Author: unitedfamilies

Leaving Screens Behind: A Review of ‘The Opt-Out Family’

Jul 9, 2024 | ,

For those who have been following the research on the negative effects of social media on kids, concern is high but solutions are few. The litany of problems caused by too much time on screens is so familiar now that naming them off is hardly necessary. Erin Loechner lists several of them, along with supporting statistics, in the first chapter of her new book The Opt-Out Family: increased risk of suicide, bullying, sexual abuse, isolation, and even nearsightedness are just a few of the problems associated with heavy tech use by children and adolescents.

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SCOTUS rules on the abortion pill

Jul 8, 2024 |

On 13 June 2024, the United States Supreme Court ruled that abortion drugs can remain on the market. The background is that in 2000, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which approves pharmaceutical products for sale to the public, allowed the sale of the abortion drug Mifepristone (RU486), usually used in conjunction with Misoprostol (Cytotec) to end a pregnancy by medical means.

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After 3 months of legal euthanasia in New South Wales, it’s going gangbusters

Jul 8, 2024 |

Euthanasia and assistance to suicide became legal in New South Wales on 28 November 2023, when theVoluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022 came into operation. The Act provides for the Voluntary Assisted Dying Board, which it established as an “agent of the Crown”, to issue a “a voluntary assisted dying substance authority” to a medical practitioner to prescribe a lethal poison either for the purpose of the patient named in the authority ingesting the poison in order to cause the person’s own death (suicide) or for the lethal poison to be administered to the person by a medical or nurse practitioner (euthanasia).

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