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News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
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Jonathan Last has an excellent article on China’s One-Child policy in the current issue of The Weekly Standard.
Not only is the policy unspeakably evil, of course, but what most people don’t realize is that the demographic damage it has wrought on China almost certainly will not be reversed merely by lifting it. That is to say, the One-Child policy has so devastatingly altered Chinese society that there may be no going back.
Last offers the Jiangsu province as a case study:
In modern countries with access to contraception and abortion, the theoretical upper limit on a society’s fertility rate is its “ideal fertility”—that is, the number of children women say they would like to have in a perfect world. This ideal number is always higher than achieved fertility, because parents bump into various real-world constraints. For example, although most Western countries have an ideal fertility number above 2, the only Western country with a fertility rate above 2.0 is America.
In 2006, Chinese demographers began studying the Jiangsu province, where couples are allowed to have a second child so long as one of the parents was an only child. They surveyed women who were eligible for a second child, trying to get a handle on what China’s ideal fertility number might be. Among women who could have two children if they wanted, 1.46 was the ideal number.
For the Chinese, this is the scariest number of all because it suggests that even if One-Child were lifted tomorrow, it might not matter. [Continue reading ...]
Recently, League Executive Director Eric Scheidler’s posted a piece here at the Hotline that has been turning heads in the media and generating a lot of buzz.
Though Planned Parenthood has their way of spinning the numbers, Eric’s article makes it clear that although Planned Parenthood’s government funding has increased every year for many years, the rate of unintended pregnancy has stayed level and even increased slightly even though Planned Parenthood’s contraception and abortion services are supposed to bring that rate down.
Recently, Eric was invited on CBN News to speak more about this glaring discrepancy. Check it out and share this important information with your friends!
For many years, pro-abortion advocates in the Western world have tried, and failed, to get the Philippines to pass the so-called Reproductive Health (RH) bill.
If passed, the RH bill would, among other things, massively expand the presence of contraception and force medical professionals and businesses to provide them in spite of any conscientious objections. In this largely Catholic country, that hasn’t gone over well, and that’s why Filipinos continue to overwhelmingly oppose it.
But the pro-RH forces aren’t done trying to get the bill passed, and with seemingly endless streams of cash continuing to come into the country, the bill is closer to being passed than ever before, despite the fact that one pro-RH congresswoman has actually admitted that it is intended to be a population control measure, and the recent confirmation via Wikileaks that the U.S. government — which, in what should come as a surprise to no one, officially supports the RH bill — has been funding population control measures in the Philippines for the past 40 years. [Continue reading ...]
Eric Scheidler’s post earlier this week shone a spotlight on Planned Parenthood’s failure to reduce unintended pregnancy in the U.S., despite receiving ever increasing taxpayer funding.
Following on his commentary, I thought it would be worth taking a closer look at another element of the seemingly endless “How can we reduce unintended pregnancy?” debate: namely, so-called emergency contraception (hereafter: EC).
Today I came across a press release dated September 2, 1998 from a company called Gynétics (which at the time was based in New Jersey, but is now based in Belgium). The release announced that the their product, Preven, had just become the “first FDA-approved product for emergency contraception that can prevent pregnancy when used within 72 hours” after sex.
The press release contained this comment from one Dr. Anita Nelson, an Ob/Gyn professor at UCLA:
It is estimated that nearly 50 percent of all abortions and unintended pregnancies in this country could be avoided if women had access to emergency contraception.
That’s no small prediction. And looking back, it’s turned out to be hopelessly wrong. [Continue reading ...]
Last week, the Guttmacher Institute announced the publication of an analysis of the rate of unintended pregnancy in the United States from 2001 to 2006. The report unwittingly makes the case for defunding Planned Parenthood.
Guttmacher reports that overall “the unintended pregnancy rate has remained essentially flat” during that period but that it “has increased dramatically among poor women.” Their conclusion [PDF]: “The United States did not make progress toward its goal of reducing unintended pregnancy between 2001 and 2006.”
The Institute was founded as a division of Planned Parenthood in 1968, and later named in honor of former Planned Parenthood director Alan Guttmacher when it became independent in 1977. However—as the two groups’ response to the new report shows—Guttmacher and Planned Parenthood continue to work hand-in-glove.
“The Guttmacher Institute’s new analysis of unintended pregnancy should serve as a national wake-up call,” declared Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards—and for once I agree with her. But we’re completely at odds as to what the wake-up call is trying to tell us. [Continue reading ...]
Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration issued a mandate requiring so-called “comprehensive” sex education for all middle and high school students in NYC public schools.
In response, Dr. Anne Nolte, a family practice physician in Manhattan, wrote in a Fox News column last week that the city’s new mandate reminded her of the saying, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
She then goes on to make some incisive observations:
In medicine, sometimes what is needed is a paradigm shift — not just small changes but a radical re-evaluation of the problem and the assumptions and presuppositions relating to it.
If we had the courage to look honestly at teen pregnancy, we wouldn’t be satisfied with a mandate that does the equivalent of placing a tiny band-aid on a gushing artery. If we had the courage to admit that we don’t have a solution, we’d be unwilling to spend more money on an old model that has pretty much failed. [Continue reading ...]
If any topic has rivaled the debt ceiling negotiations lately in the news, it’s been the controversial move to force insurance companies to cover birth control without co-pays under President Obama’s health care law. Check out the video below from Fox Chicago’s newscast last night to get League Executive Director Eric Scheidler’s take on the issue:
Thanks to Obamacare, it looks like the liberal dream of free birth control is about to be realized.
Earlier this week the Institute of Medicine (IOM), formed in 1970 to inform the government about health care matters, recommended that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) require all insurance providers to eliminate co-pays for birth control. HHS is expected to adopt the recommendation next month.
The recommendation is one of several in the IOM report on preventative services that should be made available to women under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. [Continue reading ...]
Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade recently wrote in a syndicated column that appeared in papers across the country that he now knows “what winning really means.”
Wade was just awarded custody of his two sons. He grew up in Chicago, and his own father was heavily invested in his upbringing. Wade wrote that since his sons have come to live with him, “every day has been like Father’s Day.”
President Obama recently appointed Wade to a new parenting program geared toward encouraging fathers to become more involved in their children’s lives. That means accepting the responsibility for the lives they help to create. Being a responsible dad means serving as a role model for his sons and daughters. That demands honesty, integrity, dependability, compassion, discipline and love. [Continue reading ...]
In her post earlier this week about the fire at The Women’s Center CPC in Chicago, Ann Scheidler noted that five (5) members of Walk for Choice Chicago had picketed outside The Women’s Center last week, where they passed out cards [PDF] claiming that the center was “operated by the Pro-Life Action League”.
To be clear, while we wholeheartedly support the lifesaving work of The Women’s Center and often work closely with them, the center is not now, nor has ever been, operated by us.
Quite frankly, I have no idea how the members of Walk for Choice Chicago ever got the impression that it is. Are they really that uninformed about the organizations that make up the pro-life movement? [Continue reading ...]