True love - or lust and contraception: It's your choice.

Since the 1960s we've been in a sexual revolution launched by a wide range of artificial hormones generically described as "the pill." In recent years the drugs have also been delivered via hormone-filled tubes inserted in a woman's upper arm (NORPLANT) or a patch worn underneath her clothing.

What most women don't know is how dangerous these drugs are, particularly the birth control patch which delivers about 60% more estrogen than the pill. Hundreds of women have developed deep vein thrombosis (blood clots) in the legs or pulmonary embolisms (blood clost in the lungs). At least twenty women have died. This is consistent with the experience of the early high-dosage pill which also caused death in women leading to the development of lower-dose alternatives.

Johnson and Johnson, maker of the Ortho Evra birth control patch has settled hundreds of cases to the tune of $68 million in payouts. Unfortunately, most of those have been out-of-court settlments with confidentiality invoked letting the company continue to pretend the drugs have minimal risk.

The world continues to ignore or ridicule Humanae Vitae as the facts upholding its warnings mount. No one who follows Church teaching against the use of contraception will ever suffer like the 25-year-old assistant Volleyball Coach at the University of Cincinnatti, Stefanie Rosenfeld. She died of a heart attack less than a month after starting the patch. And there are dozens of other young women like her, some only teenagers, victims of a culture that encourages uncommitted copulation rather than the true spiritual intimacy and conjugal love of marriage and child-bearing.

Women are the big losers because they bear the most damage from the sexual revolution: physical damage to their bodies, but equally devastating spiritual damage to their souls. Women are naturally inclined toward love and nurturing. A man can more easily separate his sex drive from his soul-center. But for women, it can be shattering. If she gives herself out of a mistaken notion of love, the betrayal is deep and long-lasting. Is that not, perhaps, one explanation for the growing number of lesbians among us?

We need a return to the beautiful virtue of chastity. It's a manly virtue that requires courageous self-control on the part of young men who need to guard their eyes from a continuous barrage of lustful images thrown at them by the culture. It is also a womanly virtue wrapped in modesty that guards and protects true love. Pray the young and remind them that:

True love waits. Pass it on.