Population: Quiver or Quake

The writers on this blog are generally aware of the problems caused by population growth, for example here and here. But there is a movement in modern American Fundamentalist culture that puts the Catholic baby mill mentality to shame. They call it the Quiverfull Movement. The idea is basically that a woman is a quiver full of potential babies, and therefore must produce as many babies as possible. Only when she runs out of eggs may she consider another career. I first read about it at FreindlyAtheist a few days ago, with typically scathing commentary. Then another friend sent me a link to this report on Salon.com. It began a generation ago:

Since 1985, Quiverfull has been thriving in the Southern and Sunbelt states. Although the conviction of "letting God plan your family" is not an official doctrine in many churches, there are signs of its acceptance in high places; the Rev. Albert Mohler, Theological Seminary president of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, argued, for example, that deliberate childlessness was "moral rebellion" against God.
It is mainly a propaganda campaign,
Quiverfull has gained exposure through cable TV's fascination with extraordinarily large families, including the 18-child Duggar family. The Duggars, an Arkansas couple whose husband Jim Bob was a former Arkansas state representative, have appeared on several Discovery Health Channel specials about their immense brood and currently have a TLC reality show, "18 Kids and Counting," that focuses on the saccharine details of large family life.
So the principle of outbreeding your opponents is now a conscious tack of the American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. Thoughtful citizens of this world intentionally breed less. Therefore we are bound to be ever more seriously outnumbered with a couple of generations of this nonsense.

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Obama Backlash Growing Quickly

For the last eight years, the fear and doubt crowd have had one of their own in the head office. Comforted that science will be suppressed and church programs will be federally funded, the vocal conservatives fell into relative complacency. Or did I miss it? But now, the flood gates are opening. The "gun nuts" are buying up weapons and ammunition creating a price spike never before seen. Why? Because they are convinced that Obama is a communist who will outlaw their guns and tax their ammo. The anti-family-planning crowd is staging bigger sit-ins at health clinics. They are also submitting bills to local, state, and federal government to restrain the feared upsurge in availability of contraception and related information. He overturned the stem cell funding ban. Now discarded blastocysts are again eligible research subjects rather than just trash. The humanity! After all, they quail, if we don't respect trashed cell clusters as people, how can we possibly value adult citizens? Anti-science groups are pushing ever more vocally for science in schools to be properly tempered by religious counterpoints. Bills appear in state after state calling for "Academic Freedom," meaning to give the Bible equal weight as proven science in schools. Yes, this started long ago, but now they have greater urgency. The conservative media is calling Obama's initial tax cuts a hike, and his pushing through of the stimulus package (that had been in the works for months under his predecessor) as typical unrestrained Democrat unilateral spending. They can get away with it because they knew that the necessary spending will pass whether or not they approve it. Looking tough with no teeth is all they have, at present. Recall the political fury during the 1930's depression. A Democrat prevailed over strong Republican objections and turned the country around doing basically what Obama is now doing. He kept getting re-elected because he got results. Results directly opposite of all the dire predictions of the Republicans. Basically, the same arguments being made now against Obama.

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North Dakota House says any human fertilized egg is a person

North Dakota's House of Representatives has passed a bill declaring that every fertilized egg has all the same rights of a baby. If passed, this bill would mean that any abortion is the equivalent of murder. Here's the wording of the bill, from Yahoo News:

The bill declares that "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens" is a person protected by rights granted by the North Dakota Constitution and state laws.

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A bit of sanity re eight babies sharing a womb

I'm delighted to see that people are raising some pointed criticisms about the single woman with six children who decided to fill her womb with octuplets, endangering them in the process and hogging neonatal resources. This commentary is by Thomas H. Murray of the Hastings Center, in an article published by CNN:

The point of infertility treatment, after all, is to create a child. But that child-to-be is not the clinic's patient -- the would-be parents are. I believe that the interests of those children deserve at least as much consideration as the wishes of the prospective parents.

The vast majority of infertility patients are no doubt fierce advocates for the well-being of the child they so earnestly seek to bring into their lives. What happens, though, when the client's request shows little consideration or regard for the welfare of the would-be children? What happens if a woman in her early 30s with six children wants eight embryos implanted all at once?

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Go Ahead…Make My Day…Again…Again…

It’s like Clint Eastwood has come to town and all the bad guys are hiding under the tables or in closets. President Obama is striking down one stupid rule after another his predecessor left behind. It’s a martial arts level kung fu pen-fest, signing (or consigning) the detritus of ignorance from the last eight years into the dustbin of… Well, he's overturned the international gag rule concerning abortion information. He’s undoing the restrictions on stem cell research. He has ordered Gitmo shut down within a year and a panel to look into what to do with the detainees. Before the vacillations of moral outrage erupt over the gag rule overturn, it should be considered how absurd and cowardly a ban on talking about something actually is. And I don’t mean from a national security perspective. Clearly, some information is sensitive in that sense and should not be publicly disseminated. But in the case of the gag rule, we’re talking about something that is, for all intents and purposes, Public Knowledge. If you know what to look for, anyone can find this information and not be arrested for having it. Yet grown men and women have been constrained from talking about it in the performance of their duties as doctors and nurses. What part of “choice” do the enemies of choice not understand?

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