Free Republic

An article in The Wall Street Journal (April 12) breathlessly informs us of the latest fad on the Incredible Shrinking Continent -- "As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit: Islam's Rise Gives Boost To Militant Unbelievers; The Celebrity Hedonist," the headline teases. The "Celebrity Hedonist," isn't geriatric frat-boy Hugh Hefner, but Michel Onfray, a 48-year-old author dubbed "France's high-priest of atheism" in the Journal piece. Reporter Andrew Higgins describes the doyen of disbelief -- commander of the faith-less -- strutting onto the stage of Caen's 500-seat Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium, dressed in black from head to toe, to deliver...

January 26 2007 The Times January 18, 2007 Mother wins a grandchild from tomb of soldier son David Sharrock in Ramat Gan Rachel Cohen was praying at her son’s grave when a call on her mobile phone brought news that she had been awaiting for four years. An Israeli court had cleared the way for her to become a grandmother. The legal decision is unprecedented because her son, Keivin, who was shot dead by a sniper in Gaza in 2002, never knew the woman who will become the mother of his child. She was selected by a family charity and...

In a remarkable op-ed appearing in the Washington Post, a young woman named Katrina Clark explains what it's like to know that you are the child of an anonymous sperm donor. It's not fun. The essay could be Exhibit A in any argument about the morality of artificially assisted human reproduction. The child of a loveless, sterile union between gametes speaks with authority when she reminds us that nobody asked for her opinion on the circumstances of her birth. Her mother (whom she still admires) got the baby she wanted. But the baby didn't get a father she could know....

Suppose for a moment that the birth in Bethlehem that Christians celebrate this week never happened --that it is, as the secularists would have it, mere mumbo jumbo, superstition, a myth. In other words, consider it not as an event but as a narrative. You want to launch a big new global movement from scratch. So what do you use? The birth of a child. If Christianity is just a myth, then it is, so to speak, an immaculately conceived one. On the one hand, what could be more powerless than a newborn babe? On the other, without a newborn...

Filming your neighbour having sex is legal As long as you are not caught in the act it is legal to film your neighbours naked, or even having sex. That is the conclusion reached by prosecutor Bo Birgersson, who has just dropped the charges against a 20 year old man accused of filming 20 of his neighbours in various states of undress. "It is not possible to be molested without one's knowledge. And even if you find out after the act that somebody has been peeping at you it is not enough to bring about a conviction," Birgersson told Sydsvenskan....

Prof: U.S. liberals on slope to extinction WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (UPI) -- U.S. liberals face extinction if they don't start having enough babies to keep up with conservatives, a Syracuse University professor told ABC News. Professor Arthur Brooks said after studying numbers from the governmental General Social Survey, he found 100 unrelated liberal adults have 147 children, while 100 unrelated conservatives have 208 kids. Brooks said that makes a difference, as 80 percent of people with political opinions vote like their parents. In response, conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told ABC liberals are creating their own fertility gap by their beliefs....

THE LAW of UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES You've probably heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It refers to the unanticipated later results of earlier decisions or actions. We saw a television report of an unintended consequence of "sperm banks"--organizations which sell male sperm to lesbians or other single women who want pregnancy "without a father," and couples who want to have children despite male infertility of the husband. You will be shocked, as we were, to discover an estimated 40,000 children are born each year using this repulsively modern means. Apparently, anonymous "profiles" of the sperm donor are used to market...

Over the past years, a new demographic crisis has emerged as a subject of intense debate: the most affluent, most advanced, freest societies of the world are not having enough children to sustain themselves. Recent books—including Phillip Longman’s The Empty Cradle (2004) and Ben J. Wattenberg’s Fewer (2004)—have described the potentially tragic consequences of this decline. Lamenting the collapse of modern birthrates, world leaders as diverse as Vladimir Putin and Pope Benedict XVI have advocated pro-natalist state policies. Popular magazines and newspapers that once worried about the horrors of a “population explosion”—mass starvation in developing countries, environmental catastrophe, the subjugation...

EuroStemCell scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris have demonstrated one of the body's most sophisticated ways of regulating the genetic material of stem cells. Their findings, published in Nature Cell Biology, show for the first time the mechanism that adult muscle stem cells use to protect their DNA from mutations. Understanding this has important implications for cancer research, the study of gene regulation, and ultimately growing stem cells of therapeutic potential in the laboratory. When a cell divides, its DNA is duplicated and each resulting daughter cell inherits one copy of the DNA. Over time, errors arising during the...

Seattle, Jun. 12, 2006 (CNA) - A relatively new method of regulating fertility is catching on around the world.  CycleBeads are 95 percent effective and, in themselves, do not conflict with Catholic teachings related to reproduction and fertility. The CycleBeads, which consist of 32 beads in three colors, is a fertility awareness-based method that helps plan or prevent pregnancy naturally. Victoria Jennings, an anthropologist and director of Georgetown's Institute for Reproductive Health, believes women are looking for non-hormonal, non-invasive ways to control their fertility. She and other researchers at Georgetown University conducted a scientific trial of the beads they call...

"So, now you are finished, right"? The politely asked question came after my wife told a woman co-worker the ultrasound results. Our next baby is a girl. We just found out. This co-worker knew we had a boy last summer. So, I guess she has figured we have done our reproductive quota, and she wanted to know if we'd play by the rules, and not welcome any more children. Now needless to say, I am thrilled about this miracle, as is Mrs. Gb. But even within the culture wars, we were not expecting, so soon, such a question. We don't...

Summer 2006 issue - Three years out of graduate school, Julia Derek has twelve kids. Or so she thinks. As a penniless senior at George Mason University, she spotted an ad in The Washington Post from a couple looking to buy a young woman’s eggs. Ten years, 12 donations, $50,000, and one successfully financed postgraduate degree later, Derek, now the author of “Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor,” explains the appeal of egg donation: “You’re doing a good thing, it feels good that people want you, it’s cool to spread your genes…It seems like a great thing to make money...

Madrid, Feb. 17, 2006 (CNA) - Reacting to passage of a new law on assisted reproduction by Spain’s House of Representatives, which would allow genetic selection, cloning and the selling of human embryos, the spokesman for the Bishops’ Conference of Spain, Father Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, said the measure was “very troubling” in its consequences for respect for human life.Speaking to Europa Press, Father Martinez said the new law “opens the door to human cloning, as it only prohibits reproductive cloning and therefore allows therapeutic cloning.”  According to the Spanish priest, the law would also authorize eugenics, that is, “the...

ROME, January 31, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The UK Ambassador to the Vatican got an earful from a Vatican Cardinal at a Rome conference ten days ago for refusing to acknowledge facts about fertility decline and its serious implications.Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the President of the Pontifical Council on the Family was the keynote speaker at the conference titled "The Family in the New Economy: Reflections on the Margins on Centesimus Annus".  The conference, sponsored by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, was also addressed by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, a Senior Fellow in Economics at the...

PROVINCETOWN-- Its year-round population declining and its economy sagging like a wet beach bag, Provincetown has a new worry: It's getting old. With its colorful art galleries and Bohemian personalities, Provincetown has long been a mecca for gay travelers. But town officials worry that its population is graying and that it needs younger visitors and their disposable incomes to pump up the local economy. In the last year, the Provincetown tourism office has begun running flashy ads in gay and lesbian magazines that cater to readers under 40, such as Instinct, Genre, Curve, 411 Magazine, and Out Traveler. It has...

Pope Benedict XVI on Wednesday praised large families and called for countries to approve legislation and other incentives to help them. "Without children there is no future," Benedict said.The pope addressed his remarks to Italian pilgrims present at his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square, including more than 2,000 members of the Italian Numerous Families Association."It is my hope that further adequate social and legislative interventions be promoted to protect and support the more numerous families, which constitute a richness and a hope for the entire nation," the pope said.Recent European Union statistics put the average number of children...

Every once in a while, a case comes along that makes me truly grateful to be a Catholic. Our Holy Mother Church has been looking out for us and trying to keep us out of trouble, even when we chafe at her constraints. But when I see the trouble people get themselves into, I am grateful for our Holy Mother’s foresight. That is how I felt when I read the California Supreme Court’s ruling on the April 22 case, K.M v. E.G. Perhaps you don’t remember a case by that name, but surely you remember the headlines: “California Establishes Lesbian...

Last Updated: Thursday, 8 September 2005, 16:30 GMT 17:30 UK Embryo with two mothers approved Image of cloning The aim is to get healthy offspring free of inherited genetic disorders. UK scientists have won permission to create a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers. The Newcastle University team will transfer genetic material created when an egg and sperm fuse into another woman's egg. The groundbreaking work aims to prevent mothers from passing certain genetic diseases on to their unborn babies. Such diseases arise from DNA found outside the nucleus, and thus inherited separately from DNA in...

By Clive Cookson, Science Editor Published: August 31 2005 18:46 | Last updated: August 31 2005 18:46 The first detailed genetic comparison between humans and chimpanzees shows that 96 per cent of the DNA sequence is identical in the two species. But there are significant differences, particularly in genes relating to sexual reproduction, brain development, immunity and the sense of smell. An international scientific consortium publishes the genome of the chimpanzee, the animal most closely related to homo sapiens on Thursday in the journal Nature. It is the fourth mammal to have its full genome sequenced, after the mouse, rat...

JEFFERSON CITY - Some Republican legislators want to charge unwed fathers thousands of dollars for hospital birth costs incurred by low-income mothers on Medicaid. "But the last time I checked, it takes two people to make a baby. And there is some responsibility, not just for child support, but for the cost of bringing that child successfully into the world," said Shields, R-St. Joseph. Medicaid pays for 43 percent of the births in Missouri. At an average cost of $3,286 a birth, the tab hit $120.6 million last year. Nearly two-thirds of the moms on Medicaid are unmarried. Critics say...