WOMEN'S VIOLENCE AGAINST THEIR OWN CHILDREN, IN THEIR OWN WOMBS (Letter to Dom Post, Nov 28)

‘System fails to save woman’ says the sub-heading for your story Murder victim had protection order (Nov 28). The system fails to save women because it fails to save their unborn children. Men’s violence against women is ‘all the more tragic’, as Women’s Refuge’s Heather Henare says of this instance, because although almost always at least partly due to male duress, abortion is primarily a result of women’s violence against their own children, in their own womb.  

Julia du Fresne

 

ARE WOMEN'S PLATONIC RELATIONSHIPS EVER VIOLENT?(Letter to Dom Post, Nov 25)

It’s tragic that any woman, let alone Dr Jackie Blue (Police can’t stop abuse alone, Nov 25), should suffer the way she has, but it’s hard to imagine such subverted passion and brutality being unleashed except by having sex. As surely every conceivable aspect of sexual relationships has by now been studied, surveyed, researched and reported, some earnest academic somewhere must have asked women in violent relationships whether or not that relationship was sexual or platonic, and I believe Dr Blue’s statement, ‘my boyfriend had moved in with me’, would supply the clue as to their answers. 

Julia du Fresne

 

INCONVENIENCE AND EXPENSE THE REASONS FOR ABORTIONS (Letter to Dom Post, Nov 19)

So ‘figures show that if teenage parents were well supported, and continued to achieve academically, the outcomes of their children were no different to children who didn’t grow up in poverty’ (Child abuse report urges sexual health services overhaul, Nov 19). Fancy that. Now we know that ‘mental health’ reasons for abortion are a sham and that with moral and financial support teenagers’ babies don’t suffer, what reasons can there be for New Zealand’s high rate of abortion? Inconvenience and expense, that’s what. 

Julia du Fresne

DR ROSY FENWICKE STICKS HER NECK OUT (Letter to Dom Post, Nov 22)

 

When Dr Rosy Fenwicke endorses ‘the social benefits of sound sex ed’ (Letters, Nov 22), she invites charges of financial self-interest. She’s a member of the Abortion Supervisory Committee, allowing thousands of abortions every year on the grounds of mental health which are now proven not to exist, and ‘having worked in reproductive and sexual health throughout (her) career’, she’s witnessed the rise and rise of teenage pregnancies and STDs accompanying the increasing promotion of sex education in schools. As a certifying consultant performing abortions at Wellington Hospital, she stands to profit from such promotion and its inevitable consequences. 

Julia du Fresne

THE ROOT OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (Letter to Central Hawke's Bay Mail, Nov 19)

 

 

I hate to say this, but the root of domestic violence is abortion (Riders coming to say it’s not OK, Nov 19). Violence against the human species is now experienced more in utero than any place else on earth, and the womb is our first home. You can’t get more domestic than that. 

Julia du Fresne

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN LINKED TO VIOLENCE AGAINST THE UNBORN (Letter to Dom Post, Nov 15)

 

Catriona MacLennan is right to suggest (NZ dragging chain on reforming handling of sex abuse cases, Nov 15) that leading the world in lowest rape and sexual assault crime figures would be far more meaningful than winning the Rugby World Cup, or the America’s. But for that to happen New Zealand would first need to lead the world in the lowest abortion figures. Violence against women is linked psychologically and inevitably to violence against the unborn – and if anyone wants to deny that abortion is violence, I have the pictures to prove it.

 

Julia du Fresne

A QUISLING'S DOUBTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN MEDITATION (First published in 'NZ Catholic', November 17)

Who am I, to question the prayer of the World Community for Christian Meditation, a global movement present in 100 countries? However, even if I’m seen as a quisling or turncoat, I have to say that as a lay Carmelite member of a Christian Meditation group I now have serious doubts about this method of prayer. ‘Im indoors says I’m in good company – Richard Dawkins’.

I joined CM to support people wanting deeper prayer, and for a while I was hooked. CM is ecumenical, simple, accessible; I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Now I believe my initial graces flowed simply from a resolution to adopt CM’s twice-daily prayer routine: as Woody Allen has said, ‘showing up is half the work’. Then I began to think I was showing up at the wrong address.

I was discombobulated by CM’s claim to have retrieved from 4^th century obscurity a prayer practised by Carmelites for the past eight hundred years. Recorded talks by CM’s founder John Main and his successor Laurence Freeman told us week in, week out to ‘say your mantra’; it sounded like to get God’s attention that was all we had to do.

CM is Hindu in everything except intention, and abolishes all distinctions between styles and stages of silent prayer. You ‘say your mantra’ (an effectively meaningless word) until you can’t say it - when God supposedly intervenes, infusing contemplation - and recommence when you realise you’ve stopped. Never mind traditional prerequisities for receiving contemplation like conformity to God’s will, humility, service, generosit y, purification, penance, receptivity, solitude, determination; just ‘say your mantra’. Was this a prayer word, I wondered, or a god?

John Cassian, a disciple of the desert fathers, was ‘discovered’ by Main as the Christian authority he needed for the meditation he’d learned from a swami, but on becoming a monk had obediently abandoned. The prayer which Cassian (who incidentally is to be found, quoted, in the Divine Office) had learned from  one Abbot Isaac is ejaculatory, continuous prayer, not reserved to periods of meditation. Detachment (in essence, the conditions given above for contemplation) was essential for such prayer, which ‘we hand on only to a very small number of souls eager to know it’: a principle reiterated in The Cloud of Unknowing (oft-quoted by CM), by Doctors of the Church Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

But CM is taught to allcomers – thousands, maybe millions - in the pious belief that regardless of their spiritual state, the Holy Spirit fetches them there and sits them down to repeat a meaningless word while emptying their minds of everything, including Jesus Christ- who taught that ‘no one comes to the Father except through me’ (Jn 14,6). And astonishingly, should the Spirit offer them the blissful experience of God’s love, they ought to refuse it.  

To CM’s theory of ‘one size fits all’, we may cite contrary, incontrovertible evidence: ‘Strait is the way, and few are they who find it!’( Mt 8,14).