The church may oppose the pill, but one Catholic bank in Germany was profiting off it
Talk about hypocrisy. A Catholic bank in Germany was revealed by newspaper reporting to have invested money in the stock of American birth control maker Wyeth, despite the Roman Catholic Church's condemnation of birth control.
Der Spiegel newspaper discovered the bank had invested 580,000 euros (£495,310, $826,674) in British arms company BAE Systems.It also invested 160,000 euros in American birth control pill maker Wyeth and 870,000 euros in tobacco companies.
The bank apologised for behaviour "not in keeping with ethical standards".
Let's tell women not to use it, but make money when they buy it. Nice one.
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Good grief. This could be salvageable if the bank came out with a statement disagreeing with the Vatican on birth control. But people rarely put their mouths where their money is.
Also, I don't want to sound gushy, but Miriam, your posts are quickly becoming my favorite. Great topics, always.
Aww thanks! And you're right, instead of disagreeing with the policies, the bank came out with it's tail beneath it's legs and said it was an oversight.
Hypocrisy city! Thanks for sharing this with us.
Don't Wyeth make all sorts of drugs?
It is pretty hard to only invest money in companies which share your ethics 100%. Not that I think you shouldn't at least *try* to achieve this.
I think it's somewhat misleading to described Wyeth as an "american birth control maker", that makes it sound like birth control is their sole or primary product. Wyeth also makes drugs like Robitussin and Advil.
I really think this could have been a genuine oversight. Somebody at the bank either didn't go over the entire list of Wyeth's products and activities to make sure that all of them were morally acceptable to the church, or they did and it simply didn't occur to that/those person(s) that there was a problem.
That's quite possible. Also, the Catholic Church does not prohibit using the birth control pill for necessary medical purposes that don't involve contraception--i.e. when the fact that it provides contraception is basically a side effect, like when a young teen who isn't having sex takes it to deal with cramps and heavy periods. I dated a hardcore Catholic guy for awhile, and he was OK with my being on the pill because I was taking it for cramps and acne, not contraception. (We weren't having sex.)
So basically, the hardcore Catholic guy was okay with you being on the pill as long as it was being used for the "right" reasons. I think this really speaks for the mentality of the catholic church. Maybe the bc pills, arms, and tobacco were okay to invest in as long as it helps further their agenda in the end.
Even if it was an oversight, I agree with what kataphatic said below. To me it seems like there was laziness by these people. They did not fully investigate their investment of hundreds of thousands of Euros in something that could be against the church's beliefs. I guess the church just has that much money to throw around.
Yeah, it took me all of a week after he and I broke up to start being really, really relieved that I didn't have to deal with the Catholic Church's restrictions (about other areas, too, not just birth control) anymore. There are a lot of things the Catholic Church does that I am really, really not OK with, and prohibiting contraception is one of them.
Sure it's likely that this was an "oversight" but what hubris, for a church that is willing to play fast and loose with the lives and well-being (emotionally, economically, etc.) of the women and families who are members, while not being willing to put in the HARD WORK that would be necessary to ensure that they are not (even inadvertently) supporting or making money off of of what they are demanding these women avoid.
If anything, being put in such an ugly ethical spot (forbidding members something that may increase their quality of life while making money off that very thing--inadvertent or not!) this should teach them that this issue is much more complex and nuanced than they previously wanted to admit.
Not only did they invest in a drug company that makes birth control but they also invested in arms and tobacco, which as it states in the BBC article, “Pax Bank has previously advertised ethical investment funds, specifically claiming to avoid arms and tobacco companies along with organisations that do not adhere to Catholic beliefs.” Sounds like hypocrisy to me.
I actually find it more amusing that they invest in arms companies. That's the holy, loving way, you know: force, violence, and death.
But arms make so much f'n money that probably everybody and their brother who invests is connected to one in some way or another.
Yep--and the investment in arms isn't consistent with Catholic teachings either. Catholicism has actually become pretty progressive about issues that don't involve sex. I don't like the Catholic Church, but I'll say this in its favour: Its "ethic of life" is at least consistent. No supporting the death penalty and unnecessary wars while opposing abortion, like a lot of evangelical/fundamentalist Protestants.
Ha that's so funny!
What's not so funny is that the majority of Western Catholics do use birth control - not many families of 12 kids at my church - ok, there are NO families with 12 kids at my church. BUT women in developing countries have to stick with this faulty facet of Catholicism. The sooner we have a progressive Pope again the better.
The move toward contraception has a lot more to do with the economic development & maturation of Western countries than with the the progressiveness of the Pope. As other countries reach similar levels of economic development, as women take up work outside the home, they too, will come to approve the wonder drug Pill which lets them reduce acne and cramping, even if, tsk, tsk, it has the 'unfortunate' side effect of controlling fertility.
"...As other countries reach similar levels of economic development, as women take up work outside the home, they too, will come to approve the wonder drug Pill which lets them reduce acne and cramping, even if, tsk, tsk, it has the 'unfortunate' side effect of controlling fertility."
Check this out: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:vetcLL5XmDkJ:www.population.org.za/SAPLER/National%2520Survey/Learning%2520from%2520Others.htm+site:population.org.za&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
"The following information is taken from an article in People and the Planet Vol.3, No.3, 1994 by Pouru Bhiwandi, Martha Campbell and Malcolm Potts.
"The percentage of married women who say they want no more children varies from under 20% in Senegal to almost 80% in Peru. In addition vast numbers of women want to delay the next birth. The crowded wards in the hospitals that treat botched abortions add reality to the statistics from social surveys.
"In countries as diverse as Buddhist Thailand, Catholic Colombia and Islamic Indonesia, fertility has fallen two to four times as rapidly as it did in the West at a comparable stage in the transition from large to small families.
"Until recently sociologists overestimated the socioeconomic variables in fertility decline and underestimated the role of family planning services. So ingrained was the conviction that increases in wealth and improvements in education were required for fertility decline that in 1967 Kingsley Davis of the University of California called the family planning programmes that were beginning at that time 'either quackery or wishful thinking'..."
And the same webpage quotes the Time magazine article "When poor people have fewer children," June 1994, by Eugene Lindon:
"...It has been embraced in the U.S. by such strange bedfellows as the offers the bland assurance that people have more children as their sense of well-being increases, particularly when technological advance or government largesse give them the idea that the old limits no longer apply.
"Conversely, it seems that countries often show a dramatic drop in their birthrate not because of prosperity but because of a decrease in people's sense of well-being.
"For instance, a study of Nigerian communities revealed that bad economic times in recent years caused young Yoruba families to turn contraception even though infant mortality was rising - a development that directly contradicts conventional wisdom about the demographic transition.
"This is not to argue that poverty is the way to control population but to point out that policymakers, in their eagerness to embrace a politically correct approach to a sensitive issue, frequently ignore what determines family size..."
Good point. Catholic teachings do affect the availability of contraception, including condoms.
They do indeed. I go to a large university with several subsidiary colleges, one of which is Catholic. The Catholic college is generally fairly liberal--some professors have Positive Space (a university pro-LGBTQ campaign) stickers on their doors, and their Christianity & Culture major offers several courses related to social justice--but orientation packets for first-year students do not include condoms there, whereas they do at the other colleges. Of course, the problem is far worse in developing countries where Catholic and evangelical influence are such that people can't just buy condoms at the drugstore like they can where I live.