Free Republic

How big a problem is family fragmentation? "Immense," says Mitch Pearlstein, head of the Minnesota think tank Center of the American Experiment. "The biggest domestic problem facing this country." So big he went out and interviewed 40 experts of varying ideology across the nation and relayed their answers in his book "Broken Bonds: What Family Fragmentation Means for America's Future." That's the good news. The bad news is that none of the experts is confident he has an answer, and neither is Pearlstein. What is family fragmentation? The facts are easy to state. About 40 percent of babies born in...

In 2013, 650 babies died under Holland’s assisted suicide law because their parents or doctors deemed their suffering too difficult to bear. Although the law was designed to help terminally ill patients have a dignified death, the right to die has also been granted to a growing number of people who are physically healthy but have psychological problems. Official figures show that 13 patients suffering from mental illness were euthanized in 2011; by 2013 this number had risen to 42 patients.And it is not just adults who are being euthanized. According to the Royal Dutch Medical Association, as many as...

WASHINGTON – A newly-released report by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America shows that the organization performed over 300,000 abortions in 2013—the latest figures on record—equating to 37 abortions per hour or 1 almost every 90 seconds.The abortion giant releases the report each year to tout its achievements, which include services largely centering around sexual activity.“In 2014, Planned Parenthood expanded our reach—and deepened our impact—providing the health care and education that help millions of people pursue their dreams and realize their full potential, and advocating for full access to and equality in reproductive health care,” Planned Parenthood wrote in...

Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest provider of reproductive health care and sex education, and it's often on the front lines of political debates surrounding abortion access and health care legislation. Working at the nonprofit organization requires a certain level of passion for these rights, says Gaitre Lorick, a senior human resources officer at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Here, she talks about how to convey that passion in an interview and get a job with the organization. What qualities do you look for in every candidate? Two important qualities are a passion for collaborating and a commitment to being...

Four years ago, I was going through life like I had it all figured out — perfect family, perfect job, perfect home. Our proud military family was living the American dream — we had it all. On December 21, 2010 — the darkest day of the year, everything changed for us as a family. Little did we know our lives were forever transformed or what that ill-lighted date would come to represent.Mother’s Day 2011 — the memory of that day is so surreal. It is the day I found out our 14 year old daughter Pyper had been raped by...

It is always better to be safe than sorry and with sexual intercourse nanotech may have the answer for lowering the risk of condoms breaking at the wrong moment. New contraceptive technologies: condoms, pills, and implantable devices – provide reversible and permanent forms of protection. The usage of such product, however, varies widely. With the new study, the focus is on condoms. Researchers are harnessing nanotechnology to develop an unbreakable and efficient condom. At the same time it is hoped that the technology will make the rubbery devices more appealing to use. Behind the research is not only a desire...

Dr. Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is best known these days for an imprudent lecture in which he suggested that the Obamacare bill (of which he was an intellectual architect) was deliberately crafted to be so complex that the stupid American people couldn’t possibly understand it. Gruber’s lecture opened a window into the arrogance of the secular clerisy: those enlightened members of the professoriate who know best and who, as a matter of duty, are going to give the dimwitted people what’s best for them—and give it to us good and hard. Yet many who...

The Hippocratic Oath is one of the last remaining impediments to the complete deprofessionalization of medicine.Doctors don’t take it much anymore, but the people still embrace its core purpose as an essential protection of their lives and wellbeing.Now, in the LA Times, a doctor and journalist try to put the Oath out of its misery by taking the primary responsibility for interacting with dying patients away from physicians and handing decision-making over to “death doulas.” From, “The Hippocratic Oath and the Terminally Ill,” by Nora Zamichow and Ken Murray: If we allow medicine to prolong life, should we also allow...

When he’s not mocking Americans for being Bible-toting, bitter gun-clingers, every chance he gets Barack Obama loves to throw Bible verses around. The problem is that the verses he quotes are usually out of context, woefully misinterpreted, cherry-picked and distorted to support a socialist worldview, and occasionally completely made-up. Listening to the president play the reverend on more than one occasion would lead one to believe Jesus Christ was a Marxist whose only objective was to further Obama’s Gospel of Collectivism. Moreover, for the Scripture enthusiast the president portrays himself to be, it’s amazing how he manages to avoid the...

The mother's parents want the life support machine switched off. A pregnant woman who is clinically brain-dead is being kept on a life support machine in an Irish hospital to keep her baby alive. The mother of two in her 20s is around 17 weeks pregnant and the baby is still alive. But the mother is being kept alive against the wishes of her parents. According to sources with knowledge of the latest case, the woman’s parents have expressed their wish that the life support machine be switched off. However doctors have been unwilling to do this due to the...

(SNIP) In many ways they are a traditional family: Cliff and Dave both work, and Britt spends her days looking after Gareth. All three adults settle on the couch at night to watch TV once their son has gone to bed. (SNIP) “The only real difference is that we’re buying food for one more person, and that person sleeps in our bed.” (SNIP) Because of ignorance or outright discrimination, some people just seem to react negatively to poly folk. (SNIP) Britt, Cliff and Dave aren’t 100 percent sure of Gareth’s paternity. They think he might be Cliff’s in a biological...

This may seem to be a rather obscure topic, but it popped up while I was reading Helen Smith’s musings on whether or not pornography should be made illegal and the long term, detrimental effects that it can have on marriage. As a subset of that discussion, she touched on David Friedman’s book, Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters. In it, Friedman makes the following observation on prostitution in general and the specific side effects it can have when married men pay for sex outside of marriage. (I specify “men” here only because...

It's every parent's nightmare, but true: Major U.S. corporations are funding a campaign of sophisticated, psychologically intrusive "gay" indoctrination programs targeting very young children in elementary schools across America. It’s part of a very well-planned and well-funded effort to reach children as young as possible without their parents’ intervention. The national program, called “Welcoming Schools”, skillfully works on the minds of young children in three ways: (1) Introducing the concept of homosexuality to children. (2) Telling them that homosexuality is normal and natural. (3) Telling them that their parents or friends who portray homosexuality in a less than positive way...

Planned Parenthood and the abortion lobby have long rallied for U.S. Peace Corps members to have abortion coverage footed by federal tax funding. According to The Hill, efforts by Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) have granted their wish through the Appropriations bill: Though it was best known for preventing a government shutdown, the Appropriations bill also contained provisions that will ensure for the first time that Peace Corps volunteers have access to abortion in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the woman. Planned Parenthood has also lavished Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) with kudos for his...

Christmastime has something that enlarges the heart of everyone--even, I suspect, the grinchiest of atheists. Whether it is lightly falling snow, or visiting family and friends, or Christmas carolling, or an audience surging to its feet at the crescendos of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, there is something about this time of year that seems to put people in better spirits. No matter how far militant secularism has spread, the Christmas story has incredible cultural power. I find that the Christmas story has much to remind those of us in the pro-life movement, things that might be easier to forget throughout the...

Julian Savulescu represents all that I find so objectionable about the mainstream bioethics movement.Rejecting the sanctity/equality of human life, utilitarian in outlook, embracing a eugenics point-of-view, the Oxford professor–what does that tell you?–would lead society in a way opposed by most of the very people bioethics claims to serve.Savulescu ”gets” that the field has not swept all before it–to which I would add, not for lack of trying. But he is clueless as to why.He writes that the alleged problem can be cured by somehow improving the “philosophy.” From, “Bioethics: Why Philosophy is Essential for Progress,” published in the radical...

When most people think of eugenics, they think of the unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler and Dr. Josef Mengele. But history tells us that some of America’s best and brightest promoted eugenics as settled science and necessary for the preservation of society. Within 100 years, our deep thinkers went from declaring that in our new country “all men are created equal” to espousing the idea that “some animals men are more equal than others.”1 Eugenics was popularized in the in the United States in the 1890s. High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s often had chapters...

(LiveActionNews) — A common narrative in our society is that, by opposing abortion and infanticide, Christians are conducting a “war on women.” However, in a fascinating study entitled “The Rise of Christianity,” published by Princeton University Press, sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the phenomenal growth of “the obscure, marginal Jesus movement” was due in large part to women. Stark argues that early Christianity was “especially attractive to women” because “within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”Furthermore, Stark argues that the Christian opposition to abortion and infanticide was one of...

One of the top possible candidates to lead Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has dropped out of contention. That has left the door open to the presidential of a leading pro-abortion group to become her campaign manager should she decide to run for presidential in 2016.Clinton is a longtime pro-abortion activists, opposing any pro-life limits on abortion and backing taxpayer funding of abortions. That gels with the views of Emily’s List, which opposes even a late-term abortion ban and requires that all of the candidates it endorses support forcing Americans to fund abortions.Now, reports indicate that Emily’s List’s president may run...

There could be an unlikely contributor to the decline of marriage in this country. And it's free pornography on the Internet. A team of researchers, who published their findings in The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany, determined that the rise of free Internet pornography is not only correlated with a pronounced decline in percentage of young adult males who are married, but might actually be contributing to the trend. "The results in this paper suggest that such an association exists, and that it is potentially quite large," the study notes. The researchers used data from the...