Entries by MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities

Has Davos got it wrong? Climate change may not be the biggest threat facing the world.

This week’s talkfest at the Swiss ski resort Davos is peak virtue-signalling. “This year we’re sensing a real desire to take action and implement change on the critical issues facing the world,” gushes its website. Everyone’s trying to make a good impression. On the train to Davos 2020, a writer for the New York Times spoke with a […]

China’s underground Christian communities: Unwitting forerunners of the Benedict Option?

Both Catholics and Protestants have survived decades of persecution. In early 2017, conservative American pundit Rod Dreher published a bombshell of a book called The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. He argued that conservative Western Christians should give up their futile war over the cultural mainstream and withdraw into tightly-knit communities […]

Roe v Wade comes to Hollywood — Exclusive interview with the star of a new film about the famous court case.

January 22 marks the 47th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the most contentious decision ever handed down by the US Supreme Court. In a 7-2 judgement, the Court held that American women have a “fundamental” right to an abortion. Since that day, an estimated 61 million of them have taken place in the US. No longer […]

The troubling terminations you’ve never heard of. Not all abortions end an unwanted pregnancy, and that makes a difference to the women

Does the termination of an unwanted pregnancy harm women’s mental health? No more than giving birth in such circumstances, according to mainstream social scientists and medical associations. Perhaps. But what about women who terminate a wanted pregnancy? A new study by sociologist Donald Paul Sullins focuses on this neglected minority – about 1 in 7 of reported […]

What is online porn teaching our children? Decades of research document the untold harm of pornography.

Last year groups like Protect Young Eyes testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee in an effort to seek better and more objective rating systems for phone apps that often appeal to children but may play host to pornographic content. Numerous states, meanwhile, recently followed Utah’s lead in passing resolutions declaring pornography “a public health crisis.” Reacting to such efforts, some […]

The other ‘marriage story’: divorce is at a 40-year low. And more kids are being raised in intact families.

The rise of divorce and the decline of marriage following the sexual revolution have destabilised the family life of two generations and have been the source of much unhappiness both for children and parents. We have lamented these trends often enough on MercatorNet, and a new movie dramatises the pain of divorce in wrenching detail. But there […]

India continues to struggle with surrogacy

The Prime Minister should walk his talk about empowering women and confront the powerful IVF industry. Indian author and activist Pinki Virani has been given a national award for her book Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India, which ripped the lid off the extent of this secretive crime in Indian homes across class and gender […]

Transgenderism: Technology and role reversals have made both sexes unattractive

Exactly what we should have expected from radical feminism. Transsexuality affects around 0.6% or an estimated 1.4 million of the 327 million people in the U.S. and yet the media and the radical left has curiously made trans people’s experience central to our imaginations and regularly propose policy changes that purport to benefit them. I am skeptical. […]

If democracy is dying, can schools revive it?

Ever since the 2016 United States elections, American pundits have been writing about the decline and fall of democracy, a sentiment that is echoed in leading British and European media. The Atlantic has a collection of such articles under the heading, “Is Democracy Dying?”, whose general purpose seems to be to explain how Donald Trump could become […]