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Josie Cunningham case shows real reasons some women choose abortion

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The UK Daily Mirror reports.

Excerpt:

Wannabe celebrity Josie Cunningham last night confessed the chance of appearing on TV’s Big Brother was worth more than her unborn child’s life.

Puffing on a cigarette and rubbing her baby bump, the controversial model and call girl – who will have her abortion at a clinic this week – said: “I’m finally on the verge of becoming famous and I’m not going to ruin it now.

“An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. Instead, I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way.”

Josie, 23, is already 18 weeks pregnant by either an escort agency client or a Premier League footballer.

[…]Josie – who caused outrage in 2013 when she demanded a £4,800 boob job on the NHS to become a glamour model – said: “Channel 5 were keen to shortlist me then they found out I was pregnant.

She’s used to taking money from the NHS:

“Suddenly I was pregnant and I could get free dental work on the NHS, so I got a tooth straightened for cosmetic reasons, and it all seemed great.

[…]“It’s not ideal situation and I wish I had never fallen pregnant. I’m not on the Pill and in December the condom split when I was sleeping with a client.

“Then I had sex with a footballer and didn’t use contraception at all. I’d known him for years and we’d had sex before. I didn’t even think about the morning after pill.”

The footballer and the client – who is a high-flying surgeon – both offered to support Josie financially if she had the baby. But she said no.

So the footballer agreed to pay for the abortion at a London private clinic.

[…]Josie – already mum to boys Harley, six, and Frankie, three – said: “I’ve had five miscarriages so the one good thing about the pregnancy is that it has shown me I can still carry beyond 12 weeks.

“I’m a good mum but this is ­something I have wanted for so long. I can’t give up my big break for anything.”

Later in the article, she is quoted saying that she is “a good mother” in spite of the fact that she is “still smoking up to 10 cigarettes a day and drinking” with an unborn child whom she intends to murder.

Daniel Rodger, who writes at the LTI blog, thinks he knows why this sort of thing is happening more often.

Excerpt:

The way in which Josie talks about her unborn child as if they are something disposable and fickle exposes how successful the dehumanising of the unborn has been in the UK. The maternal relationship is now seen as something tentative and conditional. The unborn must meet societies standards of normalcy before they are allowed to continue their existence, that is providing they come at the right time.

Francis Schaeffer once said that the two values of middle-class America were affluence and personal peace and I think they’re also applicable in the UK, and you can see these values reflected in Josies’ reasoning. By affluence Schaeffer meant the acquisition of things and more things, that’s why Josie wants her pink Range Rover and big house, if her unborn baby gets in her way to achieving those ends (utilitarian reasoning) its the unborn baby who loses. Personal peace simply means wanting your own lifestyle undisturbed regardless of the effects on others and in this case the unborn functions as a disturbance to her personal peace.

Abortion is definitely very much at home in a secular worldview where it’s OK for the strong to mistreat the weak. I would suggest that we all examine ourselves and decide whether our own personal affluence and happiness is more important than someone else’s life – and especially of our own children’s life. That little child didn’t ask to be made by that woman, but her decision to have sex did make him, and now she is responsible. Single motherhood is a terrible thing, but it’s a worse thing to kill a child. The best policy is to not have sex until both people are ready to welcome a child into the world.

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China on course to become ‘world’s most Christian nation’ within 15 years

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Story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Officially, the People’s Republic of China is an atheist country but that is changing fast as many of its 1.3 billion citizens seek meaning and spiritual comfort that neither communism nor capitalism seem to have supplied.

Christian congregations in particular have skyrocketed since churches began reopening when Chairman Mao’s death in 1976 signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Less than four decades later, some believe China is now poised to become not just the world’s number one economy but also its most numerous Christian nation.

“By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in the world very soon,” said Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.

“It is going to be less than a generation. Not many people are prepared for this dramatic change.”

China’s Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025. That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline.

By 2030, China’s total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world, he predicted.

“Mao thought he could eliminate religion. He thought he had accomplished this,” Prof Yang said. “It’s ironic – they didn’t. They actually failed completely.”

Previously, I had blogged about how the Christians in China were rebelling against the Chinese authorities to prevent them from demolishing their churches. It’s not a perfect country at all, but at least there is some good news there.

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Those who complain about “income inequality” should not ignore single motherhood

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From the Wall Street Journal of all places.

Excerpt:

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does.

[…]In an essay for the Institute for Family Studies last December, called “Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters,” University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported that children in high-income households who experienced family breakups don’t fare as well emotionally, psychologically, educationally or, in the end, economically as their two-parent-family peers.

Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children’s health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein’s 2011 book “From Family Collapse to America’s Decline.” The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today’s family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report “Creating an Opportunity Society” from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty reported that communities with a high percentage of single-parent families are less likely to experience upward mobility. The researchers’ report—”Where Is the Land of Opportunity?”—received considerable media attention. Yet mainstream news outlets tended to ignore the study’s message about family structure, focusing instead on variables with far less statistical impact, such as residential segregation.

So where does single motherhood by choice come from? The libertarian Cato Institute explains:

[T]he evidence of a link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is overwhelming. There have been 13 major studies of the relationship between the availability of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock birth. Of these, 11 found a statistically significant correlation. Among the best of these studies is the work done by June O’Neill for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Holding constant a wide range of variables, including income, education, and urban vs. suburban setting, the study found that a 50 percent increase in the value of AFDC and foodstamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.(7) Likewise, research by Shelley Lundberg and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington showed that an increase in welfare benefits of $200 per month per family increased the rate of out-of-wedlock births among teenagers by 150 percent.(8)

The same results can be seen from welfare systems in other countries. For example, a recent study of the impact of Canada’s social-welfare system on family structure concluded that “providing additional benefits to single parents encourages births of children to unwed women.”(9)

[…]Until teenage girls, particularly those living in relative poverty, can be made to see real consequences from pregnancy, it will be impossible to gain control over the problem of out-of- wedlock births. By disguising those consequences, welfare makes it easier for these girls to make the decisions that will lead to unwed motherhood.

So, if the Democrats opposed income inequality, they would oppose single motherhood by choice, and they would oppose the welfare that causes single motherhood by choice.

But of course the Democrats oppose none of those things, and they have worked to undermine the 1996 Welfare Reform bill while at the same time expanding the welfare payments that make single motherhood easier.