You’re teaching my child what?

 

A psychatrist exposes the harm done to children in the name of sex education.

The following is an interview with Miriam Grossman, MD, author of the recently-released You’re teaching my child what? A physician exposes the lies of sex education and how they harm your child. The interview was conducted by Peter Jon Mitchell, Research Analyst, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada and is published here at Mercatornet with permission.

IMFC: What was your motivation for this new book?

Miriam Grossman: Frankly, I wrote it because I was fed up. As you know, I worked for twelve years as a psychiatrist for students at the UCLA campus here in California. During that time, thousands of kids came through my office. I was alarmed at how many of them had sexually transmitted infections and concerned about students, mostly young women, whose sexual lifestyle placed them at risk for disease, emotional distress and even infertility later in life. I was frustrated to see patient after patient in similar situations, yet my hands were tied. There wasn’t much I could do for them. These were young people who were otherwise well informed and proactive about their health. They were careful about what they ate, they exercised, avoided tobacco, and so on. But in this one area, in their sexual behaviour, they took alarming risks, and that was perplexing. I began to question these students carefully, and I examined how campus health and counselling centers approach sexual health issues. Those findings were discussed in my book Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Harms Every Student.

This new project was an extension of that. I went deeper into the field of sex education, looking at exactly what kids are taught, and at the history of sex education in the United States. I went online and explored the websites, books, pamphlets and videos created for kids and young adults. What I discovered was deeply disturbing, and that’s what this book is about.

IMFC: In the book you argue that sex educators and activists dismiss the fundamentals of child development, and omit critical findings of neurobiology, gynaecology and infectious disease. You suggest this has profound consequences, particularly for girls. How so?

MG: Absolutely. We have a wealth of new science that’s omitted from sex ed. For example, in the past decade our understanding of the teen brain, and how it reasons and makes decisions during moments of high stimulation has grown tremendously. We didn’t know until recently that the brain area that is responsible for making rational, thought-out decisions, the area that considers the pros and cons and consequences of decisions, is immature in teens. The circuits aren’t complete; the wiring is unfinished. Sex educators insist that, like adults, teens are capable of making responsible decisions, they just lack information about sexuality and access to contraceptives. So the way to fight sexually transmitted infections and teen pregnancies, these authorities argue, is to provide teens with information and contraceptives, and teach them skills like how to say “no” and how to put on a condom. But current neuropsychological research does not support this stance. We know now that teens’ poor decisions are likely due not to lack of information, but to lack of judgement. And there is only one thing that will bring that: time.

Another example of critical information omitted from sex ed: a girl’s biological vulnerability to sexually transmitted infections. The cervix of teen girls is covered by a layer that is only one cell thick. That area is easily penetrated by the human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer. (The human papillomavirus is the STI we now have a vaccination against, and that’s another controversial issue.) With time, the surface is covered by cells that are 30 to 40 layers thick, and is therefore much more difficult to infect. Girls need to understand this from an early age. We have dramatic images [of the immature cervix] that we must show girls so they can grasp the importance of delaying sexual behaviour. These kids must be informed that putting all questions of morality aside, if they are sexually active at a young age, they are at risk for infections that could impact their physical and emotional well-being over the course of their lives.

A third point is kids aren’t told that oral sex is associated with cancers of the throat. Needless to say this is important, and indeed life-saving, information yet it is withheld from kids, and that is the height of irresponsibility. One of the points I make in the book is organizations such as Planned Parenthood and SIECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the US) claim to be providing up-to-date, medically-accurate information. But they do nothing of the sort.

Instead, these organizations teach kids that they are “sexual” from cradle to grave, that adolescence is the natural time to explore sexuality and that kids have the right to express their sexuality in whatever manner they choose. This message promotes sexual freedom, not sexual health. This is ideology, not science. When sexual freedom is the priority, sexual health suffers. And indeed, the statistics in the US on sexually transmitted infections, HIV, teen pregnancy, and abortion are mind numbing.

IMFC: Where do these organizations place the role of parents in their ideology? What are they saying to kids about parents?

MG: This is another disturbing feature of the sex ed fiasco. I discovered a duplicity exists. When speaking to the media, and in their material for parents, sex educators state that sex education should start at home and that parents should be the primary sex educators of children. But in material directed at kids the message is altogether different. Here’s what SIECUS says in an online booklet for kids called All About Sex. It opens with eight pages on sexual rights: “Every human being has basic rights. Still, adults may say and do things that make young people feel like they don’t have rights. It’s important for you to know your rights so you can stand up for yourself when necessary.” Then a bit later: “You have the right to decide how to express your sexuality at every point in your life. You can choose if and how to express your sexuality.”

Ninety per cent of parents want their kids to delay sexual behaviour, and they expect sex educators to enforce that message. Organizations like SIECUS promise to do so, but they don’t. All About Sex is a good example of what really goes on. The goal is for the young person to realize that, sure, adults may have their opinions, but kids of all ages have the right to their own ideas about sexuality, as well as the right to behave in any way they like. Nowhere in this pamphlet are kids told: we urge you to delay sexual behaviour because that’s the healthiest choice.

IMFC: The book will be an eye opener for parents. What can concerned parents do?

MG: The situation is sobering but my overall message is positive. The good news is that all these sexual health problems are 100 per cent avoidable. And there is so much parents can do to protect their kids. We know that young people are profoundly influenced by their parents, the messages they get from their parents, their perceptions of what their parents believe in, their parents’ values, and what their parents’ expectations are. There are many studies that I go through in the book that demonstrate that a parenting style of being warm and supportive and yet having high expectations and firm rules has profound influence on children and teens and the decisions they make. Obviously parents need to be informed. They need the information in this book; they are not going to find it anywhere else. I’m a medical doctor and I scoured the literature for the latest on sexually transmitted infections, how girls are more vulnerable emotionally and physically than boys, what kids are told about same-sex attraction, gender identity, and many other topics. My book is not politically correct, but it is medically accurate. I explain biological truths that are not discussed elsewhere. For example, kids are being told that they can be male, female or something else; that there are more than two genders and that it is natural to question who you are at any time in your life. This is madness. It’s not only medically inaccurate, it confuses our kids and it leads them into a minefield of emotional and physical hazards.

IMFC: What would you say to government policy makers?

MG: They must find the courage to challenge the status quo. People need to stand up, be politically incorrect, and acknowledge the truth of biology. Certain groups will object, because what is seen under the microscope and on brain scans contradicts their vision. It’s going to take that courage to change policy, to have an extreme makeover of our approach to sex education. You see, sex educators have institutionalized 20th century theories and social agendas, but hard science from this century completely discredits those theories and agendas. Sex education needs to come into the 21st century and leave behind ideas that are remnants of the sexual revolution and feminism.

Posted by: Miriam Grossman

tags : adolescence, parenting, sex education

A marriage proposal

 

Leading marriage scholars have come up with an index for monitoring the health of marriage in society.

Spring has sprung in the southern hemisphere and the wedding season is under way. A billboard in my city advertises a wedding “expo”, a sign of the trend that has turned a simple but dignified community event into a commercial extravaganza of daunting proportions. A young couple from abroad told me that it would cost at least forty thousand pounds to get married back home. That was one reason, apparently, why they had been cohabiting for six years.

Weddings are big, yes, but there are fewer of them, they happen later and in circumstances that often lead to marital conflict, divorce, and misery for any children of the union. The bad statistics are aired from time to time, governments step in to limit the damage, and things go on much as they did before. It is true that many community groups and, increasingly, scholars and even a few politicians voice concern about the state of marriage, but there is no agreed way of monitoring its health -- nothing like, for instance, the economic indicators that keep the state of the economy constantly before our eyes, so that we know every little rise or fall in GDP and, therefore, in our collective fortunes.

It is precisely this lack that one of the leading marriage research and advocacy institutions in the United States proposes to rectify. This week the Institute for American Values, together with the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting, has launched The Marriage Index, a set of five key indicators that can be used to monitor the health of American -- and, of course, other -- marriages. As IAV scholar David Blankenhorn and colleagues authors point out, “no social progress is possible without widely shared, trackable goals”, and, “for any society that cares about its future, leading marriage indicators are as important as leading economic indicators”.

What are these indicators? Taking the baseline year as 1970, they look, decade by decade until 2008, at the percentage of adults married; happiness in marriage; the percentage of first marriages intact; the percentage of births to married parents; and the percentage of children living with their own married parents. There are charts on the institute’s website setting these figures out clearly in grid form for both the general and African American populations.  Overall they show that the health of marriage in the US sits at 60.3 per cent -- better than many countries, no doubt, but notably worse than four decades ago and no cause for complacency.

Percentage of adults married. The age range here is from 20 to 54 years, to take account of (a) the large number of non-marital unions amongst the youngest age group and (b) the distortions that would arise from including the population older than 54 and its increasing proportion of widows. The marriage trend, as we know, is down. In 1970, 78.6 per cent of adults were married; in 2008 the figure had dropped to 57.2. Cohabitation, by contrast, has grown enormously: from 439,000 couples in 1960 to 6.4 million in 2007.

Married persons “very happy” with their marriage. Theoretically, the easy access to divorce that has existed for several decades should mean that those who are married are, on average, happier. But this is not the case; surveys show a moderate but significant decline in marital quality between 1970 and 2000. Ironically, this is partly to do with divorce -- the ideal of permanence has declined, and with it a sense of security in marriage.

Marriages intact. The decline here has also been marked -- from 77.4 per cent of first marriages intact in 1970 to just under 60 per cent in 2000. The good news is that there has been a slight increase in marital stability since then -- a sign that “we can renew marriage as lifelong commitment,” say the authors of the index.

Births to married parents. In 1970, 89.3 per cent of children were born to married parents, while today the figure is 60.3 -- a dramatic decline. More children are born into cohabiting or single-parent homes.

Children living with their own married parents. While the percentage of children living with their biological or adoptive mother and father has dropped since 1970 (from 68.7 to 61.0 in 2007) this trend has also levelled off over the past decade -- another encouraging sign.

 

Article by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags : cohabitation, divorce, marriage

Raining on their parade

 

Who is responsible for China's infamous one-child policy? Surprisingly, it is not 60 years of Communist rule. 

Today China celebrates the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule. The Party is highlighting the nation’s huge and powerful military, its international influence, its towering role in the world economy, and its growing prosperity, at least in the large coastal cities. It has left behind the barbarities of Mao Tse-tung and has become a "civilized", "harmonious", "prosperous" and "democratic" country.

But one barbarity persists: the one-child policy. On September 25, 1980, the Communist Party announced that, with very few exceptions, couples were permitted to have only one child. Party officials insisted that the population had to be capped at 1.2 billion by the year 2000.

This policy has not only blackened China’s reputation as a human-rights abuser. It also is leading to economic and social disaster. China’s population is ageing so rapidly that care for the elderly will impose a crushing burden on its economy. And because Chinese have a traditional preference for sons, infant girls are often aborted or murdered, which means that as many as 15 percent of Chinese men will never find wives.

How was this insane idea endorsed by the government of the world’s largest nation?

This is the question raised by anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh in her valuable book Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Greenhalgh reads and speaks Chinese and used to work for a US-based NGO which promotes birth control, the Population Council. With this background, she won the confidence of many high-ranking government officials involved in forging the policy. Her detective work yielded a surprising answer.

Article by: Michael Cook

tags : China, one-child policy, population control

Russia looks to its religious culture

 

The Orthodox Church has won its battle to make religious education compulsory in schools, but secularists have won concessions too.

Patriarch Kirill's public triumph in Ukraine in July was preceded with another achievement no less important for the Russian Orthodox Church. This took place in the much more intimate atmosphere of the presidential residence in Barvikha, in the Moscow Oblast. There Dmitry Medvedev met with the leaders of Russia's traditional religions, and responded to two appeals from them.

He agreed that the history and culture of the country's main religions should be included in the core school curriculum. He also agreed that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation should have military priests.

Patriarch Kirill was the first to sign both documents. The Muslim and Jewish religious communities supported the Orthodox position, despite previous objections from some muftis and rabbis.

What will this decision mean in practice for schools? Twice a week from the spring of next year, pupils in the fourth and fifth classes will study one of three new subjects. They and their parents will be able to choose between the religious culture of one religion (Orthodox, Islam, Judaism or Buddhism), the history and cultural background of the world's great religions, or the foundations of secular ethics. It will be compulsory for pupils to choose one of these three modules.

To start with, it will be introduced in 18 regions in six of the seven federal regions of Russia. The three-year experiment will be introduced in 12,000 Russian schools, 20,000 classes, 256,000 children and 44,000 teachers, according to the Ministry for Education and Science. From 2012, the new modules will be introduced to all Russian schools.

These three modules, "Foundations of religious culture", "Foundations of history and culture of world religions" and "Foundations of secular ethics",- will be taught by teachers who have taken a special training course, though most of them will probably have had  a secular education. The rector of Moscow's State University V.A. Sadovnichy has already expressed a desire to put the resources of the country's leading university behind the re-training of these specialists. But it is clear that at first the main problem will be a serious lack of qualified teaching staff.

The contents of the textbooks for these modules is also likely to prompt public debate. Consequently, the Church has already declared its readiness to work with the Ministry of Education and Science, the Russian Academy of Education, and a number of other institutes in order to inspect the new textbooks and study materials. This has already been announced by the head of the Synodal Department for Religious Education, Bishop Zaraisky Merkury.

 

Article by: Viktor Malukhin

tags : Orthodox Church, religious education, Russia

Parents wonder if cancer jabs are worth the risk

Debate over vaccinating girls against the human papillomavirus to prevent cervical cancer is running hot in Britain after a 14-year-old schoolgirl died and an older teen developed epileptic seizures and brain damage following the jabs.

A couple of weeks ago the UK’s drug safety watchdog, the Medicines and Health care products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), reported that over 2000 individuals had suffered adverse reactions, some more than once, giving a total of 4602 suspected reactions to the vaccine Cervarix. They ranged from mild (rashes, pain in the arm, and allergies) to serious (convulsions, eye rolling, muscle spasms, seizures and hyperventilation). A similar report about Gardasil was published in the United States in August.

Anti-vaccine groups are warning parents off the Cervarix programme, which has been rolled out through schools (on a voluntary basis) starting in April last year, while professionals and cancer charities are urging people to continue. The latter argue that, given the millions of girls and young women vaccinated so far, serious reactions are extremely rare and are far outweighed by the benefits of reducing the risk of developing cervical cancer from the now very widespread and sexually transmitted HPV.

Drug companies manufacturing and promoting the vaccine (and profiting handsomely from it) are naturally rejecting the assumption that it caused particular reactions until there is proof. They -- and public health officials -- say that 14-year-old Natalie Morton most likely had “a serious underlying medical condition” that caused her death. The chaplain at the Anglican school she attended said there was nothing on her file to indicate that she suffered from epilepsy or any health problem.

Here is how one public health number cruncher sees it:

Even if the girl’s death proves to be a consequence of the vaccination, and it is still a big ‘if’, only one death would be prevented for every 500,000 girls who decided not to be vaccinated – albeit at the cost of 700 deaths to cervical cancer.

That is no comfort to her bereaved parents, however, or the parents who now have brain damaged daughter to look after. And, really, we have to come back to the truth that the HPV and cervical cancer epidemics -- like AIDS -- are basically very preventable with a change in behaviour. But rolling back the sexually permissive society seems to be the last thing on the minds of health authorities.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: cervical cancer, HPV, vaccination

Working mums have less healthy kids

Last night on New Zealand television the British female lead of the live show Mamma Mia! joked about how she went to work to get away from her four young children -- a firstborn plus triplets who are on tour with her. Great for her, but how are the kids doing?

Research just published in her homeland suggests that the children of working mothers are less healthy and are more likely to have poor dietary habits and a more sedentary lifestyle. They eat less fruit and vegetables, watch more television and consume more crisps and fizzy drink than the children of mothers who stay at home.

This is bad news for British authorities, whose crowded social agenda includes fighting childhood obesity and getting women to return to work. It looks as though the two goals are at loggerheads. Flexible working arrangements for mothers in full-time work seem to make no difference, and children of part-time working mums were still not as healthy as those whose mothers stayed home. Variables such as socio-economic background, single parenthood and household income were taken into account in the results, which are based on 12,000 British children born between 2000 and 2002.

Researchers on the latest paper concluded that with approximately 60 per cent of British women with a child aged 5 or younger in employment, more support was needed. “For many families the only parent or both parents are working. This may limit parents’ capacity to provide their children with healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity,” they said. “Policies and programmes are needed to help support parents and create a health-promoting environment.”

To say nothing of emotional health and character development.

Nobody, of course, is rushing to say that mothers of young children should not go out to work. The authors of the study suggest that the quality if childcare needs looking at; they are not sure whether the link they found was associated with what the kids did while the mother was at work, or with time pressure on parents when they are back in the home -- that is, whether it’s the staff at the daycare centre or the grandparents allowing bad habits, or the parents themselves being too busy and exhausted to insist on good habits.

All the same they hint that there may be something wrong at policy level:

“What policymakers need to understand is that what might be a solution to some issues may create others. There are upsides and downsides.”

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan 

tags: children's health, working mothers

China’s stolen babies

Girl babies adopted by American and other overseas couples from orphanages in China in recent years may have been forcibly taken from their parents, not abandoned, as the adoptive parents were told. The Los Angeles Times reports at length on a scandal that can be laid at the door of China’s inhuman population control policy and corrupt local family planning officials.

It seems that many couples in China have been left distraught by what amounts to baby trafficking, and couples who have adopted the babies are left wondering whether their little girl was snatched from a sobbing mother or tricked away from a bewildered father or grandparent.

Since the early 1990s, says the LA Times, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the US. Many, perhaps, were abandoned, but some parents are coming forward to report that they were coerced to give up an unauthorised baby by government officials motivated by the $US3000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.

The Times puts its finger on the basic problem:

The problem is rooted in China's population controls, which limit most families to one child, two if they live in the countryside and the first is a girl. Each town has a family planning office, usually staffed by loyal Communist Party cadres who have broad powers to order abortions and sterilizations. People who have additional babies can be fined up to six times their annual income -- fines euphemistically called "social service expenditures," which are an important source of revenue for local government in rural areas.

Where people are too poor to pay the fine, officials often punish them by ransacking their homes or confiscating cows and pigs. That’s how it was for the residents of Tianxi, a village in the mountains near Zhenyuan, during the 1980s and 1990s.

Then, in 2003, things changed. The year after the Social Welfare Institute in Zhenyuan was approved to participate in the burgeoning foreign adoption program, family planning officials stopped confiscating farm animals. They started taking babies instead.

The villagers, by the way, “resent the suggestion by some that they don't love their daughters and readily abandon them.

"People around here don't dump their kids. They don't sell their kids. Boy or girl, they're our flesh and blood," said Li Zeji, 32, a farmer who says his third daughter was taken in 2004.

In Gaoping, a small town in Hunan province, officials have used family planning laws to confiscate even first-born children on the ground that a couple did not meet all the requirements. These include having a birth permit before conceiving, the woman being at least 20 and the man 24, and having a marriage certificate -- itself dependent on each partner having a proper residency permit.

The officials, of course, deny forcibly taking children:

"It's a lie that they took babies away without their parents' permission. That's impossible," said Peng Qiuping, a party official and propaganda chief for Zhenyuan. "These parents agreed that the children should be put up for adoption. They understood that they were greedy and had more children than they could afford."

"They're better off with their adoptive parents than their birth parents," argued Wu Benhua, director of Zhenyuan's civil affairs bureau.

They claim the money all goes to improve conditions in the orphanages, but theTimes could not verify that, noting that “most of the babies had been housed with families who were paid only $30 a month for their services, according to one foster parent.”

Some people blame international adoption itself, saying that the money involved creates the opportunity for abuse. With China there are obviously reasons to be extra careful -- the lack of freedom for a couple to found and raise a family, and the absence of a free press that might thoroughly investigate the whole question of “abandonment” of baby girls.

Since most of those adopted overseas go to the US, it is certainly an issue for the government there to investigate and put the heat on Beijing if necessary.

Article by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags : adoption, China, one-child policy, trafficking,

Stand Up and Pray: The Blaspheming of the Sacred Must End - Catholic Online

Stand Up and Pray: The Blaspheming of the Sacred Must End - Catholic Online

Shared via AddThis

Raising boys for fun and profit

There are things parents can do to help their sons make the leap from stumbling boyhood to manhood.

Okay, I was kidding about the fun. And, I was lying about the profit. There are, however, a few things parents can do to help their sons make the leap from stumbling boyhood to manhood.

In a recent article I commented on the numerous reports of boys’ poor academic and employment performance compared with girls, and the growing concern that so many young males are trapped in what appears to be a permanent adolescent world of porn, sports and video games. Somehow, the societal landscape has shifted and the young men who tamed the West and built the nation’s robust economy are now sitting numbly in classrooms and office cubicles. The male needs to achieve, to become independent is not slaked by Fantasy Football and watching American Idol. And while it may be too late for your beer-and-bong addicted brother-in-law, there is much that can be done to save our boys.

First, however, I need to confess my modified adherence to the "Bad Seed" theory. The Bad Seed is a 1950s novel, later a movie, about a child who stops at nothing, even murder, to get her way. While the child of loving and sober parents, she appears as evil incarnate. I bring this up because while I have never encountered an evil child, I’ve known a few smart and loving parents who have borderline monster kids who seem to possess a teflon ability to reject the good influences surrounding them. In their quest for freedom or whatever, they seem to have defined their parents as the enemies they must conquer. While a few of these teenaged fiends have grown up to be self-centred ogres, a surprising number of them in their 20s and 30s make a caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis that is quite astounding. In the meantime, though, their parents have been dragged through various circles of Dante’s Inferno. All of which is to say, there are no universal, guaranteed rules in child raising. Suggestions, yes. Ironclad rules, no.

New baby, new priority

First, then (and it may be an obvious point) raising a child has to be the numero uno priority -- especially in the case of a boy in today’s world. Whether the "package from Heaven" was carefully planned -- or was or an upsetting surprise -- isn’t the issue. When Junior arrives, he (like all his siblings) needs to go to the top of the list. His upbringing must leapfrog over parental career, romance, friendships and, certainly, over sport, recreation and leisure. It is not that these lesser priorities are abandoned, but that they are recast or rearranged in the face of new responsibilities.

In bygone eras, when most moms and pops were farmers or small shop owners, the total training and education of their sons was in their hands and this child-raising priority had real teeth to it. And the incentives were high. Their sons were part of their survival system and they were, de facto, the insurance policy of their old age. The stakes were high for making Junior a loyal and upright guy. In the modern world, parents have outsourced much of the education and training to schools, and camps and professional youth workers. Few children are going to pursue the vocations of their parents. Few parents can help with algebra or compete with their 13-year-olds in computer literacy.

The one area to which the schools and youth workers give a wide berth is moral training. One of the mixed blessings of a democratic and diverse society is that, in principle, "imposing ethical values", let alone a moral compass, is a social no-no. However, in the absence of a strong moral training from home, these "secondary parents" will take over.

Article by: Kevin Ryan
tags : boys, character, parenting, temperament

The spiritual world of children

News that the spiritual welfare of young children is being neglected somewhere will not surprise anyone, but the evidence adduced by a British researcher produced an eye-catching headline in the London Telegraph. “Angel sightings ‘should not be dismissed’”, it read.

Kate Adams, who lectures at an Anglican university college, interviewed 94 children who believed they had a dream with a religious connection but one third never confided in anyone. Exploring children’s belief in the unseen, Dr Adams was told by a seven-year-old girl that her parents paid no attention when she told them she saw an angel at her bedside every night.

Dr Adams said such testimonies were a saddening indictment of adults’ misunderstanding of children. She was presenting her findings to an educational research conference in the hope of encouraging teachers to take more interest in the spiritual life of children.

(It is one of the charming things about Britain that, despite being the home of atheist poster-boy Richard Dawkins, it still has legislation requiring schools to give religious education and to attend to children’s spiritual development.)

Another study to be presented to the conference, based on interview with 166 trainee teachers at eight English universities, showed that 44 per cent felt their course barely covered spiritual development.

No doubt some Britons would like to see an end to religion in schools, and yet growing numbers of religious (faith) schools are being opened across the country and more students are opting to take senior exams in religious studies.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: children, religion, United Kingdom

Parenting pathways

If your parents were negative and harsh with you growing up, that’s the way you will be with your kids. And if they were positive and affectionate, well, lucky for your kids. That’s the assumption behind a popular theory of parenting, but researchers who have done long-term studies say it’s wrong.

Parenting styles have their effect much earlier, says David Kerr of Oregon State University, by allowing good or bad behaviour to take hold in adolescence. And this happens in two ways: by modelling good/bad ways of dealing with people, and by monitoring/not monitoring what they learn from other people.

"For instance, if you try to control your child with anger and threats, he learns to deal in this way with peers, teachers, and eventually his own children.

“If you do not track where your child is, others will take over your job of teaching him about the world. But those lessons may involve delinquency and a lifestyle that is not compatible with becoming a positive parent," Kerr pointed out.

So, the “pathway” from one generation to another is not a matter of remembering back to how your parents did it, but through the habits you have already formed. The good news is that it works in a positive sense as well.

"We knew that these negative pathways can be very strong," Kerr said. "What surprised us is how strong positive parenting pathways are as well. Positive parenting is not just the absence of negative influences, but involves taking an active role in a child's life."

The researchers found that children who had parents who monitored their behavior, were consistent with rules and were warm and affectionate were more likely to have close relationships with their peers, be more engaged in school, and have better self-esteem.

"So part of what good parenting does is not only protect you against negative behaviors but instill positive connections with others during adolescence that then impact how you relate with your partner and your own child as an adult," Kerr said

The study, by the way, was done with 206 boys considered at risk for delinquency, from the age of 9 to 33. Whatever those risks were (and the full study is to be published in the journal Developmental Psychology this month) they were clearly less critical than what the parents actually did. And that seems to be another argument for parent education.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: adolescence, habits, parenting

The UN’s sex-ed plan for kids

Some years ago I saw a cartoon whose subject becomes more real by the day. It showed a Brave-New-Wold nursery in which newborns were being instructed via a loudspeaker: “Today you will be going home, but before you go, here is your first sex education lesson...” I was reminded of it by a Fox News report of a new universal sex-ed curriculum from UNESCO.

The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation has decided that, “in a world affected by HIV and AIDS”, it is “imperative” to teach children as young as 5 about masturbation as well as “gender roles, stereotypes and gender-based violence”.

By the time they're 9 years old, they'll learn about "positive and negative effects of 'aphrodisiacs," and wrestle with the ideas of "homophobia, transphobia and abuse of power."

At 12, they'll learn the "reasons for" abortions — but they'll already have known about their safety for three years. When they're 15, they'll be exposed to direct "advocacy to promote the right to and access to safe abortion."

Not sure what’s left for 15 to 18-year-olds: maybe they’ll be getting work experience in a clinic.

The scheme, with its surrounding material – including long lists of experts consulted, studies “rigorously reviewed” and footnoted, and various rationalisations -- runs to 98 pages. The authors are Douglas Kirby, the elder statesman of comprehensive sex-ed research and advocacy in the United States, and Nanette Ecker, employed at the time by SIECUS – the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the US.

Mark Richmond, director of UNESCO’s Division for the Co-ordination of UN Priorities for Education (wonder how many staff he has...), was asked to justify the curriculum (which it is up to governments to accept or not):

Richmond defended teaching about masturbation as "age-appropriate" because even in early childhood, "children are known to be curious about their bodies." Their lessons, he added, would hopefully help kids "develop a more complex understanding of sexual behaviour" as they grow into adults.

For "complex" read "perverted". One doesn’t like to bash the UN, but really, doesn’t this sort of thing illustrate that it is trying to do far too much and that its brief should be severely curtailed?

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: abortion, AIDS, sex education, United Nations

Calling all monogamous men

Family scholar Patrick Fagan has come up with an elegant schema contrasting “monogamous” culture with other kinds of sexual culture which he calls, collectively, “polyamorous”. Speaking at the World Congress of Families recently in Amsterdam, he highlighted the gulf that exists between the two cultures in terms of values and practical consequences. And he proposed a solution.

Fagan, who is with the Family Research Council, argued that these cultures can only co-exist in once society if parents in both are given control over the programs that cause conflict: education, adolescent health and sex education.

At present, he said, the polyamorous culture is expanding through its control of these three areas by means of the public bureaucracy, snatching children away from their parents by drawing them into sexual activity. Each time this happens, the polyamorists have won several “victories”:

* The adolescent has been initiated into the polyamorous culture (albeit without knowledge of what is at stake) by having his first sexual experience outside of marriage;

* With the out of wedlock births or abortions that follow they have broken the family before it has started, solidifying the polyamorous stature of the adolescent or young adult;

* And, especially, they have pulled the young person away from participating in the sacred because formerly religious teenagers who begin to engage regularly in sex outside of marriage tend to stop worshipping God.

They -- the polys -- even fight any attempt by monos to defend their kids, through abstinence education, for example, or home schooling. And all this while the poly culture is being subsidised by the mono through tax funded welfare. As Fagan says, it’s simply unjust; the polys should have to pay their own way.

One way to progress in this direction and to make the behavioral bureaucracy to serve both cultures is to give all parents, parents of both cultures, and control over the program money set aside for their children. That is giving parents vouchers, in one form or another for all three program areas

The social welfare safety net will still be in place but the parents (be they monogamous or polyamorous) will choose who holds the net in place for their children.

Fagan admits it will require a huge political effort. And this is where the monogamous men come in. It’s their job, above all, to protect the family, he says.

Monogamy men will be expected to fight for control over is what is his and his family’s just due, what his taxes fund, and what he can use in raising his children: control over the three big programs of childhood education, sex education and adolescent health programs, so that they can be carried out in a way that supports the norms of monogamy culture. In this rearrangement polyamory parents have the same control to do as they wish for their children.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: education, family, men, monogamy,

Ted Kennedy’s ambiguous legacy

 

For America’s most famous Catholic, morality and politics had little to do with each other.

Today Massachusetts mourns its Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy. At Dunkin Donuts, the flags are flying at half mast. Boston's famously snarled traffic has come to a standstill because of "Kennedy events". The casket of Camelot's last survivor made a final tour of its shrines – Hyannis Port, his family's summer residence, St Stephen's, his mother’s church in Boston’s North End, and Faneuil Hall, where he had announced his unsuccessful bid for the presidential 1980 nomination. The Massachusetts royal family waved through tinted car windows at the crowds. Thousands passed through the Presidential Library at Harvard dedicated to his brother to view the casket and sign the condolences books.

For Boston, it is a Diana moment.

Edward M. Kennedy died of a brain tumour on Tuesday at the age of 77. He had been in the Senate since he was 30 and stayed there for 47 years, the third longest-serving Senator in American history. Some wits quipped that while most politicians grow up and then enter politics, Kennedys enter politics and grow up later.

But Massachusetts voters doted on Ted Kennedy and patiently gave him time to mature. There was his expulsion from Harvard for cheating; there were rumours about drinking and womanizing; there was Chappaquiddick; there was his 1982 divorce, his 1992 remarriage (after an annulment from the Catholic Church). He was a Kennedy – Joe and Rose's son, Jack and Bobby's brother – and nothing stuck. He had a scare in the 1994 election when he faced Mitt Romney -- and won with only 58 percent of the vote. Other politicians can only dream of that kind of support.

But Ted Kennedy was not a seat-warmer. Politicians from both sides of politics praised him as an accomplished lawmaker. With the years, the lion-maned Bostonian became a consummate deal-broker who worked both sides of the aisle to get what he believed in. In 2001 he worked with President George W. Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act. He was a liberal, the very Aslan of American liberalism, a consistent champion of government spending to right wrongs and remedy disadvantage. Health care was the cause of his life, although he died without seeing victory for the Democrats' plans to reform it. In the words of President Obama, “He became not only one of the greatest senators of our time, but one of the most accomplished Americans ever to serve our democracy.”

But one of Ted Kennedy's most important legacies to American politics has hardly been mentioned in the acres of newsprint – how he shaped the debate about faith and politics.

For Ted Kennedy was a Catholic. He had the Massachusetts Catholic vote in his pocket. His mother was a saintly woman. His brother was the first Catholic president. He was married in the Catholic Church, received communion in the Catholic Church, saw a priest before he died, is being buried in the Catholic Church.

But he was a peculiar kind of Catholic. On the one hand, he always supported big-spending social policies for the last, least, lost and most vulnerable. It was his interpretation of Catholic social teaching. On the other hand, he was a strong supporter of abortion and human embryonic stem cell research. There was no ambiguity about this. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood gave Kennedy ratings of 100 percent as a champion of abortion rights. He ignored criticism from the bishops of his Church.

Through his role as the spokesman for America's leading Catholic family, Teddy helped to entrench the feeling that Catholicism is a tribal loyalty, not a divine light shining on religious and human truths. The doctrine of separation of Church and State meant that morality and politics had little to do with each other. In fact, political expediency should trump moral truths.

For politicians anywhere, this is a disastrous starting point for debate. It means that it is impossible for them to argue rationally about moral positions. On the issue of abortion, for instance, the Catholic bishops' opposition was based less on the Bible than on science, which tells us that the foetus is human. On this issue, at least, Kennedy's self-serving rationalisations turned his politics into expediency and his religion into sentimentality.

“I hope for an America where neither 'fundamentalist' nor 'humanist' will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of goodwill look at life and into their own souls,” he said in an influential 1983 speech at Liberty University before Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Twenty-six years later, President Obama would make a similar speech at Notre Dame University, gracefully acknowledging differences on abortion, and obstinately refusing to change.

Shortly after his death, Mr Obama declared that Ted Kennedy's “ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected in millions of lives.” Including his own. In particular, when he addresses issues like abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage, perhaps the President will be using the dark art of charming without changing which he learned from America's most famous Catholic.

By: Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He is currently in Boston.

tags : Catholicism, Edward Kennedy, politics, United States

The Democrats after Kennedy

 

What Obama must now do is to articulate a clear, distinct course of policy.

The first time I met him, on a boat trip along the coast in Florida at Easter 1962, just before he was manoeuvred into the Senate by family clout, arguably before he had reached the qualifying age, he and his first wife, Joan, were as beautiful as young gods. They were tanned and toned in seersucker, the very image of the American rich on vacation.

The last time I saw him, at a fundraising lunch in Boston in the late 1990s, he was ravaged - face brick-red, boozer's nose and eye, grossly overweight, but still charged with rare charm and formidable energy. This was the image that characterised his later years, until his death on 25 August 2009 at the age of 77.

In a Newsweek article he wrote after he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, called "The Cause of My Life", Kennedy listed just some of the medical and psychological disasters he and his family had survived, among them the plane crash that broke his back and several ribs, a son's leg amputated for one cancer, and a daughter treated for another.

He might have mentioned a sister's crippling by a (possibly unnecessary) frontal lobotomy, the death of a brother, a sister-in-law and a nephew in separate plane crashes, and the murder of his two brothers.

His point in the article was that he and his family survived in part because of his congressional insurance, in part because of his family's great wealth. He understood that many other Americans less fortunate than him, were wiped out financially by healthcare costs, or simply died miserably for lack of the money to pay for care. That was why, he was saying, healthcare was, of all his liberal causes, the one that meant most to him, and it is true that in his forty-seven years in the Senate reform of the American healthcare system was his absolute top priority.

By: Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University

tags : Edward Kennedy, Obama, United States

All shall be poor

 

How today’s sexual narcissists insist on propagating their dreary values.

A hot new must-read book making the rounds is Frenchwoman Corinne Maier's No Kids: Forty Good Reasons Not To Have Children. Having read her embarrassingly superficial Maclean's interview and perused the jejune list of what constitutes "reasons" for Maier --kids cut into your "fun," kids are "conformists" --I'll pass on actually reading the book. Yet, because it would seem there was both money and celebrity to be gleaned from time Maier might otherwise have idly frittered away in an afternoon nap, I'm tempted to give the idea a whirl myself.

Since wisdom clearly isn't a prerequisite for success in this genre, but a knack for "shocking" hopelessly retrograde traditionalists is, how's this for a book concept: Forty Reasons Women Should Love the Burka (1--No more pesky skin cancer fears! 17 --Size 2 or 14, who's to know, so goodbye dieting! 31 -- You're out of that whole beauty rat race thing! etc.).

Does this parodic riff exaggerate the inanity of Maier's thesis? Just a tad. I wouldn't normally dignify such lifestyle bumf with a column, but it struck me that the hoopla around this silly book falls into a cultural pattern, according to which the media eagerly aggrandize purveyors of utter banality, as long as they are advocating for the abandonment of demonstrably valuable social norms.

The 19th-century Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem commonsensically pointed out what seems obvious to me: "It's no sin to be poor, but it's no great honour either." The problem is, in this age of self-esteem uber alles, in which all must have prizes, being known as "poor" is no longer acceptable to the, er, poor. Or at least not the evolutionary version of poor -- those bent more on their own pleasure than the producing and raising of society's future citizens: you know, the ones paying for Corinne Maier's Parisian nursing-home bed.

Nowadays, our culturally wealthy live and let live: Since the rise of counterculture in the 1960s, we dull normals -- faithful marrieds privileging the natural law and their children's happiness over our own transient self-indulgence -- have for some time eschewed any labelling of alternate lifestyles as sinful. But our cultural poor aren't satisfied to return the favour and let dull normals live their socially productive lives in peace.

Unlike Marxists, the evolutionary poor don't want the wealthy to share their wealth. They just won't stop pestering them to concede that it is as desirable -- what am I saying? more desirable -- to be poor than to be rich, a theory the rich are disinclined to endorse for excellent reasons.

A case in point: In a long feature article in the July/August issue of Atlantic magazine, by regular columnist Sandra Tsing Loh, "Let's Call the Whole thing Off," one of America's top journalists exploits the failure of her own 20-year marriage (two young kids) as a self-esteem-boosting springboard to the argument that traditional marriage is no longer a good thing for anyone: "Isn't the idea of a lifelong marriage obsolete?" (a question she never asked when happily married).

Adducing validation of her thesis in the disintegration of several friends' marriages, as well as a few cherry-picked theorists urging radical family re-engineering, Loh eventually arrives at "some modest proposals" that include: "marriage as a splitting-the-mortgage-arrangement"; or "some sort of French arrangement" with a gourmet cook or handyman for a husband "and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see."

Above all, Loh cautions all women to "avoid marriage" and with it the pain that accompanies "something as demonstrably fleeting as love." Deep stuff, eh?

Why couldn't Loh just divorce and shut up about it? Because she felt lousy. Infidelity (hers) and divorce felt like failure. Her self-esteem took a hit. That didn't compute with a lifetime of assurance that self-esteem is an automatic entitlement, rather than the fruit of earned achievement. Fortunately, as an intellectual with a social podium, she knew just how to get it back: Publicly announce that henceforth marriage failure is actually ... success!

Sholem Aleichem would scratch his head in puzzlement at the modern syllogism Maier and Loh represent: All are entitled to self-esteem; Having children cramped my style/my marriage flopped: Eureka! All must stop having children/must not marry!

Non-reproductive sexuality-pride, infidelity-pride, divorce-pride, anti-children pride: In this topsy-turvy politically correct world, the media have glommed onto the mantra that poor is rich, even if it's only the exhibitionistic, the immature, the egotistical and the narcissistic who keep repeating it.

By: Barbara Kay is a columnist for Canada’s National Post, in which this article was first published.

tags : marriage, narcissism, parenthood

Decline of traditional media

Should the threat to traditional media from the internet really be a cause for concern?

The new social media -- blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube are current faves -- revolutionising the publishing world, for better and worse. Let's look at both the better and the worse in perspective.

The current tsunami of personal choices in communication is slowly draining the profit from mainstream media. These media traditionally depend on huge audiences who all live in one region and mostly want the same things (the football scores, the crossword, the TV Guide, etc.). But that is all available now on the Internet, all around the world, all the time.

One outcome is a death watch on many newspapers, including famous ones like the Boston Globe. As journalist Paul Gillin noted recently: "The newspaper model scales up very well, but it scales down very badly. It costs a newspaper nearly as much to deliver 25,000 copies as it does to deliver 50,000 copies. Readership has been in decline for 30 years and the decline shows no signs of abating. Meanwhile, new competition has sprung up online with a vastly superior cost structure and an interactive format that appeals to the new generation of readers."

Traditional electronic media are not doing any better. As James Lewin observes in "Television audience plummeting as viewers move online" (May 19, 2008), mainstream broadcasters "will have to come to terms with YouTube, video podcasts and other Internet media or they’ll face the same fate as newspapers."

Radio audiences have likewise tanked. Overall, the recent decline of traditional media is remarkable.

Some conservative writers insist that mainstream media's failure is due to its liberal bias. But conservatives have charged that for decades -- to no effect. Another charge is that TV is declining because it is increasingly gross or trivial. True enough, but TV's popularity was unaffected for decades by its experiments with edgy taste.

Let's look more closely at the structure of the system to better understand current steep declines. Due to the low cost of modern media technology, no clear distinction now exists between a mainstream medium and a non-mainstream one, based on either number of viewers or production cost. Today, anyone can put up a video at YouTube at virtually no cost. Popular videos get hundreds of thousands of views. Podcasting and videocasting are also cheap. A blog can be started for free, within minutes, at Blogger. It may get 10 viewers or 10,000, depending on the level of popular interest. But the viewers control that, not the providers.

The key change is that the traditional media professional is no longer a gatekeeper who can systematically admit or deny information. Consumers program their own print, TV, or radio, and download what they want to their personal devices. They are their own editors, their own filmmakers, their own disc jockeys.

Does that mean more bias or less? It's hard to say, given that consumers now manage their own level of bias. So they can hear much more biased news -- or much less. And, as Podcasting News observes, "Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development."

Understandably, traditional media professionals, alarmed by these developments, have constructed a doctrine of "localism" and, in some cases, called for government to bail them out. That probably won't help, just as it wouldn't have helped if the media professionals had called for a government "bailed out" of newspapers when they were threatened by radio, or of radio when it was threatened by TV. Video really did (sort of) kill the radio star, but the radio star certainly won't be revived by government grants.

Still, the news is not all bad. Yes, new media do sometimes kill old media. For example, no one seriously uses pigeon post to send messages today. But few ever thought birdmail was a great system, just the only one available at the time. However, radio did not kill print, and TV did not kill radio. Nor will the Internet kill older media; it will simply change news delivery. Sometimes in a minor way, but sometimes radically.

Media that work, whether radio, TV, newspapers, books, blogs, or any other, thrive when there is a true need. Today's challenge is to persuade the consumer to look at alternatives to their own programming decisions.

By: Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

tags : culture wars, internet, public opinion, social networking

Abstinence, yes, but what about marriage?

The abstinence-until-marriage movement in the United States has been a positive and courageous response to the sexual revolution. As the basis for sex education it has met with determined opposition because of adult scepticism, and probably dislike of the very idea of abstinence. Now a sociologist who is also an Evangelical Christian is suggesting another reason for reviewing the way Christians promote abstinence.

…[A]fter years of studying the sexual behavior and family decision-making of young Americans, I've come to the conclusion that Christians have made much ado about sex but are becoming slow and lax about marriage—that more significant, enduring witness to Christ's sacrificial love for his bride. Americans are taking flight from marriage. We are marrying later, if at all, and having fewer children.

Professor Mark Regnerus, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Texas, specialises in the study of romantic relationship formation. He sets out his case for earlier marriage in the August issue of Christianity Today. There are pragmatic reasons, such as compelling evidence that marriage provides the optimal conditions for child-rearing and increases the wealth and independence of the individuals involved. But there is also the evidence that most people, Christians included, find the temptation to begin a sexual relationship irresistible. Regnerus argues that it defies nature for those aiming at marriage to postpone it beyond the early 20s and remain chaste:

Evangelicals tend to marry slightly earlier than other Americans, but not by much. Many of them plan to marry in their mid-20s.Yet waiting for sex until then feels far too long to most of them. And I am suggesting that when people wait until their mid-to-late 20s to marry, it is unreasonable to expect them to refrain from sex. It's battling our Creator's reproductive designs. The data don't lie. Our sexual behavior patterns—the kind I documented in 2007 in Forbidden Fruit—give us away. Very few wait long for sex. Meanwhile, women's fertility is more or less fixed, yet Americans are increasingly ignoring it during their 20s, only to beg and pray to reclaim it in their 30s and 40s.

Delay, he says, suits men better than women; it means they can delay growing up, and this produces an increasing mismatch in maturity between men and women, making marriage more difficult to achieve. The difficulty is compounded by “Christian practical ethics about marriage” that have evolved into “a nebulous hodgepodge of pragmatic norms and romantic imperatives, few of which resemble anything biblical”.

Regnerus is not advocating teenage marriages, which, on the whole, are not successful, and he reviews the reasons for this. But he is advocating for marriage to be seen as a formative institution in which a couple mature together, rather than the “capstone” that completes a relationship where everything else has been put in place.

The response to Regnerus’ ideas, from both Christians and secularists, has been mainly in the range of sceptical to hostile. In April he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post on the same subject and got 296 mostly negative online comments. The 240 comments posted on Christianity Today were not altogether favourable either.

But his ideas are well worth pondering and discussing.

  Article by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: abstinence, Christianity, marriage.

Rag trade withdraws sexy baby clothes

It is almost beyond belief what some companies will try to get away with in the line of exploiting children. Australian clothing group Cotton On has withdrawn baby clothes with slogans which include “I'm a tits man", "The condom broke", and “I'm living proof my mum is easy" after they caused an uproar in Australia and New Zealand.

The company shed crocodile tears of repentance:

"The Cotton On Group is an organisation that respects family, social and moral values and ... would like to announce that the issue has been taken seriously and in agreeance [sic], willingly extends an apology to those who have been affected by the slogans," the company said.

Why would they produce anything so vile to start with if that were true?

The sexualization of babies brings a broader trend to a new low. Suggestive T-shirts for older children have been around for some years, a 2008 Little Losers line featuring slogans such as : “Miss B**ch”, “Miss Wasted” and “Miss Floozy”, and for boys “Mr Well-Hung”, “Mr Pimp”, “Mr A**hole” and “Mr Drunk”.

Here is another example (see our previous post on art galleries) of “adult” material intruding on children. Where adults claim the right to play with filth, the dirt will inevitably rub off on children.

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: fashion, pornography, sexualisation of children.

Are girls risking death now to avoid cervical cancer?

 

The vaccine promoted as a safeguard for girls against developing cervical cancer later in life has been linked with at least 20 deaths in the United States and hundreds of other serious adverse reactions. This is prevention, if you like, but not the sort most parents envisage.

The vaccine has been given to more than seven million girls and young women in the US, a large number of them 11- and 12-year-old schoolgirls, the New York Times reports.

Some 12,424 reports of adverse events were made to a voluntary government database. Of those, 6.2 per cent (772) were considered serious, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The most common serious complications were fainting and an increased risk for potentially fatal blood clots, possibly related to oral contraceptive use and obesity. There were 32 reports of death, but only 20 could be verified. Among those, other causes are implicated (diabetes, drug abuse, Lou Gehrig’s disease, flu and others) and it is not at all clear what are the risks of Gardasil for any individual girl.

The majority of the reports were filed by Merck and company, manufacturer of Gardasil, but most failed to provide enough information for further investigation, say the study authors. However, they are confident in recommending that people get the vaccine, which, they say, seems to be as safe as other vaccines.

Merck is also upbeat, saying that the study “confirms the very favourable safety profile we’ve seen in our extensive clinical trials”. Mind you, this is the company that wooed professional groups with grant money for educational programmes to promote the vaccine.

But an accompanying editorial in JAMA questioned whether any level of risk is acceptable for vaccination when there is an alternative way of preventing cervical cancer:

“There are not a huge number of side effects here, that’s fairly certain,” said the editorial writer, Dr. Charlotte Haug, an infectious disease expert from Norway, about the vaccine. “But you are giving this to perfectly healthy young girls, so even a rare thing may be too much of a risk.

“I wouldn’t accept much risk of side effects at all in an 11-year-old girl, because if she gets screened when she’s older, she’ll never get cervical cancer,” Dr. Haug said in an interview. “You don’t have to die from cervical cancer if you have access to health care.”

The other point is that you probably don’t have to die from cervical cancer if you avoid contracting the sexually transmitted disease -- human papillomavirus -- that is the precursor in the vast majority of cases. But HPV is now so widespread that there is no telling who has it.

Then again, should this really be a dilemma that parents and their young daughters have to face? Wouldn’t a truly rational response to the prevalence of HPV and other STDs be to redouble efforts to encourage chastity among young people?

Posted by: Carolyn Moynihan

tags: cervical cancer, Gardasil, HPV,

Justifying one’s existence

Choosing to live out one’s natural life will soon be as unpopular as refusing an abortion.

Have you noticed that the subject of euthanasia/ assisted suicide is picking up momentum -- that it is, so to speak, taking on a life of its own? I mean in particular that we seem to be approaching one of those interesting tipping points in public debate where the tone of those supporting a once-shocking idea is shifting from defensive to offensive.

Take for a representative example one of the "letters of the day" in the Post's July 22 edition, from Alexander McKay of Calgary. Mr. McKay argues for assisted suicide with the conviction of one endorsing, rather than flouting, received wisdom. The notion that the individual not only has the right to control his time of departure from this Earth, but has the right to society's complicity in a death deliberately chosen, is embedded in the calm and confident air with which Mr. McKay projects his reasons for wishing, when his "wonderful life" dwindles down to a putative final season of debility and suffering, to "consider my options."

Mr. McKay does not wish to see his life "cruelly extended" (assumption: suffering and pain are unnatural add-ons to life, not as much a part of life as youth and vigour). He says, "life is for the living" (assumption: the terminally ill no longer hold the moral status of "living"). And, of course, "Canada's medical system is for those who need it" (assumption: medical "need" is an entirely fungible notion).

His trump card -- or so he believes -- is his final flourish: "What possible exercise in logic or morality (my emphasis) would deny me my dignity and force me to suffer against my will?" (assumption plus corollary: dignity is a quality that only attaches to health and personal autonomy; those who willingly suffer pain and suffering with a view to a naturally prescribed death have no dignity).

All right-thinking people, religious and secular, already believe that in cases where there is no hope of recovery and a life is seeking its own natural end, life should not be unnecessarily prolonged through artificial or heroic measures. As to the deliberate, state-sanctioned and/or state-activated termination of a life because it is no longer pleasurable, or because it involves chronic caretaking and/or is burdensome to loved ones, or for any other reason we squeeze under the benign umbrella of "quality of life," that's a whole other subject: Mr. McKay's in fact.

Well, here is where my sense of "logic or morality" leads me. The idea behind legalized suicide is that it will free the elderly, the infirm and the pain-wracked from their misery. In fact, those who will effectively be freed will be the young and the healthy. By removing the sanctity of life from the equation and replacing it with logic, we will be shifting responsibility for the care of the old and the vulnerable from their loved ones and society to themselves alone.

We have up until recently assumed that we cannot control life's end. When that was the case -- just as when we used to think we could not control life's beginning -- caretaking for those at the heart of the drama was accepted as everyone's responsibility. But now we would view late-life sufferers, as we used to consider unwed mothers, as having gotten themselves "in trouble" and in need of a termination to that trouble. Of course, as with abortion, the pregnant woman, or the sufferer pregnant, so to speak, with pain, can choose not to terminate. But then, if that's your choice, the result of the choice (the baby, the suffering) is also your problem, isn't it? Because in the case of the sufferer, if you haven't made a deliberate decision to die, then continuing to live is not a given, something you needn't concern yourself with; rather, continuing to live then also becomes a deliberate decision, one for which you, not your family and society, are responsible.

For a glimpse into a future in which euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal, read a short essay by Richard Stith, Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men in the August/September issue of First Things magazine. Stith, who teaches at Valparaiso School of Law in Indiana, makes the persuasive case that when having children became an elective rather than a natural consequence of sex, responsibility for children shifted wholly to women. Men instinctively understood that if conception could be undone, then so could their responsibility for being involved with the children women chose not to terminate.

Instead of empowering women, abortion has placed many women in a cleft stick. As Stith notes: "One investigator, Vincent M. Rue, reported in the Medical Science Monitor, that 64% of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. Another, Frederica Mathewes-Green in her book Real Choices, discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children." If you substitute the words "euthanize" for "abort" and "elderly" or "chronically ill" for "children," the analogy with end-of-life termination could not be more clear.

As with abortion, if euthanasia and assisted suicide become legal, the voices of those who cling to the "sanctity of life" rubric will be pushed to the margins of public life. They will become pariahs, just as pro-life voices on campuses must fight tooth and nail to be heard.

Ironically, if euthanasia and/or assisted suicide are legalized (philosophically it comes to the same thing), by the time Mr. McKay's "wonderful life" has become less wonderful to the point of chronic pain and suffering, he may find, to his surprise, that against all logic he wishes to "cruelly extend" his life. But he may also find -- nothing could be more logical -- that others around him reproach him, saying no, "life is for the living," and therefore it is unconscionable for him to have such expectations.

And thus, as is so often the case with those who privilege "logic" over human nature and the natural law, Mr. McKay, and others who are so smugly sure they know in advance what their late-life wishes will be, may be chagrined to discover that the words "deny me my dignity" and "against my will" have taken on a whole new -- and rather macabre --meaning.

Article by: Barbara Kay is a columnist with Canada's National Post, in which the above article was published July 27. She writes and lives in Montreal.