The challenges ahead

The new President has surfed into office on a tidal wave of good will. Will he use it effectively to promote human dignity?

Barack Hussein Obama has now been sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. His accession to that office shows that America has finally come to terms with what has often been called its "original sin", racism.

He moves into the White House with a war chest of good will. The sight of two million enthusiastic admirers from all over America to attend the inauguration spoke for itself. More than 80 percent of Americans approve of how he has handled the transition from the Bush administration. A BBC poll also shows widespread and growing optimism about his presidency around the world. In 17 countries polled, 67 percent of people think it will lead to improved relations between the US and the rest of the world. Even in the world’s largest Muslim country, the figure is 64 percent.

This is an historic opportunity. As the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, President Obama can set the agenda for human dignity in many areas, domestically and internationally. But will he?

While there is much to recommend Mr Obama, the editors of MercatorNet have some definite points of concern and disagreement with him, mostly focussed on the issues of life and human dignity. As he takes office and begins to exercise his executive powers, we pledge to watch him on these key issues. (Please add comments about other issues which you think should be on our agenda.)

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The possibility of a global financial meltdown didn’t emerge until late in the election campaign – but it has arrived. Saving jobs and keeping Americans in work has become Obama’s top priority. The economy lost 760,000 jobs last year and unemployment could rise towards 9 percent by the end of the year. Without work, people lose their sense of self-worth and dignity.

No issue is more inflammatory for Americans than abortion. Other countries follow the US lead on abortions rights, so what the new President decides matters for the whole world. Obama has already declared that he will back abortion rights. Back in 2007, he promised Planned Parenthood that he would sign the controversial Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) as soon as he was elected. This will effectively guarantee a right to abortion up to birth and would override any state legislation to the contrary. He should face up to the fact that African Americans are a specific target of the abortion industry.

Obama has promised to lift restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research imposed by President Bush. This matters, even though the human beings which will be sacrificed in scientific laboratories are only visible under the microscope. Without restrictions of some kind, scientists will also begin creating embryonic clones and even chimera and cross-species embryos with Federal funding. (This is already permitted in the UK.) In any case, he ought to know that despite millions of dollars and years of effort, scientists have made no progress towards cures with destructive embryo research. But significant progress has been made with other, ethically acceptable, stem cells. Ethical science, in the end, is always the best solution.

Obama says that he will provide affordable, accessible health care for all Americans. This will be a huge battle, especially in the current economic crisis. About 47 million of them are uninsured. People without insurance receive less preventive care, are diagnosed at more advanced disease stages, receive less therapeutic care and have higher mortality rates than people with insurance.

The United States is an ageing society. Providing for the elderly is one of the greatest challenges faced by the new Administration. At the moment the long-term unfunded cost of programs for the elderly has ballooned out to US$43 trillion (not billion, trillion). Obama has promised to be honest about the solvency of social security programs. If he’s not, American seniors will suffer. Fixing social security must be the hardest job in American politics – and one of the most serious.

Because of his Kenyan heritage, Obama has a special link with Africa, the poorest, most violent, most underdeveloped, least healthy continent. But with its youthful population and vibrant people, Africa could be a global asset. Helping sub-Saharan Africa to develop ought to be one of Obama’s top foreign policy objectives. He mustn’t squander this historic opportunity. One way of squandering it would be to let the population control movement (aka reproductive health) dictate American policy. Since the movement is racist, it would not be a good look for a black president.

The war in Gaza is a reminder that American foreign policy has failed to make progress in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Life in Gaza is the pits: a densely-populated city with a high birthrate, high unemployment, and high poverty levels. After Israel’s invasion, it looks at though an earthquake had hit. Creative diplomacy is needed to break through the grievances on both sides so that both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security. Instead of cynically tossing this in the too-hard basket, Obama should apply his own advice: Yes, we can.

By: Michael Cook

del.icio.us Tags: Obama,Kenya,Africa,Health,Gaza,Population,Economy,Abortion.

Consumer kids exploited through new media

Parents have no idea of the extent to which big business targets children through their use of new media, according a new book out in Britain. Consumer Kids, by Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn, says that children are spending twice as much time in front of a TV or computer screen as in the classroom and have become a captive audience for marketers. The relentless marketing through websites and other media is an intrusion into children’s privacy and is destroying family life, the authors say.

They claim that while parents are waking up to the threat of sexual predators online, they have no concept of how business grooms their children for profit, recruiting them to promote products to their friends, and peppering their favourite websites with ads made to look like content. Personal information is routinely sought, often as a condition of getting access to a site.

On average, British children spend two hours, 36 minutes watching TV each day, one hour and 18 minutes on the internet, and one hour, 24 minutes on a games console. The screen is no longer just “an electronic babysitter,” say the authors, but “a whole electronic world” driven by profit. “The conventional paradigm of childhood as a stage that evolves around family and schools has had to change. It’s the commercial world that dominates the time of today’s children.”

Children’s bedrooms have become “high-tech media bedsits” with more gadgets than an entire family had a generation ago. About 90 per cent of teenagers have a TV in their bedroom, as do 60 per cent of five to six-year-olds. And the trend is not driven by income: 98 per cent of teens from deprived backgrounds have their own TV compared with 48 per cent from more affluent families. Two thirds of five and six-year-olds watch TV before school each day and a similar proportion watch it before bedtime.

More than a third of children have their own laptop or PC and two thirds have a games console. One quarter have access to the internet in their bedroom. The researchers estimate the size of the children’s consumer market at 99 billion pounds, up 33 per cent in the past five years, 12 billion pounds of which comes from pocket money. ~ Times Online, Jan 21

 

del.icio.us Tags: Kids,Media,TV,School,Consumer

A family domain on the internet

Family-minded people need to think globally as well as act locally, according to a group working to establish a family domain on the internet. Dotfam, an association registered in Spain last year, wants the family to be present in the world of the internet as an institution and a reference point. To this end it has applied to ICANN, the US-based body that co-ordinates the internet’s naming system, for approval of the top-level domain name, .fam

A video in Spanish and English on Dotfam’s website explains that the group wants to establish a high quality domain with many functions that will foster today’s “cyber homes” as safe places, protecting the nature and rights of families. The domain should be identifiable from any place in the world as an international support for the family community, with the hope that many problems and necessities of modern families can be assisted and even solved through the network.

Although there are already many family websites, Dotfam believes “it is appropriate to have a specific domain, one that guarantees and safe, secure family environment. We would like to make possible that from now on each and every family has both its physical home and its cyber home.”

The ultimate goal is that any procedures, administrative tasks or connections with financial or other entities can be done through this website, as a window from the family into the world.

http://www.dotfam.net/es/index.asp

Technorati Tags: Family,Internet,Domain,Cyber,English

Families must help shape mass media

Christian families should not shun the mass media, which often project false values, but they should actively participate in shaping media culture and infuse it with their own values, a Vatican spokesman told a huge gathering in Mexico City. Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, was addressing sixth World Meeting of Families, a Catholic event begun with the encouragment of the late Pope John Paul II.

The media has become “the air we breathe,” said Archbishop Celli, and it is in the family and the Church that people must “learn to filter, to decide, to choose what is seen and heard”. Educating children to make good use of communications media is the responsibility of parents, the Church and schools, he added. Good films could be a “perfect” means of deepening values and developing good criteria in children and benefiting the whole family. In this way there would not be just “one group” engaging in the media but everyone would become an active participant.

It was important not to leave children by themselves with new media such as cell phones, video games and computers, but to be with them so they could learn to use them to promote a culture of respect, dialogue and friendship.

The meeting drew between 10,000 and 30,000 participants over five days and received a video message from Pope Benedict XVI. The Pope called the family the “vital cell of society, the first and decisive resource for its development, and many times the last refuge for those whose needs aren’t met” by other social structures. For that reason “the family has the right to be recognised in its proper identity and not be confused with other forms of living together,” he said. The family should also be able to count on “deserved cultural, legal, economic, social and medical protection,” and the state should offer families school choice. ~ Zenit, Jan 18

Technorati Tags: Children,Family,Media,Church,Medical,Catholic,Communication

Mamma mia, here they go again

Why does Hollywood think that smoking is awful, but promiscuity and open sexuality are harmless pastimes?

Warning: This article contains arguments that challenge conventional North American thinking (or lack thereof) regarding media, culture, and youth behaviour. Some paragraphs may offend (politically correct) readers.

Whether you're watching a television program or a movie, often even when you're playing a video game, you will see warnings about content. Those warnings exist to help you make an informed decision about whether you or your children should take in whatever is about to pop onto the screen. But now the warnings at the beginning of a production are increasingly being followed by disclaimers and warnings at the end as well. My wife and I noticed this as we were watching the credits roll at the end of the DVD version of Mamma Mia.

Taken at face value, Mamma Mia is an entertaining musical that features the songs of Swedish pop group ABBA, of which I admit I'm a fan. To summarize the story, it's about a young woman named Sophie who grew up with her single mum on a Greek island and wants to finally learn who her father is so he can walk her down the aisle when she gets married. So Sophie invites the three men who could conceivably be her father to her wedding in hopes of learning the truth.

But there's more to this movie that just what's on the surface. As the credits roll at the end of the production there's a fascinating disclaimer that makes sure all viewers understand that smoking is a dangerously unhealthy habit and that nothing was meant to encourage young people to smoke. Was there a lot of smoking in Mamma Mia? Hardly. The only tobacco product was one scene of Sophie's fiancé chomping on an unlit cigar. And it came during the musical number,Lay All Your Love on Me that featured the fiancé singing the familiar lyrics, "You've heard me saying that smoking was my only vice." That's it. But in the new age of responsible movie production, that's enough to warrant a disclaimer.

The disclaimer is the result of a major policy at Universal Pictures which "discourages depictions of tobacco smoking in all youth-rated films and will exert its influence, where possible, to minimize the occurrence of smoking incidents in them". Universal even has a "Tobacco Depictions Committee" to ensure compliance. Other Hollywood production companies have similar policies. Their logic is simple. According to the American Legacy Foundation more than half of youth-rated (G, PG, PG-13) movies contain smoking and research indicates those images can influence 200,000 new youth smokers per year. Universal may be on to something here. This is one of the few times that any movie production house has explicitly admitted that content can influence behaviour for good or ill.

But if that's the case, what about the rest of Mamma Mia? It can leave you wondering where Universal's disclaimer is for the other images in what is considered a youth-rated movie. I caution you, though, that the following my spoil the movie for you if you haven't seen it. Here's a sampling of some of the content teenagers would take in. One character refers to her repeated marriages, breast enhancements, and skimpy underwear. Later in the movie a young man hits on a woman about three times his age and she responds by flirting with him. The choreography of the movie during several songs features sexually charged images of shaking bottoms, spread out legs, crotch grabs, pelvic thrusts, and a woman's cleavage. As well, two women are shown severely hung over. Two gay man are shown exchanging lustful glances and hugging.

Perhaps more powerful than even those images are key plot elements in Mamma Mia. The main character, Sophie, starts off planning to get married and trying to learn about herself by finding out who her father is. Yet she comes to the jaded realization she doesn't need marriage, so she runs off and lives with her fiancé, and is happy meeting her three possible dads without ever knowing which man is really her father. Moreover, Sophie's mum overcomes her regrets for living promiscuously in her youth and leaving her daughter essentially fatherless by dismissing her concerns as "Catholic guilt". The concept of consequences for poor moral choices seems lost on the producers of this film (and the original stage musical).

Strangely, given Universal's concern for influence on youth, there is no disclaimer encouraging young viewers to ignore what they'd just seen. It seems ironic that a young man chomping an unlit cigar calls for a disclaimer, but all the other images get nary a mention. The only clue you have about the content before viewing the movie is a PG-13 rating that "strongly cautions" parents about "some sex-related comments." Still, if we accept the premise that movies (and other media) influence youth behaviour, there is good reason to consider what other types of content Universal and other companies may wish to limit in youth-rated films. Is it not plausible that the normalization of promiscuity and open sexuality on screen will influence the behaviour of teenagers and young adults? If so, that has some major implications.

The choices young people make could be life-changing, for better or for worse. Doctors Joe S. McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush have reviewed some of the latest neuro-scientific research on the effect of sex on teenagers. In their bookHooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting our Children they outline how sexual activity releases chemicals in the brain that create emotional bonds between the people involved. Breaking those bonds is not only painful, it makes it more difficult for someone to form a new bond in the future. But at the same time, the rush of dopamine experienced during sex is especially addictive in the young brain. And Doctors McIlhaney and McKissic Bush note that such an addiction can lead young people to adopt riskier sexual behaviour more frequently. And Wendy Shalit notes in her book Girls Gone Mild that many young women, find that living on the sexual wild side has left them unable to trust men, fearful of disease and emotional pain, and depressingly dissatisfied.

In the case of an addictive substance such as tobacco, which is a notable cause of lung cancer, emphysema, and other deadly ailments, movie producers have decided to take action for films young people are likely to see. I applaud them for that. But why do they not do the same when it comes to casual sex, which can also be addictive and cause serious mental and physical health problems? In fact, they could go a step further and not simply avoid what might cause negative behaviour, but deliberately show what could influence positive behaviour in young people. Then again, this is Hollywood we're talking about. I won't hold my breath.

By: Daniel Proussalidis is a journalist and broadcaster in Ottawa, Canada.

Technorati Tags: Mamma mia,Television,Casual,behaviour,Sexuality,marriage,smoking

Rick Warren’s Predicament, Obama’s Chilling Cleverness

What does it mean when the pro-life pastor blesses the pro-choice president.

As we move each day closer to the Age of Obama, few things have been as chilling – or revealing –as that gesture offered as a grand show of “reaching out to the other side”: the invitation to the Rev. Rick Warren. Warren is the author of that highly noted work The Purpose Driven Life. He also presided over that famous session at the Saddleback Forum, in which Obama remarked, on the subject of abortion, that the question of when human life begins was one beyond his “pay grade.” That encounter turned out to be, for Obama, a minor disaster. All of which seemed to bespeak a large nature when he invited Pastor Warren to give one of the invocations at the upcoming inauguration.

For Warren has been quite clear in his public teaching as pro-life, opposed to same-sex marriage, and unwilling to regard the homosexual life on the same plane of legitimacy as that “sexuality imprinted in our natures.” The invitation to Warren has sparked cries of “betrayal” and spasms of violent outrage on the part of gay activists and the partisans of legal abortion. Another group, even more fevered, has sought to go to court to block Warren from invoking Jesus Christ on this high public occasion. Warren, an evangelical, professes not to know how to give anything called a prayer without invoking Christ. But while Warren has become a target of hatred, the clear winner, sailing serenely beyond it all, has been Barack Obama. As James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal observed, the show of hatred on the part of the Left has simply drawn to Obama the sympathy and good will of the religious in this country as he holds to his decision and refuses to disinvite Pastor Warren.

And yet, as this controversy has unfolded, there has been surprisingly little attention given to Warren's dilemma, or to injuries he is likely to impart by lending his benediction to this event. Against all reason, against all evidence available to the senses, the surveys reveal a bloc of people, evangelicals and Catholics, who actually think Obama is pro-life. For Warren to offer his blessings at the inauguration is to foster the impression, irresistibly, that Obama’s intentions reflect at least a good will, that his policies on abortion come well within the range that Warren may regard as defensible and legitimate.

And yet, any sober look at Obama’s record, and the planning for the new administration, should sweep away instantly any such benign haze. We already knew that on the first day in office, Obama would overturn the executive orders restored by President Bush barring the funds of the national government from any agency, foreign or domestic, that promoted or performed abortions. But with the departure of the Republican administration, there would be no veto on a host of measures that the Democratic majority has been gearing up to pass: the removal of restraints on the funding of abortions in military facilities, in every program and agency of the government and the District of Columbia, and even in the Indian Health service, with its program for Native Americans. Obama may emit sounds about finding common ground, but it would require a vast project in self-deception for anyone to believe that Obama would make the slightest concession to any moral premise on the pro-life side.

Pastor Warren cannot believe that his presence would do anything more than preserve, for certain evangelicals and Catholics, the deception that has beguiled them. But Warren’s dilemma was that he could not decorously refuse. He would appear small-natured, and his community of Christians narrow, unbending. Could he use the occasion, not only to invoke the Lord, but to raise anew the call to respect the lives of the unborn? That would only make things worse. For it would do nothing to summon Democrats and it would only further the impression that those pro-life sentiments were shared by the new president. Nothing has brought home more surely the consummate cleverness of Obama in offering that invitation to Warren, making it impossible for him to refuse, and gaining nothing but dividends for himself from every angle.

It would be unseemly for Warren to negotiate in public the terms of his participation, or to back out with denunciations of the man who invited him. I would float one alternative: that he should be frank in reviewing with Obama the awkwardness of his position, and that he should ask one small thing. Obama had declared that he too would have voted for the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act passed by Congress. Warren could now take him up on that avowal. The Bush Administration muffed the most serious case that came to it under that act. Since Obama wished to reach across the partisan division, would he take at least one of the cases presented to the government as the occasion for teaching a public lesson and enforcing that act?

Warren could leave with Obama the sole discretion and responsibility for making and keeping that promise, but with the proviso that he would be free, a few years hence, to tell the story. After two years, Obama and Warren would know whether that modest promise had been accepted and kept. In telling the rest of us, Warren could convey to us something truly revealing about this new president. But if he feels constrained from speaking, who would know? To adapt a line from Thomas More, Warren would know, Obama would know – and God would know. And the difference is that Warren would know that God knows.

By: Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. This article was originally published at The Catholic Thing.

Pope says financial crisis demands rethink on global poverty

Pope Benedict XVI ushered in 2009, a year "marked by uncertainty and concern for the future", by calling for a major overhaul of the current global economic system and by urging individuals to live with "moderation and solidarity".

The "growing social and economic crisis" figured in all three homilies the Pope delivered on New Year's Eve, New Year's Day and Epiphany (6 January). He noted that "dark clouds are gathering over our future", but said they could be overcome by hope in Christ and a change of lifestyle. "It is a crisis that requires greater moderation and solidarity from everyone, in order especially to help people and families in greater difficulty," the Pope said at Vespers on 31 December.

The next day at the 1 January Mass for the World Day of Peace and the Feast of the Mother of God, Pope Benedict said the crisis was the chance to establish "a ‘virtuous cycle' between the poverty one can ‘choose' and the poverty one must ‘fight'" - "an unjust poverty that oppresses so many men and women and threatens peace for all". He said this meant reducing "the gap between those who waste the superfluous and those who lack even the necessary" and rediscovering "moderation and solidarity, which are equally evangelical and universal values".

Commentators noted that the Pope's solution to the crisis stood in stark contrast to that offered by some Western leaders - including Italy's billionaire premier, Silvio Berlusconi - who have urged people not to change spending habits or their present style of living.

But the 81-year-old Pope went even further, suggesting that long-term changes in the economic system were also necessary in responding to the current global crisis.

"Are we are ready to read in its complexity a challenge for the future instead of just an emergency to which we provide short-term answers? Are we willing to profoundly revise the dominant model of development so as to correct it in a concerted and far-sighted way?" he asked, noting that more than just financial difficulties were at stake. "Such changes are needed to address the planet's environmental health and even more so our cultural and moral crises, whose symptoms have been visible for quite some time in every part of the world," the Pope said.

He later said that today's shadows, "however dark", could not dim the light of Christ, in his homily on Tuesday for the celebration of Epiphany. Pope Benedict lamented "the destructive hatred and violence that continue to shed blood in many regions of the world and man's selfishness and pretensions to be his own god, which leads sometimes to dangerous distortions of God's design about life and the human dignity in matter of the family and the harmony of creation". Quoting his encyclical Spe Salvi, he said that "even if we outwardly achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces, it is the great hope based upon God's promises that gives us courage and directs our action in good times and bad.

A creation myth for the 21st century

Did anyone ever ask IVF children whether they wanted to go through life as genetic orphans?

This month, a court in British Columbia, Canada is expected to certify an important class action that was launched near the end of last year by a gutsy 26-year-old journalist. Her name is Olivia Pratten, and her lawsuit is likely to become a major thorn in the side of the booming fertility industry. Olivia was conceived with the sperm of an anonymous donor, and she is supposed to not care about her genetic origins -- after all, she was wanted and loved by her "intended" parents. But Olivia compares herself to adopted children, and like them, she wants the law to recognize her right to information about her biological parent.

Many people are still surprised to learn of the scale of the donor-gamete business. Louise Brown, the first test tube baby, was only born in 1978. How much could have happened in just 30 years? Let's put it this way – the growth of reproductive technologies has been not linear, but exponential. In 2006, Harvard Business School Professor Deborah Spar estimated the worth of the fertility industry at US$3 billion in the US alone.

IVF has become a beacon of hope for many infertile couples who could not otherwise have their own biological children. What can compete with the powerful pain of infertility, combined with the desperate desire for parenthood? Regardless of its cost, and despite a success rate of only about 30 percent, couples have been willing to pay for IVF, even if it means remortgaging the house or racking up credit card debt. And IVF has opened the door to still other possibilities, especially the use of egg donors and surrogate mothers, the genetic screening of embryos, and recently, the creation of embryos with the sperm of infertile men (ICSI, a technique known to transfer infertility to the resulting male children).

The use of donor sperm was of course possible before IVF, and artificial insemination was practised to some extent even before Louise Brown came along -– but the practice really took off with the IVF boom. It has now become a gigantic industry, where profit-driven sperm banks compete in marketing paid "donors" -– and not just to infertile couples: the world's largest sperm bank, the California Cryobank, reports that over 30 percent of its clients are single women and a growing proportion are lesbian couples. Just visit their website to order from an incredible selection of donors described by physical features, occupation and education, sports inclinations, interests and personality tests, baby photos, personal essays, and even handwriting analysis and audio interviews. And for many fertility businesses, the higher the caliber of the donors, the higher the price.

Like a religion, the whole donor-conception industry is undergirded by a central creation myth. The industry cannot stand without faith in this central tenet: that biological parenthood is irrelevant, and that "social" parenthood is what matters for children's full emotional and psychological development. The theme of every sperm bank and egg donor agency is effectively the Beatles song "All you need is love." Needless to say, many infertile couples are only too happy to sing along and accept this claim at face value. Few reflect on the paradox that they clearly want a biological connection while denying its importance for their children. In effect, the industry heals the parents at the children's expense, by giving them their own genetic children while depriving these children of a biological parent.

Back to Olivia Pratten. According to the creation myth of the fertility industry, Olivia should not give a hoot about her anonymous sperm donor. She is one of those very special donor-conception children who was very deeply wanted and loved by her "intended" parents. For her, the anonymous donor should be on par with a nice blood donor who once donated blood to her parents – barely anything to do with her, right?

And yet, Olivia is disturbing the peace and challenging the creation myth. She insists that her sperm donor is important to her, and she speaks of the "psychological distress" she has suffered at not knowing her biological history, including what race, culture, and religion her biological father may have come from. In 2001, she went to the Canadian Parliament and told the Standing Committee on Health: "the genetic tie that I share with my biological father cannot be minimized or made to disappear. I carry it with me. It is visible in who I am and what I will be…. I'm always left pondering, trying to put the pieces together of who this man was and how this relates to who I am today. If I could somehow know who he was…everything I already know about myself would be put into a different context, and I believe my perception of things would be altered."

Olivia's voice is not the only one speaking out these days. The blogosphere is filling up with young people from around the world, conceived with the aid of reproductive technologies and crying out in pain. One Australian young man writes on his blog, Donated Generation: "Nothing can fix the sorrow I feel for my own loss and the loss experienced by other donor conceived children." A young American woman writes on Confessions of a Cryokid: "One tries to argue that having a social father makes up for the lack of genetic attachment, but it doesn't." And in a powerful cry, a young Australian woman writes on her blog, Umbilically Challenged:

"I am very sad today, with a grief that is not talked about. It is not allowed. Because I had two loving parents. I am not granted asylum. I am not allowed reprieve. Well... what…are you complainin' about ?? You got everything you wanted. You had so many presents at Christmas and your birthday that it was supposed to buy your happiness. You were supposed to forget about your mother. You had everything. Why would you want more? WE GAVE YOU EVERYTHING. I had everything... everything but my mother. You just can't fix that. Sorry."

How has the fertility industry responded to these cries of pain? Olivia and others have been accused of being "ungrateful" for their creation. They have been asked, would they rather not have been born? A rather shocking but frank answer was given by 23-year-old Tom Ellis, a donor-conceived man who wrote in a British newspaper: "I have done a Master's degree at Cambridge and am reasonably successful, but it doesn't make me feel any better about not knowing who I am... I don't think I should have been born. I can't compare living under these conditions and not living at all, but nobody should ever be created under these circumstances... I feel like a tree that has half of its roots missing. And without them, I can hardly stand up."

Voices like these will keep on coming, as donor conception becomes ever more popular. In fact, for the first time in history, our society is engaged in a massive re-definition of the family that rejects its most natural and fundamental basis, genetic connection. The Beatles expressed the mantra not only of the fertility industry, but also of our increasingly utilitarian society as a whole. More and more children are being taught that "love" is what makes a family. This is true especially in countries like Canada , which have already legalized same-sex marriage. To ensure that such unions are equal to heterosexual marriages, it is necessary to open up a way for them to create progeny – and when it comes to reproduction, such unions are largely dependent on the fertility industry. But if children are to have two mommies or two daddies, it also means that they will be separated from at least one of their biological parents, who is not part of the same-sex union. The myth requires us to believe that these other parents will not matter to the child.

If love is all you need to create a family, and if two mommies and two daddies are just as good as one of each, then what about other combinations? Today, single women and even single men are increasingly resorting to the fertility industry to have children without waiting for a suitable partner. Having a child is now only as difficult as buying a book on Amazon.com. No father need apply -- just order the sperm online.

On the other end of the scale, the highest court in the Canadian province of Ontario ruled in 2007 that a child can have three legal parents: the lesbian mother, her partner, and the sperm donor father whom the lesbians wanted to keep involved with the child. But if three legal parents, why not four or five? Certainly, a child could now have up to five "parents" of sorts -– the "intended" couple, the egg and sperm donors, and a surrogate to carry the baby to term.

What's happened is that children have become a commodity. Every movie star is entitled to a Chihuahua, and every adult is now entitled to a child. Though perhaps it started with the right not to have a child, by destroying the undesirables through abortion. The other shoe has now dropped, and we have added the right to have a child at almost any cost.

And to fill in the picture, we also increasingly have the right to choose the kind of child we will have. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) allows parents to select only embryos without genetic predispositions to various genetic diseases. For instance, recently for the first time the UK allowed parents to use PGD to select only embryos that will not carry a genetic predisposition to breast cancer – and to discard embryos that have the gene, even though they have a 20-50 percent chance of never having breast cancer at all. PGD has also been used by midget parents to have midget children, and by deaf parents to have deaf children. And of course, parents have used PGD to select "savior siblings" whose tissues may be used after birth to cure their ill brothers or sisters.

Who will stop the madness? Perhaps only a rising tide of the children themselves. In a "me first" society, adults seem too busy pursuing their own desires to care much for their children's rights and needs. But through lawsuits like the one started by Olivia Pratten, the children are forcing adults and governments to take notice. The myth that "love is all you need" needs to fall, and it might take the children themselves to cut it down, through their own bitter testimony and experience.

BY: Lea Singh graduated from Harvard Law School in 2003. She works for a nonprofit organization in Ottawa, Canada.

Seal pup silliness

Regulations are piled upon regulations in Canada about killing seal pups, but there is no law about abortion.

Maybe I should make a New Year's resolution to avoid spending so much time following the news, in order to help me cultivate a more cheerful disposition. Reading the newspaper can often be an exercise in discouragement, not just because of the actual contents but also because of the relative importance given to news items and the types of items that happen to be published simultaneously. We shake our heads as we note full page stories with accompanying colour photos of the Jolie-Pitts appearing in the same editions as tiny articles picked up from the wire services about families left homeless after a house fire, or death tolls from famine.

Earlier this month a letter to the editor of our local paper caught my eye. Its author, who was both a mother and a pet owner, objected to the way two different crimes had been covered on the same day. I well remembered the newspaper page she was describing. One story told of a cat that had died as a result of terrible abuse. It took up at least one third of a page in the paper and included a photo of and interview with the grieving owner. Taking up a fraction of this space on the same page was the story of a three month-old infant who died one month after being admitted to hospital with a head injury. The letter pointed out that the suspicious death of a baby should merit at least as much if not more outraged media coverage than the abuse and death of a cat.

No doubt it is difficult to obtain interviews and photographs where an abused child is concerned, in large part because of laws governing the privacy of individuals and families. In this case, the infant had been apprehended by child welfare authorities soon after her admittance to hospital, and the infant's mother was legally, at the age of seventeen, a minor. Still, there was an indignant tone to the cat story, not only because of the space it was allotted but also because it included quotes expressing the justifiable sadness and shock of the community. There was no such tone, no such space, and no such quote solicited by the reporter who covered the baby's suspected abuse and subsequent death. I sincerely hope it's because the reporter chose not to use quotes from the community, or that he did but his editor didn't. Either of these two explanations would be preferable to the worst -- that the community just couldn't summon up any real outrage over a tiny little girl meeting such a terrible, premature end.

Two more contrasting articles in the National Post made me wonder if we really have reached the point where the worst explanation above is in fact the most plausible. On the one hand was a Post article about an amendment to government regulations (in response to international protest) meant to ensure the humane slaughter of seals in the annual hunt that takes place in Newfoundland and Labrador. And on the other hand was an article reporting how our current prime minister has no intention of re-opening the abortion debate or introducing any bills that mention gestational limits (Canada has not had any such limits on abortion since 1988, when existing abortion laws were struck down by our supreme court).

Just let that sink in for a minute. My country has rule upon rule governing the seal hunt (the length of the season, the minimum age for a seal to be harvested, the manner in which they are killed, bled and skinned), and no law governing abortion. Do you think it would have helped the pro-life cause if Sir Paul McCartney had helicoptered on to an ice floe with his soon-to-be-ex-wife to wag his finger at Canada because of the number of abortions performed here each year instead of because of the seal hunt? Of course I'm not arguing against sealing regulations or for the wanton slaughter of animals. I'm not even necessarily arguing in favour of the hunt itself. But it is worth noting that the hunt is in support of human beings -– those rural populations who derive a small income from not only the pelts but also from the oil and meat. Whether other industries should be encouraged instead is a subject for another article. The fact remains, however, that unborn Canadian children are treated with less consideration than Canadian seal pups.

It's not only seal pups that get more consideration. Canadian MP Rod Bruinooge, chair of the multi-party pro-life caucus, points out that the rules governing organ donation mean that even Canadian kidneys get more consideration than Canadian embryos. Bruinooge's op-ed was actually in the same edition of the paper as the previous two articles I've mentioned. A daily newspaper, both national and local, really can give us a snapshot of ourselves as a society. Sometimes it's not such a flattering picture. But we can take heart when people like Roy Bruinooge say, this time in a Globe and Mail article about the pro-life caucus, "The bottom line is that people like myself are not going to stop until, at the very least, unborn children have more value than a Canadian kidney." Now that's a New Year's resolution.

BY: Michelle Martin writes from Hamilton, Toronto.

Walking in a demographic winter wonderland

Why are people averting their eyes from the coming collapse of population growth?

Demographic Winter is an independently produced film describing the consequences of the population collapse of industrialized countries. I have been amazed at the response, or I should say, lack of response to this film. Many of the reviewers either dismissed the thesis of the film, or changed the subject. The lack of serious American attention is surprising, considering that Demographic Winter has been translated in several languages, most recently, Romanian. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed as one of the experts for Part II, as yet to be released.) Commentators Left and Right are wandering through a Demographic Winter Wonderland with their eyes glazed over.

The film argues that falling population will mean a diminished quality of life for the aging generation and for future generations. For instance, pensions, both private and public, have to be paid for. When the retired population is too high relative to the working population, paying the promised pensions becomes an enormous burden. Either the young pay crushing taxes, or the elderly will not get what they expected, or both.

Consumer spending keeps the economy humming and the stock market climbing. When population shrinks, the demand for goods and services of all kinds shrinks. Harry Dent, one of the experts interviewed on the film, is an investment advisor. He discovered the significance of population growth by accident. He had a chart showing birth rates over a hundred year period on his desk next to a chart showing the stock market over the same period. He laid them over each other and realized that the stock market tracks birth rates with about a 40 year lag. That is because people spend the most money in their 40s. They buy the biggest house they’ll ever have; they feed, clothe and educate their children; they buy cars and vacations.

I have been thinking about Harry Dent and his charts while I drive through my San Diego neighborhood. Out of 42 homes, we have 4 foreclosures. Yes, the housing prices ballooned up and people took on mortgages they couldn’t pay. But there is more to the story than the credit crunch: there simply are not enough people at the right age, with enough income, to afford these houses. Because the Baby Boomers didn’t replace themselves, there are not enough people to buy their homes. Falling demand translates into falling home prices.

The Chattering Classes can not bring themselves to take the Demographic Winterthesis seriously. The Left dismisses it as a hysterical racist rant. Kathryn Joyce, writing in the Nation magazine, reports on her conversation with Stephen Mosher. "Mosher, president of the Catholic anticontraception lobbyist group (cue scary music) Population Research Institute (PRI), describes his grim vision of Europe's future: fields will lie fallow and economies will wither. A great depression will sink over the continent as it undergoes ‘a decline that Europe hasn't experienced since the Black Death.’"

Joyce never refutes Mosher’s argument that population decline precedes economic decline. Instead, she changes the subject to something she wants to talk about: the alleged racism of pro-natalists. "The white Christian West, in this telling, is in danger of forfeiting itself through sheer lack of numbers to an onslaught of Muslim immigrants and their purportedly numerous offspring."

Oddly enough, the Demographic Winter film makes no mention of race or nationality. In fact, the film emphasizes that the problem of population decline is a worldwide problem. Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker notes that 70 countries now have fertility rates below replacement. The left-wing commentariat would like the film to be about race, so they can dismiss it as unworthy of attention.

Representing the Libertarian Right, we have Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine. He likewise makes no pretense of engaging the actual argument of the film: "I doubt that the "demographic winter" portends economic collapse or social deterioration, but let us set that aside for this column, and instead ask why people are choosing to have fewer children?" He wants to talk about how the modern world has given men and women more choices, which is a good thing.

His libertarian instincts blind him to the fact that the Invisible Hand does not always promote the social good. Having children may be optional for individuals, but it is not optional for society as a whole. The principles of individual liberty and personal choice that he holds dear are not self-sustaining. Those ideals will collapse, if the people who hold them do not transmit them to the next generation. In this case, we are not even creating a next generation.

As I mentioned, the producers of Demographic Winter interviewed me to appear in Part II. The producers happen to be Mormons. They told me that they had anticipated more interest in the film from church groups of all kinds. But in fact, only Catholics and their fellow Mormons seem receptive.

This is not entirely surprising, in that these two groups have theological reasons for supporting larger families. But still, churches and all of civil society, ought to take the argument of Demographic Winter seriously.

By: Jennifer Roback Morse, PhD is an economist and the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to bringing hope and encouragement for lifelong married love.

Children want to ban divorce

If they could make the rules for the world, the first thing British kids would do is ban divorce. That is what under-10s said in a poll conducted for the country’s fourth National Kids’ Day. It is the first time divorce has topped the list of things children would like to make rules about if they were king or queen of the world. From other list of items children chose marital splits as the second worst thing in the world -- the first was being fat, which has come up from ninth place in 2006. The very best thing in the world was “good looks”.

Bullying was another big issue for children and behaviour that they would ban. About two-thirds of the 1600 youngsters said they were happy, but 27 were not and a further 7 per cent were not sure. Nearly all had a best friend who was kind, many of them because they were “in love”.

The survey questioned the children about marriage: over 80 per cent thought they would marry when they grew up -- although 17 per cent gave a definite “no” on the subject; 66 per cent wanted to have children -- most stopping at one or two.

Patricia Murchie of Luton First, the group that did the research, remarked on the “pre-teens” concerns about looks and weight, which possibly reflected media images of glamour, and new educational initiatives in nutrition and healthy eating.

~ From the Telegraph (UK), Dec 14

A reform-minded education secretary?

Barack Obama's choice for education secretary offers hope for a change in America's schools.

Would Chicago Public School CEO Arne Duncan make a good secretary of education? There are reasons to wonder if President-elect Barack Obama's nominee is the right candidate for the job. But there are other signs that he may indeed make the grade.

Duncan is one of several innovative, reform-minded, big-city school chiefs. He recognizes the need for local leadership and innovation. And he supports amending federal policy to grant states greater flexibility and autonomy.

Yet given his support for sharp federal spending increases, it's unclear how well Duncan would translate local lessons to the federal level.

What is clear is that Duncan's past work has earned applause from school reformers. He supports charter schools, public school choice, and merit pay for teachers and school leaders. Duncan also supports holding schools accountable for results and maintaining transparency about school performance through public reporting.

In his words, Duncan's mission has been to make Chicago "the premier urban school system in America." And his leadership appears to be making a difference, with Chicago students making gains on a number of outcome measures.

Of course, the big question is what the next education secretary thinks about No Child Left Behind and the federal government's role in education.

Duncan supports NCLB. But as the leader of the nation's third-largest school district, he also has dealt with the challenges of implementing that law. Those of us who are skeptical that Washington can fix our nation's public-school problem should be encouraged by Duncan's support for providing states and school districts with greater flexibility and autonomy.

Testifying before the House Education and Workforce Committee in 2006, Duncan spoke approvingly of NCLB's accountability framework. But he noted that Chicago's success depended largely on the opportunity to innovate in how federal goals are met:

"Congress should maintain NCLB's framework of high expectations and accountability. But it should also amend the law to give schools, districts and states the maximum amount of flexibility possible _ particularly districts like ours with a strong track record of academic achievement and tough accountability."

This suggests that Duncan may be open to the proposals like the A-PLUS Acts, which grant states greater autonomy and flexibility in how funds are used if states agree to maintain academic accountability and transparency.

As the leader of a big-city school system, Duncan surely appreciates that it takes leadership on the ground to improve a public-school system. It would be a breath of fresh air if the next secretary recognized the limits of federal power and worked to reform NCLB to empower local leadership.

Duncan's experience in Illinois should also cause him to recognize some of the dangers of federally driven accountability. NCLB's arbitrary deadline that all students be scoring "proficient" on state tests by 2014 has created a perverse incentive for states to weaken state standards to demonstrate artificial progress on state tests. The Land of Lincoln appears to be a leader in the so-called "race to the bottom."

Researchers Paul Peterson and Rick Hess have been tracking national trends in state standards since 2005. They report that Illinois' standards have weakened between 2003 and 2007. Only 8 states had weaker standards than Illinois. Ending perverse federal incentives to lower standards should be a priority for any NCLB reauthorization.

In one key area, Duncan appears to be singing the traditional liberal tune: He supports sharp increases in federal funding for education. In his 2006 congressional testimony, he urged Congress to double funding for NCLB over five years, calling it "the best long-term investment Congress can make."

Unfortunately, the data show that Duncan deserves a failing grade here. Decades of increased federal expenditures have yielded little improvement in student performance. After adjusting for inflation, federal spending per pupil has tripled since the 1970s. But long-term test scores have remained relatively flat.

Since spending on NCLB has already grown by nearly 50 percent since 2001, the next education secretary may have difficulty explaining why pouring another $24 billion into the nation's school systems will provide the answer _ especially in the context of the ballooning budget deficit.

In the days ahead, we will be learning a lot more about Arne Duncan's views on education policy. But it's encouraging that he has demonstrated leadership in local school reform and supports giving states and school districts greater flexibility from federal regulation to encourage innovation.

If he successfully pushes that, he could wind up getting a solid report card from parents across the country.

By:Dan Lips is a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. This article appears courtesy of the Heritage Foundation.

The educational reform we need most

Smarter teachers? More parental involvement? More computers? Better assessment? Healthier lunches? Nope. Try harder-working kids.

School reform has become a real yawner. Even in the face of falling test scores, the exodus of the best and brightest teachers and employers’ anguished complaints about school graduates, the topic just seems to cause eyes to roll. The school reform debate is a revolving merry-go-round of predictable topics: hire better teachers, get parents more involved, have longer school years, longer school days, year-round schooling, more computers, more assessment, better teacher education. And round and round the arguments go.

Underlying all the reform talk is the educational blame-game. We don’t have the right teachers; get rid of the teachers’ unions; we’re teaching the wrong stuff, it’s a curriculum problem; we don’t have enough computers and technological support; parents are unsupportive and uninvolved; and that the hearty "money" perennial, the public is stingy and trying to do education on-the-cheap. What is missing from discussions of educational reform is the real problem, the elephant in the school house: the kids.

American children are, by and large, a mess. Their embarrassing academic performance in school (i. e., achievement scores in math and science) is only one indicator among many. In a recent survey, 64 percent admitting to cheating and 30 percent to stealing. Boys (35 percent) a little more than girls (26 percent). The same large-scale survey revealed that one in five has stolen from a friend and 23 percent have robbed from their own family! Well over half of our high school seniors are already sexually active, giving the US the highest rates in the developed world of illegitimate births and sexually transmitted diseases. One primary reason why American businesses have gone overseas is that young Americans don’t have a clue about how to put in a day’s work.

Of course, this is not accurate for all American youth. Approximately 15 percent of our children have used their educational opportunities and achieved some resemblance of mature adulthood. They have some semblance of self-discipline and know how to set goals and even how to achieve them. The great majority, however, are unskilled, unmotivated and unready for the harsh economic realities of the 21st Century which are rapidly closing in on them.

Honey, I spoiled the kids

It is, of course, bad form to blame the children. But, let’s face it. They are the ones who don’t do their homework, who have the work ethic of a slug. They are the one who come to school primarily to socialize with their friends, and whose idea of a tough day is when the batteries on their iPod run out. They are the ones whose idea of teacher harassment is being asked a questions, such as, "How come you’re late for class again?" Or worse, being given homework over the weekend. They are the ones whose deepest sense of human injustice is having the privacy to their lockers violated. They are the ones whose life horizon stretches to that blessed day when they get their own wheels. Or, perhaps, to getting away to college where the real party-hearty time begins.

This is not an allegation that our children are born defective. Or that the genetic material we send off to school is somehow substandard. Our homes and schools have pretty much the same stuff to work with as Finnish or Indian or Taiwanese homes and schools. Then why the glaring differences?

The problem is our children are addicted to pleasure. They have become the new Lotus Eaters. Over the last forty years, young Americans have drifted along in a corrupting culture that has made few demands on them. They wallow in a wrap-around world of instant gratification. They have no chores or work at home and no parents teaching them how to self-discipline themselves and how to work. Once they reach the age of, say, twelve or grow over five feet tall, teachers have little or no authority over them. Since school failure has so few consequences, kids can sink to whatever level they choose and still hang around in school to be with their friends.

Americans have evolved a unique children-raising process, based on the pleasure-principle. Parents are eager dispensers of happiness and strain to be their children’s best friends. Teachers have been reduced to nurturing guides, devoid of real clout. This youth culture of low expectations simply isn’t working. Children aren’t built for pleasure. They are built for challenges and growth.

If one thinks that the 21^st Century will, indeed, bring on the Age of Aquarius and that America will be leading the world into a renewed Land of Milk and Honey, we can keep on fueling our kids’ pleasure addictions. If we think that the Post WWII era was a unique period of prosperity and now the rest of the world is aggressively competing with us for their share of the pie, then we need to rethink what we are doing with our children.

Parenting vacation time over

If there is one truism about our species, it is that human beings are adaptable to our surroundings. Our cultural surroundings are, however, made, and, as such, they can be unmade. History is filled with accounts of nations picking themselves off the floor and regaining greatness. We can make the culture our children need in order to grow and flourish. The places to start the cultural change are the home and the school.

Parents have to return from their prolonged vacation. We can’t outsource the raising of our children to their peer group, social agencies, or the media. This means a change in parental behavior and a change of goals. It means eyes off the TV and the golf ball and onto the world of our children. We need to reengage with our children on a very basic level, as in "I’m in charge until you are ready to go out on your own."

Once upon a time, before our romantic, progressive ideas about human nature starting dictating our parenting policies, the word "training" was synonymous with being a parent. We looked upon children as young animals needing to be trained how to think and behave. This cultural wisdom was everywhere in phrases like, "As the twig is bent, so the tree inclines." Practically, it means parents demonstrating, correcting, encouraging and, yes, punishing. Figuratively and literally, it means being "hands-on" parents.

Schools need a similar sharp change in direction. It goes without saying that parents should have the opportunity to be able to select the type of school they believe is best for their particular children. Little will change in our schools until the public school behemoth is forced by competition to improve. However, almost all schools need a shift in direction. Instead of catering to "where the student is," schools should focus on where the student should be. If educators are not ready to identify what a graduate should know (that is, a serious, no-nonsense curriculum) and, more importantly, what kind of person he or she be, then they don’t deserve the name "educator." But clear goals are not enough. We have to return the teacher’s authority that is central to education. No more toothless teachers or Jon Stewart wannabees masquerading as educators.

We need schools that have a strong culture, a culture have clear expectations for how people should behave. This means sensible rules and clear consequences. These in turn guide behavior. If some students cannot yet exist within a school culture, then they should be removed and placed in another, one with a stronger carrot-and-stick culture. If the handful of hardcore resisters need an educational Devil’s Island, then so be it. Teachers and administrators and school board members cannot continue to allow undisciplined, attention-getters to set the educational tone of a school.

Clearly, Americans are heading into rough economic waters. The relaxed spirit of the 1980s and 90s, which has lead to our passive, but indulgent child raising must go. We must pry our children from their pleasure addictions and get them ready for the new realities. If history has taught us anything it is that it is cruel to the pleasure-addicted.

Kevin Ryan founded the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, where he is professor emeritus. He has written and edited 20 books. He has appeared recently on CBS's "This Morning", ABC's "Good Morning America", "The O’Reilly Factor", CNN and the Public Broadcasting System speaking on character education. He can be reached at kryan@bu.edu

Gays angered by Pope’s stand on ecology

If we don't trash the physical environment, do we have a right to trash the moral environment?

If nominations for the best bright idea of 2008 are still open, I’m voting for Pope Benedict XVI’s  “ecology of man”. It goes without saying that this will not pass unchallenged. His intriguing suggestion surfaced in a speech to his staff a couple of days before Christmas -- and instantly the gay lobby had conniptions.

An Anglican priest in London, Giles Fraser, founder of the pro-gay Inclusive Church movement, told the London Times: “I thought the Christmas angels said, ‘Fear not’. Instead, the Pope is spreading fear that gay people somehow threaten the planet. And that’s just absurd. As always, this sort of religious homophobia will be an alibi for all those who would do gay people harm.”

What did the Pope actually say?

He was discrete, but it doesn't take much to read between the lines. He said that the Church had a duty to “protect Man from destroying himself”. The Church “ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself” by gender-bending. True, it was a critique of homosexuality, but it was not based on the yuck factor or even primarily on the Bible.

He did not intend to insult gays, either. Even the gay Australian writer David Marr acknowledged that. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, he scolded his over-sensitive buddies: “But poofs who love the planet more than themselves should acknowledge the pontiff was onto something here: not just saving homosexuals from their ‘own destruction’ but announcing a new role for the church defending ‘the earth, water, air, as gifts of the creation that belongs to all of us’”.

Marr’s reaction suggests that the notion that man is part of the ecological web could be fruitful and persuasive. It could, in fact, lead to a better understanding of why homosexuality is wrong and a violation of human dignity.

But to grasp why, you have to read the original text,not just scraps from jaded Vatican journos. These were not just off-the-cuff remarks. Instead, they represent a consistent theme in Benedict’s teaching: that because nature has been created by God, it is rational, orderly and ultimately comprehensible. Hence it is possible to carry on a rational dialogue with people like David Marr.

This is an idea that Benedict visits again and again, and it is very similar to his critique of Islam in his Regensburg address a couple of years ago. In that controversial speech he declared that "The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby."

In his Christmas speech, Benedict plays the same tune. Human bodies, having been created by God, are evidence for an authentic sexual morality: “The fact that the earth, the cosmos, mirror the Creator Spirit, clearly means that their rational structures which, transcending the mathematical order, become almost palpable in our experience, bear within themselves an ethical orientation.” If the biology of male and female sexuality are complementary, there must be an ultimate reason for it. A rational person searches for that reason and draws ethical conclusions.

He also appeals to a principle that now seems self-evident, at least in the Western world: that we trash the environment at our peril. Why? Because “the earth is not simply our possession which we can plunder according to our interests and desires. It is rather a gift of the Creator who has designed its intrinsic laws and with this has given us the basic directions for us to adhere as stewards of his creation.”

Man, even though he has a spiritual element, is part of this ecology. He may not – he cannot – reshape himself without risking his own destruction, just as abusing the atmosphere, the earth or the sea could lead to catastrophe.

“When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysics. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him.”

Admittedly, this will not be easy for supporters of homosexuality to accept. What they feel is that biology is less important than the longings of the heart, or the desire to conquer and manipulate nature. They are unwitting disciples of Francis Bacon, the English Renaissance philosopher who argued that the destiny of science and technology was to remake and triumph over nature. In his recent encyclical Spe Salvi, Benedict treated Bacon as an important figure, whose naïve enthusiasm for scientific progress ended up justifying the terrifying and destructive potential of modern technology. Not long ago Bacon was worshipped as a visionary thinker, but contemporary philosophers are less complimentary. They regard him as a forerunner of Western science’s continuing legacy of alienation, exploitation, and ecological oppression. Someday, the Pope hints, we will realise that the gay culture is just an extension of this.

The inescapable fact of human existence is that we are both rational and animal. As W.B. Yeats put it in one of his great poems, we live “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”. Even if our reason transcends it, we are as much part of the ecology as beetles and sea gulls. We can no more defy the laws of nature than they can.

Will the Pope's brief words, just a couple of dense paragraphs actually, convince people that homosexuality is “unnatural”? Absolutely not. But they could spark a realisation that it is inconsistent to demand respect for the laws of ecology with the single exception of man himself. When that philosophy was adopted by the Industrial Revolution, it turned forests into deserts, fields into wastelands and seas into stagnant ponds. Benedict wants us to see that the Sexual Revolution could do much the same.

By: Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet

An indulgence of adult desires

Surrogate motherhood isn't about forming families; it is about satisfying adult desires.

Nothing like the Christmas season to remind us how selfish and adult-centred we should be.

No, you’re right. That doesn’t sound very good.

I have been struggling for a while now to come up with a good logical reason why I dislike stories about surrogate motherhood like this one (requires free registration to the New York Times website). In “Her Body, My Baby,” New York City writer/socialite Alex Kuczynski tells the often heart-wrenching story of how she went from wanting a baby to having a baby. It’s a journey most people go through reasonably straightforwardly but in her case it involved no end of medical complications, ultimately resolved by cutting-edge science, tens of thousands of dollars, and a spare womb inside a 43-year-old Pennsylvania substitute schoolteacher.

You should read the article for yourself, when you’re in the mood and have a good cup of coffee handy. It is very long but also very detailed, and remarkably honest for a woman famous for having written a book about plastic surgery.

I should state at the outset that I sympathize with Ms. Kuczynski’s desire to be a mother and with the pain her own inability to carry a child to term therefore caused her. I also wish to keep an open mind about the surrogate mother, Cathy, and her expressed desire to be “needed in a profound, unique way.” I admit I don’t get it (pregnancy and childbirth for the pure altruistic fun of it?), but I accept it as presented. And most importantly, I do not want to imply that Max, Ms. Kuczynski’s son, did not deserve to live. His conduct is blameless. And he’s here now, so let’s leave him out of the story. But it is possible to approve of an end and still disapprove of the means.

The question here is, why does surrogate motherhood make many of us recoil? Even so-called “gestational surrogacy,” where the surrogate mother did not contribute her egg to the equation, which is the sort Ms. Kuczynski had. In this kind of assisted pregnancy the child that emerges from the surrogate mother is the biological offspring of the parents who will raise him. He has no genetic connection to his “host mother”. The woman who carries him and nurtures him in utero and goes through the pain of childbirth for him must give him up – for, after all, he is not hers.

There’s something very wrong about that. The question is, what?

Yes, the objective is to produce a child, which is good. Yes, all people involved participate voluntarily, which is good. Yes, the surrogate mother, who agreed to the arrangement, is well looked after medically and is compensated financially for her services. It does not sound like exploitation. But it is.

When the prospective parents look for a suitable candidate, they look at her reproductive history, her health, her family situation, and all manner of personal details. Even if you agree to put yourself on the rent-a-womb block, the fact remains that selecting a candidate based on her breeding record is, at the very least, crass objectifying. I’m re-reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin these days, and I can’t help seeing images of potential buyers examining the “merchandise” by looking into its mouth. Yes, its.

“Whoa, honey! Check out the size of that uterus!”

Not very dignified.

Sometimes I envy religious folks. They seem to have such a clearer view of what’s right and what’s not. For instance, the Vatican just released Dignitas Personae, a set of guidelines for the modern bio-ethics age. It reasserts that “any form of surrogate motherhood” is “illicit”.

The reasons are outlined in an earlier document, Donum Vitae:

“Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.”

Basically, the Church appears to think that the only morally licit way to produce children is via the conjugal act between man and wife. Who knew the crusty old moralists were so keen on the fun part?

It’s all fine and good to be against offending the dignity of a child. And certainly one can object, with current techniques, to how assisted reproduction treats the other children: the discarded “superfluous” embryos, those left behind in the Petri dishes, the ones frozen and never thawed, and the ones conceived with donor gametes who will never know their genetic history. It’s also quite fine to promote conjugal fidelity and happy, fruitful marriages. But surrogacy doesn’t have to involve unfaithfulness or unhappiness. And it’s not quite enough to explain my reaction against surrogate motherhood.

No. What bothers me most about it is that it is part of a wider culture that promotes and aggressively encourages anything that lets adults indulge their every whim and fancy. On any given day, countless women go for an abortion while countless others go through invasive assisted reproductive techniques while other women wait to have their uterus chosen to carry someone else’s precious embryo or their ovaries plucked so they can sell their eggs. The only moral standard here is that whatever I want is right, and must be mine. It is not possible to build a coherently decent society on such a basis.

Methinks it’s also not a very grown-up way to behave.

By: Brigitte Pellerin is a writer and broadcaster based in Ottawa.

Photo Credit: karindalziel via Flickr

Titanic China has an appointment with an iceberg

The headlines proclaim China's growing financial power. But its ageing population may scupper its ambitions.

China Rises, the blog of Beijing correspondent of McClatchy Newspapers, Tim Johnson, has a post on China's Ageing Population that points to a 30 second dynamic graphic that shows the ageing bulge moving through the population over time from 1950 to 2050. By then 31 percent of the population, or some 400 million people, will be aged over 60.

China Rises says the graphic "will give you a quicker idea of the changes looming on the horizon for China" – the declining ratio of the working age population to retirees. To appreciate the change consider that in 1950 the ageing population comprised around 6 percent of the total while those of working age made up slightly less than 50 percent of the total. By the 50 year mark (2000), the aged stood at just under 10 percent of the total while the working population stood at just under 60 percent. However, by 2050 the working age population will be at just under 50 percent of the total, compared with 31 percent of the ageing population.

This change is the result of two things: improved mortality rates (folks are living longer thanks to better healthcare) and the one-child family policy.

Let’s do the maths. In 1950 there were roughly 8.3 working age people to every person over 60. But by 2050 there will 1.6 working people to every aged person. The future family structure in China will be four grandparents, two adult children, and one very hard-working grandchild. Scary stuff, indeed.

These changes are going to place a huge strain on the Chinese economic and social system. In fact, an American doctor, Joseph Flaherty, who studied the situation with the help of Chinese colleagues, wrote in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society last year that: "Few countries in the world have faced such challenges, at the level of a potential crisis, for their elderly as China is beginning to face".

First is the issue of how China will fund the pension system necessary to take care of all these retirees – 400 million people is larger than the current combined populations of the United States and Canada. With such a small working age population, it’s not going to be easy to feed, clothe and house the elderly. The West was fortunate: Europe and the US first became rich, and then they grew old. Most people in China, however, will grow old before they grow rich.

Second, a large aged population is going to place incredible pressure on an already overburdened healthcare system. Retirement villages and nursing homes have not been a strong feature of Chinese culture because, even today, many Chinese take it as a family responsibility to care for elderly relatives. But in the future there will be increasing demands for these services to be outsourced. Additionally, more medicines for the ailments of ageing populations will be required.

While Western companies involved in the management of retirement villages and nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies may be rubbing their hands with glee, the rest of us might want to pause to consider the unthinkable.

Suppose the working age population, who have grown up without siblings, indulged by their doting parents and grandparents, opt not to take care of their ageing relatives in the future. After all, who says the West has a monopoly on granny-dumping? Cultural conditions that demanded people take care of the old and infirmare already weakening in today’s China. Thanks to 60 years of Communism, many people see it as the State’s obligation to care for the poor, the elderly and the sick, rather than their own.

Will the State be able to take up the slack? How can it, if fewer people are paying taxes?

And, as China’s median age rises, it might even face rising labour shortages in the future that would exacerbate its economic problems. The country may find it harder to attract foreign investment and its huge cache of foreign reserves will soon be whittled away as it spend its way through crisis after crisis.

In my experience, many crises occur because people, corporations or governments fail to take evasive action even when they are clearly heading straight at an iceberg. Consider the current global financial crisis. There was ample warning. Had regulators done their job properly or financial institutions followed sound principles of financial management it would not have happened.

China is clearly on a collision course with the iceberg of demographic winter. It’s time for its leaders to stop shuffling the deck chairs. The one-child family policy is one article of faith that the Chinese Government should reconsider. It would be best to do so sooner rather than later.

By: Constance Kong is the pen name of a Shanghai-based business consultant.