If you needed an excuse to splurge on a lot of racy lingerie this weekend, Victoria’s Secret lead model Gisele Bundchen has provided a good one. When the pope brought his, uh, Prohibit Pregnancy Prevention tour to her native Brazil (where abortioin is illegal), the beloved Gisele publicly voiced her puzzlement at the Vatican’s prehistoric position on contraception. “It’s ridiculous to ban contraceptives,” she summarized with the directness we’ve come to expect of our finer featured friends. “Today no one is a virgin when they get married,” she was quoted as saying. “Show me someone who’s a virgin!”

She’s right, of course: 95 percent of people have sex before marriage, including nearly all Catholics. The Catholic Church’s position on birth control is not just ridiculous, it’s out of touch and it’s dangerous. While most people wisely abide by the cardinal rule: no sex advice from virgin men in gowns, Brazilian lawmakers have fallen prey to the pope’s advice on such matters. For example, following the pope’s lead, Brazil banned abortion — only to achieve one of the highest abortion rates in the world. (Abortion is far more common in Brazil than in countries where it is legal.) And so the pope arrived in Brazil in his chauffeured Segway-like vehicle with a plan to further his good work. He hopes to ban prevention.

Of course, the “pro-life” mouthpieces in response to such facts got the target in sight and started …. demeaning Gisele. Dinesh D’Souza states sneeringly, “Models, like small children at adult dinner parties, should be seen but not heard.” Judie Brown, mother superior of the American Life League continues, “The thousands of Catholic parents in our world who raise their children to be representatives of Christ by imitating His invitation to virtue will never make the news with such a splash. But give a scantily-clad ‘supermodel’ an opportunity, and she will do all she can to discredit God's gift of personhood. If only the average person would wake up and see that until there is virtue where once there was vice, abortion will never disappear. Why is that such a hard concept to understand?”

Because it’s not true, Judie. Apparently, “pro-lifers” don’t like hearing about the only proven way to prevent abortion (contraception), or to save infants’ and mothers’ lives. Gisele is onto something more than just plain common sense when she defends contraception—and that’s why someone with so much influence saying true things is such a threat to “pro-lifers.” As Save the Children reports in their report, State of the World’s Mothers, “Increased access to and use of modern contraception can lead to dramatic improvements in infant and maternal survival rates.” That’s why, in Finland, a country where 75 percent of women use birth control, the lifetime risk of a mother dying in childbirth is one in 8,200 and four out of 1,000 Finnish infants do not make it to their first birthday. Compare this to a country that has taken the pope’s and the “pro-life” movement’s approach, like Niger where only 4 percent of women use birth control. In that country, one in seven mothers die in childbirth and 156 of 1,000 infants die before reaching age one. The most pro-life thing one can do is give people the means to plan their pregnancies, as Gisele suggests. That concept is even more threatening to Judie, Dinesh and the pope than a Victoria’s Secret lace-trim ultrasmooth v-string, which is on sale now for just $5.99!