Tag Archives: Welfare State

Podcasts

Jennifer Roback Morse podcasts on declining males and the overpopulation myth

Leave a comment

From the Ruth Institute podcast page.

More women marrying down as men’s education and salaries decline

The MP3 file is here. (from 1/22/2010)

Topics:

  • women are “marrying down” educationally and financially
  • what do women typically want out of husbands and marriage?
  • are women happier bring the primary breadwinners?
  • has the feminist agenda driven men out of the university?
  • should there be complementarity or equality in the home?
  • men mature more slowly so they are less ready to marry
  • is it sensible for men to stay at home and for women work?

My previous post on this topic is here: How feminism’s war against men ends up hurting women.

The myth of overpopulation and what it means to you

The MP3 file is here. (from 1/22/2010)

Topics:

  • how the transition from country to city discourages child-bearing
  • how religion impacts how many children parents have
  • what is the US birth rate, is it high enough?
  • can we just import immigrants to alleviate the low birth rate?
  • has increased prosperity encouraged people to have more children?
  • how has the purpose of sex changed after the sexual revolution?
  • how does the demographic crisis threaten entitlement programs?
  • what do we learn from the declining birth rate in Japan?
  • how does population growth impact stock market performance?

Dr. J’s wonderful blog is here.  Please give it a visit! She has really been writing a lot of her own thoughts into her posts lately. It’s very fun and engaging!

News

Are elderly women who have babies through IVF being selfish?

13 Comments

The lovely Betsy of Ruthblog linked to this old 2009 article from BioEdge.

Excerpt:

The record for Britain’s oldest women to give birth will be broken next month by 66 year old Elizabeth Munro, from Cambridge. It is thought that Ms Munro, who is single and a successful business woman, travelled to the Ukraine to become pregnant using donor eggs and IVF treatment.
In the UK, health trusts determine which women will be eligible for IVF treatment on the National Health Service (NHS), and factors limiting availability include the age of the woman. Not many trusts will consider providing NHS treatment for women over about 39 years old. However, some private clinics, which are not obliged to follow NHS guidelines, will offer treatment to women up to the age of 50, although it is rare for them to consider treating women older than this.

[…]Ms Munro, who is due to give birth next month by Caesarean section, claims she still feels 39 and is fitter than many women a third her age. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, she said: ‘It’s not my physical age that’s important – it’s how I feel inside.’ She added: ‘I don’t have to defend what I have done. It’s between me, my baby and no-one else’.

The Telegraph article says this:

The childless divorcee travelled to the Ukraine for IVF treatment and is planning to give birth at a clinic in Cambridge in the next month.

She will be nearing 80 when the child becomes a teenager.

I also note that IVF is covered for women under 40 by the state-run National Health Service, (as are breast implants), just like in Canada. Another reason that Christians should oppose socialized medicine.

Betsy makes this snarky comment:

Yet another example of how selfish people can be. So much for what’s best for the child. I want it, and I can get it, so I will. And of course the doctors aren’t willing to turn down a buck. So sad. Poor kids with moms who will likely die while the kids are in college. How kind. I’m willing to bet old women are doing this because their grown children are too selfish to provide grandchildren. And what 20-year-old wants to spend his time caring for his mom after her hip replacement surgery or while she’s dealing with dementia?

I note that Ms. Munro is divorced, so her child will be raised without a father in the home. I just think that when people begin a new realtionship with a living thing, that they should count the cost of the relationship and make sure that they can set aside the time, money and effort required to take care of that other person/animal/whatever. It’s no good to treat children like property, and no good to treat husbands like property either.

Something even worse

Anyway, here is a newer UK Daily Mail article that is even worse.

Excerpt:

Cradling her twin boys in her arms, the world’s oldest mother confidently proclaimed that longevity ran in her family.

But just two and half years on, Maria Carmen del Bousada’s boasts have been proved sadly wrong.

The 69-year-old, who admitted lying about her age to receive fertility treatment in the U.S, has died from cancer.

[…]Orphaned before reaching school, her sons, Christian and Pau, will have to rely on others to find out about her.

[…]Earlier this month, Britain’s oldest mother Elizabeth Adeney, who had a boy in May, was 67. Like Miss Bousada, she too was childless and single when she underwent fertility treatment using a donor egg and donor sperm.As for Miss Bousada’s cancer, it is understood that the former shop worker had been told that the drugs used during her fertility treatment may have hastened the advance of the disease.

[…]It is known that some types of cancer are sensitive to hormones associated with both pregnancy and fertility treatment. Miss Bousada told doctors in Los Angeles that she was 55 when she travelled there to undergo IVF treatment.

Critics, including her own family, called the pensioner, who went through the menopause 18 years before her £20,000 treatment, ‘selfish and irresponsible’.

After the birth she admitted lying about her age and predicted she would live to 101 as her mother had done.

‘I have every reason to believe longevity runs in my family,’ she said.

Please take a look at the related post below on how children are affected by single motherhood, because there is an interesting debate with a single mother in the comments, and you can see how they think.

Related posts

Commentary

Can all opposition to secular socialist policies be dismissed as racism?

1 Comment

Story from the Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

For years now, those on the left have conflated resistance to any item of their agenda–high taxes, extravagant spending, laxity on crime, what have you–with motives of a dark nature: racism, nativism, fear of “the other,” and various species of “hate.”

[…]As Obama’s grandiose plans created a predictable political reaction, which first took form in the tea party movement, his sympathizers in the media theorized that racism, which had been in abeyance for the six monthsaround the election, had re-reared its mean head.

[…]Time‘s Joe Klein looked at people protesting taxes and spending, bailouts and czars, deficits in the trillions, and discerned fear of Hispanics spreading like wildfire in the white working class. “They’re seeing Latinos .  .  . move into the neighborhoods. They’re seeing South Asians .  .  . running a lot of businesses. They’re seeing intermarriage .  .  . all these things that they find threatening. .  .  . They believe that the America that they knew, which was always kind of a myth, has disappeared.”

[…]Michael Lind, writing for Salon, said… “From the beginning, attempts to create a universal welfare state in the U.S. have been thwarted by the fears of voters that they will be taxed to subsidize other Americans who are unlike them in race. .  .  . Racial resentments undoubtedly explain the use of ‘redistribution’ and ‘socialism’ as code words by John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Republican working-class mascot ‘Joe the Plumber’ during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

But the problem is that there isn’t any evidence of racism:

The most conclusive rejoinder to the contention that “socialism” is a racist code word comes from a poll taken by the Democracy Corps (the firm founded by James Carville and Paul Begala), which delivered the verdict that while tea party protesters were insane by the partisan standards of Bill Clinton’s backers, the protesters’ concerns were what they said they were–taxes and spending; the expansion of government–and were not about race. The pollsters began discussions among older, white, and conservative voters and found “race was barely raised, [and] certainly not what was bothering them.”

Is it healthy for democracy for the secular left to demonize their opponents all the time instead of listening to their arguments? Doesn’t this shurt down dialogue and prevent us from listening to a diversity of opinions and perspectives? It seems to me that the only people who ever make race an issue are people on the left. I’m really questioning whether we should be voting in close-minded leftists to run the economy when they seem to be incapable of appreciating both sides of economic questions.

It’s the economy, stupid.