feminine-genius

Child abuse -- times two

The numbers for teen pregnancies in Britain are staggering: roughly 40,000 per year. And it's not a question of better birth control, because peddling those actually causes the number to rise. (This is the constant explanation of those who oppose sex ed and distribution of devices: they only increase the activity. Numbers back this up everywhere.)

The number of 14-year-old British girls having abortions has soared by almost a quarter in only two years. Department of Health figures show that 166 girls of that age aborted their babies last year, compared with 135 in 2006. For 15-year-olds, the number was up 16 per cent over seven years.

Britain’s teen pregnancy figures are the worst in Western Europe, despite (or perhaps because of) a raft of failed Government initiatives. Earlier this year, the public learned that young girls on a £5.9m state-sponsored programme to cut pregnancies among poorer teens had instead “significantly” increased the likelihood of their becoming pregnant.

The UK has one of the highest abortion rates in the western world, with abortionists killing almost 200,000 babies every year. The number of teen pregnancies is also one of the highest, with 40,000 girls becoming pregnant every year.

The latest figures, released by the Department of Health following a Freedom of Information request, show that the number of abortions committed on under-16s rose from 3,658 in 2001 to 4,113 last year—a rise of more than 12 per cent.

Norman Wells of Family and Youth Concern noted that “High abortion rates among teenagers are the inevitable fruit of a society that has made an idol of sexual pleasure”.

Rather than looking at statistics, could we imagine one lonely child, no father in the home, mum working, time to kill either after school or by skipping school, attention from a boy in her middle school (or older) and all the sex ed she needed from a very young age. It's in all the songs, the movies, the television plots, the magazines -- there is no means of resistance, not a single voice around her to help her say no. How can she learn, so distracted by her loneliness and the throbbing of the culture in her ears? How can the teachers teach with almost all of their young charges consumed by passions beyond their years -- or soaking up the drama all around them?

Remember, those abortion statistics don't cover miscarriages, babies carried to term, and the sexually-active girls who are already sterile because of various diseases. If a foreign invader came to their shores to rape and pillage, they couldn't do more damage than what Britain has done to itself through sloth, irreverence, and lack of parental concern. Poor, poor children.

New statistics reinforce breast cancer claims

Here is more information that won't be coming out via the Susan B. Komen breast cancer people:

Study: Chinese Women With Abortions Have Statistically Significant  17% Increased Breast Cancer Risk / Scientist Argues Researchers Underestimated Risk

Chinese researchers Peng Xing and his colleagues conducted a case-control study in Northeast China examining reproductive factors associated with subtypes of breast cancer. They found a statistically significant overall odds ratio of 1.17 (17% increased breast cancer risk for all subtypes combined) among women with induced abortions.

Earlier this year, a Turkish study reported a statistically significant 66% increased risk for women with abortions. Both studies show that, when honest research is conducted outside the control of the U.S. National Cancer Institute and other Western governmental agencies or organizations tethered to abortion ideology and politics, the truth emerges that abortion raises risk. Studies reporting no abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link were proven in medical journals to be stupendously flawed (fraudulent).

"The Chinese and the Turkish studies are relevant considering the debate over government-funded abortion through healthcare reform," said Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer. "Government-funded abortion means more dead American women from breast cancer."

I'm baffled

Fifteen abortions in sixteen years -- she calls herself an abortion addict. While her site (and upcoming book) try to explain the inexpicable, my over-riding question is, "Why can she not see that choice = death to all?"

"I am worried about my safety and the hate mail," she told ABCNews.com in a telephone interview as her [two] home-schooled children were at work on a painting project.

"No book like this has ever been written," she told ABCNews.com. "I just imagine the 'baby killer' and I could be a poster child for that kind of fundamentalism. And there are my little kids in all of that."

Well, fundamentally, she has killed her babies and is trying to explain why -- isn't that the point? Here's a telling blurb:

“Lolita Lebron's granddaughter, heir to the most public female embodiment of heroic self-sacrifice in Puerto Rico in this century, has written a memoir full of searing, intimate truths, silences broken open to reveal the personal costs of public myth making...A momentous act of courage. ”
—Aurora Levins Morales, The Women's Review of Books

"Myth making" might be an excellent clue. There seems to be a partial effort to tie the self-mutilation to "colonialism," but one cannot liken a husband to an occupying army -- unless you hate him that much. She actually stresses more importantly that the media abuses women through its toxic and confusing messages:

Vilar blames much of her poor choices on a hypersexualized society that at once values the perfect mother, but also expects women to be sexually attractive to men and to achieve professionally.

"Women have a deep need for agency, for purpose and direction and society is not providing natural and healthy channels for creative action," she said.

"In school and on TV, every message I get is what I am doing as a mother or wife is wrong," said Vilar. "I should be thinking about a profession and not mothering. Everyone is having babies, and yet they don't want to care for them.

"Are many of the repeat abortions in part an embodiment of this mixed message? A lost, ambivalent attempt at an act of agency that cannot find its proper vessel? "

The Marxists (with whom she aligns herself) demanded promiscuity without bounds and reproductive rights as a key to the dialiectic -- and yet she cannot indict them as part of the problem, so it's confusing from the start. But I don't think the book claims to be straight-forward.  

The fact that everyone admits that a mental imbalance caused her to do what she did doesn't make them question abortion on-demand in the least. Just so the crazy women are sexually available, who cares what they suffer in the process. All the requisite links for planned parenthood and naral are there -- so the lies will continue.

Why don't women care?

From Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer:

Study: Turkish Women with Abortions Have Statistically Significant 66% Increase in Breast Cancer Risk / Researchers Likely Underestimated the Risk, Reports Scientist
 
"I guess they didn't get the 'memo' from the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), which declared back in 2003 that the non-existence of the ABC (abortion-breast cancer) link had been 'established'"! - Professor Joel Brind, Breast Cancer Prevention Institute
 
A retrospective study conducted by Dr. Vahit Ozmen and his colleagues at the Istanbul Medical Faculty and Magee-Women's hospital reported a statistically significant 66% increase in breast cancer risk among women who'd had any abortions.
 
According to Joel Brind, professor of endocrinology at Baruch College, City University of New York and a director at the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, Ozmen's team most likely underestimated the breast cancer risk associated with abortion because of a flaw known as "selection bias."
 
Selection bias would also explains their team's unusual findings - significantly decreased risks for women who use oral contraceptives (OCs) and hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The World Health Organization and the NCI acknowledge that use of combined (estrogen + progestin) OCs and combined HRT increase risk.
 
Selection bias is a flaw in the study because only hospital or clinic patients were selected as study subjects, and they were therefore not representative of the general population. According to Brind's hypothesis, a disproportionate number of "modern" women were likely represented among the controls, a group more likely to use HRT and OCs, have abortions and visit the hospital often for minor complaints. By contrast, a disproportionate number of "traditional" women were represented among the patients; women less likely to use HRT and OCs, have abortions and visit the hospital (except in cases of serious illness, like breast cancer).
 
To their credit, Dr. Ozmen et al. did acknowledge the likelihood of selection bias in their study, although they were not specific in attributing any effects on their results to it.
 
Brind's analysis of Ozmen's research can be read here.
 
"Although the NCI, the nation's largest funder of cancer-research, and others have worked feverishly to suppress the ABC link by publishing fraudulent research and even leaning on scientists whose studies have shown risk increases among women who have abortions, honest research occasionally escapes the NCI's purview," declared Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer.
 
The Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer is an international women's organization founded to protect the health and save the lives of women by educating and providing information on abortion as a risk factor for breast cancer.
 
References:
 
1. Ozmen et al. Breast cancer risk factors in Turkish women - a university hospital-based nested case control study. World J Surg Onc 2009;7:37. Available at: http://wjso.com/content/7/1/37. 

We warned them!

The callousness of the medical industry is occasionally astounding. A woman and her husband naturally conceived sextuplets (a real rarity!) about which their little Irish town is delighted. Prayerful bunch, I'm sure. And two months after their precarious delivery, one has died.

The babies were born 14 weeks prematurely and were being treated in intensive care. Parents, Nuala Conway, 26, and her husband Austin had been warned of the dangers of the multiple birth but ignored the advice of doctors.

Mrs Conway said she and her husband never considered aborting some of the foetuses. "We knew without discussion what we both wanted," she said in an interview last month. "These babies are a wonderful gift from God."

Do the doctors think the parents would sleep better with five children, having killed one -- rather than giving them all a fighting chance and letting God decide? Somehow, I think there is a peace amidst the grief in knowing the child didn't die by their own hand. Prayers for the courageous family.

Biology 101

Askmen.com has a vile article that gives men male human beings tips on how to get their partners to abort their offspring. "Love tip 300" feels their pain, knowing that children can put "tremendous strain" on a relationship. While all of it is beyond bad, consider the bizarre notion about parenthood:

If you’ve followed all of these steps and your woman decides to have the baby anyway, this does not mean you’re required to get married or move in together. You’ll probably want to provide for your child regardless, but if you’ve been clear about your intentions from the start, you are not obligated to contribute beyond what your conscience and the law expects of you. This was her decision, not yours, and the bulk of the responsibility is now hers.

Staggaring in myopic indulgence, breathtakingly wrong in its irresponsibility. Sexual intimacy produces babies -- clear and simple. The man male who chooses to become intimate with any woman under 50 engages in behaviour which creates more persons. The one who says it was "her decision" or "the responsibility is now hers" is not capable of the generosity on which stable, healthy relationships are built.

It also gives us another view of "choice," which often involves such coercion -- and even this final step of blackmail. Boyfriend or baby: you can't have them both (and for those who choose abortion, they usually end up with neither. Some choice.)

Yes, centuries ago, women were put away or rejected for not producing male heirs -- which biology now shows to be the domain of the male progenitor. Why modern men should blame women for pregnancy after intimacy is baffling, except that modern education is capable of creating just as many neanderthals. Yes [sigh], the responsibility is hers -- because she chose to be intimate with a selfish clod. Pursuit of abstinence weeds them out, and spares children from death and fatherlessness.

Brings to mind an image American Thinker posted under "What a real man looks like."

Hospitals are about life

Father Pavone has chilling anecdote about a woman giving birth in 1973:

After she had given birth and was in the hospital recovering from her caesarian section, she was struck by the fact that even though the maternity ward seemed to be full of women, there were no other newborn babies around except hers. In fact, her infant son was all alone in a room full of empty incubators. It was a strange and almost eerie site.

Please read the piece for the excellent point that he makes. That said, I remember a singular birth, sadly a stillbirth, our fifth child who was delivered in our familiar maternity ward. Not everyone on the floor had received the memo about the tragic outcome, and it was touching to see how various passing nurses scrambled for the baby equipment -- all the paraphanalia they noticed was missing from our room -- only to be told in whispers that it wouldn't be necessary.

They were geared for life. In its own way it was beautiful. To tell you the truth, the whole event was beautiful -- knowing the Author of Life had it all in hand. Tough, surely, but one of those poignant moments that bring so much truth to the surface -- that was the richness of that particular "life-giving" opportunity. God bless good priests for making these truths known in season and out.

Finally, a diocese that cares

I am delighted that the Archdiocese of Saint Louis has put out a statement concerning the Susan G. Komen "Race for the Cure." On their site, they explain that they cannot support the organisation for a variety of reasons:

• Komen gives money to Planned Parenthood;
• Komen supports embryonic stem cell research; and
• Komen ignores the link between abortion and breast cancer.

I know there are intense emotions surrounding breast cancer and great hopes to eradicate the disease, but it cannot be done over the bodies of babies or while ignoring a significant contributing factor. Women deserve better -- and kudos to the good souls in the chancery who are responsible for bringing this important information to light!

Sexual roulette

Being overwhelmed by all the chatter going on about Notre Dame, I missed Anthony Esolen's excellent analysis of the current attitude towards sexual intimacy. He equates promiscuity to Russian roulette (playing games of chance with a loaded gun) where the odds are that eventually someone dies. It's not "intentional" but a natural outcome of such recklessness.

Except in the case of rape, there are no "unintended pregnancies," none.  There are plenty of women who do not want to be pregnant, and plenty of men who do not want them to be pregnant, but in all those cases the pregnancies are the results of intentional actions that have pregnancy as their perfectly natural and perfectly predictable consequence. Contraception does not change the nature of the act itself; indeed, it makes the actors more keenly aware that they are doing what makes babies, since otherwise they would not go so far out of their way (donning or inserting into the body uncomfortable devices, or flooding the system with pregnancy-mimicking hormones) to thwart the body's natural functions. The "problem" in the case of Sexual Roulette is not that the body fails, but that it succeeds.

I agree completely thus far. He then challenges the premise that there need to be fewer unintended pregnancies:

For the question we should immediately ask is not, "How do we dispose of this child we do not want?" but, "What is wrong with us that we do not want this child?"

This is where I think he's putting emphasis on the wrong place. There are too many very simple answers to that question, beginning with, "Bad timing, overwhelmed with life already thanks, no money, no space, a family member has a terminal illness, etc." Even happily married people who are quite close to God may occasionally realise [sadly] that they are not privileged to co-create with God at a given time, and decades of disussion over the legitimate uses of NFP have hashed out what these serious reasons might be.

I think the more basic question should be, "What gives us the audacity to think that we have a right to a sexual union without its natural outcomes: babies and bonding?" It's the cavalier view of sex as a frivolous contact sport that makes the byproduct (pregnancy) such a shocker to its fan base.

Reading some lovely novels (George Eliot's Middlemarch and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park) has reminded me of the fundamental view held by many mature people that that they are simply not in a position to marry -- for the very reason that they cannot support a family. By Dr Esolen's criteria, there would be something wrong with these people, for they do not want children. Their decision to avoid children involves continence, which leaves them lonely, but these are not decisions made lightly. I think they are more mature than the single mother who serendipitously rolls in the sack but then heroically brings the subsequent child to term. (And yet, then we wander into the mind-boggling metaphysical equations weighing the value of a new soul who wouldn't exist with perfect chastity ...)

The comparison to roulette is excellent, but in a bizarre way, the promiscuous have the same reticence towards rearing children as the chaste men of old. The fundamental difference is their view towards intimacy and the very different price each insists on paying to remain childless.

Self control

MercatorNet has a story on a fascinating study on children and self-control that is very telling. Basically, a group of children were offered one treat, but then told that if they could wait they would receive two treats. Then the researcher left the room.

Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an Oreo, delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling before returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.

The real merit of the case is that the children were followed for years, decades even, so that a pattern could be established between those who exhibited self control and those who didn't. Common threads became evident, concerning eating habits, school discipline, and success in the workplace, but it became evident that some who had little self-control at age four developed it later -- proving that environment (read: family) could change the behaviour of even the most impatient little rascals.

I pulled the quote above because there is another element that was missing from this secular study. The little fellow with the nicely parted hair reminds us of something that is key to our actions: is anyone watching me? He thought he was alone and unminded, which led to his little prank of filching the creme from the cookie. Precious on one level, but there is where family can instill self-control of another sort. The child who is taught that God is omnicient and concerned will know that no action goes unnoticed. Furtive looks aside, a person who knows he is ever the beloved child of God cannot hide from His watchful gaze.

To take this into another realm completely, imagine the correlation of two seemingly separate elements: secularism and birth control. Under such a combination, children are now raised to believe that there is no God to care for them and hold them accountable for their actions. Likewise, with access to birth control, even the most natural outcome of illicit sexual unions can be hidden from view, followed up by a morning after pill or trip to a clinic in case of a "slip up" in coverage.

With this backdrop to the maturation process, is there any wonder that there is little self-control in any dimension of every day life? Why bother?