This Week’s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

Telling the Truth on Abortion and Adoption.

The idea that babies are better off dead than adopted is repugnant. And, as a society, we should push back hard against it and work for the day when all reasonable people gasp and shake their heads in disbelief that there was a time when this line of reasoning was advanced in a civilized society. Read more

What premarital sex has to do with divorce — and other takeaways from marriage research.

Having premarital sex makes divorce more likely, as a number of studies have found. But researchers are still trying to understand why that is, and a forthcoming study challenges some of the most common assumptions. Read more

US Population Growth Just Hit an All-Time Low. Here’s Why That’s Bad for Humanity.

For most of human history, humanity subsisted, but only barely. Incomes almost never exceeded $3.50 per day in today’s dollars. But ever since the industrial revolution allowed humans to multiply their productivity with technology and science, economic growth per capita has skyrocketed and the portion of the population living in extreme poverty has diminished from over 80 percent to less than 10 percent. All of this occurred while the human population exploded from less than 1 billion in 1800 to almost 8 billion today. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

Study finds kids ages 9-12 sharing nudes more than doubled in 2020, researchers concerned.

The share of minors ages 9-12 who are sharing self-generated nude images online more than doubled in 2020, and advocates involved in combatting online child sex abuse are worried about the trend, a new study shows. Read more

Was the ‘She-cession’ Narrative Overblown?

As the Senate continues to negotiate what might be included in the multi-trillion dollar “Build Back Better” reconciliation package, part of the rationale for such an expansive package has been the pandemic’s damage to female participation in the labor market.

But the narrative of an ongoing shock to female employment needs some correcting. To the extent there was a negative impact, it seems to have predominantly limited to those first initial months when life was turned upside down. If lawmakers want to expand public funding of child care or other safety-net expansions, they should argue for it on its merits, not as a response to the pandemic’s impact on the labor market. Read more

Chicago schools force boys and girls to share restrooms for the sake of ‘gender equity’.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) announced that it will require all schools under its jurisdiction to post signs expressly permitting students and staff to choose male or female restrooms based on their preferred “gender identity or expression” in the name of achieving “gender equity.” Read more

Sanctity of Life

If Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Other Nations May Also Protect Babies From Abortion.

This week, pro-life leaders in Latin America talked with the Catholic News Agency’s ACI Prensa about how the infamous U.S. Supreme Court ruling has affected their countries and what overturning it could mean for unborn babies’ rights internationally.

Overturning Roe would bring a “very important ray of hope” for the whole world, said Raúl Magnasco, president of the More Life Foundation of Argentina. Read more

California Wants to Become Abortion Safe Haven, Force Taxpayers to Fund Abortions for Out of State Women.

California already forces its taxpayers to pay for elective abortions for mothers who live in the state. Now, its leaders want to force taxpayers to pay for out-of-state moms to abort their unborn babies, too. Read more

Switzerland Approves New Suicide Machine With Detachable Coffin Lets You Kill Yourself Anytime.

Switzerland has just legalized a new way to die by assisted suicide. The country’s medical review board has just given authorization for use of the Sarco Suicide Pod, which is a 3-D-printed portable coffin-like capsule with windows that can be transported to a tranquil place for a person’s final moments of life.

Conventional assisted-suicide methods have generally involved a chemical substance. Inventor Philip Nitschke of Exit International told the website SwissInfo.ch that his “death pod” offers a different approach. “We want to remove any kind of psychiatric review from the process and allow the individual to control the method themselves,” he said. “Our aim is to develop an artificial-intelligence screening system to establish the person’s mental capacity. Naturally there is a lot of skepticism, especially on the part of psychiatrists.” Read more

Religion

SCOTUS to Hear Arguments on Students Using State Aid to Attend Christian Schools.

The case, Carson v. Makin, is centered around parents who wished to send their children to Christian schools using state aid, only to be banned from the assistance program. Pender Makin, commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, contends that the state should not have “subsidize” religious instruction. Read more

Religious freedom advocates ask Biden to put Nigeria back on watchlist for anti-Christian violence.

Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken removed Nigeria from the list. A coalition of 12 organizations and 30 advocates, including Christians who faced persecution in the Muslim world, like Andrew Brunson (a former prisoner in Turkey), Mariam Ibraheem (who was sentenced to death for “apostasy” in Sudan) and Joy Bishara (a survivor of the Boko Haram kidnappings), praised former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to place Nigeria on the CPC list in December 2020 and urged Biden to return to that designation. Read more

Religious liberty is inadequately protected by Australia’s Religious Discrimination Bill.

Despite the many positive elements of the Bill it does have some major limitations.

A critical flaw of the Bill is that the protections for the conscience rights of health professionals found in the previous draft of the Bill have been removed. These provisions protected a health practitioner who objected to a procedure that conflicted with their religious beliefs. Read more

Sexuality

‘Girls who don’t like dolls being pushed to swap sex’, says top psychiatrist in U.K.

Dr Bell said that a focus on “very superficial surface phenomena”, accompanied by a “lack of probing”, was typical of clinical assessments made at the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).

He said that many young people who were “unwilling or unable” to “conform to gender stereotypes” were often “misunderstood as being transgender”. Read more

Psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman: Trans Teens Told They Can ‘Deny Biology and Not Pay a Big Price’.

As just one example of the “freefall” Grossman sees happening when it comes to gender ideology, the psychiatrist described how elective double mastectomies can now be required to be covered by health insurers in California.“If you are a transgender individual who has breasts, the way that the insurance in California will refer to your breasts, when you want them removed, is they will call them ‘abnormal structures of the body caused by congenital defects,’” she said. Read more

Chile same-sex marriage: Law overwhelmingly approved by parliament.

Chile has approved a landmark law allowing same-sex marriage in the historically Catholic country. The legislation, overwhelmingly approved by parliament on Tuesday, also enables gay couples to adopt children. Read more