News

Nebraska teen arrested for throwing her newborn baby out the window

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Baby elephant rejected by his mother
This baby elephant is crying because he was rejected by his mother

The UK Daily Mail reports on a 16-year-old girl who allegedly threw her newborn baby out a second story window.

Excerpt:

A 16-year-old girl accused of throwing her newborn out of the window has been pictured in her mugshot.

Antonia Lopez, of Omaha, Nebraska, is being charged as an adult in the death of her daughter.

[…]Authorities believe Lopez went into labor on Friday, gave birth in her bedroom and threw her baby girl from the second floor of her apartment building.

Lopez then told her mother what had happened, according to authorities. Lopez’s mother found the baby in the grass, called 911 and gave the newborn CPR until paramedics arrived, police said.

[…]The baby had died by the time she was transported her to the hospital, paramedics said. She was then pronounced officially dead.

This is really sad. Have you ever thought about what it must be like for a little baby to be rejected by its own mother? And for the mother to not care about him, because she just wants to do what makes her happy, even though she made him? It’s horrible. Every baby should have a mother who welcomes him and takes care of his needs. Who else is there to take care of him, if not his own mother?

Amanda Prestigiacomo has a comment on this story at the Daily Wire, then I’ll say something that occurred to me.

Amanda writes:

The baby girl weighed only two pounds and was believed to be 27-28 weeks old at the time of her murder, according to the director of the neonatal intensive care unit at the Nebraska Medical Center, Dr. Ann Anderson-Berry. Murdering a baby inside a woman’s womb at this stage, called a third-trimester abortion, is legal in 12 states and the District of Columbia.

[…]Lopez was charged with murder: one count of felony child abuse resulting in death.

But all she really had to do was ask to have her baby murdered while she was still in her womb. This gruesome act is somehow interpreted as a “woman’s right to choose” on account of location of the baby at the time of the murder. Twelve different states—Iowa, Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, West Virginia—and the District of Columbia, would have happily murdered the baby, injecting the baby with poison and ripping them apart limb-by-limb, with zero legal repercussions.

Third-trimester babies are completely viable to live outside of the womb and can feel pain.

As soon as I read this story, it made me think about the baby elephant who cried for 5 hours, because its mother tried to stomp it to death. Every time I think about that baby elephant, and it makes me cry. I don’t see how this story is any different, except it’s worse because it’s a person who was made in the image of God, and the people who tried the save the baby were not in time to save him.

Baby elephant's birthday is supposed to be happy
A baby elephant’s birthday is supposed to be happy

OK, I have another point about this. When I looked at the selfies of this teen in the UK Daily Mail article, the first thing that occurred to me was that this teen was interested in having fun, feeling good, getting attention, etc. The fact that her father is never mentioned anywhere made me think that no one was around to teach her to be responsible and to put the needs of others above her own pursuit of happiness. She didn’t see the baby as more important than her own happiness, even though it she chose the man who impregnated her, and she chose to have sex with that man. The baby wasn’t to blame for anything, he just wants to have a mother like all the other babies do. She has a moral obligation to take care of what she chose to make. He needs her to take care of him. It’s his birthday, for God’s sake!

When you look at the Bible, you see Jesus divesting himself of power, and coming as a man to serve others – to look out for their needs. Paul says that this example should be imitated by followers of Jesus in Phillipians 2:

Look at Philippians 2:1-11:

1 Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion,

2 make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.

3 Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves;

4 do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.

5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,

6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,

7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.

8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

9 For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name,

10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

OK, so what’s more important? Avoiding obligations to others, or taking care of the needs of others? Yes, there is time for having fun and doing fun things. But Christians need to be alert to those around them. Whenever someone close is in need, they have to consider it a calling from God, and act to help the person in need. In the case of the pregnant teen, it was her baby. The baby was conceived as a result of the teen’s decision. It’s just like buying a pet in the pet store – you own it, and it has a natural claim on you to provide for and protect it. You made the decision to make it (or with pets, you made the decision to own it). We all understand that taking care of babies is not fun and thrills. It’s work. But for Christians at least, we ought to be trained to see the needs of others as acceptable to us. We can’t always be running away from expectations, responsibilities and obligations.

In fact, I would recommend to young people that they get used to having to care for others, and not getting their way all the time. With practice, you can actually get to the point where you don’t resent having to care for the needs of others. Now, I don’t think you should commit yourself to more than you can handle, and that might mean that you take fewer risks, so you have more time and resources to help others who may need you. Don’t stress your resources, in short. But the point is that we need to be alert to the fact that there is something in Christianity that praises self-denial, and self-sacrifice. This is more important in Christianity than having fun, having peer approval, doing “interesting” things so that other people will be impressed. Manage your life wisely so you can take on someone else’s problems if you need to. Don’t take risks that will create situations that you can’t handle. But if a situation occurs, take it as a task from God to live out your faith. We ought to be different. There ought to be a difference between us and them.

Polemics

Why is it so hard for a working man to provide for a family these days?

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Welfare spending
Welfare spending

Here’s my argument which answers the question:

  1. Feminism was behind no-fault divorce.
  2. Making it easier to divorce means that more divorces will occur.
  3. Marital instability causes women to vote for bigger government.
  4. Unmarried women vote mostly for Democrats.

*Please note that I am talking about unmarried (never married, divorced) women throughout this post.

Here’s the evidence for each point.

1. Feminism was behind no-fault divorce, according to this feminist, pro-no-fault-divorce writer.

Excerpt:

Households of 2010 don’t look quite like they did in 1969, when no-fault divorce actually was a controversial topic and these counter-arguments held some weight. The working dad/stay-at-home mom model of the middle class has been replaced by two-parent earner households and a growing number of working mom/stay-at-home dad arrangements. In working poor and impoverished families, the one-parent provider model was never the norm. No-fault divorce seemed scary when it had never before existed, but the truth is that its introduction was long overdue. Feminist groups at the time supported no-fault divorce, as it provided women an escape hatch from desperately unhappy marriages in a society where they were already disadvantaged on almost every level, regardless of their marital status. Imagine an abusive marriage in 1968, when the court-savvy abuser could actually force the victim to stay in the relationship forever. Imagine that now, and you know why domestic violence attorneys are in full support of introducing no-fault divorce to New York. And the judges aren’t the only problem.

Note that the author of this piece thinks that it is not women’s fault that they choose men who they then want to divorce. It’s not the woman’s fault that she is unhappy with the man she courted with and then chose and then made vows to – women need a no-fault escape hatch, and children do fine without fathers.

2. Easier divorces means more divorces.

Abstract:

This paper analyzes a panel of 18 European countries spanning from 1950 to 2003 to examine the extent to which the legal reforms leading to “easier divorce” that took place during the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the increase in divorce rates across Europe. We use a quasi-experimental set-up and exploit the different timing of the reforms in divorce laws across countries. We account for unobserved country-specific factors by introducing country fixed effects, and we include country-specific trends to control for timevarying factors at the country level that may be correlated with divorce rates and divorce laws, such as changing social norms or slow moving demographic trends. We find that the different reforms that “made divorce easier” were followed by significant increases in divorce rates. The effect of no-fault legislation was strong and permanent, while unilateral reforms only had a temporary effect on divorce rates. Overall, we estimate that the legal reforms account for about 20 percent of the increase in divorce rates in Europe between 1960 and 2002.

It seems obvious, but more evidence never hurts. About 70% of divorces are initiated by women, either because they chose to marry the wrong man, or because they are unhappy with the right man.

3. Marital instability causes women to vote for bigger government for security.

Excerpt:

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws.

[…]More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes. 19

Bigger government must be paid for by higher taxes, of course, which makes it harder for one working man’s income to provide for a family. In fact, feminists wanted men to be displaced as sole-providers. They would prefer that women are “equal” to men, and that means making women get out and work like men. Feminists had every reason to want bigger government and higher taxes to make traditional single-earner families unfeasible financially. They did it for equality.

4. Women are in fact observed to vote for bigger government.

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, the nation made history. It made history in electing the first African American president; it made history in building a bigger margin for the first female Speaker of the House; it made history in delivering the biggest Democratic margin since 1964; it made history in sending a record number of people to the polls and the highest percentage turnout since the 1960 election. Analysts will spend the next few months sifting through the data, trying to figure out what happened and why. Historians will likely spend the next several years and decades studying this election, as well. But one thing is immediately clear. Unmarried women played a pivotal role in making this history and in changing this nation. They delivered a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin to Barack Obama and delivered similarly strong margins in races for Congress and the U.S. Senate. Although unmarried women have voted Democratic consistently since marital status has been was tracked, this election represents the highest margin recorded and a 16-point net gain at the Presidential level from 2004.

In fact, there was a recent (2011) study showing that unmarried women do in fact vote for higher taxes and more government as a substitute for a husband’s provider role.

Abstract:

The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a political gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic party. We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer. Data for the United States support this argument. First, there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap – higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the Democrats among men but not women. Second, longitudinal data show that following marriage (divorce), women are less (more) likely to support the Democratic party.

What follows from voting Democrat?

Since the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006, and then the Presidency in 2008, the national debt has more than doubled from about 8 trillion to 20 trillion. A lot of that money was spent in welfare for single mothers, which only makes the women and their fatherless children more dependent on government. Children raised in unmarried home are far less likely to marry themselves, and to be independent of government. Which means that they will vote for bigger government when they start to vote, since they can’t make it through life on their own strength.

If more people vote for Democrats then we will get higher taxes to pay for all the government spending. Higher taxes means that a married man can no longer retain enough of his earnings to support a family. And that means his wife has to work, and that means that his children will learn what the government schools decide they should learn – so that all the children will be equal and think the same (pro-government) thoughts. This should not be controversial, because it is what it is. But if we want to talk about the decline of marriage honestly, then we need to be talking to single women about how they choose men, when they have sex with men, and how they vote at election time. You really can’t have it all.

News

Obama shut down Judicial Watch whistleblower organization

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Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?
Is Barack Obama focused on protecting the American people?

This story is from the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

Political operatives within the Obama administration wrongly punished conservative legal group Judicial Watch, stripping it of “media” status and trying to force it to pay higher fees for its open records requests, the General Services Administration inspector general said in a letter released Thursday.

The GSA botched several high-profile open records requests, delaying them for months while political appointees got involved, Inspector General Carol F. Ochoa said. The findings were released while the administration was facing charges of slow-walking open records requests for Hillary Clinton’s emails, as well as other requests.

In the case of Judicial Watch, the order to strip it of media status came from political operatives with long ties to Democratic causes — and even from the White House.

 The inspector general said the decision came at the behest of Gregory Mecher, a former Democratic campaign fundraiser who at the time was liaison to the White House. He is married to Jen Psaki, a longtime spokeswoman with the Obama administration and its election campaigns.

[…] Judicial Watch ended up suing over the request, the agency finally agreed to waive all fees and even ended up paying Judicial Watch $750 as part of the settlement.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, questioned the agency’s decision to fight a losing case that ended up costing it money.

Let’s recall what Obama confidently promised his naive supporters during election campaigns:

Just remember the confidence sound of the words – the confidence is what caused so many people to vote for him. Just his handsome face and confident words.

But the reality after he won the election was quite different, of course.

And this is not an isolated case – it’s a pattern of deliberate concealment of government abuse of power:

Last year, the administration spent $31.3 million to fight FOIA cases — more than twice the $15.4 million the administration spent in 2008, the final year under President George W. Bush.

So the intention was never to be more transparent. The words were put out as bait to catch voters who didn’t want to dig into the man’s record before choosing him. And it worked! And it worked again in 2012, even after the truth was known. This is the problem with choosing men based on confident words, rather than based on demonstrated ability. The word “transparency” sounds so good, but there was no passion for transparency anywhere demonstrated in his actions prior to campaigning. Some people just don’t have the self-control to override their feelings and intuitions. We can’t be like that – we have to insist on seeing demonstrated ability before voting.

Unfortunately, the voters who believed the confident words will not see this story about Judicial Watch on CNN or MSNBC or the Comedy Channel, and so they will probably never learn from their mistakes. Or maybe they just don’t care to vote based on evidence, when they can vote based on feelings, intuitions and first impressions. Vote based on self-delusion, in short. Or maybe they just vote out of a greedy desire to be transferred more of their neighbor’s earned money. It certainly isn’t because of a desire for more transparency in government.