Mayo Clinic, Planned Parenthood, the World Health Organization, and weirdly enough, the American Civil Liberties Union, you can no longer get Norplant and its new and improved version, Jadelle, in the United States. Fortunately, you can still get an etonogestrel implant called Nexplanon which is equally effective. That is, as long as we Americans are still allowed to have access to it. And with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we are all reminded that nothing is guaranteed.

The first website I encountered during my research was rather hair raising in its bias. It was from a crackpot organization called the Population Research Institute. After looking into this organization, I came to the same conclusion that Wikipedia does, and since they put it so succinctly, I’ll quote them directly:

“The Population Research Institute (PRI) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based in Front Royal, Virginia, US. The organization opposes abortion. They believe that overpopulation is a myth, and oppose hormonal birth control in females and vasectomies in males. In addition, the organization issues opinion pieces questioning the veracity of human driven climate change and the natural origin of COVID-19.”

Even without the Wikipedia assist, PRI’s ridiculously extreme and hysterical article on Norplant made it obvious to me that it shouldn’t be taken it seriously. It claimed that this creepy organization had “driven a stake through the heart of Norplant,” and that “population controllers have long dreamed of chemically sterilizing women for extended periods of time”. They go on to say that this contraceptive was so harmful that it could cause you to go blind or be bedridden for months on end, and that when women asked to have these implants removed, the “population control officials” flatly refused to allow it.

C’mon. Seriously?

Yes, some women suffered side effects, as some people do when taking any medication. (Check out another factually warped article by Human Life International, with its laser focus on the remote chances of side effects. It’s like reading the script of a badly written horror film.)

But I think it was PRI’s media campaign that encouraged women to engage in class action lawsuits, and even though Wyeth, the company which produced Norplant, never lost a single one of these lawsuits, after a time they chafed at the expense of these legal proceedings and started settling out of court with 32,000 women.

That blew the side effects thing way out of proportion, causing a media frenzy which scared a lot of people, and the upshot is Norplant/Jadelle are still approved by the FDA, but they’re no longer sold in the United States. They’re still available in more than 60 countries and they are used by 7 million women worldwide.

The Population Research Institute would have you believe that those 7 million women were merely “easy targets” that “lacked the means to fight back legally.” And just in case you aren’t buying that argument, they also say that it causes women to conceive children which are then aborted after the egg “fails to implant in the uterus.” In essence, they believe that life begins at the zygote stage.

A zygote is a cell. The skin you are shedding even as you read this are cells, too. Does that mean that any time we scratch an itch, we are committing murder? Should we hold funerals for every skin-derived dust bunny under the bed? If so, I’ll be busy for years. There’s no nervous system or brain in a zygote. It’s not sentient or viable. It’s about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

Anyway, it was awfully nice of PRI to close off yet another avenue of family planning for American women. Talk about population control! This organization, if given the opportunity, would force you to have children whether you like it or not.

Fortunately, it appears that most American women aren’t buying what these crackpots are selling. Check out this report by the Guttmacher Institute if you are curious about the statistics regarding contraceptive use in the US. Given its efficacy, though, I wish the percentage of women who chose implants when seeking birth control were higher.

Sadly, not only do you have extremists who would like to eliminate all forms of birth control on one end of the reproductive rights continuum, but on the opposite end, you’ve got the equally scary people who would like to exert control over women by forcing them to have implants as a punitive gesture. Women’s rights, under these circumstances, might be considered moderate middle ground.

According to the ACLU, Norplant is one of the many types of “contraception that enhances the reproductive freedom of women and men,” but they go on to say that it can also be “a vehicle for infringing on the reproductive autonomy of women.” Not good.

It seems that many judges and legislators attempted to mandate Norplant’s use by some women or groups. Some states wanted to give women convicted of child abuse or drug use during pregnancy a choice between Norplant and jail. (Let me state the obvious: Women on Norplant can still abuse children and use drugs.) Other states wanted to give incentives to women on welfare if they agreed to use Norplant. Still others wanted to require women who received public assistance to either use Norplant or lose their benefits. For a time it was quite popular to offer inmates reduced sentences if they got an implant.

I don’t want the government to decide anything about my childbearing capacity or decisions. It smacks of eugenics. I want all the available information on all the available birth control methods so that I can decide what to do with my own body. Men are never forced to medically acquiesce to politicians. Male child abusers are not forced to have vasectomies. Men’s public assistance is not contingent upon his birth control or lack thereof.

This article by the Guttmacher Institute reminds us that every woman’s birth control choice should be fully informed and completely voluntary. That is a fundamental right that should.be accorded to every human being. Even though our rights are constantly being infringed upon, it’s still shocking to me to contemplate that so many people would deprive us of these rights.

The article goes on to describe the horrific history of sterilization abuse in this country, which is against the law now, but has still taken place as recently as 2013. Then it goes into further detail about the many controversial Norplant proposals. Then it reviews the many ways that countries the world over have attempted to control a woman’s reproductive choices by either prohibiting pregnancy because of overpopulation, or prohibiting birth control out of a desire for more workers, soldiers or patriots, or to comply with certain religious beliefs.

The bottom line is that we women are caught in the middle between groups who want us to reproduce whether we like it or not and groups who want to deprive us of the right to reproduce even if we want to. It’s all about control. It’s all about power.

A worldwide commitment to reproductive rights is the only way women can control their lives and futures. Toward that end, please support the Center for Reproductive Rights. The statistics below, which can be found on their website, make it perfectly clear that for many of us, these issues are a matter of quality of life, and, unfortunately, the potential for death. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to make those types of choices on my own.

74 million women living in low and middle-income countries have unintended pregnancies annually.
Every year, 215,000 pregnancy related deaths are prevented by modern contraceptives.
The rate of maternal mortality in the US is 24 women per every 100,000. That’s more than three times the rate of most other high-income countries.

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Beware of Defective Germ Plasm

I just read the most disturbing thing ever. Actually, I just skimmed it because it made me too sick to read it all the way through. It’s a report entitled Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ Plasm in the American Population. This report was published in 1914 when eugenics was in its heyday. Hitler would have loved this document. Actually, I bet he read it.

Basically, this document is a justification for involuntary sterilization of the “less desirable” members of our population, and it was taken quite seriously at the time. It was based on a series of studies done by a group called the American Breeders Association. In the introduction it states, “It is the purpose of the committee to investigate all phases of the problem of cutting off the supply of defectives… The committee will therefore study the facts in reference to the numbers of and the rate and manner of increase of the socially inadequate. It will strive to analyze the factors of heredity and environment in the production of the social unfitness observed. It will report first-hand facts concerning the drag that these classes entail upon the general welfare, and will review the first-hand studies in human heredity that have been made by careful study of the problem. And finally the committee will point out what appears as a result of study to be “the best practical means,” so far as the innate traits are a factor, of purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of these anti-social classes.”

If that doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, you have no soul. This committee “studied” several “groups of degenerates” including “The Feeble-minded Class,” “The Pauper Class,” “The Inebriate Class,” “The Criminalistic Class,” “The Epileptic Class,” “The Insane Class,” and “The Deformed Class”. Reading this positively gave me the chills.

The remedies they investigated, but, thank God, didn’t uniformly advocate to remove these supposed social blights included “Life Segregation,” “Sterilization,” “Restrictive Marriage Laws and Customs,” “Systems of Matings Purporting to Remove Defective Traits,” “Polygamy,” and “Euthanasia”. Here’s what they had to say about Polygamy.

“In animal breeding polygamy or the “pure sire method” has been one of the most potent agencies in rapid advancement and, could the essential biological principles of polygamy be applied to mankind, we should expect these same biological values to accrue. An eugenical program that advocates polygamy must be doomed to failure because it strikes at one of our most priceless heritages so laboriously wrought through centuries of moral struggle. It would be buying a biological benefit at vastly too great a moral cost. A eugenics program to be effective must and can be based upon an enhanced sense of monogamy, and of the sacredness of love and marital fidelity. If any serious students of the modern eugenical studies advocate polygamy, it is unknown to the members of this investigating committee, although many uninformed critics of the eugenics program unhesitatingly complain that eugenics proposes “to apply the methods of the stud farm to mankind.”

Whew. That’s a load off. Apparently they had some kind of moral compass, anyway. But here’s what this completely insane mindset did to our country in the first half of the 20^th century. According to Wikipedia, “The United States was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics.” Apparently many people were sterilized against their will or without their knowledge during other medical procedures. This was particularly true of African American and Native American women. It also happened in prisons. “In the end, over 65,000 individuals were sterilized in 33 states under state compulsory sterilization programs in the United States.”

For the most part, sterilization laws are off the books, although Bill Bryson states in his book “One Summer” that 20 states still have them on the books in one form or another. If that’s true, that’s rather terrifying. I was unable to find any further evidence of this, however. The Wikipedia article states that 27 states had these laws on the books until 1956. “After World War II, public opinion towards eugenics and sterilization programs became more negative in the light of the connection with the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany, though a significant number of sterilizations continued in a few states until the late 1960s. The Oregon Board of Eugenics, later renamed the Board of Social Protection, existed until 1983, with the last forcible sterilization occurring in 1981.”

But lest we think that sanity finally has been restored throughout the land, contemplate this. California did way more sterilizations than any other state, and the most chilling sentence of all in the Wikipedia article was the following: “148 female prisoners in two California institutions were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 in a supposedly voluntary program, but voluntary consent cannot be given while under duress.”

I never wanted children, but the thought that someone might decide that I should be forced to have an operation that would alter my body’s natural function, whether I liked it or not, seems like the ultimate violation. The fact that this was ever considered a good idea by anyone, the fact that committees were formed and papers were written and men in suits and ties were drawing conclusions that would cause these atrocities to occur is horrifying. And the fact that the victims of these procedures have never been compensated, and in most cases have never been acknowledged, tells you a lot about the rotten core of our political process.

[Image credit: dcclothesline.com]

My Hobbies are None of Your Business, Boss

Just when you thought the Supreme Court couldn’t sink any lower in its conservative white male support of corporations over the human beings they are supposed to represent, along comes this foolishness with Hobby Lobby. Their landmark ruling on that lawsuit means that your employer now has the right to impose his beliefs on your body. HOW DARE THEY???

The owners of Hobby Lobby have very strong religious convictions. Good for them. They have decided that contraceptives are a sin. Fine. Then they shouldn’t take contraceptives.

But they’ve taken the concept one step further. They’ve decided that they have the right to impose their beliefs on the at least 15,000 women that they employ nationwide. Thanks to the Supreme Court, they are now allowed to provide these women with health insurance that will not cover birth control.

This won’t stop these women from using birth control. I guarantee you that. But it will impose a financial hardship, and I have no doubt that Hobby Lobby pays its employees pathetically, as that seems to be the retailer trend these days. In many cases it will cause these women to seek out more affordable but less effective alternatives, and this will impact their health and the very structure of their families.

Here’s what no one seems to be saying. If my boss tried to have a conversation with me about my health choices, if he tried to give me advice on what I should do when I’m off the clock, if he even dared to suggest that my private life were any of his business whatsoever, I’d sit him down, look him straight in the eye, calmly inform him that I’m a grown-ass woman and he is not my father, and then I’d tell him to shut his pie hole.

And that should be the end of the conversation. There should never have been a single court in the land that would view this as a legitimate lawsuit. It is a sad day in this country when there is legal sanction to treat employees as if they are children. You pay me, and part of that pay is in the form of health insurance, in exchange for my hard work. A fair trade. It has been that way since the emancipation proclamation. What I do after receiving that compensation, even if it involves sacrificing goats under the light of the full moon, has nothing whatsoever to do with you.

One thing is for certain: I won’t ever spend another penny in a Hobby Lobby. And since the vast majority of their customers are women, I hope all women with sense will do the same thing. If I were a competing retailer, I’d take advantage of this opportunity to make it perfectly clear that I, unlike Hobby Lobby, respect a woman’s right to make her own decisions. Now THAT store would have my undying loyalty.

And believe you me, if there were a way to also boycott the Supreme Court, I’d be doing that, too. They are completely out of control. Sheesh.

[Image credit: Hikaru Cho]

10 Quotes That Should Piss Off Any Woman With Sense

What breaks my heart is that this blog entry could practically write itself.

“The fact is the Republicans don’t have a war on women, they have a war for women, to empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.” –Republican Mike Huckabee (Gee thanks, Mike. It sure has been no fun being a victim of my gender up to this point.)
“If I was a woman over 50, I wouldn’t need gynecological services.” –Republican Allan Rothlisberg (So, Allan, can I assume your prostate disappeared at the same time my vagina did?)
“Legitimate rape rarely, if ever, results in pregnancy.” –Republican Todd Akin. (Oh, where to begin.)
“You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.” –Rush Limbaugh (Now let’s figure out how to stop you from talking.)
“Do your husbands like you working full time?” — Democrat Joe Biden on a visit to Japan (What is this, 1950?)
“The women in my family are doing great. That’s what I see in all the statistics coming out. I have, you know, young women in my office that are the leading intellectual lights of our office. So I don’t really see this, that there’s some sort of war on women that’s, you know, keeping women down.” –Republican Rand Paul (SUCH a relief that your family is a valid statistical sample for the rest of the country, Rand. It makes life so much easier.)
“Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was.” — Failed Virginia Republican candidate for lieutenant governor E.W. Jackson (Really?)
“If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’” – Ann Coulter (There’s nothing more idiotic than a women-hating woman.)
Liberal women “have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness — to let them know that we are not going to have our men become subservient. That’s what we need you to do. Because if you don’t, then the debt will continue to grow…deficits will continue to grow.” –Republican Allen West. (Sounds like time to invest in cast iron cod pieces. Do it for the economy.)
Birth control is “not okay.” “It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” –Republican Rick Santorum (Sounds like you really have your finger on the pulse of how things are supposed to be, Rick.)

This is 2014, isn’t it? Keep reminding me. It’s easy to forget.

[Image credit: thepoliticalcarnival.net]

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Do Republican Women Hate Themselves?

When I was in college I was invited to join the youth division of a service organization called the Rotary Club, and I was seriously considering it. I thought it would look great on resumes and applications, and it would be wonderful to have a positive impact on this world.

Then I had a conversation with one of my professors. “Why on earth,” he said, “would you even think about joining an organization that does not allow adult women to join?” (Although the Rotary Club does allow women in its membership now, it didn’t at the time, and hadn’t for the first 75 years or so of its existence.)

That’s really all it took for me to give it a pass. No way was I going to lend my talent, effort and enthusiasm to an organization that, upon my 19^th birthday, would deem me unworthy to join their ranks based solely on the fact that I did not have the requisite reproductive organs.

From that day forward I’ve always been rather befuddled by women who endorse any group or philosophy that supports the notion that women are in any way inferior. In particular, I will never understand why a woman would join the Republican Party here in the United States. Let’s look at their policies:

Republicans don’t mind you having birth control covered by your insurance, as long as you don’t work for an organization that would get upset about it. For example, if you have a job in a Catholic organization, regardless of your own particular religion, they think it’s okay for you to be deprived of your right to affordable contraceptives.
They also do not see any problem at all with a woman earning less than a man for doing the same job.
They do not support or condone the equal rights amendment.
They want to cut the funding for WIC, a federal aid program for pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and children under the age of five.
If you want to be totally outraged, simply Google “Republican” and “Rape”. Their views, even the less extreme ones, make it quite obvious that they are still of the philosophy that most women bring it on themselves. They aren’t even comfortable with the idea that we should reform policies to crack down on sexual assault in the military.
Conservatives oppose the support of violence prevention programs and battered women’s shelters, as evidenced by their opposition to the Violence Against Women Act.
They have practically criminalized the term “Planned Parenthood”. In 2009, this organization, according to Wikipedia, “provided 4,009,549 contraceptive services (35% of total), 3,955,926 sexually transmitted disease services (35% of total), 1,830,811 cancer related services (16% of total), 1,178,369 pregnancy/prenatal/midlife services (10% of total), 332,278 abortion services (3% of total), and 76,977 other services (1% of total), for a total of 11,383,900 services. The organization also said its doctors and nurses annually conduct 1 million screenings for cervical cancer and 830,000 breast exams.” And 75 percent of their clients have incomes 150 percent below the poverty level. Oh, yeah! These folks are EVIL!

And let’s talk about the elephant in the room, shall we? Abortion. Many women that I’ve talked to identify themselves with the Republican Party because it is opposed to abortion.

Here’s what utterly confounds me about this line of thinking. I am opposed to smoking. There is overwhelming proof that it kills you. But never in a million years would I try to introduce legislation that would prevent a consenting adult from making the choice to smoke, as insane as I think that choice may be. That choice means, effectively, that that person is killing a full grown human being and possibly people in their vicinity. And if they’re pregnant, they’re flooding the fetus with carcinogens. These are people who are loved by others, and often depended upon by others. But it is not for me to decide what he or she does with his or her own body.

So in essence, women who join the Republican Party because they oppose abortion are NOT saying, “I disagree with abortions, so I’ll never have one, and I will try and talk my loved ones out of having one.” That I could respect. But no, what they are saying is, “I disagree with abortions, so I want to join a political party that is hell bent on depriving every woman of the right to make their own life choices, because the male-dominated political arena is more capable of doing that for them. I also want to reverse the law of the land and put desperate women who are doing desperate things in jail, and relegate the rest of them to back alleys and coat hangers, so that instead of just the fetus being killed, the woman will be killed too.”

Yup, sorry. If my choice is between saving the life of a full grown, fully developed human being or a fetus, as distasteful as having to make a choice of that kind may be, I’m going to choose the adult every single time. And the irony is that if you oppose family planning and sex education and access to contraceptives as the Republicans do, you give women two choices when the inevitable unwanted pregnancy comes along. Either they become brood mares or they seek the very abortions you oppose.

I don’t get it. Why on earth would any woman want to join the war on women? Do they hate themselves and their daughters and their sisters? It makes absolutely no sense to me.

I am braced for outraged comments, but I hope people have the good sense to realize that I’m expressing my opinion, and I’d love it if someone could make me understand, but I really don’t see that happening.

Even if you personally never take advantage of the programs, benefits, and services that the Republicans so vehemently oppose, if you are a Republican, you are depriving women, not men, of those programs, benefits and services. As a woman, how can you do that?

There’s no reasonable explanation for supporting a group that does not support you.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[Image credit: opednews.com]

The Pope and Higgs Boson: Too Much God to Digest all at Once?

So, we have a new Pope. That’s a load off. Not that I’m Catholic, mind you, but I think it’s never a good thing to have a vacancy for the position of God’s representative on earth, do you? He’s from Argentina, he’s chosen the name Francis, and he’s a Jesuit. All of these things are firsts, and for the Catholic Church, firsts are usually avoided, so this impresses me. And the fact that he was never a Hitler Youth is a big fat plus in my book. He’s also the first Pope in 600 years to have to deal with a Pope Emeritus, which can’t be easy, but so far he seems to be handling it with aplomb (a word I don’t get the opportunity to use very often).

During the great outpouring of admiration that we’ve all witnessed, you learn that he is a man of the people. He’s humble. He cares about the poor. He has held mass for the homeless and the prostitutes of Buenos Aires. He wants to be a populist Pope. Again, all wonderful things.

But I’m having a bit of trouble reconciling all of the above with what the Christian News Service says about him:

“In 2010, when Argentina became the first Latin American country to legalize same-sex marriage, Cardinal Bergoglio encouraged clergy across the country to tell Catholics to protest against the legislation because, if enacted, it could ‘seriously injure the family,’ he said.

He also said adoption by same-sex couples would result in ‘depriving [children] of the human growth that God wanted them given by a father and a mother.’”

CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips says that until now, Pope Francis’ conservative views on birth control, homosexuality and women’s roles in the Church have not made him popular with his relatively progressive Jesuit brothers. That, to me, is a bad sign. If you are a steadfast conservative within a progressive group, what does this say about your ability to be a Pope who listens to Catholics in the modern world, particularly ones with diverging viewpoints?

How can you be a Pope of the people and shun homosexuals? These are our brothers, our sisters, our nieces, our nephews. Are you saying that pedophilia is more acceptable? It certainly seems to be in many areas of the church. And how can you view women as subordinate in the 21^st century? Our mothers, our sisters, our daughters. And most important of all, how can you preach to prostitutes and yet believe that birth control is a sin? Isn’t that tantamount to a death sentence for them?

It will be interesting to see what message he brings to those countries in Africa where entire populations are on the verge of extinction due to AIDS. When it has been proven, time and time again, even by your own priests, that abstinence is not going to work, it’s time to wake up and move into the present. But that is probably way too much to ask of a man who is 76 years old, and a religion that is at least 1900 years old.

In other news, the very next day in CERN, they announced that they’re confident they’ve discovered the God particle, also known as the Higgs Boson. According to Hayley Dixon of the Telegraph, “Finding the Higgs plugs a gaping hole in the Standard Model of physics, the theory that describes all the particles, forces and interactions that make up the universe.” That, my friends, is HUGE. In my opinion, Higgs Boson is where God and science intersect. And I firmly believe that they can intersect, if you have an open mind.

According to CBS News, it is “the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.”

WHY ISN’T EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT THIS? I’m stumped. I guess the building blocks of the universe got overwhelmed in the news cycle that is Pope Francis. And that’s a shame, because if you have any faith whatsoever, both of these events will have a sweeping impact upon you, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Or maybe it’s just that we mere mortals can only digest so much God in one sitting. Either way, hold on to your hats. This is going to be a bumpy, albeit fascinating, ride.