Monthly Archives: January 2012

News

Republican candidates should push incremental pro-life measures

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If Republicans want to stand out from Democrats on social issues, then we have to find ways to make our pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-child positions resonate with the public at large. For example, on the pro-life issue, we should not be focused on outright bans on abortion, but instead on incremental measures to restrict abortion accessibility.

Here are some ideas for incremental pro-life measures:

  • Outlaw sex-selection abortions
  • Require parental consent before having an abortion
  • Require that additional information be provided to women considering abortions (e.g. – mandatory sonogram)
  • Eliminate subsidies for abortion providers
  • Require all private insurance plans to have a version of each plan offered that does not cover abortion
  • Restrict the most vicious methods of abortion, such as partial birth abortion
  • Recognizing unborn children who are harmed during a crime as victims of that crime
  • Outlaw abortions after the time when the unborn child gains the ability to feel pain
  • Increase the tax deduction for children
  • Reward adults with tax incentives for getting married and staying married

Let’s take a closer look at the first item in the list.

Consider this front page story from today in Canada’s National Post newspaper. The title is “Canada is haven for parents seeking sex-selective abortions:  medical journal”. Canada is the only country in the developed world that has no law governing abortion. They are strongly pro-abortion.

But consider this excerpt from the article:

An editorial in a major Canadian medical journal Monday urges doctors to conceal the gender of a fetus from all pregnant women until 30 weeks to prevent sex-selective abortion by Asian immigrants.

A separate article in the same issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal warns that Canada has become “a haven for parents who would terminate female fetuses in favor of having sons” due to advanced prenatal testing and easy access to abortion.

“Female feticide happens in India and China by the millions, but it also happens in North America in numbers large enough to distort the male to female ratio in some ethnic groups,” said the editorial by interim editor-in-chief Rajendra Kale.

While few studies have been done to assess how frequent the practice may be among immigrant communities in Canada, the editorial points to research that suggests sex-selection is more common among immigrants from India, China, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines who already have at least one daughter.

It cites U.S. census data from 2000 that shows male-biased sex ratios among U.S.-born children of Asian parents, and a study of 65 Indian women in the U.S. from 2004-2009 that showed 89% of them terminated pregnancies with female fetuses.

Kale told AFP he believes that several hundred sex-selective abortions take place in Canada each year.

[…]Kale’s controversial proposal was welcomed by conservative groups but opposed by the pro-choice advocates who warned that the debate extends much further than sex-selective abortion in minority groups.

Canadians are more liberal on social issues than Americans, yet they nevertheless oppose sex-selection abortions. According to a recent poll, 92% of Canadians oppose sex-selection abortions. It therefore seems reasonable  for Republicans to pass a bill to ban sex-selection abortions.

And in fact the “PRENDA” bill that Trent Franks introduced that does just that.

Excerpt:

A U.S. congressman has reintroduced legislation that would ban sex-selection or race-based abortions. Congressman Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican who is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, has brought back the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.

The measure would prohibit knowingly performing or financing sex-selection or race-based abortions.

[…]“[T]he Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, or “PRENDA,” … restricts sex-selection abortion and race-selection abortion, and the coercion of a woman to obtain either. The woman seeking an abortion is exempted from prosecution, while abortion providers are held to account,” wrote Franks in a letter to colleagues on Monday.

[…][A] 2006 poll showed a majority of Americans would likely support the bill. A 2006 Zogby International poll shows that 86% of the American public desires a law to ban sex selection abortion. The poll surveyed a whopping 30,117 respondents in 48 states.

So the majority of Americans would support this measure.

Now comes the interesting part – the pro-abortion group Planned Parenthood, which receives taxpayer funding to perform abortion procedures, opposes the bill.

Excerpt:

As members prepare to hear from experts on how the sex-selection abortion culture has made its way from nations like China and India to the United States, according to one study, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, ACLU and a total of 30 pro-abortion groups banded together for a letter opposing the legislation, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act.

The claim the bill, sponsored by pro-life Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, is “simply more of the same from the anti-choice extremists choice extremists in the House” and they urged a no vote on it.

“[T]he bill will effectively exacerbate already existing disparities by limiting some women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health care and penalizing health care providers,” they allege.

They claim:  “Instead of addressing health disparities and ensuring accessible and culturally competent medical care for all women, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act will further isolate and stigmatize some women — particularly those in the Asian American and Pacific Islander and African American communities — from exercising their fundamental human right to make and implement decisions about their reproductive lives.”

Nancy Northup, President of Center for Reproductive Rights talked about her group’s opposition to the bill with Fox News and said it is an “anti-choice” measure that she claims is a “trumped up bill for a trumped up problem,” and a “ridiculous waste of congressional resources at a time when the U.S. economy is faltering.”

“This bill is a cynical and offensive attempt to evoke race and sex discrimination when actually it’s about taking women’s rights away,” she said.

So I think this is enough to show that abortion can actually be an asset to a Republican candidate. So long as the person is able to focus on incremental measures that are supported by 60% or more of the population, then the pro-life issue would not be a liability in the 2012 election contest. In fact, it could be very useful to have Obama have to go on record as being opposed to a ban on sex-selection abortions. Most voters have no idea exactly how liberal Obama is on the abortion issue. Raising incremental pro-life measures in a debate situation would be a good way to bring out his extremism on the life issue. Candidates like Rick Santorum, who actually have a record of proposing incremental measures, will be particularly effective in making such arguments.

To learn more about the effects of sex-selection abortions in countries that allow it, you can check out this Wall Street Journal article.

News

Alexander Vilenkin: “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning”

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From Uncommon Descent.

Excerpt:

Did the cosmos have a beginning? The Big Bang theory seems to suggest it did, but in recent decades, cosmologists have concocted elaborate theories – for example, an eternally inflating universe or a cyclic universe – which claim to avoid the need for a beginning of the cosmos. Now it appears that the universe really had a beginning after all, even if it wasn’t necessarily the Big Bang.

At a meeting of scientists – titled “State of the Universe” – convened last week at Cambridge University to honor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston presented evidence that the universe is not eternal after all, leaving scientists at a loss to explain how the cosmos got started without a supernatural creator. The meeting was reported in New Scientist magazine (Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event, 11 January 2012).

[…]In his presentation, Professor Vilenkin discussed three theories which claim to avoid the need for a beginning of the cosmos.

The three theories are chaotic inflationary model, the oscillating model and quantum gravity model. Regular readers will know that those have all been addressed in William Lane Craig’s peer-reviewed paper that evaluates alternatives to the standard Big Bang cosmology.

More:

One popular theory is eternal inflation. Most readers will be familiar with the theory of inflation, which says that the universe increased in volume by a factor of at least 10^78 in its very early stages (from 10^−36 seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between 10^−33 and 10^−32 seconds), before settling into the slower rate of expansion that we see today. The theory of eternal inflation goes further, and holds that the universe is constantly giving birth to smaller “bubble” universes within an ever-expanding multiverse. Each bubble universe undergoes its own initial period of inflation. In some versions of the theory, the bubbles go both backwards and forwards in time, allowing the possibility of an infinite past. Trouble is, the value of one particular cosmic parameter rules out that possibility:

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn’t work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). “You can’t construct a space-time with this property,” says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. “It can’t possibly be eternal in the past,” says Vilenkin. “There must be some kind of boundary.”

A second option explored by Vilenkin was that of a cyclic universe, where the universe goes through an infinite series of big bangs and crunches, with no specific beginning. It was even claimed that a cyclic universe could explain the low observed value of the cosmological constant. But as Vilenkin found, there’s a problem if you look at the disorder in the universe:

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists – nothing like the one we see around us.

One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn’t increase, so needn’t reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.

However, Vilenkin’s options were not exhausted yet. There was another possibility: that the universe had sprung from an eternal cosmic egg:

Vilenkin’s final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally “cracked” to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed – and therefore also after a finite amount of time.

“This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe,” Vilenkin concludes.

So at the end of the day, what is Vilenkin’s verdict?

“All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

This is consistent with the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem, which I blogged about before, and which William Lane Craig leveraged to his advantage in his debate with Peter Millican.

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) proof shows that every universe that expands must have a space-time boundary in the past. That means that no expanding universe, no matter what the model, can be eternal into the past. Even speculative alternative cosmologies do not escape the need for a beginning.

Conclusion

If the universe cam into being out of nothing, which seems to be the case from science, then the universe has a cause. Things do not pop into being, uncaused, out of nothing. The cause of the universe must be transcendent and supernatural. It must be uncaused, because there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. It must be eternal, because it created time. It must be non-physical, because it created space. There are only two possibilities for such a cause. It could be an abstract object or an agent. Abstract objects cannot cause effects. Therefore, the cause is an agent.

News

Why are gas prices so high? 11 more Solyndras in Obama’s energy program

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Hans Bader reviews Obama’s energy plan.

Excerpt: (links removed)

A liberal Congress must share the blame for this fiasco, since the massive $800 billion stimulus package it passed in 2009 funded these boondoggles. As a Solyndra stakeholder exulted, “there’s never been more money shoved out the government’s door in world history.”  But as the Washington Post noted, energy programs were “infused with politics at every level” under Obama.  His Administration hastily approved subsidies for Solyndra, whose executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment, despite obvious danger signs and warnings about the company’s likely collapse. (Later, federal officials successfully pressured Solyndra to delay its announcement about upcoming layoffs until just after the 2010 election, to avoid embarrassing the Obama Administration).

The Obama Administration also used green-jobs money from the stimulus package to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.”   As the Investigative Reporting Workshop noted, “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas . . .In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company.” (The stimulus package also funnelled money to left-wing community organizers and liberal lobbying groups.)

What does it mean to you when Obama takes money from consumers and business owners in order to spend, spend, spennd on his campaign fundraisers and other beneficiaries of “green energy”?

Click here to see a graph of gas prices from January 2009.