feminine-genius

35,000 per day

That's the average daily abortion rate in China, and you can be sure that the great majority of those abortion--13 million yearly--are targeted at baby girls. That is the impetus for this firm reminder from US Rep. Christopher Smith:

“The war on women is very real, and it’s being employed by the Chinese government every day of the week against Chinese women, including mothers, but also against unborn baby girls who are killed simply because they happen to be female,” Smith said.

“And the number of sex-selection abortions in China has no parallel,” Smith said. “It is the direct consequence of the one-child-per-couple policy, and unfortunately, the Obama administration has given money to the very organization – the (United Nations) population fund – that defends to the hilt the one-child-per-couple policy and says it ought to be replicated around the world.”

A 2011 report by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy states that in 2000 more than half of abortions in China were a result of prenatal sex selection.

Smith called the Democrat charge [that Republicans are waging a war on women] “nonsense” and said that the Obama administration should be helping Chen and his battle against the Chinese government’s forced abortion and sterilization policies.

“They ought to be standing firm with Chen Guangcheng and fighting for his asylum and, on an every day basis, be fighting against China’s forced abortion policy,” Smith said.

Instead, the Obama administration is following China's lead on family planning programs--not only at the UN but in the US--which begin with free hand-outs and end up with coercion on the government dime.

And to the Church's shame, a “Catholic” institution will give a soap-box to the head of the program for one of its graduation events:

Former governor of Kansas and current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, will be addressing the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.

That explains why when Chen risked everything to escape to the US embassy in China, he saw for himself what our government prioritises:

Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who has suffered years of imprisonment and beatings for objecting to forced abortions and sterilizations in his native country, thought he could find shelter and friendship in the United States embassy following his recent escape from house arrest. He is now learning the hard way that the pro-abortion Obama administration, which helps to finance the same “one-child policy” that Chen is fighting, would rather see him disappear.

Pray, friends, and keep your lamps lit.

Background to the HHS controversy

While Americans are in a lather over the HHS mandate to provide "free" contraceptives to all who want them (paid for by all, despite the moral objections of many) such policies have long been in the making on an international level.

Consider these Yogyakarta Principles approved on an international level in 2007:

The Yogyakarta Principles are a set of principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity. The Principles affirm binding international legal standards with which all States must comply. They promise a different future where all people born free and equal in dignity and rights can fulfil that precious birthright.

If sexual expression is a birthright, then it joins the fundamental rights of life and liberty, and must be provided for everyone on the planet, no matter what obstacles cultural norms create. That means that there is no difference between the Muslim endorsement of child brides and polygamy and the Christian call for chastity and fidelity within marriage. Both would be wrong if a young girl wished to express herself as a lesbian, as a prostitute or as a mymphomaniac. No one can tell her "no."

Ubiquitous, sterile sex is the panacea for the left, and is foundational to those who support the Yogyakarta Principles. It will only work if there is:

• sex without babies
• sex outside of marriage
• sex with whomever we want
• sex at any age
• sex without commitment
• sex without any ties or bonds (and babies ruin it!)

This has been the mantra of the UN population control people for years, and this has been the mantra of the SEICUS people who have been corrupting our children's education for decades.

Once people assume they have a right to sex without any restrictions, then it creates a market for abortion, which is lucrative ($$ billions annually).

The only thing better than sex without any commitment or restrictions is making it free -- i.e. making the taxpayers foot the bill. This has been in the works a long time. Pope Paul VI knew this when he wrote Humanae Vitae, and the Catholic Church has been holding the line (alone!) on this for years.

While the HHS manual is primarily a question of religious liberty, it is also a teaching moment to show how contraception has been an integral part of sexual license, promiscuity in all realms of society, and the destruction of the traditional family. Please inform yourselves of the link between contraception and divorce, abortion and sex trafficking. Pope Paul VI was right:

We take this opportunity to address those who are engaged in education and all those whose right and duty it is to provide for the common good of human society. We would call their attention to the need to create an atmosphere favorable to the growth of chastity so that true liberty may prevail over license and the norms of the moral law may be fully safeguarded.

Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men's baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture (25) or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities (HV, 22).

The Price of Abortion

The American Vice-President is a Catholic who doesn't seem to mind pandering on behalf of the most pro-abortion White House in history. His latest mouthful of horror was offered while visiting China, to whom his country is deeply in debt. Deeply in debt. That said, there are ethics, and there is realpolitik -- the latter shredding the former much like the way that humanity is being shredded across the vast Asian continent. 

The following is a portion of Vice-President Joseph Biden's remarks in which he responds to a question about the deficit and America's need to curb spending:

So the savings will be accomplished. But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I’m not second-guessing -- of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.

So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that's much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that. 

Interestingly, he points out that there is a harsh financial price to be paid when limiting families to one child: it is not sustainable. But what he glosses over in that equation (each worker supporting four elderly relatives) is the means by which they arrive at this state of affairs -- mandatory sterilisations and forced abortions. But he's not second-guessing that!

Let this woman make it clear to you what is involved:

 

Even many "pro-choice" advocates can see that this is inhuman -- and yet the aging, fatherly civil servant dares not interfere with the internal policy of the nation to whom we owe money. In fact, we might link arms and chat about how many babies can be sacrificed on the altar of economic growth while not adversely impacting the twilight years of their would be grand-parents.

For shame! Thankfully, the American Speaker of the House (also Catholic), John Boehner responded forcefully:

I’m deeply troubled by the comments reportedly made by the Vice President yesterday regarding China’s reprehensible one-child policy, which has resulted in forced sterilizations and coerced abortions and should not be condoned by any American official. No government on Earth has the authority to place quotas on the value of innocent human life, or to treat life as an economic commodity that can be regulated and taken away on a whim by the state. I hope and trust that the Vice President didn’t actually say what has been reported, and that a correction or clarification from the White House will be forthcoming. The Obama administration should be focusing on jobs for the American people, not encouraging foreign governments to utilize abortion as a means of population and deficit control.

All the deficit control in the world cannot justify killing the most vulnerable among us. This will soon become even more complicated with our own aging population, as fewer young people are asked to bear the costs of sustaining them. That is when aborting our own will logically lead to rationing care for those who acquiesced to such a calculating society. A cold logic that.

The imperfect couple

Singapore, which is suffering an alarming population decline, is asking its citizens to consider marriage as the establishment of a new family rather than simply a means of finding a "soul mate." This video wanders into a some questionable humour but manages to make an important point. I think overall the campaign is a good one and removes the fairy tale nonsense from married life in order to replace it with the reality of sacrificial love.

What about simplicity?

The "sustainable development commission" in England is about to make a proposal:

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

There are two important arguments against this. The first is that it's an effort to justify population control measures in third world countries where the families greatly value (and simply need) more children. Many still die of curable diseases and many hands are needed in labour-intensive economies. This is wrong and bad -- and it's racist. "Less from the unfit" (Sanger) is their motto behind closed doors.

Secondly, it ignores the fact that in developed countries, larger families consume less overall goods because of the economy and oblation necessary. Clothes are passed on or shared, extra-curriculars are minimised because of the family dynamic already present, each expenditure is shared (strollers, skates, cars, books, etc.) and these children simply learn to need less as they mimic the requisite generosity of the parents.

The premise about environmental costs assumes that each child will be outfitted and pampered to the nth degree. Larger families operate differently. Thus the outlay of a family with two children is usually far greater than one with six. (Now college is a different matter, but there are ways to cope with those ridiulous costs, which may even be rigged partially for this end.)

A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning. Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.

Thus self-control is not even an option -- let the elderly and sick die, kill the children. These are very unpleasant people, wouldn't you say?

In the end, larger families will have more children to contribute their sane thoughts in the public square than those who limit their children. They will also bear the burden of supporting the aging population. If I had a choice in my nursing home, I'd love a cheerful nurse from a large family who has the people skills and abundant virtues learned in a large family. What are the odds...?

British idea of womanhood

Dear Joanna Bogle turns our attention to a despicable act by the British government--to create a postage stamp in honour of Margaret Sanger.

She's been chosen as one of various British women to be so honoured. This is a gross and offensive thing to have done: she was anti-semitic, sent a book of poems to Hitler as a gift with a gushing letter, and believed that people she considered "defective" (poor eyesight, physically handicapped, ill) should be prevented from having children...

For more details about her "professional" contributions to our fair world, consider her associations with eugenicists and financial backers to eliminate those who imperiled Western "civilisation:"

The book, "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population," was written by Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly and shows why today's reproductive rights advocates are "faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea where it comes from or where it can lead."   

In 1952, at a secret, invitation-only gathering in Colonial Williamsburg, John D. Rockefeller III brought together what would become the modern population control establishment. Setting the agenda for the following decades were the heads of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, National Academy of Sciences, and top scientists "from embryology to economics," including past and present Nobel Prize winners.
    
From verbatim transcripts of the "Conference on Population Problems," just one of the countless number of such meetings the book exposes, Connelly found that what drove them were the questions of how many people the world could hold along with "whether 'industrial development should be withheld' from poor, agrarian countries like India." By decreasing mortality and encouraging "breeding," development would increase inferior populations and further degrade "the genetic quality of the human race." They decided radical measures to reduce birthrates were justified in order to save "Western Civilization" from being dragged down by the growing humanitarian demands of Third World countries.
      
Thus was born the Population Council, which would in turn become the nexus of the entire population control movement, going on to coordinate the work of the United Nations, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) - founded three weeks later - as well as major pharmaceutical firms.

The founder of IPPF, Margaret Sanger, selected for its first director general the psychologist C. P. Blacker, who called for a strategy of "crypto-eugenics," saying "you seek to fulfill the aims of eugenics without disclosing what you are really aiming at and without mentioning the word."
    
When Nehru presented India's first population-limitation policy in December 1952, the population establishment found a willing government that would allow them to start experimenting on its people to find a cheap contraceptive "to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles and among the most ignorant people," as Margaret Sanger put it. Years later, Planned Parenthood would import the experiments back into poor neighborhoods in the United States. Sanger said, "I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them."

Now, the last gasp of the British Empire is to honour a woman who wanted to weed out the very citizens who made up that "global village." Who knew that the real white man's burden would be to eliminate the ignorant and decimate the slum-dwellers?

How does this square with the push for multi-culturalism in England today and the refusal of the immigrants to assimilate? Talk about mixed messages--"lack of disclosure" has its own grim sense of humour.

International clichés

Kay S. Hymowitz has a brilliant piece in Front Page Magazine, concerning the feminist imperialism that has altered the lives of women worldwide.   

Yes: Carrie Bradshaw is alive and well and living in Warsaw. Well, not just Warsaw. Conceived and raised in the United States, Carrie may still see New York as a spiritual home. But today you can find her in cities across Europe, Asia, and North America. Seek out the trendy shoe stores in Shanghai, Berlin, Singapore, Seoul, and Dublin, and you’ll see crowds of single young females (SYFs) in their twenties and thirties, who spend their hours working their abs and their careers, sipping cocktails, dancing at clubs, and (yawn) talking about relationships. Sex and the City has gone global; the SYF world is now flat.

She outlines the demographics and what the numbers bespeak, and how morals have changed radically from the days of the first well-known SYF, Mary Richards (remember, who worked for Lou Grant...?)

By the late 1990s, the SYF lifestyle was fully globalized. Indeed, you might think of SYFs as a sociological Starbucks: no matter how exotic the location, there they are, looking and behaving just like the American prototype. They shop for shoes in Kyoto, purses in Shanghai, jeans in Prague, and lip gloss in Singapore; they sip lattes in Dublin, drink cocktails in Chicago, and read lifestyle magazines in Kraków; they go to wine tastings in Boston, speed-dating events in Amsterdam, yoga classes in Paris, and ski resorts outside Tokyo. “At the fashionable Da Capo Café on bustling Kolonaki Square in downtown Athens, Greek professionals in their 30s and early 40s luxuriate over their iced cappuccinos,” a Newsweek International article began last year. “Their favorite topic of conversation is, of course, relationships: men’s reluctance to commit, women’s independence, and when to have children.” Thirty-seven-year-old Eirini Perpovlov, an administrative assistant at Associated Press, “loves her work and gets her social sustenance from her parea, or close-knit group of like-minded friends.”

Sure sounds similar to this July’s Time story about Vicky, “a purposeful, 29-year-old actuary who . . . loves nothing better than a party. She and her friends meet so regularly for dinner and at bars that she says she never eats at home anymore. As the pictures on her blog attest, they also throw regular theme parties to mark holidays like Halloween and Christmas, and last year took a holiday to Egypt.” At the restaurant where the reporter interviews them, Vicky’s friends gab about snowboarding, iPods, credit-card rates, and a popular resort off the coast of Thailand. Vicky, whose motto is “work hard, play harder,” is not from New York, London, or even Athens; she’s from the SYF delegation in Beijing, China, a country that appears to be racing from rice paddies to sushi bars in less than a generation—at least for a privileged minority.

With no children or parents to support, and with serious financial hardship a bedtime story told by aging grandparents, SYFs have ignited what The Economist calls the “Bridget Jones economy”—named, of course, after the book and movie heroine who is perhaps the most famous SYF of all.

No wonder birth rates are plummeting. These women are sexually available, hard-pressed to find husbands, even less willing to cash it all in for diapers and personal oblation.

To keep a population stable, or at its “replacement level,” women must have an average of at least 2.1 children. Under the New Girl Order, though, women delay marriage and childbearing, which itself tends to reduce the number of kids, and sometimes—because the opportunity costs of children are much higher for educated women—they forgo them altogether. Save Albania, no European country stood at or above replacement levels in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live in countries with fertility rates below 1.5, and even that number is inflated by a disproportionately high fertility rate among Muslim immigrants. Oddly, the most Catholic European countries—Italy, Spain, and Poland—have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. Much of Asia looks similar. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, at 0.98 has broken the barrier of one child per woman.

You knew that already. What to do, short of wishing that a Y2K bug demolishes the viral culture, we must pray like mad and put it in God's hands. He loves these girls -- every one. We must, also. Our motherly ethos -- physical and spiritual is diminishing, but not extinguished. There were so few women under the cross, but they have nourished the world for two millennia. Let's simply do our small part in faith.

Germany hits record low

Germany is realising that it is hitting a dead-end when it comes to replacing its population. The number of new births for 2005 was the lowest since 1946 (a time when real anxiety over post-war conditions may have caused couples to postpone having children).

Last year, only some 676,000 children were born in Germany according to German daily Die Welt which cited forecasts by the Federal Statistics Office. That pushed the birth rate to its worst low in 15 years: in 2004, the number of newborns amounted to 706,000. That's all still significantly less than the 922,000 births in the post-war year of 1946.

"That's dramatic, we're running into a dead end," Michael Hüther, director of the Cologne-based Institute for the German Economy told the paper.

While all of Europe is facing the same trend, Germany is significantly worse off than the rest.

According to Eurostat, the EU statistics office, there were 8.5 births per 1000 inhabitants in Germany in 2004 -- making it the country with the lowest birth rate in the entire European Union. Countries such as France and Britain boasted birthrates -- at 12.7 and 12.0 respectively in the same year -- that exceeded German levels by more than 50 percent.

For years, politicians and demographers in Germany have warned of the dangers of a falling birth rate and ageing population. In recent months in particular, the subject has raced to the top of the political agenda and been the focus of heated debates over family-friendly and childcare policies.

These numbers are alarming the country's leaders, who call the trend a "free fall." They can ill afford monetary incentives with the financial problems Germany suffers. All that couples need is trust -- which comes from knowing God. Oremus.

An absolute "must read"

On the run, but you cannot miss this by Jennifer Roback Morse. More later, but here's a tidbit:

I submit that this view of sex is at the root of the West’s demographic death spiral. Sex is naturally a force for sociability. Consumer sex inverts the whole natural order of sexuality. Instead of drawing us out of ourselves and into relationship with others, we turn sex inward, on ourselves and our own individual pleasure. The natural purposes of sex, both procreation and spousal unity, have become strictly optional. We think we are entitled to have sex with someone we’re not married to, or not even in a relationship with. And we have created a conspiracy of silence around the sad fact that no one really wants to be on the receiving end of this “use and be used” culture.

Motherhood, fatherhood, oxytocin, essential role of women in fighting Islam and demographic demise. It's all there in an easy dose.

Prosperity is killing the family

Women in South Korea have prioritised several monumental things above motherhood, such as this:

At 26, Park Su Mi is a well-educated bride-to-be who's decided she and her husband will have just one baby. That would make them an average couple in South Korea, which now has the lowest birth rate in the world.

"My mother says more than two children would be better, but I don't want to give my future to my children. I want to enjoy my life," Park said.

South Korea's rising prosperity gives young women choices and powers their mothers and grandmothers never had. But a declining birth rate has made the country an "aging society." In another generation, South Korea will become a "super-aged" society, where more than 20 percent of the population is older than 65.

Add to that the premium on education:

A dedication to work spreads to children as well. It's not uncommon for school children to spend an extra eight or nine ours a day with tutors or at private prep schools where students cram for college entrance and career examinations.

"Their zeal toward education is abnormal," said Jonathan Kim, a Korean-American who is a professor at Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. "And it is so, so expensive. They don't trust public education anymore. So once school is over in the afternoon, they put children in private education institutions, and that drains a lot of economic power from homes. They cannot afford to have two children."

Learning English has become so important that thousands of Korean couples live apart so one parent can enroll their son or daughter in schools in the United States, Canada, Australia or other countries while the other parent stays behind working in South Korea.

There is a dearth of child-care, men are busy with their own careers keeping them out of the home, women marry later, everyone is strapped for time, divorce is rising making the gamble of children too risky, and the entire society is rushing blindly over a cliff. Prayers that they wake up before it's too late.