"Called to Eternal Life": Babies and Rights

Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.

Dr. J's favorite quote:
Our culture rejects, for the most part, the best and most exalted way in whichchildren should come among us. Thus, we have a society filled withpeople who have not known what was naturally due to them. That is, eachchild is to be born in a home in which each child has a father and a mother whobegot him and accepted him in love and generosity as a gift they did not plan ordevise. The actual child was not even in the thoughts of parents, whoseattention was on each other. Yet, they were prepared and happy to accept thattheir relation naturally led to something beyond themselves, something seen inthe faces of their own children.

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2009/schall_rightsbabies_sept09.asp

Britain needs a middle-class baby boom

A growing population is a blessing so long as everyone joins in, argues Melanie McDonagh By Melanie McDonagh

When I was born, I was, though I didn't know it at the time, part of the great Sixties baby boom. It was quite inescapable in Ireland. I was the sole only child in my class – everyone I knew came from families of around five. A proper big family had 12 children, which was the case with one friend of mine. When her grandmother was asked how many grandchildren there were now, she'd answer: "Twelve, at least last time I counted." It meant that, whenever you went to play in someone's house, you'd always find yourself being shushed up because you might wake the baby.

And you know what? It was good fun being around big families, even though those children were reared by mothers for whom family life was synonymous with hard labour. By definition, a society that has lots of children is fundamentally optimistic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/6103250/Britain-needs-a-middle-class-baby-boom.html

What the Experts Are Saying Now

The most recent research in child development. Among the findings: 4-year-olds lie once an hour.

By KAY HYMOWITZ
For more than a century American parents—ever more distanced from grandmothers and ­suspicious of tradition—have looked to social ­science to explain their children to them. Thus they have gobbled up books and articles by experts who ­periodically deliver the latest truths about ­child-rearing. Back in 1945, when Dr. Spock published his "Baby and Child Care," readers' devotion to expert opinion was so intense that he began his book with the reassuring words: "Trust yourself." Not that he ­believed it. The book was jammed with advice.
Now, in "NurtureShock," Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman survey the newest new findings about child development. Little in the book is all that shocking, but given our enthusiasm for turning tentative child ­research into settled policy, the studies that the ­authors discuss are of more than passing interest.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574371422231600220.html

Children are worth having

Barbara Lilley

Are people who have children selfish? Would the world be better off if more of us were childless?
In an August 3, 2009 Maclean's Magazine article, “No Kids, No Grief”, author Anne Kingston takes a look at what appears to be a growing and vocal section of society – people who have decided against having children. The reasons for refusing to procreate seem to run along the lines of the following: it's better for the environment, children are expensive, having them means you have to give up some material things you'd rather not and my personal favourite, childless marriages are far happier.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/children_are_worth_having/

Iran’s plummeting birth rates

Michael Cook

Despite its fundamentalist Islamic reputation Iran has experimented with birth control with some unexpected, and unwelcome, consequences. If demography is destiny, the family of Farzaneh Roudi is a snapshot of Iran’s past, present and future. A program director at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC, Ms Roudi was born in Iran. Her grandmother had 11 children, her father had 6 and she has 2.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/irans_plummeting_birth_rates/

Babies have a right to a heritage

Brenda Almond

Fertility clinics are creating a new class of dispossessed human beings, says a British philosopher. Baby manufacture is already big business. Recent ads targeting women college students in America have offered them free holidays in India in exchange for parting with their eggs during their visit, with Indian women teamed to become paid surrogates and return the product – the student’s child – to those who commissioned it. Do other jurisdictions want to follow this precedent and should Americans be more concerned about what is done in their name? The selling of slaves was considered offensive – should selling babies be OK?

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/babies_have_a_right_to_a_heritage/

American Babies Are Ruining Everything

WILLIAM MCGURN
The truth is more brains will likely mean cleaner energy technologies.

Forget about the birthers, and the nutty claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. More and more, we are hearing from people who might best be described as anti-birthers. Their claims have nothing to do with long- versus short-form Hawaiian birth certificates. Instead, they advance a simple proposition: that the birth of each additional American child is a kind of calamity for the environment. The most recent example of anti-birth thinking comes from Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax of Oregon State University. In a study called “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals,” they suggest that if you truly care about the environment, it’s not enough to trade your SUV for a Prius, use the right lightbulbs, or limit your lawn to organic fertilizers. To the contrary, you need to start thinking about something way more important: i.e., having one less child.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204313604574328823712388930.html

The Grail Searchers

Despite endless efforts to prove the contrary, science shows that an embryo is a human being.

By Maureen Condic, Patrick Lee, and Robert P. George

“The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.” — Langman’s Medical Embryology, 7th edition, 1995
For people who advocate the killing of embryonic human beings in the cause of biomedical research, the Holy Grail is an argument that would definitively establish that the human embryo, at least early in its development, is not a living human organism and therefore not a human being at all. The problem for these advocates is that all the scientific evidence points in precisely the opposite direction. Modern human embryology and developmental biology have shown that fertilization produces a new and distinct organism: a living individual of the human species in the embryonic stage of his or her development.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDFkM2ZiOGEwOWVkY2Y2ZTlhNDk2MjdkMWQ3NzZhNmY

Babies have a right to a heritage

NOTABLE QUOTE: "...equity in the preservation of personal identity has not received as much attention as the rights of adults to fertility treatment."

Brenda Almond
Fertility clinics are creating a new class of dispossessed human beings, says a British philosopher.
Baby manufacture is already big business. Recent ads targeting women college students in America have offered them free holidays in India in exchange for parting with their eggs during their visit, with Indian women teamed to become paid surrogates and return the product – the student’s child – to those who commissioned it. Do other jurisdictions want to follow this precedent and should Americans be more concerned about what is done in their name? The selling of slaves was considered offensive – should selling babies be OK?

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/babies_have_a_right_to_a_heritage/

Messing with Mother Nature

Barbara Kay

The human species is changing but we're stuck on polar bears The single 69-year old Spanish woman who gave birth to twins at the age of 66 died last Saturday. Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara, who thought she had every prospect of living to see her now two-year old boys Christian and Pau into adulthood because her own mother died at 101, claimed not to regret her late-motherhood decision, even though her doctors told her that "the powerful drugs used during her fertility treatment could have helped her disease [believed to be breast cancer] to spread."
Although at the time of the birth Ms Bousada de Lara's case attracted a few stalwart supporters of the "right" of a woman to control her own fertility destiny, the general reaction was one of dismay and recoil. The most commonly adduced argument was that her children's odds of growing up motherless were sharply escalated by her selfishness. And so it came to pass, which will doubtless serve to dampen the enthusiasm of other older women contemplating the idea of post-menopausal pregnancy.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/messing_with_mother_nature/

Lessons from career woman’s no-baby shock

Carolyn Moynihan

I have just caught up with a classic “confessions of a career woman” story by a British woman who has reached the age of 45 bitterly disappointed that she will never have her own child. The Daily Mail headline says it all: “Seduced by stories of stars giving birth later and IVF myths, career-obsessed Lucy believed children and love could wait.”

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/lessons_from_career_womans_no_baby_shock/

Paternal and maternal ages at conception and risk of bipolar affective disorder in their offspring.

A consistent association between paternal age and their offspring's risk of schizophrenia has been observed, with no independent association with maternal age.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19627644?ordinalpos=2&itool=Email.EmailReport.Pubmed_ReportSelector.Pubmed_RVDocSum

Pope’s letter calls for openness to human life

Carolyn Moynihan
Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical letter, “On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth”, discusses a wide spectrum of social realities, among them the need for openness to new human life, which, he says, “is at the centre of true development”, and protection of the family founded on “marriage between a man and a woman, the primary vital cell of society”.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/popes_letter_calls_for_openness_to_human_life/

British baby siezed in Ireland after parents flee social workers over custody row

By Andrew Alderson
A three-day-old girl is at the centre of an emotional custody battle after a British couple fled to Ireland to have their baby only to have it siezed by social workers in the Republic.

On the advice of an MP, the heavily-pregnant woman and her partner gathered belongings into their car and left the UK for Ireland last week after British social workers told them their child would be taken into care within hours of birth.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/5459740/British-baby-siezed-in-Ireland-after-parents-flee-social-workers-over-custody-row.html

Changing Face of Motherhood: Who's Giving Birth?

Children Pay Consequences for Decline in Marriage

By Father John Flynn, LC
ROME, May 24, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The number of children born outside a stable married life continues to rise. Northern European countries have the highest levels of births to single women, but the United States is catching up.The latest figures come from a report published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).According to the May Data Brief issued by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, births to unmarried women totaled 1,714,643 in 2007, 26% more than in 2002. As a result in 2007 nearly 4 in 10 births in the U.S. were to unmarried women.

http://www.zenit.org/article-25981?l=english

Think family, not soul-mate, Singapore tells singles

Carolyn Moynihan

Singapore’s National Family Council is pushing the boundaries of taste somewhat in its latest effort to promote marriage and family life, but the island nation’s dismal fertility rate of 1.09 children per woman helps explain why.
As part of its Think Family campaign the council is running a competition for the “most imperfect-perfect couple” (prize: romantic getaway) and an ad in which a widow pays a funny/sad tribute to her deceased husband’s “imperfections” at his funeral. A trifle crass, but evidently a necessary wake-up call for Singapore singles waiting too long for the perfect mate to turn up.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/think_family_not_soul_mate_singapore_tells_singles/

When It Comes to Illegitimacy, We’re Living in Separate Worlds: An Update on the White Underclass

By Charles Murray

The New York Times has gotten around to reporting something that has been known for a couple of months, that in 2007 the U.S. illegitimacy ratio (the proportion of live births that occur to unmarried women) reached the truly remarkable, once unthinkable, figure of 40 percent.

The news behind the news here, something the Times doesn’t mention, is that illegitimacy varies enormously by socioeconomic class. There’s now an exceptionally clean data base for examining this: The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that followed (among others) women born from 1957 to 1964 through their entire childbearing years. We now know with no statistical complications the profile of their children. Since so much of the commentary about American out-of-wedlock births gets tangled up in issues of race and ethnicity, let’s take them out of the equation and limit the numbers to whites of European origin.

http://blog.american.com/?p=714

Wrong Marriage Debate

It is primarily about safety and security for children.

By Mona Charen
The other day I chatted with a pregnant gal at the hair salon. She was about 20, sweet, pretty, and demure. Because I am always doing sociological fieldwork, I asked my hairdresser if the girl was married. No. But she has a fiancé. As always in these situations, you just want to grab these young people by the lapels and say “Get to the altar! It’s critical for your child.” I didn’t of course — because, while I am a zealot for marriage, I’m not yet prepared to become a public nuisance.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTM0MzI2NGFkOTFlNmM3YjgzZTM5Mzk1Njk3MWIxOTQ

Old-fashioned parenting good for everyone

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow -

The head of the Beverly LaHaye Institute says a recent report on the number of unwed mothers highlights a problem over 40 years in the making.

According to a recent report on U.S. births, the number of babies born to unwed mothers is sharply rising. Currently the rate stands at about 40 percent. An Associated Press report quotes one of the researchers as saying the rise is due to the amount of women who believe they do not have to live under the same rules as their parents.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=529832

Sweden rules 'gender-based' abortion legal

Swedish health authorities have ruled that gender-based abortion is not illegal according to current law and can not therefore be stopped, according to a report by Sveriges Television.

The Local reported in February that a woman from Eskilstuna in southern Sweden had twice had abortions after finding out the gender of the child. The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about possible chromosome abnormalities. At the same time, she also asked to know the foetus's gender.

Doctors at Mälaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they "feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender" without having a medically compelling reason to do so.

http://www.thelocal.se/19392.html

Are Men Are The 'Weaker' Sex? Pregnancy With Male Fetus Riskier, Study Claims

ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2009) — Nurses in the maternity ward often say that a difficult labor is a sign of a baby boy. Now, researchers at Tel Aviv University claim that a new study provides scientific evidence that a male baby comes with a bigger package of associated risks than his female counterparts.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090331112729.htm

Build-A-Bear Babies?

Check out this FOX News segment on a fertility clinic which claims to deliver specific genetic traits to parents looking to "customize" their baby. Dr. Jeff Steinberg says that he has already let thousands of couples decide their kids' gender, and within the next six months will let moms and dads pick the hair and eye color.

Steinberg believes that these reproductive technologies are inevitable. "Genetic health is the wave of the future," he said. "It's already happening and it's not going to go away. It's going to expand. So if they've got major problems with it, they need to sit down and really examine their own consciences because there's nothing that's going to stop it."

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=434892