Conservative Roman Catholics can handle it when non-Catholics oppose Vatican doctrine. But when other Catholics publicly disagree with church dogma and still have the audacity to call themselves Catholics, the hard-liners start pulling fire alarms. So it’s been in recent days as Melinda Gates, a practicing Catholic, prepared to co-host the London Summit on Family Planning. Because the Vatican still condemns birth control, fundamentalist Catholic blogs have been going off like air-raid sirens at the thought of Gates — wife of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, with whom she runs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — promoting contraception as a means of reducing high maternal mortality rates in the developing world. “Time to Reboot Melinda Gates,” read a headline this week on the conservative website Catholic Online. “Instead of using her vast wealth to promote virtue,” the site said, she “is using her wealth to promote vice … [T]his is not what a ‘practicing’ Catholic does.” Other sites have even called Gates an “evil” woman whose contraception campaign is not only “a blatant attack on Catholic sexual morality” but also an endorsement of eugenics — or racist population control — an effort “to make sure there are fewer Africans,” according to one blog. (MORE: The Catholic Contraction) Gates has shrugged off the Catholic right’s wrath, insisting that the London conference, where the Gates Foundation and the British government hope to raise $4 billion to expand access to contraception in regions like Africa, won’t be discussing abortion or population control but rather “giving women the power to save their lives.” A new Johns Hopkins University study, financed by the Gates Foundation and published this week in the British science journal the Lancet, shows that increased contraceptive use could cut maternal mortality in developing countries by a third, not just by lowering unhealthily excessive childbirth rates but also by helping to avoid risky teen pregnancies and reducing unsafe abortions. Such evidence rarely, if ever, convinces the Catholic fundamentalists, who adhere to the Vatican’s medieval-era insistence that birth control and nonprocreative sexual intercourse violate![]()
