Everybody loves… BABIES. This visually stunning new movie simultaneously follows four babies around the world – from first breath to first steps. From Mongolia to Namibia to San Francisco to Tokyo, BABIES joyfully captures on film the earliest stages of the journey of humanity that are at once unique and universal to us all.

Watch it. It’s adorable. Focus Features has done some films I liked like Away We Go, Atonement, and Enternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but they’re not exactly the most family friendly pictures, or produced by a company run by NFP and birth advocates. So, cynical me is wondering…what’s the catch? What population control ridiculousness or birth control status quo are they going to try to work into the film? Time will tell. Release is early 2010.

H/T to American Papist.

One More Soul's New Logo

Number five in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective NFP Promoters is Creative Presence, which includes an updated and effective web site that utilizes pictures and other media well. Here are a couple of my favorite web sites, including One More Soul’s newly updated web site, a priority of new Exec Director, Jenn Giroux (interview forthcoming). They’ve got a new logo, a slide show of their featured posts, persons and events, and an overall new setup.

One of those fertility-friendly web sites that’s gone through a redux is FertilityCare Centers of America. Well done, FertilityCare Centers!

They’ve harnessed the power of video and YouTube. They’ve kept the text simple, bulleted and readable (as opposed to their sister site of the Pope Paul VI Institute which is text heavy–8 point Times New Roman is not recommended–and virtually image and click-through free). Their color palette is cool, which is relaxing and lends itself I think to a medical feel, affirming their clinical setting. They offered simple and persuasive testimonials, links and very practical information on the p in obtaining insurance codes for natural family planning and fertility treatment through natural family planning.

The only thing I think they could add is a Facebook fan page (there are some hard-core FC fans out there!), an Amazon.com or One More Soul link to purchase their amazing testimonial book “Women Healed.” But it’s a great step in the right direction!

One of my other favorites is New Jersey NFP Association (NJNFP), founded by Damon & Melanie Owens. It’s clean, simple, uses effective and modern NFP terminology, and is organized well. They only thing that they could use is perhaps some embedded video promoting NFP. Damon’s a well known Theology of the Body speaker, so I imagine he’s got some video coverage somewhere! Keep it up Owens’!

From a Catholic Diocesan office point of view, Chicago’s NFP Office got one of the best–if not THE best–NFP sites out there. It’s got a similar color pallette as NJNFP, which gives it a warm glow and comfortable feel. They have a simple but good use of Flash in their header and left sidebar.  My only criticism might be that NFP is generally listed in the engaged area, which sort of makes the assumption that there’s not pastoral need to promote NFP to married couples. Since 90% of Catholic married couples are contracepting, I might make NFP more prominent in their “Marriage Resources” page. Overall, they just have a lot going on over in Chicago, so there’s plenty of coverage of their programs.

I love 30 Rock. Despite her politics, I love Tina Fey. She’s so dang clever, and freakin’ hilarious. She gets a ton of mileage out of the ugly duckling writer thing–even though everyone knows she cleans up nice.

Well, I was watching 30 Rock a couple weeks ago, and low and behold, one of the main themes was vasectomies. The Big Snip. Here we go again, I think. Nothing is sacred any more, and nothing promotes family and the beauty of children. Bugger. Stupid 30 Rock, and  stupid culture of death. This is particularly poignant for me because someone I know is considering a vasectomy, despite the moral and physical dangers (please pray for this person).  He just doesn’t know. Little did I know the way the story would develop…

There were too many killer lines in the episode to note them here, but I’ll say that the real highlight of the show is when Tracy Morgan (playing a  caricature of himself, “Tracy Jordan”) is about to go under the knife when the anesthetic–which causes him to hallucinate–induces a alternative universe for him in the form of a Cosby Show life featuring Tracy. In the scene Tracy walks in the the back door to a replica of the the famous Cosby kitchen, and his 30 Rock son, playing Theo, throws a his stuff onto a pile of garbage. Dialogue is initiated, and the place is a mess. Bill (Tracy) inquires about Sondra, Vanessa and Rudi, and  the 30 Rock version of Theo reveals that there’s no Sondra, no Vanessa, no Rudy. There’s no girls. They were never born. Enter vasectomy, stage right!

Essentially, Bill/ Tracy realizes how women civilize and balance out the family, and he comes out of the hallucination saying, “I need a baby girl, I need a baby girl….” You can guess (or watch) the rest.

The bottom line is that the writers of 30 Rock portrayed the utterly selfish motivations for getting a vasectomy (or any birth control in general, actually), and the life-changing potential for children, not to mention the semi-subtle fact that women and men are different, and that women compliment men for the better.

Can you imagine the comic potential if they’d actually introduced the dangers of vasectomies, not the least of which is spiritual alienation from God forbidding one from receiving Holy Communion (for Catholics) and an increase in auto-immune diseases and cancer?

Thinking about the big snip? Do a little research here:

• The Hurtful Consequences
• General overview, Q&A on Vasectomies (oops, not 100% effective, btw)
• What Sterilization did to us, and Sterilization Reversal: an act of healing: the awesome testimony of a retired Naval officer who regretted his vasectomy from the beginning, and his resulting journey to cure his inexplicable depression. For them, it wasn’t about having more children, but simply restoring his manhood and obeying God. I loved this story. Hearing a military man–someone of inherent vigor, virtue and quality–tell his story and regret brought me to tears.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG2IZEzUmA0]

While not the best piece of cinematic art out there (review coming super soon), it’s got truth, science and a compelling message on its side. We need more people and investors willing to put this message out there, and directors/ producers like Rick Stout and Barry McLerran to do it.

Once people realize it’s not that healthy or safe, it deconstructs relationships and marriages and potentially ends pregnancies, they throw one last argument in the mix: overpopulation. Throw this on your crumbling polemical pyre, folks: threatening overpopulation is a myth. While there has been exponential population growth, especially in the last century, it is not having the disastrous effect as was predicted by chicken little butterfly specialist (yes, really) Paul Erlich in the 70′s. Mind you, none of his hyperbolic and sensationalist predictions of “The Population Bomb” have come true.

I know that people feel really strongly about this, and are really attached to the idea of overpopulation. This is fueled by heart-wrenching pictures of emaciated children in parts of the world where civil wars and genocidal dictators have taken away their access to food–not the sheer numbers of the population. For those whom this video ticks off or perhaps surprises you, I would encourage you to not only check out the Population Research Institute, but to see the documentary Demographic Winter (review forthcoming).

After you do that, you can check additional secular pieces in well known publications to confirm the crisis of rapidly declining fertility rates.

For screenings in your area, look here.

(Newly Updated 5/8/09)
ABC’s Nightline did a piece tonight on Christopher West and Theology of the Body tonight, and I tuned in to see how badly the media would mess it up.

View the video here.

But guess what? It was brilliant. Zero trace of anti-Catholicism, and several money moments for telling the Good News of Sex and Marriage, complete with married couples’ testimonies, the bulimia-contraception analogy, and the mutual climax quote from John Paul II (You’ve got to see the clip or read the books to know what I’m talking about).

A downside in trying to pack in so much in ten minutes is that you leave out all of the dimensions of the Theology of the Body, like the beauty of vocation, celibacy and consecrated life, its implications for art, liturgy and beyond. As I said recently to a friend, sometimes people get the idea (as it would be easy to) that TOB is “Theology of the Genitals,” when, in fact, it’s Theology of the Body, Soul and entire person.

Another critique I have, which is probably a critique that many have of Christopher West, is that if you didn’t know Christopher West, Theology of the Body, and the context, he might come off a little like a sex maniac. However, if you know how far he’s come in his personal and professional development, you get it. West is really good at what he does–communicating and getting one’s attention so that he can share Theology of the Body. This is a message people need to hear, and one that has affected the lives of so many already.

Did you see it? What did you think?

Things you can do:

• Read Theology of the Body for Beginners, or buy it for someone who’s not read it
• Pray for hearts and minds of those who saw this tonight to be opened
• Thank ABC (see link above) for doing a piece on TOB

Update: Read CNA’s Interview with West regarding the “sensationalism” of the interview content.
Update 2: CNA’s Interview with Dr. Alice Von Hildebrand, Mary Shivanandan, and Fr. Jose Granados.

Update 3: Facebook conversation on Natural Family Planning discussion board.