Car seat belts and AIDS in Africa

What have those two things got to do with each other? Still thinking? Well, this month’s Smithsonian magazine has the answer.

It is 50 years since the invention of the three-point car seat belt by Nils Bohlin for the Volvo company -- possibly the most effective safety device ever. Experts estimate that it has saved at least a million lives and spared millions of others life-altering injuries -- or has it? An analysis conducted in the US in 1975 concluded that while federal auto-safety standards had saved the lives of some vehicle occupants, they had also led to the deaths of pedestrians, cyclists and other non-occupants. A study of seat belts in the UK in 1981 found there was no overall decrease in highway fatalities.

The explanation for these counter-intuitive results seems to be that when drivers feel safer in their vehicles they take more risks. Behavioural scientists call it “risk compensation” and trace it to an inbuilt human tolerance for risk. Skydivers leave it too late to use their improved ripcords; people move back in to flood plains reassured by subsidised insurance and disaster relief; children who wear protective sports equipment engage in rougher play; and enhanced HIV treatment can lead to riskier sexual behaviour.

Responsible scientists and health workers know that the big hole in the condoms-against-AIDS campaign is this very human tendency to follow our impulses when we feel it is safe -- rather than good or responsible -- to do so. For every advance in “protection” or treatment of HIV there will be a compensating tendency to take more risks. That is why no major HIV-AIDS epidemic has been curtailed by condoms, but only by behavioural change -- chiefly, a reduction in partners.

Unfortunately, some psychologists push the concept of risk compensation too far, claiming that humans have an automatic risk setting (“risk homeostasis”) that needs external manipulation to be re-set. It’s then up to society or employers and so on to reward safe behaviour and thus turn the risk thermostat down. But this merely infantilises people, or treats them like animals, ignoring the human capacity for self-restraint. Risk-taking is a positive element in human behaviour -- civilisation depends on people who dare a lot -- but only when kept in check by a moral code, in which case it becomes virtue.

Article by: Carolyn Moynihan

Bleak stories behind failed condom campaigns

Before blanketing the continent with condoms to stop AIDS, why don't you live in rural Africa for a while?

Sub-Saharan Africa has two-thirds of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases. So you would think that Western journalists and politicians might condescend to ask us what we think about how to fight AIDS. But they haven’t. A pity, because they would have found that many of us support Pope Benedict XVI’s scepticism about the effectiveness of distributing condoms.


A few days ago, The Lancet, a leading British medical journal which regularly pontificates about public health, slammed the Pope for making “a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people”. I wonder if the editor of The Lancet has ever visited rural areas of Nigeria, (Kenya) or South Africa. If he did, he would begin to see why fighting AIDS with condoms is like extinguishing a fire with petrol.


First of all, many rural Africans are illiterate and proper use of condoms cannot be relied upon. In any case, many men think that it compromises sexual pleasure. “Would you eat sweets with a wrapper on?” is a common objection. Secondly, social organisation in rural Africa is quite unlike sedate suburban life in Sussex, or wherever the editor of The Lancet lives. In villages here there is often a low standard of moral behaviour. Men don’t get married but they do want children, so using condoms does not even come into their minds. They sleep with whomever they like until they are very old and need someone to cook for them. A man might be sleeping with six different women in a year. And the women often don’t mind whether a man will marry them or not.


Day to day life is unlike the West. The huts are open and at night there is no electricity to supply light. Anything can happen. Thus rape of children as young as six is not uncommon. As most of these go unreported, the aggressors go scot-free. Even when the rapist is known, nothing much is done. In South Africa, which has some of the highest rates of AIDS in the continent, researchers claim that half a million women are raped each year. Journalist speak of a “rape epidemic”. More than a quarter of all the females can expect to be raped at least once in their life, even in infancy. Half of the victims are under 18. It is hard to get hard figures, because most attacks go unreported. Tell me, how do you persuade a rapist to use condoms?
If condoms are so effective why is HIV still on the increase in Africa?

One factor is certainly that people with condoms are emboldened to take more risks. Part of the counselling of people living with AIDS is “try not to spread it” -- in a word, to live abstinence. But before they got the disease they were told “hey, no need to curtail your libido, just use condoms.” If personal control is not achieved before contracting HIV/AIDS it is often impossible afterwards. I overhead a chilling conversation once of a boy planning to sleep with a girl. “What if she has AIDS?” his friend asked. “Well then, I have seven years to live and I will enjoy myself to the limit,” he replied.
There are even more basic obstacles. Many villagers are unschooled and know little about modern science. Poisoning or sorcery is suspected when people fall ill. Western medicine is often seen as a last resort after traditional healers have failed. So doctors find it difficult to explain to HIV/AIDS patients the cause of their illness. It is not uncommon for them to go to their graves with the stubborn belief that an enemy cast a spell on them. The more serious and "treatment defying" an illness is, the more it confirms the malignant power of the sorcerer.

Villages are often cut off from distribution networks for goods and services because of difficult terrain. You can’t jump into your car and make a midnight trip to the pharmacist to buy a packet of condoms. In fact, you might be cut off from condom suppliers for weeks at a time. One doctor related to me a typical example. A youth in a village explained why he did not use condoms with his girl: “well, I had to convince and convince, and when she finally said yes, I could not risk going outside to buy condoms since she might change her mind before I came back.”


And people are not just careless, they are ashamed. Here’s another story from the same doctor. A woman came to him for an antenatal check of her second child (the first was a year old). She discovered that she was HIV positive. She was terrified of what her husband would do to her. The doctors called the husband and tried to break the news gently. To their amazement he told them that he was HIV positive and had been on treatment for over a year -- without telling his wife. Why? “Well, someone gave it to me,” he said. Many infected people deliberately spread the disease, thinking; “I can’t be the only one. Since someone gave me the disease, I will give it to someone else.”


Plus, there are other means of transmission of AIDS which are unfamiliar in the West. One treatment you will not find in Cleveland is medical scarification. A traditional healer in a village will make an incision over the affected area to discharge fluid or blood. The healer uses the same implement to cut different people, leading to the spread of HIV/AIDS and other infections. Traditional scarification for aesthetic or cultural reasons also exists and is no more hygienic.
It is true that in rural Africa HIV/AIDS spreads mainly through heterosexual relationships. But it is also transmitted by intravenous drug users. African villagers prefer injected drugs to tablets because, so they think, it is better value for money. So the local chemists (who are seldom trained pharmacists) oblige them. Sometimes they save money by reusing syringes and not swabbing the skin with disinfectant. The resulting infections sometimes create huge abscesses.


The Pan African Health foundation (PAHF), a non -profit HIV/AIDS prevention charity, is building a factory in Nigeria with a capacity of 160 million syringes a year. This will supply  20 percent of Nigeria’s needs and, when fully operational, most of sub-Saharan Africa. Inexplicably, American and British foreign aid agencies which doled out lavish donations for condoms to fight HIV/AIDS were not interested in supporting the foundation. The local state government finally gave some funding.


UNAIDS, the international agency which coordinates research and treatment for AIDS around the world, is a strong supporter of condoms. Its official position is that: “The male latex condom is the single, most efficient, available technology to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.”
Note the stress on the word “technology”. The condom is just a technology. And technology is not much good for changing behaviour.
The West is addicted to technology as a substitute for free will and moral effort. If you eat too much, you get gastric banding surgery. If you’re depressed, you take Prozac. If you’re a smoker, you wear nicotine patches. Here in Africa, this fantasy has collided with the reality of the AIDS crisis. There is no technology to tame sexual desire. There is only self-restraint and faithfulness to your partner. These will eventually rein in AIDS; condoms won’t.


Article by: Chinwuba Iyizoba is an electrical engineer in Enugu, Nigeria

Excuse me, Madam Speaker

If Nancy Pelosi wants to save the American economy some money she needs to stop investing in irresponsible sex.

Nancy Pelosi made “stupid” history this week by her claim that “family planning” funds will stimulate the economy. Her argument, if you can dignify it with that term, is that reducing unwanted pregnancies will reduce the burden on taxpayers. But she doesn’t ask herself whether more contraception is really the answer to “unwanted” pregnancies

I recently had the opportunity to visit with some teen mothers in Reno, Nevada. Casa de Vida is a private, nonprofit corporation providing a home and support services for pregnant young women. The youngest was 14; the oldest was just 20. These are, presumably, the mothers whose pregnancies are expensive to the taxpayers. These young unmarried mothers need a variety of social services in order to take care of their babies. The Casa has a special classroom set up in their basement, so the girls can finish high school. Some will be unable to go back to their families for a variety of reasons and will need subsidized housing. Many take advantage of jobs training programs. And, of course, virtually none of them have their own health insurance, so the taxpayers pay for medical care for the mothers and babies. The social worker refers them to the public services for which they qualify.

I came at the invitation of some of the board members to talk with the girls about sex. Their social worker wanted me to help them think about having a plan for dealing with the desires they are sure to have for another relationship with a man. Neither I nor the social worker had any illusion that one chat in an afternoon will change the whole course of their lives. But we do hope that we gave them a few thoughts that will lodge in their brains when they need them later.

So we talked about their hopes and dreams for their babies. These young women want to be good mothers, and they want to be loved. Right now, they are focused on the immediate fact that their babies will be born soon. I tried to help them think about their futures beyond the birth of their babies. One day, they will be interested in boys again. Their social worker had told me that a) most of them won’t even consider adoption and b) most of them will be pregnant again within two years.

Talking with them helped me to see why the whole contraception approach to avoiding teen pregnancy is so hopeless. These girls get pregnant because they want to: they want to be loved by their boyfriends, and by their babies. Contraception is notoriously unreliable among teens. Even among women seeking abortions, who you might think would be especially motivated to avoid pregnancy, 53 per cent were using some form of contraception at the time they conceived. Passing out pills or promising abortions doesn’t deal with the underlying desires that are driving their behaviour.

Social worker Paula Crandall and Casa de Vida board member Kathleen Rossi told me that, sometimes, the Casa turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to the girls. Some of them are able to develop a sense of their own worth as persons. They get adult assistance in the ordinary problems of living, such as finishing high school, applying for jobs, looking for an apartment and so on. For some of them, the staff members at the Casa are the first adults who have taken a real interest in them, and who have the means to really help them with these basic skills. No amount of “comprehensive sex education” or “access to reproductive health” can meet these very deep-seated human needs.

If Nancy Pelosi wants to reduce the costs to taxpayers, she should be promoting marriage. Out-of-wedlock childbearing is one of the surest roads to poverty and, thereby, to taxpayer expenditure. A recent study by the Institute for American Values conservatively estimated the taxpayer costs of non-marital childbearing to be $112 billion per year, or roughly the GDP of New Zealand. Responsible, sustainable childbearing takes place within marriage. And, incidentally, if Speaker Pelosi really wants to reduce abortions (which she hinted at, but did not say) she should also be promoting marriage. Some 80 per cent of abortions, year in and year out, are performed on unmarried women.

Having babies and raising them to responsible adulthood is a significant social investment. If the family around the child breaks down or never forms in the first place, the odds of the child being raised to responsible adulthood are greatly reduced. These young girls are having babies not because their contraception has failed, not because they don’t know how to use contraception; they are having babies because they want to be loved. If Nancy Pelosi wants to save the taxpayer some money in the long run, she needs to stop investing in irresponsible sex, and start investing in responsible adult supervision and guidance of the young.

I’m not holding my breath.

Article by: Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute.

Demographic winter heralds same-sex marriage spring

The New England region is a sitting duck for the further de-construction of marriage.

Giv Jim Douglas AP Photo/Toby TalbotI would not like to be the governor of Vermont right now. But I must say the man who has the job is showing a lot of backbone in the face of a legislature on the brink of legalizing same-sex marriage. Vermont has had civil unions since 2000. This legal status for same sex couples is now deemed to be inadequate, which supposedly accounts for the decline in the number of civil unions. In 2001, the state granted 1,876 civil unions, compared with only 262 last year. The Vermont Senate has already approved the Freedom to Marry bill and Democrats in the House say they will vote for it on Friday. But Gov Jim Douglas says he will veto the measure if passed.

The gay rights movement has targeted New England for their “6 by 12” strategy of having same sex marriage in all six of the New England states by 2012. This strategy makes sense from their point of view. They already have same sex marriage in Massachusetts and Connecticut, by judicial fiat. In addition, New England is less religious than the rest of the country. And this is a region which has already given up on having babies as a viable way to create a future.

A priest from Vermont recently told me what it is like to minister in one of the least religious states in America. It has one of the highest proportions of the population who consider themselves “unaffiliated” with any religious tradition, at 26 per cent, compared with 16 per cent of the US population. Only 23 per cent of the Vermont population attends church services at least once a week, compared with 39 per cent of the general US population. The priest has had one wedding in the past year, and that was a couple in their fifties. He has perhaps one or two baptisms per year. It sounded rather grim, and a lot like Europe.

About the same time I happened to be reading P.D. James’ chilling novel, The Children of Men. That dystopian novel imagines what the world would be like if the entire human race became sterile. Since no one can have kids, marriage doesn’t mean much. Women lavish attention on child substitutes: they have elaborate christenings for cats and drive dolls around in baby carriages. Since no young people come into being, nothing new and energetic can really happen. People lose hope and reason for living as they age. With the exception of the cat christenings, it sounded a lot like the priest’s description of Vermont.

So this got me to thinking: what is Vermont’s demographic situation? Are they reproducing themselves?

Vermont has the lowest total fertility rate of any state in the union: 1.66 babies per woman. (Note: you have to click on the link for the excel file to see the birth rates.) While you’re looking at the table, please notice that the six New England states, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are in the “top ten” of the lowest total fertility rate states in the country. Not surprisingly, Vermont has a low population growth rate compared with the rest of the country: Vermont’s population grew 2 per cent between 2000 and 2007, while the entire country grew by 7.2 per cent over the same period.

None of these states are replacing themselves with births. All of them have net out-migration: more people left between 2006 and 2007 than moved into the New England states. See pages 5 and 6 here.

Taking this demographic malaise together with the general low religious practice, the whole region is a sitting duck for the further de-construction of marriage. And make no mistake: instituting same sex marriage amounts to the de-construction of marriage.

Natural, man woman marriage attaches fathers to their children, and mothers and fathers to each other. Redefining marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the union of any two persons jettisons three important principles: first, the principle that children are entitled to a relationship with both parents, second, the biological principle for determining parentage, and third, the principle that the state recognizes parentage, but does not assign it. Regular religious practice seems to inoculate people from believing that these principles are unimportant.

Sometimes the arguments over same sex marriage degenerate into an argument over cause and effect. Advocates of same sex marriage argue that there is no real connection between that legal change and changes in other aspects of marriage, at least not when looking at measurable demographic indicators like non-marital child-bearing. But that is not what I am suggesting here.

My point here is that people who have already excused themselves from reproducing do not see any particular problem in redefining marriage. The people who have given up on reproducing don’t mind uncoupling marriage from concern about children. And if religious people are the only ones who can muster the hope in the future necessary to shoulder the effort of raising children, so much the worse for the non-religious.

But the fact that the aging solons of New England have given up doesn’t mean that the rest of us ought to. The people of Vermont and the rest of New England are not going to surrender this territory without putting up a good fight. Letters and emails are pouring into Governor Jim Douglas’ office. The principle that kids need mothers and fathers is worth fighting for.

Article by: Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute, a non-profit dedicated to promoting lifelong married love to the young by creating an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage.

Iowa’s earthquake

No matter what the judges say, they changed the meaning of marriage in Iowa when they ruled that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article,“Why Gay Marriage Matters”, Michael Judge, a Iowa freelance journalist and a contributing editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review, celebrates the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision to overturn state law in order to make same-sex marriage legal. He confesses that it does not occur to him as to how anyone could oppose this enlightened decision – even if those opposing it include the majority of the people of Iowa, who supported the law against such “marriages” in the first place. “Why,” he asks, would anyone now wish to sponsor an amendment to the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman?

Well, let’s see. Judge quotes the Court’s complaint against “the disadvantages and fears [homosexuals] face each day due to the inability to obtain a civil marriage in Iowa.” The court then enumerates the legal disadvantages, which are all real – no sharing in health insurance, pension benefits, hospital visitation rights, etc.

Active homosexual relationships are based upon the act of sodomy. The plaintiffs ask for, and the Iowa Supreme Court wishes to bestow public affirmation, meaning moral approval, of this act as a foundation for marriage.

The point, however, is not that there are disadvantages. The question is whether the disadvantages are based on a distinction made only by convention (and therefore changeable as a matter of custom) or by one that exists in nature (and therefore normative and morally imperative). The exact same disadvantages exist for mistresses, unmarried heterosexual lovers, polygamists, and those in man-boy relationships.

If hardship is the criterion, should not all these be enfolded into the new definition of civil marriage? After all, they too, as the Court said of homosexual couples, are “a historically disfavored class of persons [excluded] from a supremely important civil institution.” Are they not also “kind-hearted people,” like Mr. Judge’s homosexual brother on whose behalf he writes?

Absent from the article or the court’s decision is any explanation of why marriage is so important as a civil institution, and why those other than monogamous men and women have normally been excluded from it. Before expanding upon the traditional definition of marriage, or rather destroying it, one should at least understand why it has existed for so long in the first place.

Aristotle begins The Politics, not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and a woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. The family is the irreducible core. In turn, a healthy family is posited upon the proper and exclusive sexual relationship between a husband and wife. In other words, sexual relations are morally ordered to the family and reach their pinnacle in it. Heterosexual sex in the family is normative as a matter of nature or what is known as natural law. All other sexual relationships can only ape it, and aspire to it (which explains the homosexual desire to mimic it).

The family alone is capable of providing the necessary stability for the profound relationship which heterosexual union both symbolizes and cements, and for the welfare of the children who may issue from it. Society can be said to exist only to the extent to which those spousal relations remain intact. That is the “constitutionally sufficient justification” for marriage between a man and a woman that the Iowa Supreme Court, in an attack of aphasia, could not recall. The Court also seems to have forgotten that the legal disadvantages against homosexual and other partnerships were put there exactly for the purpose of shaping behavior in a certain way to the general benefit of society and for discouraging behavior that undermines it.

Aside from the pecuniary penalties mentioned earlier, the Court opined that “perhaps the ultimate disadvantage expressed in the testimony of the plaintiffs is the inability to obtain for themselves and for their children the personal and public affirmation that accompanies marriage.”

Here is the real nub of the matter. Active homosexual relationships are based upon the act of sodomy. The plaintiffs ask for, and the Court wishes to bestow, public affirmation, meaning moral approval, of this act as a foundation for marriage. This is what public affirmation means, because law is inescapably based upon morality. Both the Court and the plaintiffs claim that this change in the definition of marriage will make things better, which is a notion that has to be measured against an understanding of what the goodis. Those who consider sodomy an intrinsically disordered and morally corrupt act will now be un-affirmed and forced by law to acknowledge the opposite. This is, after all, a change in the public order, and that is what such changes mean.

This makes the Court’s statement that “the sanctity of all religious marriages celebrated in the future will have the same meaning as those celebrated in the past” particularly disingenuous. How could they have the same meaning when the Court has just changed the definition of what is morally acceptable as marriage? Is this deceit or ignorance on the Court’s part?

Lastly, the Court trotted out “equal protection of the law” as its excuse for the ruling. Equality before the law does not mean that everyone gets to be “affirmed” in whatever they may choose to do. That is why laws have penalties. It means that the law applies equally to everyone, despite their personal desires. The Court has actually acted against this principle by saying that there should be a special category of marriage for those disposed to the act of sodomy, who, for whatever reason or indisposition, refuse to comply with the laws for marriage passed by the Iowa legislature. The Court should at least have the presence of mind to acknowledge what it is actually doing, and be ready to explain to any other “historically disfavored class of persons” why the Court should not, by judicial fiat, also create a special kind of marriage for them.

My use of Aristotle may provoke the response that some of the ancient Greeks wrote paeans to homosexual love. This is certainly true. However, it did not occur to any of them to propose homosexual relationships as the basis for marriage in their societies. In fact, no civilization ever has. Perhaps Mr. Judge and the Iowa Supreme Court should ponder on the reasons why.

Article by: Robert R. Reilly writes from Washington DC. He is a contributing editor to Crisis magazine

Breakdown Britain’s ‘little monsters’

It has happened before in Britain, but last weekend’s horror story of two children almost doing two others to death lost none of its shock value for all that. Two brothers, aged 10 and 11, set upon two other boys, aged 11 and 9, on the outskirts of an English village, bashing, slashing and burning them as well as stealing their money, mobile phones and trainers. The nine-year-old was found, barefoot and soaked in blood, wandering along a street in town. The 11-year-old was found unconscious with his scalp slashed.

Comment has been flowing freely in an attempt to understand what turns some children into “little monsters” or even “incarnations of evil”. Nicci Gerrard in the Daily Telegraph sees the fact that the attackers were newly arrived in a care facility in the town as significant -- and it surely is. Family breakdown is the cause of much -- most -- juvenile crime and what the Brits call anti-social behaviour. She also notes: “This distressing story follows an intense scrutiny of childhood; it seems like an apt and ghastly demonstration of the anxiety that has been expressed by think-tanks, children's charities, teacher associations and cultural commentators,” about a “growing crisis in childhood”.

Gerrard also comments perceptively:

“The way that we think of children today is very different from the way that we thought of them in previous centuries. We live in a post-Christian, Romantic age: we do not believe in original sin, that we are born imperfect and in need of religious redemption. Instead, we have the Wordsworthian idea that a child is born perfect and uncorrupted and only gradually becomes blemished by the world. As Romantics, we are deeply shocked and disturbed by the image of young boys behaving with such frenzied cruelty: it seems as if they are acting against nature, and have become mutant versions of themselves. It seems worse to us that a child should behave badly than that an adult should; children who kill and torture become like emblems of an innate evil…

Then she proposes “an alternative version of children in which they are a chaotic package of impulses, desires, appetites and fears.” Think, Lord of the Flies. “Perhaps it is surprising that these terrifying incidents do not happen more often and that the restraints placed on children who do not yet possess a learned conscience, a socially-inherited morality, are as successful as they are.”

But why are there 10- or 11-year-olds without a developed conscience and moral code? Because, says Gerrard, they come from deprived homes and bad institutional alternatives: “The family is a dark place and the homes that replace them hidden ones.” And here she throws in the towel: “Anything that is done – the overhaul of the social services, the increase in pay and status for those who work with children in care homes and in foster families, the slow and painful attempt to end child poverty – will be gradual, partial and messy, and there will always be people who fall through the nets.”

But there would be fewer casualties, surely, if, instead of dismissing “the family” as “a dark place” she and the rest of the commentariat recognised the need for social support of the family -- real families with two married parents, who are the ones best equipped to give children the upbringing they need. It’s true that all the other remedies she mentions will fail; true also that some families will also fail. But with proper recognition of what a family is, there would not be the epidemic of social problems that has produced “breakdown Britain”.

An Evangelical movement that leaves family planning to God

The United States birth rate is rising and Evangelical families in the Quiverfull movement (named after a verse of Psalm 127) are playing their part in the trend -- to the alarm of the greens, no doubt. A few weeks after the New York Times looked at the subject of large families, National Public Radio has run a feature on the movement, which comprises about 10,000 families, mainly in the Midwest and South of the United States.

NPR interviewed some families in Michigan. KeSwanson family. Barbara Bradley Hagerty/NPRlly Swanson and husband Jeff say they didn’t want any children when they first married, but then began to notice that the Bible gave special value to big families. Now they have seven children and would like more. They are leaving it up to God to decide how many they can handle. The average family at their church has 8.5 kids, which compares with a national total fertility rate of 2.2 children per woman. (In 1976, 20 per cent of American women had five or more children, but by 2006 that figure had fallen to 4 per cent.)

Misty and Seth Huckstead, both 31, have six children and another on the way. When they were 23, already with four children, Seth had a vasectomy, but they then came to realise that sterilisation was an affront to God and he had the procedure reversed. “Family has always been the foundation of church and society,” they say. “It’s God’s design; it’s beautiful.”

Nancy Campbell, a leader of Quiverfull and author of Be fruitful and Multiply, sees her six children as allowing her to “impact the world for God.” She says if believers don’t start reproducing in large numbers, biblical Christianity will lose its voice -- while the Islamic world is strengthening its voice, simply by “multiplication”.

Outsider Kathryn Joyce, who has also written about the movement -- although from a critical point of view -- says its people have ambitions to take over the Congress and talk of reclaiming “sinful cities like San Francisco” and being “able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God’s will”.

Is abortion a remedy for abuse of minors?

After watching the story of the nine-year-old Brazilian girl pregnant with twins who were aborted unfold for several weeks, the New York Times has run an on-the-spot piece -- the spot being a Sao Paulo women’s health clinic specializing in treating victims of sexual violence. One of the “treatments” offered by the Perola Byington Hospital is abortion, which the doctors there say is often necessary to protect the lives of sexual-violence victims. Of the 47 abortions carried out in the hospital last year, 13 were on girls under 18, all victims of rape.

The Times purports to be concerned about sexual abuse. Unfortunately, it does not explain how aborting babies conceived through rape -- often within the home -- will reduce the incidence of sexual abuse of young girls. If it is so easy to dispose of the evidence, wouldn’t it encourage more abuse? The Times says the problem “may be getting worse”.

The writer summarises events in an offhand and inaccurate way: “A Brazilian archbishop summarily excommunicated everyone involved — the doctors for performing the abortion and the girl’s mother for allowing it — except for the stepfather, who stands accused of raping the girl over a number of years.” The Archbishop did not “summarily excommunicate” anyone; he pointed out that those who directly procured the abortion incurred the automatic penalty under church law of excommunication. This did not fall on “everyone involved”; the archbishop specifically stated that the girl was not excommunicated.

The Times dwells on Brazil’s restrictive abortion laws and appears to want to make a case that easy access to legal abortion is the answer not only to women’s “reproductive rights” but to saving the lives of sexually abused girls. The assumption that abortion does save their lives is not questioned.

One news service did investigate the question, however. Figures provided by a pro-abortion group Grupo Curumim and derived from Brazilian government data shows that 192,445 girls from 10 to 14 years gave birth between 2000 and 2006 in Brazil (which has a population of 190 million); 105 died during pregnancy, birth or having an abortion -- 55 out of 100,000, which is lower than the average maternal mortality rate of 75 out of 100,000 for all ages in Brazil. And some of them could have died from abortion -- the statistics do not appear to specify the exact cause of death.

“The rate may be lower because such cases, being relatively uncommon, receive special attention in Brazil. Hospitals monitor such pregnancies closely, and a cesarean section can be done to protect the child from the rigors of giving birth,” says LifeSite News.

What is evident from all the news coverage of the “child from Alagoinha”s tragic story is the underlying problem of the breakdown of the family and sexual morality in Brazil, as throughout the world. But none of the leading media want to discuss that.

A life well worth living

Here is a great story about a Canadian couple whose first child was born with Canavan disease, a rare, inherited neurodegenerative disorder that usually leads to death by the age of four. Jacob’s condition was diagnosed at two months and his shocked parents, Ellen and Jeff Schwartz, were told that he would never speak, sit up or even see.

Today, Jacob is nearly 12. It’s true that he cannot sit up or speak, but he smiles and makes a range of appropriate noises as he lies on his mat. When his dad lies next to him and yells at the hockey game on television, Jacob howls laughing. He goes to a special school, and at home enjoys hearing his younger sister and brother playing around him in the garden while he lies in a swing. It says a lot for his parents that they decided to have more children given the implications of Jacob’s diagnosis and the strenuous demands his condition makes on them.

And that is not all. With community support Ellen and Jeff founded a charity, Jacob’s Ladder, to promote awareness and research for neurodegenerative diseases. Ellen, a teacher, wrote a book, Lessons from Jacob, and has now launched Project Give Back, a course to develop empathy and philanthropy among school children. As part of the course, Ellen brings her elder son to the class. Though the students are awestruck and silent at first, she says they “go from fear to acceptance in 40 minutes”.

There’s just one off-key note in this wonderful story. As well as funding research, some of the $1.7 million raised by Jacob’s Ladder over the past decade has gone into promoting genetic screening campaigns in several cities across Canada. It’s not clear what that entails, but one hopes it does not feed into the trend of snuffing out the lives of babies already conceived.

While anyone contemplating marriage and parenthood could benefit from being informed about their risk of passing on such a disease, it’s also evident from the Schwartz’s story that a handicapped child can do others an immense amount of good.