Free Republic

~snip~ “There are fewer risks than people think, and that makes sense to me,” Pacey said. “The single thing that affects fertility is how big your testicles are. If you’re blessed with big testicles, you’ll produce more sperm.”

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna has long been a vocal supporter of Humanae Vitae’s teaching on the morally appropriate means of family planning. So it was noteworthy that Cardinal Caffarra recently conceded that, while Humanae Vitae’s conclusions were true, its presentation of those truths left something to be desired. As the cardinal put it, “No one today would dispute that, at the time it was published, Humanae Vitae rested on the foundations of a fragile anthropology, and that there was a certain ‘biologism’ in its argumentation.” Which put me in mind of a document I discovered in 1997 in a...

Q: If God established marriage for the procreation of children, does it affect the validity of a marriage if one spouse is infertile? What if you know for sure that you can’t have children, can you get married in the Church anyway? How does that work? –Donna A: As we’ve seen before in this space, the Church holds that marriage is, by its very nature, ordered to the well-being of the spouses and the procreation and upbringing of children (c. 1055.1). As Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World stated nearly 50 years ago, “By its very...

Jill Knapp begs us to “Please Stop Asking Me When I’m Going to Have Children.” Being that I am still a newly-wed and have just moved to a new city, I am in no rush to have a kid. This is an unacceptable answer to a lot of people. The constant reminders that your clock is ticking and that you don’t want to be confused for your child’s grandparents when they grow up are not making us move any faster. Having children is a big responsibility. What Jill doesn’t understand is that her fertility is not subject to whim...

Frustrated by their inability to have a baby, Roger and Jasmine Hill of Canastota are going public in their effort to conceive a child. The young couple is asking for donations from the public to help pay for the costly IVF, or In-vitro fertilization, procedure they are hoping to try. There are incentives for those who help: $100 gets you a copy of the sonogram and a photo of the newborn, $500 gets you in the baby book and $1,000 gets you a T-shirt plus all the other rewards. Roger, who works at Walmart in Oneida and Jasmine, an accountant...

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The University of Utah is investigating a complaint that a convicted felon working at a fertility clinic replaced a customer's sperm with his own, fathering a girl 21 years ago. The mother of the girl, Pamela Branum, says she and her husband discovered a genetic mismatch in their daughter, and were able to trace her lineage with help from relatives of the now-deceased fertility clinic worker, Thomas Ray Lippert. "I don't think we're the only ones," Branum told CBS affiliate KUTV in Salt Lake City. "We think we're one of many" victims who used a...

Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Calif., believes that if her Assembly Bill 926 passes, researchers will be able to pay egg donors as they develop medical advances that can help all women. To her, the bill is an issue of simple fairness -- gender equity, really. Since a well-intended 2006 bill banned researchers from paying egg donors more than expense reimbursement, researchers have been at a competitive disadvantage, while affluent couples can offer fertile women top dollar. UCSF Professor Marcelle Cedars lamented at a hearing of the state Senate Health Committee on Wednesday that the status quo robs potential egg donors of...

Eleven people have been arrested following a joint investigation by the police and Financial Crimes Squad (SDOE) that revealed a clinic in Thessaloniki was paying foreign women 1,000 euros each for their ovaries, which it then sold to patients in Greece and abroad who were seeking assisted pregnancies. The head of the Athens security police, Dimitris Georgatzis, said the clinic, which had a branch in Athens, had a number of clients from Northern Europe. A similar case was uncovered in 2010, when a clinic in northern Athens was accused of using ovaries from Bulgarian and Romanian women. The clinics in...

“First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes the baby in the baby carriage,” goes the rhyme. Unfortunately, in large swaths of American society, this rhyme is playing in reverse, with dire consequences for lower-income Americans. Given five decades of deteriorating marriage trends, it appears Americans concur with H.L. Mencken, who joked, “Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who'd want to live in an institution?” Since 1960, the percentage of married Americans plunged from 72 percent to 51 percent last year, a record low. Meanwhile, babies born to unwed mothers skyrocketed from 4 percent in 1960 to 41 percent in...

Global demographics, not domestic policy, will control who comes and who goes. In Washington, politicians are trying to reform America's immigration system, again. Both President Obama and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are proposing "paths to citizenship" for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Other proposals abound, including finishing the border fence, creating a better E-Verify system for employers and passing the last Congress' Dream Act. All of these ideas, however, fundamentally misunderstand immigration in America: Future immigration is probably going to be governed not by U.S. domestic policy choices but by global demographics.... --snip-- ...that Puerto Rico's fertility rate...

Are childrens’ car seats driving down the fertility rate in America?Jonathan V. Last sees car seats as part of a “huge constellation of factors in modern life” that “nudge” people toward having fewer children, he said during an interview about his book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.Last said car seats effectively create a small “tax on people who want to have more than two kids” by making it harder to fit three kids into a normal sedan, which encourages parents to buy a larger car. This penalty may not dissuade people who already want...

•EU watchdog reveals approval for GM foods fails to identify poisonous gene •54 of the 86 GM plants approved contain the dangerous gene •Gene found in food for farm animals producing meat, milk and eggs •Biotech supporters argue there is no evidence that GM foods are harmful A virus gene that could be poisonous to humans has been missed when GM food crops have been assessed for safety. GM crops such as corn and soya, which are being grown around the world for both human and farm animal consumption, include the gene. A new study by the EU’s official food...

After almost 40 years of legalized abortions throughout the United States — and longer in states that okayed abortions pre-Roe — the U.S. population has been decimated to the point that the nation is seeing the lowest population growth since the 1930s.Abortion has destroyed not only one generation of Americans but a second as well — people who should be boosting the fertility rate in their childbearing years now who were victims of abortions in the 1970s and 1980s. In total, more than 55 million Americans are been victimized by abortions and millions more were never born because their parents...

Abortions in the United States Total number of abortions in the U.S. 1973-2011: 54.5 million+ 234 abortions per 1,000 live births (according to the Centers for Disease Control) Abortions per year: 1.2 million Abortions per day: 3,288 Abortions per hour: 137 9 abortions every 4 minutes 1 abortion every 26 seconds These statistics include only surgical and medical abortions. Because many contraceptive measures are abortifacients (drugs that induce or cause abortions), it is important not to overlook the number of children killed by chemical abortions. Since 1965, an average of 11 million women have used abortifacient methods of birth control...

Dr. Ernest Zeringue Davis, CA, November 21, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A doctor in Davis, California is promising a successful IVF pregnancy for just $9,800, with an unheard-of money-back guarantee.  The catch?  Patients will be implanted with someone else’s baby. In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is notoriously expensive.  A single round of IVF averages $12,400, with no guarantee of a pregnancy.  Women wishing to become pregnant using the method must often undergo the procedure repeatedly until they end up with a baby or run out of money, since insurance typically limits how much can be spent on the procedure. Dr. Ernest Zeringue cuts...

Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and womb. The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes 40 long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women will always face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies....

Technically, it is Jeanette Fardelin’s children who are the bona fide modern-day miracles. Conceived on the same day but born six years apart — thanks to the wonders of IVF and the deep freeze — the five Fardelin siblings are ‘quintuplets’ for our age. But any working mum spending an afternoon with Jeanette and her brood would leave their neat Liverpool home concluding that she is the extraordinary one. How does she do it? (And by ‘it’, I don’t mean pop out five matching babies in six years. That one can be scientifically explained). The result? Five little miracles born...

To those who've declared European civilization dead due to demographics, I've often replied that in Europe, there are ents. In J.R.R. Tolkein's "The Lord of the Rings" series, ents were extremely long-lived tree-like creatures who thought in terms of centuries, not years. They were painfully slow to act, but amazingly forceful when they do. What we're witnessing in Europe is a rebound of birth rates that is slow and incomplete, yet highly significant and growing. These rebounding birth rates are not due to Islamic and African immigrants. In many nations, the number of Islamic immigrants is much lower than perceived...

Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad presents The Polar Express in Durango, Colorado.The Polar Express

A speech by Don Feder at Ave Maria University, September 20, 2011 Hollywood has a penchant for blowing things up – especially the world. Since the 1950s, apocalyptic movies (which come with a variety of special effects) have been all the rage. We’ve met our doom through nuclear war (“On The Beach,” “The Day After”), a worldwide super-plague (“Twelve Monkeys” “The Stand”), global warming (“The Day After Tomorrow,” “Waterworld,”), the earth’s core over-heating (“2012,” “The Core”), overpopulation (“Soylent Green”), a comet striking the earth (“Deep Impact,” “Armageddon”), sentient machines taking over (the “Terminator” and “Matrix” series), rampaging simians (the “Planet...