Day Seven: Trees More Important than Babies

Another in our on-going series of UFI at the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW)

Attending and participating in this presentation required my finest acting skills.  “Ecology and Feminism:  Sacred Feminine, Circles and Valuing Girls and Trees” was the title of this “parallel event” and I just couldn’t resist!  The attendees were a fine group of aging hardcore feminists, primarily middle-aged and older women who appeared to be from either from North America or Europe.  My guess is that women from the developing world had more important things to go to and learn about; like legitimate ideas for economic development, clean water, meeting sanitation needs, quality health care, and getting their children educated.

“I saw the tree before I saw the house,” began the first presenter, “it spoke to me.”  She expounded upon her efforts – which ultimately failed – to save the tree in her front yard.  The tree fell under the control of the homeowner’s association and they wanted it removed.  She spoke of her intense “battle” to save the tree including the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars she spent in legal fees.  “How could a tree simply be voted out of existence!” she lamented.

She spoke with passion about the “sense of the sacred, the connectedness in our consciousness between trees and ourselves,” of the “goddess in every women,” of the “sacredness coming through Mother Earth and women; a sacred dimension that is matter (mater, mother, matter).”  Referring to trees she said, “we are all one; we are connected, what happens to one happens to all…”

Her time being up, she turned her comments to the critical nature of reproductive health rights and women’s rights and the need for true feminists to re-engage and make sure abortion remains legal, human population growth is slowed or better yet stopped completely, and that nature and trees takes their proper position in humanities’ priorities.  “Respect for Mother Earth and life must prevail over all else.”  My hand immediately went into the air.  But it wasn’t Q&A time yet; my question would have to wait.

So here was where my acting skills (which are basically non-existent) came into play.  We were divided into groups of five and tasked with responding to the question:  “Think back through your life, perhaps into your childhood, and tell the group about your relationship with trees.  How have trees impacted your life?   Did you sit in them?  Do they communicate with you?  Tell us about your connection to them.”  I survived this section of the presentation because I do enjoy trees; I have about 150 of them in my yard and I raised them all from seedlings.  So I played along just fine.

Next, we had to get up, stand in a big circle, hold hands and chant a simple verse while one woman rang this little chime thing.  BTW, the leader was called “the Circle Evangelist.”  We had to each then use five words (just five) to say how we felt connected to one another- the power of women – and to nature.  I REALLY struggled to not laugh at this point and then – you guessed it – we held hands, swaying back and forth as we sang some song about peace and love in the world through recognizing the “sacred feminine” in each one of us.  Everyone was hugging and basking in the glow.   All I could think was:  “When is it question time!”

But we’d taken too much time; we had to vacate the room for the next presentation.  So I never had the chance to ask them.  So here it goes:

“You say that nature, trees, and achieving peace are all important.  I agree; I love trees and nature.  But I would add that all life is sacred and important.  How can you advocate for the life and soul of a tree (which most would say is an inanimate object), and yet completely ignore the life of an unborn child and callously advocate for its brutal destruction?  That seems pretty inconsistent to me.”

I’ll never know their response to my question.  But I’ll bet “the circle evangelist” wouldn’t have invited me back.

–M. Barlow

Myth Buster Monday: The bulk of unwed births are to teens

We regularly read of the need for more sex education in our schools in an effort to avoid teen pregnancy.  Shows like Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant garner lots of attention and add to the perception that the biggest problem with out-wedlock-child bearing can be found at your local high school.  The reality is, however, that teens account for about 23 percent of all out-of-wedlock births with sixty percent of those unmarried teen births to women who are 18 or 19.  These are certainly not numbers we should be content with, but it is worth knowing that the unmarried teen birth rate has been falling slowly over the last two decades.

The majority of unwed births in this country are to unmarried mothers in their twenties, with the greatest increase in the number of unwed births (2008-2009) occurring to women between the ages of 30 and 34.

Maggie Gallagher, in her publication “The Age of Unwed mothers, argues:  “What has changed most in recent decades is not who gets pregnant, but who gets married.”  Gallagher has written extensively about the growing disconnect between marriage and childbearing, the cultural attitudes that foster it and the damage to society that ensues.

I was getting ready to regale you with all of the statistics of the consequences to children because of the epidemic of out-of-wedlock child bearing, when I ran across this short article that just does too good of job of making my point.  So I’m passing it on to you.   It’s an older article (2008) but it’s absolutely worth the read and comes from a publication that might surprise you:

http://www.slate.com/id/2185944/pagenum/all/#p2

New way to look at Population and Poverty

“Poverty:  Where we all Started” is the title of a clever video produced by Population Research Institute (PRI).  It discusses some of the myths surrounding poverty reduction.

“Reducing the number of people in the world doesn’t make those who remain any wealthier,” says Joseph Powell, the creator and animator of the series. “That’s why, as we show in our video, population control isn’t the answer to poverty.”

You can also see some of their other videos on the myth of overpopulation here.

Too Few or Too Many?

Two articles.  One telling me that there are too many people on the planet and one telling me that there aren’t enough.  That’s what appeared in my inbox this week.  I’m always a little taken back…and extremely skeptical… when I see a headline stating that the solution to a world problem is to get rid of people.  But that’s what the environmental group “Worldwatch Institute” implies.  Here’s the lead-in to their article:

“A new report from the Worldwatch Institute argues that assuring that all women have access to contraception and taking steps to improve women’s lives should be key strategies in the fight against global climate change.”

You will regularly hear the “get rid of people” argument applied to global warming, international development, and even to the use of contraception to lower maternal mortality rates.  Yet in the other article I was referring to, the flip side is presented:

• 59 countries with 44 percent of the world’s population have below-replacement fertility.
• Worldwide, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) fell from 5.0 in the mid-1960’s to 2.7 today.  That’s a drop of close to 50 percent.
• Russia is losing 700,000 people a year and there are more abortions in that country than live births.
• Any country with a Total Fertility Rate of 1.4 or below will lose a third of its population each generation (about every 25 years).  The majority of the developed world fits in this category.
• Between 2015 and 2021, in Canada, the number of elderly will exceed the number of children under age 14 for the first time ever.  By 2050, Japan will have two senior citizens for every child.

“In discussions of the global economic crisis, almost everyone misses an underlying reality.  It’s not just bloated budgets, it’s empty nurseries.  Deficits and economic decline are driven by plummeting fertility,” states Don Feder, in a speech to the World Public Forum in October.  Mr. Feder effectively argues that the loss of people is a far more serious problem than the purported problems stemming from “global climate change.”

But I suspect that groups like Worldwatch Institute will never stop beating the “there are too many people” drum.  It’s religion for them.  Maybe we should start calling them “deniers…” population-decline deniers.

You can listen to an earlier version of  Mr. Feder’s speech here.

How Do You Help Countries Who are Struggling to Develop?

That’s the question we asked our UFI readers last week.  As you can see from the percentages below, it is a question where few people agree on the answer—including those who control the purse strings of international funding institutions tasked with dispersing funds to the developing world.

Sadly, there is little documentation that all the millions of dollars poured into developing countries over the last few decades have had any positive effective.

What is the best way to truly help and give effective assistance to developing countries?

2%          Help them lower their population

12%        Subsidize business creation

34%        Improve medical and health care

36%        Improve education system

16%        Improve the country’s infrastructure

Russia’s Birthrate now Exceeding Abortion Rate

The Russian Federation was pleased to report to the U.N.’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Committee that, for the first time in decades, the Russian birth rate now exceeds their abortion rate—a change that should be acknowledged and praised.  But instead the Russian delegation was dished a chastisement from the 23 “independent” U.N. experts who are charged with reviewing their country’s efforts toward achieving “women’s rights.”

According to our friends at Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam), “the committee expressed concern that the government was promoting motherhood and women being able to stay at home with their newborn children, instead of facilitating their quick return to the workforce.  The Cuban expert warned of the negative sexual stereotypes that could result if women were only seen as ‘good mothers, good wives, and caretakers, while men were seen as the economic providers.’”

In another remarkable piece of news, the Russians also informed the CEDAW committee that the “declining number of abortions was also decreasing women’s mortality rates after birth or abortion.”    Once again the Committee was not impressed, even though 100s of millions of dollars are spent worldwide to lower maternal mortality rates.

*Here are a few other examples of “counsel” coming from the CEDAW Compliance Committee experts:

• One expert lamented that access to “transgender medical services” were not available in many regions of Russia, and called on the nation to ensure that “women’s sexual and reproductive rights were based on scientific evidence and not on religion.”
• Fiji was taken to task for not making marriage and reproductive technologies available to same-sex couples.  The Thailand expert inquired of Fiji if the decriminalization of prostitution for adult sex workers could be proposed.
• Albania was asked, “What is the government doing to fight homophobia and violence against gays, lesbians, and transsexuals?”

The CEDAW Compliance Committee gets together to work their mischief a couple of times a year and each country that is a signator to the treaty is required to be reviewed every four years.

*A big “thank you” to C-Fam for reporting on these meetings.

The human race will be extinct in 100 years?

If the man who was instrumental in helping to eradicate small pox knows what he’s talking about, humans will be extinct in 100 years.  The question is:  “Does he?”  Professor Frank Fenner (professor emeritus at the Australian National University) believes man will be gone and “a lot of other animals will, too.”  He adds” “It’s an irreversible situation, I think it’s too late.” Too late for what? Too late to stop man-made global warming and the over population of the earth.

We’ll leave it up to you to decide what to think on the global warming debate.  But on the “over population of the earth,” part, we have to respectfully say:  “Baloney.”  As prestigious as Professor Fenner may be, we suspect he has joined the ranks of other doomsdayers whose pronouncements of overpopulation and impending doom for mankind have failed to materialize.

Perhaps the most famous was Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who predicted that population growth would outstrip food production and the inhabitants of the earth would starve by 1890.  There has been a string of Neo-Matlthusian experts who have sold their doomsday theories over the last 50 years.

• Paul Ehrlich (The Population Boom, 1968) stated that unless governments take an active role in forcing population growth down “we will breed ourselves into oblivion.”  He insisted that in the 1970’s “hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death.”  He said he “would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”  Paul’s still around today, but a little less strident in his opinions.
• More recently we have Prince Charles who a few weeks ago warned of ‘monumental problems’ if the world’s population continues to grow at such a rapid pace.
• Professor James Lovelock argues that, as a result of global warming, “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable” by the end of the 21st century.  Lovelock gives us a little better odds than Fenner; however, he claims that 20% of  humanity will be alive when the calendar turns over on 2100 AD.
• Professor Nicholas Boyle of Cambridge University claims that a ‘Doomsday’ moment will take place in 2014.

Fact:  Most developed countries of the world are well below replacement levels.  Close to 50 percent of the world’s population now has sub-replacement fertility rates with the trend in all but two countries continuing downward.

With all due respect Professor Fenner, we reject the Neo-Malthusian notion that “human numbers will invariably grow faster than food supplies, and that each new baby generates a demand on resources which exceed the benefits derived from the new source of labor.”  This ideology, first proposed two centuries ago, continues to be proven wrong.  Human ingenuity and innovation is, and has always been, the key to quality of life and sustainable development.  We have no reason to believe that won’t continue.

Italian Women Paid to Not Abort their Children

Pregnant women in Italy’s northern region of Lombardy will now have real “choice” when it comes to their unborn children.  The President of the regional government, Robert Formigoni, announced last month that “no women will abort in Lombardy because of economic difficulties.”  Pregnant women who choose not to abort their child will be given assistance for the first 18 months of the child’s life—monthly installments that add up to U.S. $5500 per year.

According to Lombardy’s Family Commissioner, Julius Boscagli, Italy’s difficult economic conditions and social instability are pushing more women into abortions.  In addition, Italy has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world ranking 206^th out of 223 countries.  With a total fertility rate of 1.32, Italy will lose more than one-third of its population with each successive generation.

According to feminist groups and pro-abortion organizations, this payment to women is nothing short of demagoguery.  Rather than cheering that pregnant women have another “choice,” the pro-choice advocates sneer at this effort saying it is a conservative propaganda ploy–it is men trying to control women, applying pressure to not abort.   Commissioner Boscagli scoffs at this notion saying, “Our measure was born of experience and the results obtained for those who work in the field for decades closely with women’s problems.”

The region of Lombardy deserves credit for recognizing what many municipalities and countries do not—bearing and rearing the next generation is a societal imperative and they are willing to spend money to assist mothers.  United Families would prefer that each child would have a stable, married mother and father that could provide for their children’s needs, but taxpayer funding is preferred over seeing an unborn child fall to an abortionist’s knife.

Commissioner Boscagli sums it up:  “”What we are doing in Lombardy, the primary objective [is] to minimize the tragedy of abortion.”

Spain: setting a trap for families

The news is full of  reports on the economic crisis in Greece.  Many don’t realize that Spain is near financial collapse as well.  Our friends at Population Research Institute have a post that we think is worth sharing.  This article contains important lessons for all of the countries of the world.

Spain: Setting a Trap for Families

by Carlos Beltramo

NAVARRE, SPAIN—Here in Spain, the government has tried to compensate for the lack of demographic growth by huge government subsidies borrowed from largely foreign lenders. Now the loans are coming due and the prospects for repaying them are dim. There is no real wealth being created in Spain today. There are fewer business start-ups and new hires. And there are far fewer families willing and able to invest in any country’s real long-term, wealth: its children. The short-term problem of debt repayment pales before the long-term problem of too few people. Socialism in Spain seeks to establish a state of what it calls ”solidarity.” Underlying this nebulous concept—which looks good at first glance—are policies that promote contraception and abortion and, in practice, punish large families. If left in place for a generation, these policies will destroy the unborn, the family and, ultimately, the entire society. We expect our leaders to behave rationally, whether they are creatures of the left or the right. But if their model state is one which attempts to eliminate all differences between individuals in terms of wealth and power, as Spain’s currently does, watch out. A social-welfare system, where the government is involved in distributing benefits and burdens among the citizens, must never undermine the twin supports of all societies: fertility and freedom. It must promote an adequate rate of population replacement so the population does not age and die, and it must promote sufficient economic freedom that the economy continues to expand and jobs continue to be created. For the first, marriage and parenthood must be encouraged and, if necessary, immigration as well. For the second, an entrepreneurially minded private sector must be protected and promoted so that human beings can exercise their natural God-given creativity. This enables, in turn, the creation of new wealth, which make it possible to provide jobs for these new members of society. Fertility and freedom. If either of these two fundamentals is missing, a country will have serious problems. If both are missing, a country is poised to collapse. Such is the case with Spain today. Last week a report was published by the Institute for Family Policies which documents the current crisis. The main points of “Evolution of the Family in Spain 2010″ are: Spain is the fastest-aging country in Europe and the one that loses the most young people to out-migration. This means that the social security system currently in place is in grave danger of collapsing with a very few years. The birth rate in Spain is a dismal 1.46, and it is only this “high” because of the many immigrants from Latin American and North Africa who have children. The marriage rate has fallen by 28% over the last 20 years, while marital breakdown rates have increased by 28%. For every 3 marriages that are formed, 2 break down. The Zapatero government has exacerbated the problem by legalizing what is called, “express divorce,” that is, a speedy divorce granted for any reason. The marital breakup rate has increased 115% during the four years since this law came into effect. Broken families now account for 4.54% of the total population. The economic impact of this disintegration of the basic unit of society—the family—is enormous. In Spain today there are more households (16 million) but fewer children. Forty percent of households do not have any children at all. One in six households consist of only one person. In 1980, 29.1% of households had five or more members. Today only 7.3% of households have that number of members. If one wants to maintain a thriving democratic society, these figures are a debacle. A society that cannot rely on its families because it has systematically destroyed them is a society that is moribund, and may not survive the difficult times ahead of it. Zapatero is not to blame for the international economic crisis. At the same time, his policies have crippled Spain in ways that make it hard for her to overcome it. One of the first things that he took away was the “baby bonus,” a government payment to a couple upon the birth of a child. Spain now has the unhappy distinction of being the least family-friendly country in Europe. Immigration is her last hope to offset a declining population, but with unemployment running at 5 million and a stagnant economy only the low-skilled and less-productive are willing to augment her ranks. Zapatero’s government must cut unnecessary spending, encourage private enterprise, and shelter young couples from taxes. If the government encourages family formation and private enterprise, the new family-run businesses that will spring up will help to move the economy forward. But this is like asking a tiger to change his stripes. The Zapateroistas are, after all, committed socialists who have no love for either family or free enterprise. Next stop: Greece.

Carlos Beltramo is PRI’s Correspondent in Spain.

Overpopulation is a Myth

Our friends at Population Resource Institute (PRI) have produced a series of YouTube videos that eloquently and simply explain some of the myths surrounding demographics and overpopulation.  They’re short and fun to watch.  Take just a couple of minutes to enjoy and learn.