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News

If you favor abortion rights, then you favor sex-selection abortions

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Consider this article from LifeSiteNews about India’s alarming sex ratio.

Excerpt:

India’s feminists and population control-pushing government are “stumped” by the dramatic drop of female births among the wealthier classes due to sex-selective abortions, reports the Globe and Mail’s Indian correspondent Stephanie Nolen.

Due to a ‘son preference’ in Indian culture, the use of new technologies to detect and abort baby girls has become widespread.

Technically it has been illegal in India to tell couples the sex of their unborn child or to abort based on sex since 1994.  This law, however, is rarely enforced.  Consequently, sex-selective abortion practices are rampant and the ratio of girls to boys is continuing to fall.  India’s 2001 census revealed that there were only 927 girls aged 0-6 per 1,000 boys, a marked drop from the 1991 census, which found 945 per 1000.  This means that in that decade there were 35 million fewer females registered in the country than males, according to Canada’s International Development Research Centre.

The statistics in certain areas are shocking.  The IDRC revealed last year that the wealthier urban families of the Indian Punjab have merely 300 girls for every 1,000 boys.  In South Delhi, the ratio is 832:1000, and in the state of Haryana it’s 822:1000.

If you are in favor of abortion, then you are in favor of murdering women just because they are women. Every person who voted for Barack Obama voted to murder women just because they are women. Abortion is the ultimate domestic violence against women.

Podcasts

What caused an atheist on RichardDawkins.net to become a Christian?

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Here is a very interesting dialog featuring a pastor, an ex-atheist and a fundamentalist atheist. (H/T Two or Three)

Here is the MP3 file.

Check out a summary from Two or Three.

Excerpt:

But what made him convert?  Two things.  First, Robertson asked him two simple questions.  Why are you an atheist?  What would it take to convince you that God is real?  Morgan, who was used to philosophical arguments rather than more personal, emotional arguments, was taken aback.  He realized that he was not open to actually being convinced otherwise.  Second, he remembered the following scripture, which led to his conversion experience, an experience of love which made him a believer:

1 John 4:19
We love Him because He first loved us.

This conversion, and discussion in the interview, bring out a few interesting things that Christians might want to observe in their outreach:

  1. We should pray before posting responses when arguing with unbelievers
  2. Often, simple repetition of the truth of God’s love go around philosophical barriers that opponents have in their mind
  3. We must engage respectfully and kindly (argh!) and consistently
  4. The *experience* of God in genuine conversion is critical

This show was extremely interesting and helpful for understanding how atheists think, and why they become atheists. Don’t forget the testimony of former atheist A. N. Wilson that I wrote about before.

News

Senate Democrats contemplating new $40 billion tax on health care innovation

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TigerHawk has a post about a tax being considered for medical device companies. (H/T Lex Communis)

Excerpt:

As we have long predicted on this blog, the health care “reformers” propose to finance at least part of the “savings” or new benefits — it is impossible to know which — by decreasing the rate of return on medical technology. There are many ways in which this might be done, but the Senate Democrats are proposing to do so directly, by levying a “value added tax” on medical device companies according to their proportion of U.S. sales. This tax would be without regard to profitability, so it would amount to a capital tax on start-ups and a massive income tax surcharge on profitable companies, varying as net margins do. In the case of my own mid-sized company, the tax would be the equivalent of a roughly 20% surcharge on our net income (in all likelihood raising our economic tax rate well above 50%) or 50% of our research and development budget, depending on how you want to look at it.

Any way you look at it, the proposed tax is a calculated effort to divert capital from the medical technology industry to other uses in the economy, because new medical technology drives costs that are now going to be assumed by the government (or at least will be if the Senate leadership gets its way). Of course, innovative medtech also extends and saves lives, and makes them more comfortable and more productive. Which is, after all, the point of medicine.

Know what would be great? If a bunch of silver-spoon bureaucrats invented something that might actually save lives instead of meddling in the financial affairs of medical innovators.

Some of the companies that would be affected are listed in this Wall Street Journal article.