Tag Archives: Pregnancy

News

Gendercide: Planned Parenthood and NARAL oppose ban on sex-selection abortions

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Letitia, who blogs at Talitha, Koum, notified me about this article in Life News.

Excerpt:

As members of Congress hold a hearing today on legislation that would ban sex-selection abortions and abortions done if the unborn child is of a specific race, leading pro-abortion advocacy groups are strongly opposed to it.

Their opposition could explain why organizations like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the ACLU almost never speak out against the horrible human rights abuses associated with the one-child policy in China – ranging from sex-selection abortions, to forced abortions, to coercive sterilizations and infanticides.

[…]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.

Got that? If you want to kill a baby simply because it’s a girl, and you wanted a boy, then Planned Parenthood and NARAL are all in favor of that. They support sex-selection abortions. They don’t just permit it, they lobby in favor of it. That’s how “pro-woman” they are.

Here’s an article from the Economist that explains how gendercide is happening in India and China.

Excerpt:

In January 2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) showed what can happen to a country when girl babies don’t count. Within ten years, the academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride because of the dearth of young women—a figure unprecedented in a country at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS, China in 2020 will have 30m-40m more men of this age than young women. For comparison, there are 23m boys below the age of 20 in Germany, France and Britain combined and around 40m American boys and young men. So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Gendercide—to borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren—is often seen as an unintended consequence of China’s one-child policy, or as a product of poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus of bachelors—called in China guanggun, or “bare branches”— seems to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as is becoming clear, the war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbour. Other East Asian countries—South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan—have peculiarly high numbers of male births. So, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans. Even subsets of America’s population are following suit, though not the population as a whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any country’s particular policy but “the fateful collision between overweening son preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination technology and declining fertility.” These are global trends. And the selective destruction of baby girls is global, too.

Boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. In all societies that record births, between 103 and 106 boys are normally born for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China the sex ratio for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was 124 (ie, 124 boys were born in those years for every 100 girls). According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100 girls. These rates are biologically impossible without human intervention.

Letitia has written a post about the prevalence of sex-selection abortions in the Asian community. Go here to read that. And Letitia also writes about the legalization of sex-selection abortions in Sweden here.

You can learn more about the Republican bill to end sex-selection and race-selection abortions.

News

New video by Yale scientist Alex Tsiaras shows fetal development

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Mbelina sent me this amazing video, which shows how babies develop from the earliest stages.

This article from Life Site News explains more.

Excerpt:

Alexander Tsiaras, Chief of Scientific Visualization in the department of Medicine at Yale University, employs new kinds of visualization technologies to view the human body.

What he has discovered, he says, “just made you marvel.”

Using micro-magnetic resonance imaging, Tsiaras tracked the development of the baby from conception to birth.

Tsiaras claims that the developing human body is “so perfectly organized a structure that it was hard not to attribute divinity to it.”

“When you actually start working on this data, its pretty spectacular,”  he said at a conference affiliated with TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design).

In the video viewers see the moment when the egg is inseminated. The baby’s first cellular division takes place within 24 hours and divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.

At four weeks, the baby’s cells are now developing at one million cells per second.

After 25 days, one can see the heart chamber developing. Within 32 days, arms and legs. At 52 days, the baby’s retina, nose, and fingers have developed.

Tsiaras calls the entire process — beginning with two simple cells and resulting in what he says is the “magic of you and me” — an “unbelievable machinery.”

“The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexities of these — the mathematical models on how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension, even though I am a mathematician.”

“It’s a mystery, it’s magic, it’s divinity,” says Tsiaras, adding that the complexity of building the human organism within a single system is “beyond any existing mathematics today.”

It’s important to know what unborn babies look like, especially when having discussions about abortion.

News

Should women think more carefully about age and fertility?

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Here is an excellent, controversial, interesting post from Robert Stacy McCain. He critiques a feminist who has postponed becoming a mother, and she is now age 33.

Excerpt:

It is one of the bitter ironies of the Contraceptive Culture: Many women spend years scrupulously using birth control — making what they have been told was the only safe, responsible decision — only to discover that when they decide they are finally ready for motherhood, they can’t become pregnant. Unknown to them, their fallopian tubes were so badly scarred by some long-forgotten infection during their youth that, for many years, they have been as sterile as if they had undergone tubal ligation surgery.

“Chlamydia . . . can go undetected for years and can cause permanent sterility. The top four [sexually transmitted infections] that affect fertility are Chlamydia, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, and HPV. PID (pelvic inflammatory disease), caused by STI’s will cause more than 100,000 women in the U.S. to experience infertility annually.”
– American Fertility Association, “Infertility Prevention Handbook”

The genuinely important thing to realize is that the ways we think about sex, romance, marriage and parenthood are shaped by our culture and society. And the dominant ideas associated with the Contraceptive Culture have become so deeply entrenched in our society that most people (especially most young people) are incapable of understanding how profoundly unnatural these ideas are.

Postponing marriage until you are 30, and then imagining that you have plenty of time to wait around deciding when you want to become a mother, is not a natural way of thinking. To a greater extent than Rachel Birnbaum or her young readers may understand, this way of thinking is an artifact — or perhaps we might call it a side-effect — of the Contraceptive Culture, which fosters the belief that the procreative process is infinitely subject to human control. Yet while it is true that childbirth can always be prevented, by contraception or abortion, the logical obverse is not equally true: Pregnancy and childbirth cannot be magically conjured up in compliance to human will.

Ideas have consequences, and the ideas of the Contraceptive Culture result not merely in attitudes, but in lifetyles reflecting those attitudes. How many thousands of Rachel Birnbaums are out there, living their 20s and early 30s with the idea that they want to become mothers eventually, but not now? And how many of these women are destined to discover that, when they finally decide they are ready for motherhood, the decision has already been made for them by their own bodies, and that the decision is an irrevocable ”no”?

Whenever I write about subjects like this, it provokes strong reactions, many of them from people who accuse me of judgmentalism, or of trying to “tell women what to do.” Such responses – and they are often quite vehement — indicate how firmly rooted the ideas of the Contraceptive Culture have become. People simply are not used to hearing these ideas examined in a critical way and, having become accustomed to thinking and living in accordance with such ideas, feel that any criticism of the ideas is a personal judgment, a moral condemnation of their lives and beliefs.

I like Mr. McCain’s blog because, like me, he isn’t afraid to take on these cultural issues, and to attack feminism. And yet his blog is enormously popular. On so many blogs that are popular, the authors just find news stories and make these short comments about the news. But with McCain’s blog, you get long form essays that don’t shy away from controversy. Like it or not, it’s worth reading. And I couldn’t agree more with him about this essay – it never hurts to think ahead and take into account these limitations.