Roundup: Demographic winter, Screwtape on stage, and more

There has never in human history been economic growth paired with population decline. But our Politically Correct ideal is worldwide population decline. Where will this lead us?

HT: Values Voter News

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Screwtape on Stage gives us a glimpse of what the film version might be like. And it removes my primary objection, which was that portraying The Patient would reduce the viewer's ability to project himself into the role.



HT: Is Anybody There?

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ScrappleFace brings us the latest news: Unnamed McCain Aide Puts Blame for Loss on Self:

“We worked for two people whose character and integrity were their chief positives,” the now-unemployed former insider said, “Frankly, the average mercenary political consultant like me doesn’t have a lot of experience with those kind of folks. So, we really had no clue how to run their campaign. As a result, we got spanked.”

“The important thing for people to remember,” he added, “is that win or lose, the consultants still get paid.”

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Americans United for Life has started a Fight FOCA campaign with an online petition. Which, I think, is primarily good for raising awareness.

FOCA would not only eliminate every single piece of legislation in the past 35 years to reduce abortion and protect women and children from seedy abortionists, it would go beyond Roe into mandating that health care professionals participate in abortion. The laws that would be invalidated have reduced abortions in this country by 20%.

The really dangerous thing about FOCA is how the wording is deliberately deceptive. If you read "The Gulag Archipelago", you will be familiar with Solzhenitsyn's illustrations of how courts are able to "interpret" laws to their own ends, even laws that seem fairly bland and inoffensive, laws that seem common-sense. ALL's analysis takes into consideration how other cases (that the writers of FOCA were well aware of and taking advantage of) will impact implementation of this act.

This is NOT a prochoice bill. It is a rabidly pro-abortion bill disguised as a pro-choice bill.

Though, personally, I think the best way to fight FOCA is to find one brave Senator -- preferably a female Democrat, and it doesn't even have to be a prolife Democrat, since this bill is proabortion and not prochoice -- to filibuster, preferably by reading aloud from Lime 5. Let them get an earful of what they'd be promoting in voting for this egregious law.

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Obama Hears a Who calls for prayer for the scales to fall from Obama's eyes, and for him to recognize the humanity of vulnerable unborn children and special-needs newborns. I agree with the call for prayer but disagree with the optimism. Obama's conversion from proponent of abortion and infanticide to defender of the defenseless would require not only an act of God, but an act of Obama. And I've not seen a lot of evidence that this guy recognizes the existence of any god but himself. Every wondrous conversion in history has been of somebody who recognized from the outset that he was not God -- even Nebuchadnezzar recognized that the God of the Hebrews did in fact exist. Obama's truly monumental ego ("A ray of light will shine...") makes old Nebuchadnezzar look like a paragon of humility in comparison. Still, it never hurts to try. And the image of Barack Obama on all fours in the wilderness eating grass for seven years has a certain appeal. Is it wrong to pray for this guy to get his comeuppance?

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News on the stem cell front. Adult stem cells (that don't require that we kill a defenseless fellow human being to get them) have been successful recently in treating Parkinson's disease, Crohn's disease, spinal cord injury, diabetes, and heart attacks. Repair Stem Cell Institute is a clearinghouse of current clinical trials and treatment centers. My sister's cancer was treated successfully with adult stem cells. This is something the MSM is keeping hidden, people, because it paints their pet project of embryonic stem cell research in a negative light.

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And check out Jill Stanek's Sunday Funny.

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Lately added: Gribbet's Word has a great Ann Coulter quote, and an addition:

In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, we owe it to the Democrats to show their president the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that they have shown our recent Republican president. - Ann Coulter

Please..in honour of your conduct over the last eight years, in sincere and honest recognition of your treatment of conservatives in general, and the President specifically, allow me to reciprocate. -- Sonnabend

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Second amendment rights clarified:



HT: Hillbilly White Trash

Reproductive Rights and Wrongs

What Women Want: Not Reproductive Oppression

Pat McEwen was visiting the small village of Huaca, high in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. The village, not far from the Colombian border, was teeming with refugees fleeing from the ongoing battles between government forces and the drug lords. Mostly women and children, the refugees had arrived with only the possessions that they could carry. Many had lost husbands, sons and daughters to the conflict. ....

Pat decided to ask the group of 42 refugee women that she was meeting with three simple questions: "What are the things you worry about most often? What are your greatest needs? What can I do to help you the most?" Their worries centered around their children, their husbands, and family members from whom they had become separated. Their most pressing need was for blankets and warm clothes. Second was a way to provide for their families. A close third was medicine or health care for their children. Not one mentioned family planning.

Pat then went right to the heart of the "reproductive health care" controversy. "If I could provide a way for you to have fewer children, or no more children, or to not be pregnant if you are pregnant, would you be interested?" she asked them.

The atmosphere in the room, pleasant up to that point, instantly turned chilly. The women whispered among themselves, shooting Pat looks that were no longer friendly. Then one woman, her voice rising in indignation, spoke for all: "Sabe nada, estupida Americana!" Up to this point in the interview, Pat had been relying on translators to help with her halting Spanish, but this stinging barb came through loud and clear: "You understand nothing, stupid American!"

These refugee women had no use for contraceptives, sterilizations, or abortions and rejected Pat's offer of "reproductive health care" out of hand. "The reproductive 'right' that these refugee women wanted was the right not to have me or anyone else interfere in their reproductive lives," Pat recalled later. "They understood that more children meant more minds to plan the future, more hands to share the work, and more hearts to share joy and sorrow. These women had lost family members to violent deaths, but they understood that their children were the promise that there would still be a tomorrow."

Don't take PRI's word for it. Prochoice researcher Betsy Hartmann wrote an excellent book, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, that came to the same conclusions: women who are considered prime targets for "reproductive rights" don't want the birth control and abortion being shoved at them.

A 2001 survey carried out by PRI in the Ghanan city of Takoradi surveyed 397 people of both sexes. They were interviewed by professionals and given a list of 15 health programs and asked to rank them according to their own personal needs. The health programs listed were: Malaria Eradication, Leprosy Treatment, Reproductive Health, Syphilis Treatment, Polio Prevention, Clean Water Programs, Natural Family Planning, Sleeping Sickness, Gonorrhea Treatment, Tuberculosis Treatment, Yellow Fever, HIV/AIDS Prevention, Cholera Treatment, Measles Prevention, and Other Programs (unspecified).

What did the citizens of Ghana list as their most pressing health needs? Malaria Eradication, Natural Family Planning, Clean Water, Measles Prevention, and HIV/AIDS Prevention.

Signs that these citizens see through the duplicity of population control fanatics can be seen in the comments section: "Stop reproductive health; it's not good," "We don't need reproductive health programs." "Stop reproductive health; eradicate malaria."

They have come to see the words "reproductive health" as synonomous with pushy abortion and artificial birth control programs.

Which, of course, means that if a program comes offering real reproductive health care -- PAP smears, STD treatments, obstetric care, etc. -- people who have had bad experiences with population control efforts will understandably not trust the program. They're fed up with the disdain, duplicity, and paternalism of western do-gooders:

PRI investigator Joseph Meaney, visiting a UN refugee camp in Albania in 1999, was struck by the fact that many of the Kosovo refugee women he was speaking to were eager to have more children, in part to make up for those they had lost to Serbian atrocities. When he mentioned this to a UNFPA doctor, the man exploded with distain for his charges: "They're refugees, don't you see! They can't have children!"

Who are we to tell the poor women of the world that they cannot have more children? This is not reproductive health. This is reproductive oppression, and the women from these developing nations recognize it for what it is: an assault on their fertility and ultimately, their race. We should give the poor nations of the world primary health care, not ideological imperialism.

"The White Man's Burden" is alive and well under a new guise.

Betsy Hartmann vindicated

Deaths, Sickness Result From Abuse, Misuse of USAID, Ipas Family Planning Programs

Adamantly prochoice author Betsy Hartmann pointed out these issues and abuses in her groundbreaking work, Reproductive Righs and Wrongs. Steve Mosher of the Population Research Institute finds that Hart's concerns remain valid:

Population controllers are constantly talking about "reproductive health," and their burning desire to reduce maternal mortality worldwide. This is the excuse that they use for pushing contraception, legalized abortion, and sterilization on developing countries all over the world. .... [But] not only does the abortion/contraception-related work of USAID or Ipas fail in its mission to provide legitimate reproductive health, it actually causes more harm to women. Obsessed with reducing the fertility of as many of the poor as possible, the controllers have long advocated turning a blind eye to their other health needs. Here are a few examples:

Family planning programs deliberately court medical problems by denying routine medical care, such as physical exams, in the name of efficiency.

Other times they inadvertently or otherwise cause health problems, such as ectopic pregnancies subsequent to sterilization, which they then routinely ignore.

In a few cases, such as the dumping of unsterilized and dangerous IUDs on the developing world, or the testing of powerful, steroid-based contraceptives on unsuspecting women, they have engaged in acts that appear criminal in retrospect.

USAID cares more about how many women are sterilized or contracepted than about how many are made healthier.

Each of these practices injures or even kills women. This is what we mean by "reproductive health" mortality: The deaths that result from the abuse and misuse of family planning programs.

"I'd rather do less good service to more people, than perfect service to fewer people," Frances Hand Ferguson, one-time vice-president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, said. (Emphesis mine -- ed.) ....

The situation is similar at USAID, which even officially rebuked Planned Parenthood for providing "unnecessary" health care. "All too often," they complained, "family planning programs impose numerous medical barriers to service which we are convinced hinder program effectiveness and impact, especially for hormonal contraceptives. Common examples of what we mean by medical barriers include unnecessary laboratory tests; excessive physical exams. . . excessive counseling and history -- taking in such a way as to include a lot of irrelevant information rather than the important things, the net effect being to increase waiting time and see few[er] clients."

Such practices lend credence to the assertion that, when it comes to women's health, USAID cares more about how many women are sterilized or contracepted than about how many are made healthier, even when health is defined strictly in "reproductive" terms.

Most so-called "modern" contraceptives have been tested in field trials on healthy women of the developed world. Their indiscriminate use on women in the developing world who are malnourished, anemic, or suffer from other health problems can have a devastating effect on women there. Many women in Bangladesh who were given Norplant, for instance, suffered serious side effects. According to Farida Ahktar, an activist concerned with the plight of poor women, Bangladeshi women who had received Norplant suffered side-effects much more serious than those admitted by Norplant's proponents: continuous bleeding far heavier than a normal menses, weakness in the limbs, severe pain and, significantly, blurred or double vision.

Dr. Stephen Karanja, the former Secretary of the Kenyan Medical Association and an obstetrician-gynecologist by training, often sees patients who have been harmed by these powerful, steroid-based contraceptives. "High blood pressure was never really a major African disease," he explains, "but now we have blood clots, liver problems, and problems with bleeding.

In Africa where tropical disease already cause women to be weak with poor blood levels, when they start bleeding irregularly or continuously because of these contraceptives, you literally reduce them to cripples.

The woman is the center of the African family. If you want to destroy the African family, attack the mother. And I ask myself, why does the US attack the center of the African family? These women walk around with difficulty because of anemia, with swollen legs, with livers damaged. There are women who are going into heart failure because of bleeding, because of [contraceptive] drugs."

The African women who are so cavalierly given powerful, steroid-based contraceptives are often not informed of the serious side effects that can result.

And, as Dr. Karanja suggests, the lack of follow-up care can in some cases be fatal. Take the danger of ectopic pregnancy following sterilization, for instance. Cutting the fallopian tubes of a woman does not always prevent conception, but it does prevent the developing embryo from entering the uterus. Instead, the embryo implants at the site of the blockage, a dangerous condition commonly known as a tubal pregnancy.

The problem is that the thin-walled tube cannot support a pregnancy beyond a couple months of gestation, and when it ruptures the resulting hemorrhaging is often deadly. Women who have been sterilized, assembly-line fashion, in population control campaigns are at particular risk of dying because they are given no warning about the possibility that they might become pregnant again in this way.

In some cases, the controllers do not merely turn a blind eye to problems, but have deliberately engaged in seemingly unethical, if not criminal, acts.

After the FDA in 1970 declared high-estrogen birth-control pills to be unsafe, the pharmaceutical companies were left with warehouses full of the now-unmarketable contraceptive. Syntex executives offered to sell USAID their entire stock at a heavily discounted price, an offer that USAID's Office of Population, less concerned about safety than in checking fertility cheaply, was only too happy to accept.

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In the words of Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), "we have turned pregnancy into a sexually transmitted disease." Only when this "disease" is completely cured will the population controllers be content to cease their activities. And it doesn't matter how many women die from family planning abuses in the meantime.

NARAL's panties in a twist. Here's a suggestion.

I am on the email list for NARAL Pro-Choice (sic) America, and they've got their panties all in a twist because on Halloween, Congress is gonna decide if we can go back to giving US tax dollars to organizations that push abortion in other countires. And, of course, they expect that even if Congress does go for the funding, Bush will of course veto it, so they want your congresscritter girded to override the veto.

Ya know, it's kind of ironic that organizations filled with people who sport buttons saying "End US Involvement in Women's Wombs" are all wanting to fund US involvement in women's wombs -- even if it's totally against the wishes of the women in question.

Now of course, according to the email, the best way to "restore vital reproductive health care to" (i.e. throw lots of pills and condoms at) poor women around the world is to send NARAL money.

I'd like to point out that even if, like NARAL, you're an enthusiastic fan of treating the word's poor and oppressed people like so many stray cats to be spayed and neutered, you don't have to fork over your hard-earned cash to NARAL to tell your congresscritter. You can email him or her right here.

Personally I'd recomend that you tell your congresscritter to keep our tax money out of poor people's crotches. But you may beg to differ. Either way, you can eliminate the middle man, then do something else with the money NARAL wants you to send. You can provide real help and health care to poor women (and children and men) through Mercy Ships.

NARAL is asking for certain amounts. I'll suggest what you might send directly to the poor women of the world instead:

$35: For just $25, you can provide a "New Life Kit" to a woman Mercy Ships has treated for her obstetric fistula. Or you can provide the thorough eye exam that is the first step toward restroring sight to a blind woman, man, or child.

$50: Provide vital dental care to a desperately poor child. Just $45 will provide agricultural training to help a family gain the life-sustaining, healtful benefits of enough to eat. And that person can pass his or her training on to the entire community.

$75: Can provide a "New Life Kit", and an thorough eye exam, and bandages for surgery patients

$100: Provide a case of surgical gowns for the surgeons who are underwriting their own volunteer work, providing life-changing, often life-saving, surgery to the poorest of the poor.

Other: $200 will keep a ship's engines running for an hour, allowing Mercy Ships to reach people in need. $360 will underwrite surgery for a suffering woman, child, or man. $3,000 (not that much if you're well-to-do, or a modest fundraising project for a small church or club) will provide safe drinking water to a village. Or, if you're rich, or if you're part of a church or club or civic organization looking to make a difference, you can donate $10,000 to underwrite the cost of a tray of surgical instruments to provide cataract operations and restore sight.

These are just a few things that I think would be a far more fruitful use of money than to send it to NARAL to underwrite their PR campaigns. (And don't take my word for it that these "family planning funds" are doing harm to poor people. Read Betsy Hartmann's excellent book, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs. Hartmann is adamantly prochoice so you can't dismiss her research as so much antichoice agitprop.)