World Family Policy Center Newsletter
* News
relative to protecting the family worldwide *
Volume 4 Issue 27 - July 18, 2005
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Quote of the Day: “Labor to keep alive in your
breast that little spark of
celestial fire
called conscience.”
—George
Washington
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Today’s Contents:
A. Featured Articles:
1. Wedding bells aren't ringing, but neither are phones
of divorce lawyers
2.
Birth control patch linked to higher fatality rate
3.
Texas Group Calls on Lawmakers to Fund Pro-Family Textbooks
4.
Sexual Images Harm Kids
5. NEA bolsters homosexual policy, practices
Related Article:
Video Testifies to Truth: Transition from Homosexuality to Heterosexuality
Possible
6. UN Health Agency Adds Abortion
Drugs to 'Essential Medicines' List
7. Japan’s fertility rate hits postwar low
Related
Article: The following Newsweek International article, published in the
September 27, 2004 issue, confirms the worldwide concern on this issue. Birth Dearth
B. Coming Events
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FEATURED ARTICLES
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1. Wedding bells aren't ringing, but neither are phones of
divorce lawyers
By Sharon Jayson,
USA TODAY
Divorce is on the decline in the USA, but a report to
be released today suggests that may be due more to an increase in people living
together than to more lasting marriages.
Couples who once might have wed and then divorced now
are not marrying at all, according to The State of our Unions 2005. The annual
report, which analyzes Census and other data, is issued by the National
Marriage Project at New Jersey's Rutgers University.
The U.S. divorce rate is 17.7 per 1,000 married women,
down from 22.6 in 1980. The marriage rate is also on a steady decline: a 50%
drop since 1970 from 76.5 per 1,000 unmarried women to 39.9, says the report,
whose calculations are based on an internationally used measurement.
"Cohabitation is here to stay," says David
Popenoe, a Rutgers sociology professor and report co-author. "I don't
think it's good news, especially for children," he says. "As society
shifts from marriage to cohabitation — which is what's happening — you have an
increase in family instability."
Cohabiting couples have twice the breakup rate of
married couples, the report's authors say. And in the USA, 40% bring kids into
these often-shaky live-in relationships.
To read entire article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-07-18-cohabit-divorce_x.htm
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2. Birth control patch linked to higher
fatality rate
Report: Device has three times greater risk of stroke,
blood clot than pill
Associated Press
July 17, 2005
Kathleen Thoren sits in bed at Sweetwater County
Hospital in Rock Springs, Wyo., on Sept. 4, 2004, with her new baby, Brandy, in
the arms of her daughter, Kelsey, husband, Tom, and son, Mikey, 7. The new
mother died just before Thanksgiving that fall after days of agonizing
headaches brought on by hormones released into her body from a birth control
patch.
Erika Klein / AP
Gingerly, Kathleen Thoren’s family gathered around her
in the intensive care unit, unable to speak to their beloved sister, daughter,
wife, or even stroke her hands. The slightest stimulation might create a fatal
amount of pressure on the 25-year-old woman’s swollen brain, warned the
doctors.
“We were horrified, but we tried to just quietly be
with her,” said her sister Erika Klein. “In the end, it didn’t help.”
The mother of three died last fall, just after
Thanksgiving, after days of agonizing headaches that the coroner’s report said
were brought on by hormones released into her system by Ortho Evra, a birth
control patch she had started using a few weeks earlier.
She was among about a dozen women, most in their late
teens and early 20s, who died last year from blood clots believed to be related
to the birth control patch. Dozens more survived strokes and other clot-related
problems, according to federal drug safety reports obtained by The Associated
Press under a Freedom of Information Act request.
Several lawsuits have already been filed by families
of women who died or suffered blood clots while using the patch, and lawyers
said more are planned.
Risk three times higher
Though the Food and Drug Administration and
patch-maker Ortho McNeil saw warning signs of possible problems with the patch
well before it reached the market, both maintain that the patch is as safe as
the pill.
However, the reports obtained by the AP appear to
indicate that in 2004 — when 800,000 women were on the patch — the risk of
dying or suffering a survivable blood clot while using the device was about
three times higher than while using birth control pills.
To read entire article:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8565177/
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3. Texas Group Calls on Lawmakers to Fund Pro-Family Textbooks
By Jim Brown
July 6, 2005
(AgapePress) - As Texas lawmakers continue to haggle
over the state's education budget, a pro-family group is urging the legislature
to include funding for new middle and high school health textbooks that
emphasize abstinence.
Both the Texas House and Senate have passed school
finance bills that give teachers a raise, lower taxes, and require all schools
in the state to begin classes after labor day. Also, the Senate version of the
legislation increases the amount of money districts get for bilingual
education. However, the bills in both chambers lack funding for the new
textbooks.
The group Texas Eagle Forum is calling on the state
lawmakers to subsidize abstinence-based textbooks that define marriage as
between a man and a woman. The Texas Board of Education approved the health
textbooks last year. But Mary Lynn Gerstenschlager says the recently passed
education funding bills fail to address the textbook issue.
"That's one thing that's very, very important to
us," Gerstenschlager says. "These are abstinence-based health
textbooks, and we would like very much to see the kids get these. They haven't
had a new health textbook in almost ten years."
To read entire article:
http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/7/62005b.asp
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4. Sexual Images Harm Kids
Citizen Link
July 7, 2005
Many instinctively know that lots of sex in the media
is bad for kids, but a lack of scientific evidence has prevented change. Now, a
study from the Medical Institute for Sexual Health may prompt needed reform.
The study, conducted by the University of Texas Health
Science Center at Houston, systematically reviewed all biomedical and social
science research conducted from 1983 to 2004 that explored effects of mass
media on youth. Of the 2,522 research-related documents examined, less than 1
percent addressed the impact of mass media on adolescent sexual attitudes and
behaviors.
"Every parent and health-care provider should be
very troubled by these findings," said Gary L. Rose, M.D., president and
CEO of The Medical Institute. "Our children are saturated in sexual
imagery. For example, the average teenager spends three to four hours per day
watching television and 83 percent of the programming most frequently watched
by adolescents contains some sexual content. Yet we have never stopped to ask
what effect all this sexual content in television, the Internet and music has
on young people."
To read entire article:
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0037107.cfm
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5. NEA bolsters homosexual policy, practices
By George Archibald
The Washington Times
July 8, 2005
LOS ANGELES -- The National Education Association
ended its four-day convention here with a big victory for members promoting
homosexual advocacy, but debate by conservatives seeking resolutions condemning
adult-minor sexual contact and supporting respect for "all living
things" was cut off.
"It was a very obvious attempt to stifle dissent
on issues with which they disagree -- biblical issues or issues on the
[political] right," said David Kaiser, a retired teacher from Ohio, who
was blocked from discussing his proposal to strike language allowing the right
to abortion from the union's family-planning policy.
The 9,000 delegates at the 2.7-million-member union's
yearly business meeting also blocked a proposal by Ohio delegate Keith Gudorf
to put the NEA on record that its longtime policy of "compassion and
respect for all living things" in an animal vivisection section also
applied to humans in the family-planning section.
Also blocked was a proposal by California delegate
Diane Lenning, ousted chairwoman of the NEA Republican Educators Caucus, to
amend the union's sexual-assault policy to state that "the association
deplores the advocacy of adult/minor sexual contact."
But convention delegates resoundingly referred the
conservative delegates' proposed resolution amendments to its national
resolutions committee, thus killing discussion and action at the meeting that
ended Wednesday.
The convention handed the large Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
and Transgender Caucus approval of its proposal for the union to "develop
a comprehensive strategy to deal with the new and more sophisticated attacks on
[school] curricula, policies, and practices that support GLBT students,
families, and staff members in public schools."
To read entire article:
http://us.f305.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?MsgId=65_1023100_191689_1800_1818_0_36255_3584_1774978219&Idx=0&YY=65553&inc=25&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&view=a&head=b&box=Inbox
Related Article: Video Testifies to
Truth: Transition from Homosexuality to Heterosexuality Possible
By Jim Brown and Jody Brown
July 14, 2005
(AgapePress) - In October, churches, libraries, and
colleges will be showing a documentary to raise dialogue concerning
alternatives for people who experience same-sex attraction.
The documentary I Do Exist features five former
homosexuals who share their testimonies about choosing to leave the homosexual
lifestyle. During the week of October 8-15, the video will be shown by groups
across the United States that believe homosexuals can change. The film, which
conveys the message no one is born a homosexual, premiered last year as a way
to counter a "homosexual pride" celebration called National Coming
Out Day.
I Do Exist producer, Dr. Warren Throckmorton, says the
video affirms that an individual's identity is defined by his or her commitment
to absolute truth.
"Many people are skeptical that people can change
their sexual feelings. Even broader than that, many people are skeptical that
we as humans have choices about our identity," the Grove City College
professor says. "Many people in our culture today believe that what we
feel defines who we are. However, there is another view. What you feel does not
define who you are."
To read entire article:
http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/7/142005a.asp
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6. UN
Health Agency Adds Abortion Drugs to 'Essential Medicines' List
By Patrick
Goodenough
CNSNews.com
July 11, 2005
(CNSNews.com) - The
United Nations' World Health Organization has added mifepristone and misoprostol,
the drug combination that produces a chemical abortion, to its list of
"essential medicines," thereby making them more readily available
around the world.
The two drugs
appear in the latest version of the WHO's essential medicines list. The list of
medicines deemed to "satisfy the priority health care needs of the
population" is updated every two years.
In recent months
groups such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) have been
lobbying hard for the decision to go ahead, after reports last April said the
Bush administration was trying to block to move.
The British Medical
Journal quotes Hans Hogerzeil, secretary of the WHO's essential medicines
committee, as saying the inclusion of mifepristone and misoprostol on the list
"is a real addition to the therapeutic alternatives for women who have to
undergo abortion, especially in developing countries where surgical facilities
are less easily available."
To read entire
article:
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewCulture.asp?Page=\Culture\archive\200507\CUL20050711b.html
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7. Japan’s fertility rate hits postwar low
Baby shortage raises concerns about aging population
TOKYO - Japan’s fertility rate hit a postwar low of
1.288 in 2004 in a fresh sign of the country’s acute baby shortage, Health
Ministry officials said on Wednesday.
The rate — the average number of children a woman
bears in her lifetime — was 3.65 in 1950 and fell under 2.0 for the first time
in the mid-1970s, raising the spectre of a shrinking population where
pensioners outnumber workers. . .
The declining trend is particularly noticeable in
urban areas, with Tokyo registering a record low of 0.9986 in 2003, they said.
The rate stood at 1.01 in Tokyo in 2004.
“It’s an extremely low figure and we are worried about
the future,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told reporters on Tuesday.
“It is very important to make it easier for people to marry and have children
while they are working.”
To read entire article:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8059030/
Related Article: The following Newsweek
International article, published in the September 27, 2004 issue, confirms the
worldwide concern on this issue.
Birth Dearth
By Michael Meyer
Newsweek International
Everyone knows there are too many people in the world.
Whether we live in Lahore or Los Angeles, Shanghai or So Paulo, our lives are
daily proof. We endure traffic gridlock, urban sprawl and environmental
depredation. The evening news brings variations on Ramallah or Darfur—images of
Third World famine, poverty, pestilence, war, global competition for jobs and
increasingly scarce natural resources.
Just last week the United Nations warned that many of
the world's cities are becoming hopelessly overcrowded. Lagos alone will grow
from 6.5 million people in 1995 to 16 million by 2015, a miasma of slums and
decay where a fifth of all children will die before they are 5. At a conference
in London, the U.N. Population Fund weighed in with a similarly bleak report:
unless something dramatically changes, the world's 50 poorest countries will
triple in size by 2050, to 1.7 billion people.
Yet this is not the full story. To the contrary, in
fact. Across the globe, people are having fewer and fewer children. Fertility
rates have dropped by half since 1972, from six children per woman to 2.9. And
demographers say they're still falling, faster than ever. The world's
population will continue to grow—from today's 6.4 billion to around 9 billion
in 2050. But after that, it will go sharply into decline. Indeed, a phenomenon
that we're destined to learn much more about—depopulation—has already begun in
a number of countries. Welcome to the New Demography. It will change everything
about our world, from the absolute size and power of nations to global economic
growth to the quality of our lives.
This revolutionary transformation will be led not so
much by developed nations as by the developing ones. Most of us are familiar
with demographic trends in Europe, where birthrates have been declining for
years. To reproduce itself, a society's women must each bear 2.1 children.
Europe's fertility rates fall far short of that, according to the 2002 U.N.
population report. France and Ireland, at 1.8, top Europe's childbearing
charts. Italy and Spain, at 1.2, bring up the rear. In between are countries
such as Germany, whose fertility rate of 1.4 is exactly Europe's average. What
does that mean? If the U.N. figures are right, Germany could shed nearly a
fifth of its 82.5 million people over the next 40 years—roughly the equivalent
of all of east Germany, a loss of population not seen in Europe since the
Thirty Years' War.
To read entire article:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6040427/site/newsweek/
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Note: The preceding
article excerpts are highlights of current events and
do not necessarily
represent the views of the World Family Policy Center
or Brigham Young
University.
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Newsletter created
and distributed by:
World Family Policy
Center
J. Reuben Clark Law
School
Brigham Young
University
Managing
Director: Richard Wilkins
Executive
Director: A. Scott Loveless
Newsletter Editors:
Joy S. Lundberg and Gary B. Lundberg
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