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

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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 abortions in the United States – and finds there is no room for complacency about the effects of abortion among them. In the following interview he talks to MercatorNet about this study, the first of its kind, published in November in the Swiss medical journal Medicina.

Golden Globes award winner Michelle Williams more or less shouted her abortion as a good career move that she does not regret. She has a daughter of 14 and is happily pregnant again at age 39. Isn’t Williams living proof of the therapeutic value of abortion?

Ms. Williams’ declaration is very consistent with the results of my study.  The child she aborted clearly was not a wanted pregnancy, and the study found that women who only aborted one or more unwanted pregnancies experienced much lower affective distress (depression, anxiety, suicidality). This is why ignoring wanted pregnancy abortions, acting as if only unwanted pregnancies were ever aborted, tends to understate how much hurt is out there for women after abortion.

There is no question that the chances for advancement in a highly demanding, competitive career often improve by removing inconvenient persons and commitments, whether through divorce, not crediting someone else’s work, character assassination, or– in Michelle Williams’ case — killing an inconveniently conceived child before birth.  Civilized people generally do not boast about exercising such brutal career realpolitik, but Ms. Williams probably (let us hope for her sake) does not comprehend the humanity of the unborn life she took.

She has no way of knowing what the acceptance and love of that terminated life, a close reflection of her own being, may have contributed to her own growth in dignity and humanity.  For all she knows, her career may have been improved, or maybe her career would have suffered but her life and happiness improved. We have no way of knowing what pain and struggle may lie (lay?) behind her defiant public mask.  Why did she feel the need, after announcing her abortion, to reassure her living child of her love for her?  Did she sense that her daughter (and we) may wonder?

In the #MeToo era, it is also appropriate to ask who was the father of the child she felt she needed to abort. Would presenting this man with a child after having sexual relations with him have impeded her career?  Male sexual exploitation does not end just with hurt feelings or degradation for the woman. Perhaps this was not the case for Ms. Williams, but for every actress who found a pregnancy inconvenient to her career there are probably several men in the film industry who have urged or insisted that she obtain an abortion.

The career obstacle for both men and women of having a child at the wrong time is a mirror image of the career and personal obstructions met by women who refuse to have sex with the right men.  Whatever her personal circumstances, Ms. Williams’ statement reflects the typical Hollywood product, in which women’s sexuality exists primarily to service male desire, and women consequently have little agency. As one Hollywood actress (don’t remember who) said of her new boyfriend, voicing a common feeling of young women today, ” I have to give him what he wants, or he will get it somewhere else.”

Even if some women experience mental health problems after an abortion, research seems to show that these are no greater on the whole than those of women who give birth, and that they soon pass away. Have researchers been missing something?

Yes.  Both the idea that mental health problems are not increased by abortion and that they are not reduced by childbearing are myths perpetrated by poor research, in this case studies that follow women for only a very short time, some only a few days and often only a few months. So far, every study that has followed women 10 years or longer post-abortion have reported significant mental health problems, compared to women who give birth.

It is important to note that most of this difference is not due to psychological deficits from an abortion but to psychological benefits from having a child.  In the Add Health data I studied, childbirth reduced mental health risk by 29% following wanted pregnancies and by 12% even with unwanted pregnancies.

The reasons for this defect in the research, I believe, is that most abortion researchers tend to think of an abortion as a detached clinical event, and do not take into account the way that having an abortion, including making the choice and defending it, alters the life course, relationships and outlook of the woman involved.  As I put it in the paper:

“The experience of deciding upon, experiencing, and recovering from the termination of a pregnancy brings many life factors to bear for women, all of which may influence subsequent mental health. For these reasons, it may be more accurate to conceive of an abortion, not as a discrete cause of mental health outcomes (a clinical event), but as one factor in a complex of influences (a life event) that together affect a woman’s level of psychological well-being or distress.”

It seems amazing that yours is the “first study ever” of wanted pregnancy abortions. Surely there is plenty of evidence of them, especially with the increase in terminations for fetal abnormality, and all we hear about #MeToo and domestic violence?

The most influential researchers have simply assumed that only unwanted pregnancies are aborted. Many studies simply define aborted pregnancies as unwanted, even when not preceded by contraception. In 2008 the American Psychological Association (APA) dismissed all wanted pregnancy abortions as due only to fetal abnormality, but (as I show in the study) such abnormalities, even if we could detect them perfectly (we detect only about 60%) and even if all of them were aborted (many are not), could account for only a small proportion of reported wanted pregnancy abortions.  When not forced to check a box on a survey, very few women spontaneously describe their aborted child as “unwanted”. There is almost always a level of ambivalence, regret and resignation, that is expressed in complex feelings about the abortion.

It is difficult for OB/GYNs in other countries to understand the sales-like pressure to have an abortion faced by women in American abortion clinics. The movie “Unplanned” does a good job of illustrating this. The abortion rate in the United States has been much higher than in countries where abortions are performed in public hospitals with no profit incentive. A recent study of Utah clinics found that just a three-day waiting period resulted in 8% of women reversing their initial decision to have an abortion.

There have been one or two studies of fetal abnormality abortions, and studies that have looked at all abortions regardless of pregnancy intention have thereby included wanted pregnancy abortions mixed in with all the others, but mine is the first study of all wanted pregnancy abortions as a distinct category.

In your study, what data and measures did you use and what did they reveal about wanted pregnancy abortions? How serious were the effects compared to giving birth or unwanted pregnancy abortions?

The study examined the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), which followed a representative cohort of 3,935 ever-pregnant U.S. women from age 15 to age 28, gathering data from three successive interviews. I looked at seven psychological disorders which Add Health measured using criteria from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM): depression, suicide ideation, anxiety, and abuse of or addiction to hard drugs, alcohol, opioids or marijuana.  Mental health was compared both before and after pregnancy, abortion and birth, and was adjusted for 20 covariates that, my previous research had suggested, account for higher mental health problems, apart from an abortion.  These were 1 = childhood physical abuse, 2 = childhood sexual abuse, 3 = childhood verbal abuse, 4 = depression, 5 = anxiety, 6 = suicidal ideation, 7 = alcohol abuse, 8 = drug abuse, 9 = nicotine dependence, 10 = cannabis abuse, 11 = conduct problems in school, 12 = neuroticism, 13 = neighborhood integration, 14 = grade point average (gpa), 15 = ever raped, 16 = relationship satisfaction, 17 = educational attainment, 18 = respondent poverty income, 19 = marital status, and 20 = intimate partner violence.

I found that by age 28, U.S. women who had ever had an abortion of a wanted pregnancy were 84% more likely to experience higher numbers of the seven psychological disorders than were women who had carried all wanted pregnancies to term.  Women who had ever aborted any pregnancy were 74% more likely to experience higher psychological disorders compared to those who had given birth.

Experiencing wanted pregnancy abortion led to higher affective distress (depression, anxiety and suicidality) than abortions of unwanted pregnancies, relative to the corresponding births.  Risk of these psychological difficulties was only 18% higher following abortion of only unwanted pregnancies, but 69% higher following abortion of one or more wanted pregnancies.

What is the significance of your finding about substance abuse?

I was surprised to find that whether an aborted pregnancy had been wanted or unwanted had no effect on post-abortion rates of substance abuse.  Overall, risk of substance abuse (of alcohol, opioids, marijuana, or illegal drugs) was twice as high (elevated 100%) for women following any abortion, but was unaffected by pregnancy intention.  Only a few studies have examined the association of abortion and substance abuse; more study is needed to understand what is going on in this area.

My hunch is that pregnancies that may be subject to abortion and substance abuse reflect risk-taking, self-destructive behavior, and their co-occurrence reflects a system of mutually reinforcing moral hazard.  I hope to explore this idea in a future study.

What is it about the design of your study that gives you confidence in its findings?

By comparison to cross-sectional studies that only take a snapshot of women at a single point in time, my study is more like a series of pictures that can show changes over time. The exact same women were interviewed at three points in time to determine the effect of their prior pregnancy history on their current mental health. Only a handful of abortion studies have used such rigorous longitudinal designs.

In addition, the Add Health data, funded by a consortium of U.S. federal agencies, are widely acknowledged to be among the most comprehensive and accurate in the world. Response rates and follow-up rates are high (over 80%) and the measures are well-designed and independently validated.

Having said that, it is important to acknowledge that no empirical study can offer definitive proof, and this one is subject to several limitations. Most importantly, every study of abortion using population data is limited by the fact that many abortions are not reported, so we can only talk about the abortions we know of. Since a woman who is more troubled by her abortion is less likely to report it, I think my study probably understates the true level of post-abortion distress for U.S. women. Other limitations are discussed in the study.

No doubt the fact that you are a Catholic priest working in a Catholic university will provoke some prejudice against your research, so it is interesting that studies by secular researchers  in Scandinavia and by David Fergusson in New Zealand support your findings. What do their studies show?

Pedersen (studying women in Sweden) and Fergusson found similar problems for women following abortions because they used a similar longitudinal design that followed women for a decade or more after their abortion. Fergusson found that ever-aborting women had 1.4 times higher overall risk (not relative to births) of mental health problems; my study found 1.2 times higher risk.

The similarity has nothing to do with their personal religious or moral convictions about abortion as public policy.  Several recent studies from Finland, by scholars who reflect that culture’s uncontroversial acceptance of abortion as reproductive health care, have found similar persistent problems for post-abortion women, such as a doubled risk of suicide, 25% higher overall mortality, and higher emotional distress among women who wanted to give birth.  This doesn’t reflect an anti-abortion bias, but just the fact that Finland has excellent health registry population data and is able to follow women’s health for a long time to see the outcomes.

Accusing me of anti-abortion bias because I am Catholic reflects a shallow ignorance of the Catholic enterprise.  Many scientists today do not even believe in objective truth, and so cannot imagine someone who does not approach scientific topics with anything more than a narrow ideology to propagate.  It is very true that my faith strongly affects my research, but not in the manner critics think.  The principles of the Catholic faith, out of which modern science developed, call for faithful scientists to be rigorously objective in their research.  Only by looking as hard as I can to find empirical evidence that contradicts the claims of my faith can I then have confidence that any resulting findings which may be consistent with faith-claims have any validity. This process — the logic of the null hypothesis — is not external to the scientific method, but is central to what every scientist should be doing.

There is a great deal of bias in abortion research, but it’s not from the religiously oriented scholars for the most part. The main difference between myself and most scholars who research U.S. abortions is that I am not employed or funded by an abortion provider.  Over 90% of U.S. abortion studies have as one or more co-authors a researcher who works for an abortion provider or a research center funded by an abortion provider. Their assertively benign findings about the experience and effects of abortion are highly self-serving and rarely withstand careful scrutiny.

What, so far, has been the response to your latest study from other researchers?

It is too soon to tell much.  Friendly researchers I know (most, but not all, opposed to abortion) have written words of appreciation and praise, and invited a couple of lectures to explain the findings further.  Pro-life attorneys have been ecstatic. With the study I published a “crosswalk” that addresses some critical responses to a similar earlier study from pro-abortion researchers. I will be interested to see what their eventual responses will be to the measures I took in this study to address those concerns.

COLUMN BY

Rev. Donald Paul Sullins, MDiv., PhD, is a Research Associate Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America and Senior Research Associate at The Ruth Institute. He is also Director of the Leo Institute for Catholic Social Research.

Reference: Sullins DP. Affective and Substance Abuse Disorders Following Abortion by Pregnancy Intention in the United States: A Longitudinal Cohort Study. Medicina. 2019 Nov;55(11):741. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/1010-660X/55/11/741  The article can be freely accessed and reproduced.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

And Then There Were None

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In 2008, Abby Johnson, the manager of the Bryan, Texas (100 miles from Houston) Planned Parenthood, became that organization’s Employee of the Year.

By 2009, she quit for conscience’ sake. Why?

That year, for the first time, she saw an ultrasound of an abortion of a 13-week old unborn child in her own clinic. This was not a blob of tissue, a clump of cells, a non-living being. This was a baby that was fighting for his life.

Although Abby Johnson was a good salesman of abortions and thought that she was helping women through her work, seeing that baby fighting for his life caused the scales to fall from her eyes.

Abby says that after she saw that ultrasound,

“I knew that I had been part of a lie. I had been a part of a corrupt system, a corrupt organization, that really preyed upon women in their vulnerable states, and I knew that I needed to leave.”

She has now written a book (with Cindy Lambert) called Unplanned, and PureFlix (“God’s Not Dead”) has now turned that book into an excellent movie.

Abby Johnson has also started an outreach, And Then There Were None (ATTWN), to help abortion workers leave the field. I have interviewed Abby before and have previously written about her story. But here is an update about ATTWN, since I interviewed for Christian television two of her assistants at ATTWN recently.

One of them is Meagan Weber, who told me,

“[Abby] wrote her book hoping that a worker would pick it up as a skeptic and see the truth, and see themselves through her words, and within three months of her book’s release in 2011, she had 17 abortion workers contact her for help.”

In effect, Abby and those 17 workers became the beginning of her work to help transition abortion clinic workers out of the field. Her reasoning is simple. She says in her ATTWN website, abortionworker.com,

“We always say that nobody grows up wanting to work in the abortion industry. Nobody. Our vision statement for ‘And then there were none’ is ‘No abortion clinic workers, no abortion clinics, no abortions’—it starts with the workers. We see ourselves as being part of a pro-love movement. That we want to love these workers out of the clinics. We want to love them to a path of healing, and we want to love them back into a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

As an abortion worker, Abby Johnson had thought that what she was doing at Planned Parenthood was helping women. But she learned the hard way that the real bottom line of Planned Parenthood was its bottom line.

Weber, who serves as Abby Johnson’s Assistant, told me, “They asked her to increase the number of abortions at her facility by half, and so she said, ‘Don’t we tell the media that we want to reduce the number of abortions to make them safe, legal, and rare?’ And her supervisor laughed and said, ‘Well, Abbey, how do you think we make our money?’ And she really was blindsided by that.”

Weber also says, “Leaving your job in the abortion industry is not like leaving your job in a fast food outlet. It has the same high turnover rate, but you don’t just leave your job, you leave your friends, you leave your ideology…you go from one day championing women’s rights and abortion rights to the next day having to humble yourself and say, ‘I was wrong. I was part of a very evil system,’ and they have to come to terms with that. So there is a lot of emotional trauma, and there is abandonment.”

I also have spoken with Laura Ricketts of ATTWN for Christian television. She observed, “As we walk through the process of healing them, as we meet their practical needs with financial assistance, with resume writing, with jobs search help, as we help them pay their bills, get back on their feet, once their practical needs are met, they are ready to meet their emotion and spiritual needs.”

So far the organization has been able to help hundreds of clinic workers get out of the abortion field. Meagan states, “And so here we are seven years later, and we’ve helped 550 workers and 7 full-time doctors.”

The movie alone helped cause about a hundred abortion clinic workers to respond…to consider coming out. Ricketts told me, “I think one of the most exciting things about the movie is the impact it had across the country and now across the world. We saw hearts changed, abortion clinic workers leaving their jobs.”

Abby Johnson says, “My story is really an exposé. It’s pulling back the curtain into an industry that has been normalized. Abortion has been so incredibly normalized in our society, and it’s anything but normal.”

© All rights reserved.

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

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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 is another, true and encouraging story about divorce – not the much bruited “good divorce” but the fact that divorce is in a four-decade decline, and family stability indicators are ticking up.

Writing in USA Today before Christmas family scholar Brad Wilcox and Institute for Family Studies blog editor Alysse Elhage highlighted three positive trends in the US: the continuing decline of divorce; falling births to unmarried women; and a rising share of children being raised by married parents. Divorce, in fact, has been falling since its peak in 1980 and is predicted to decline further.

At the same time British family advocate and researcher Harry Benson reported that marriages are lasting longer in the UK. Including couples who marry overseas, he finds that for marriages starting today, the median duration before divorce or death would be 40 years, not the 30 years estimated by the Office for National Statistics, let alone the oft-quoted “12 years”, which is the average duration of marriages ending in divorce, not all marriages.

So, what’s going on?

Divorce is down: Benson says almost all the decline in divorce in the UK is due to fewer wives wanting out of their marriage. In the absence of social pressure to marry, he suggests, men in particular are becoming more intentional about it. “More committed men means fewer unhappy wives filing for divorce.”

According to Wilcox and Elhage, it’s because modern marriage is about children:

Surveys tell us that Americans are less tolerant of divorce today. That’s in large part because, as family scholar Richard Reeves put it, “Modern marriage is not principally about money, sex, or status. It’s about children.” Today’s married couples seem to invest more in staying together, unlike the Boomers who were obsessed with their own fulfillment in the ’70s,offering their children a better shot a more stable family life and future.

Children following marriage: Non-marital births have been falling for nearly a decade in the US, the American writers note:

The rate of nonmarital childbearing has fallen from 41.% in 2009 to 39.6% in 2018. We think what has happened, in part, is that young adults in America have become more cautious in the wake of the Great Recession about forming families and, hence, are less likely to leap into parenthood without a ring on their finger.

 

Intact families: The share of US children being raised by their own married parents seems to have bottomed out, rising from 61.8 percent in 2014 to 62.6 percent in 2019, say Wilcox and Elhage, who expect the trend to continue. They add:

What does all this mean for American children? Children raised by their married parents enjoy a host of life-long benefits compared to children born into other family forms, including more financial stability, greater physical safety, more involved fathers, and greater educational, social and psychological outcomes.

This might not be the marriage story Hollywood wants to tell, but it’s a true story and young people have a right to hear it at home, in church, school and on social media, for their own sakes and that of the next generation.

COLUMN BY

CAROLYN MOYNIHAN

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

The 2010s: A Decade of Marital and Sexual Erosion

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Originally published by USA Today.

A decade ago, President Barack Obama affirmed that marriage unites a man and woman. So did 45 states and the federal government.

The only states to redefine marriage had done so through activist court rulings or, in 2009, legislative action. At the ballot box, citizens had uniformly voted against redefinition. A majority agreed with Obama.

Then, in 2012, Obama “evolved,” and the Supreme Court took cases involving marriage law.

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? Find out more now >>

Nothing in the Constitution answered the actual question at hand: What is marriage? The court should have left the issue to the people. But in 2013, it struck down the federal definition of marriage as a male-female union in a 5-4 ruling.

The court also punted on a challenge to a state definition of marriage adopted in a 2008 constitutional referendum by which a majority of Californians—yes, Californians—overturned an activist court.

Only in 2015 did the Supreme Court, breaking 5-4 again, redefine marriage for the nation, provoking four irrefutable dissents.

Same-sex marriage advocates told the public that they sought only the “freedom to marry.” Same-sex couples were already free to live as they chose, but legal recognition was about the definition of marriage for all of society. It was about affirmation—by the government and everyone else.

It was never really about “live and let live”—that was a merely tactical stance.

It’s unsurprising that once a campaign that used to cry “live and let live” prevailed, it began working to shut down Catholic adoption agencies and harass evangelical bakers and florists.

This shows it was never really about “live and let live”—that was a merely tactical stance.

Family, Marriage—Redefined

While these were the early effects of redefinition, the more profound consequences will be to marriage itself. Law shapes culture; culture shapes beliefs; beliefs shape action.

The law now effectively teaches that mothers and fathers are replaceable, that marriage is simply about consenting adult relationships, of whatever formation the parties happen to prefer. This undermines the truth that children deserve a mother and a father—one of each.

It also undercuts any reasonable justification for marital norms. After all, if marriage is about romantic connection, why require monogamy?

There’s nothing magical about the number two, as defenders of “polyamory” point out. If marriage isn’t a conjugal union uniting a man and a woman as one flesh, why should it involve or imply sexual exclusivity? If it isn’t a comprehensive union inherently ordered to childbearing and rearing, why should it be pledged to permanence?

The law now effectively teaches that mothers and fathers are replaceable, that marriage is simply about consenting adult relationships, of whatever formation the parties happen to prefer.

Marriage redefiners could not answer these questions when challenged to show that the elimination of sexual complementarity did not undermine other marital norms. Today, they increasingly admit that they have no stake in upholding norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence.

Same-sex marriage didn’t create these problems. Many in America had unwisely already gone along with the erosion of marital norms in the wake of the sexual revolution—with the rise of cohabitation, nonmarital childbearing, no-fault divorce, and the hookup culture.

It was no surprise that many would then question the relevance of the male-female norm. Legal redefinition is a consequence of the cultural breakdown of marriage.

Monogamy Is Old News

But same-sex marriage is a catalyst for further erosion. Already, we see respectable opinion-makers mainstreaming “throuples,” “ethical nonmonogamy” and “open relationships.” This was predictable; we and others predicted it.

Something we didn’t predict are the headlines about transgender and nonbinary “identities.” A decade ago, few Americans had given much thought to the “T” in “LGBT.” Today, transgender identity seems to dominate the discussion of sexuality and sexual morality.

There’s a logic here. If we can’t see the point of our sexual embodiment where it matters most—in marriage—we’ll question whether it matters at all. Hence the push to see gender as “fluid” and existing along a “spectrum” of nonbinary options.

There’s a deeper logic, too. Implicit in the push for same-sex marriage was body-self dualism—the idea that we’re actually nonphysical entities inhabiting physical bodies, or ghosts in machines. That’s why the “plumbing” in sexual acts seemed not to matter.

True one-flesh union, the foundation of conjugal marriage, was thought illusory. What mattered was emotional union and partners’ use of their bodies to induce desirable sensations and feelings.

Of course, two men or two women (or throuples or even larger sexual ensembles) could do that. But the logic didn’t stay with marriage. If the body is mere plumbing, then sex matters less than identity.

This has had tragic consequences, especially for children.

Children Burdened by Our Mistakes

Nearly unthinkable a decade ago, certain medical professionals tell children experiencing gender dysphoria that they are trapped in the wrong body, even that their bodies are merely like Pop-Tarts foil packets, as one expert explained.

Nearly unthinkable a decade ago, certain medical professionals tell children experiencing gender dysphoria that they are trapped in the wrong body.

Some doctors now prescribe puberty-blocking drugs to otherwise healthy children struggling to accept their bodies. They prescribe cross-sex hormones for young teens to transform their bodies to align with their gender identities.

As part of a government grant-supported study, doctors even performed double mastectomies on adolescent girls—including two 13-year-olds.

These changes weren’t grassroots movements. They’ve come from people wielding political, economic, and cultural power to advance sexual-liberationist ideology.

The change has been top-down—from Hollywood’s portrayal of LGBT characters to business executives boycotting states over religious freedom laws. Having lost at the ballot box over and over—even in California—activists found new avenues: ideologically friendly courts, federal agencies, big corporations.

Having secured a judicial redefinition of marriage, they pivoted to the “T,” with the Obama administration redefining “sex” to mean “gender identity” and imposing a new policy on all schools.

The change has been top down—from Hollywood’s portrayal of LGBT characters to business executives boycotting states over religious-freedom laws.

And having won government support, activists turned to eliminating private dissent. Former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke wants to yank the tax-exemption of noncompliant churches. Megadonor Tim Gill vows to spend his fortunes to “punish the wicked.”

Who are “the wicked”? Those who refuse to accept the new sexual orthodoxy.

All of us, including those identifying as LGBT, are made in God’s image, are endowed with profound dignity and thus deserve respect. It’s because of this dignity and out of such respect that the institutions serving the human good—like the marriage-based family—should be supported, not undermined or redefined. That basic rights like religious freedom ought to be upheld, not infringed. That a healthy moral and physical ecology—especially for children—must be preserved.

The “progress” of the past decade has exacted steep costs.

COMMENTARY BY

Ryan T. Anderson

Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, where he researches and writes about marriage, bioethics, religious liberty and political philosophy. Anderson is the author of several books and his research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices in two separate cases. Read his Heritage research. Twitter: .

Robert George

Robert George is the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, where he directs the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He also serves on The Heritage Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

With the demand for socialism at an all-time high among our young people—our future leaders and decisionmakers—the experts at Heritage stopped and asked a question that not many have asked:

Is socialism really morally sound?

The researchers at The Heritage Foundation have put together a guide to help you and our fellow Americans better understand the 9 Ways That Socialism Will Morally Bankrupt America.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

How Porn Changes Your Brain

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(Warning: Extremely graphic content)

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry isn’t a prude. In fact, he used to roll his eyes at his Christian friends, who he thought were exaggerating the dangers of pornography. Not anymore.

This Frenchman, who believes eroticism “is one of God’s greatest gifts to humankind,” no longer scoffs the feminists’ warnings or puritan concerns. “I have become deadly serious,” he says now. “The damage is real, and it’s profound.” And no one can walk away from his article thinking otherwise.

Debate the morality all you want, Gobry insists, but the science is absolute. People who say porn is as addictive as smoking aren’t even doing it justice. These images are as addictive as smoking, yes, “except that what smoking does to your lungs, porn does to your brain.” And the earlier you consume it, the more lethal the damage can be. We’re talking about a complete rewiring of the brain—where the body actually builds new nerve pathways just to drive a person back for more.

But pornography isn’t like cocaine. It’s much easier to binge. “Even decadent Roman emperors, Turkish sultans, and 1970s rock stars never had 24/7, one-click-away-access to infinitely many, infinitely novel sexual partners,” Gobry points out.

“The possibility of immediate, infinite novelty—which, again, was not a feature of porn until 2006—means that a user can now keep his dopamine levels much higher, and for much longer periods of time, than we can possibly hope our brains to handle without real and lasting damage.”

Suddenly, it gets tougher to feel the “high.” “You need more and more of your drug to get less and less of a kick; this is the cycle which makes addiction so destructive.

Fine—so people are addicted, you might say. “But does that mean we need to freak out? After all, smoking and heroin will kill you, serious cannabis addiction will melt your brain, alcohol addiction will wreak havoc in your life—compared to that, how bad can porn addiction be? The answer, it turns out, is: pretty bad.”

Porn trains your mind to need porn to be aroused—not another human being. The Family Research Council’s Travis Weber and I talked about this on “Washington Watch” last week.

There are literally thousands of stories of young men now who are coming of age after watching hundreds of hours of pornography. And their stories all share the same gut-wrenching theme: they’re so hooked on porn that by the time they have girlfriends, they can’t function sexually without it.

“Which is why,” Gobry warns, “we are witnessing a phenomenon which, as best as anyone can tell, is totally unprecedented in all of human history: an epidemic of chronic erectile dysfunction (ED) among men under 40. The evidence is earth-shattering.” We’ve gone from less than 1% of ED in young men to as much as 37% today.

Pornography isn’t just killing sex—it’s killing love. “A majority of women in one study described the discovery that their man uses porn as ‘traumatic;’ they not only felt less desirable, they reported feelings of lower self-worth.”

And in a world where 88% of pornography is violent, more young women are being asked to do things that abuse and brutalize them.

To kick up the high, addicts need something more taboo. They’re watching women “being caned and whipped until they are bruised and red … When the films have a storyline, it can usually be summed up with one word: rape. Or two words: brutal rape. It’s one thing to be aroused by a sadomasochistic scene where the [woman] is shown visibly enjoying the treatment; it’s quite another to be aroused by watching a woman scream in agony and despair as she is held down and violently raped.”

Now, imagine children watching this—because they are. Either by accident or intentionally, kids are being exposed to these things believing that “the acts they see—like anal and group sex—are typical among their peers.”

Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, a mom in the Dallas area, wrote a horrifying column called “When Sixth Graders Can Access Rape Porn on Their Smart Phones, School Becomes Toxic.” In a letter to the principal, she talked about the boys in her daughter’s class laughing at violent porn and joking about attacking the girls in the parking lot. “No 11-year-old should have to deal with, or even know, about things like this.”

As a parent, I can’t encourage you strongly enough to take this issue seriously. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable topic. But it’s a lot less uncomfortable than dealing with the sexual abuse, addictions, disease, and broken relationships that follow. If you don’t know what to say, start here or here.

If you’re an adult trying to escape this online world, it isn’t easy. But it’s also not impossible. Josh McDowell has a tremendous message of freedom for anyone struggling with this addiction that you can watch here.

In fact, one of the reasons the Family Research Council started its Stand Courageous conferences is because we believe this is one of the biggest issues keeping men from being the spiritual head of their homes. Consider signing up for one our 2020 events in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Florida. Above all, pray. Pray for protection—for your children, your marriages, our culture.

Gobry’s warnings are dire, but they may be exactly what parents and pastors need to hear.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Pornography Consumption: The Overlooked Public Health Crisis

White House Urged to Restore Prosecution of Pornography

Survivors’ $12.7M Victory Over GirlsDoPorn a Beacon of Hope for Other Survivors

Victory! NCOSE Endorses “END Network Abuse Act” to Combat Child Sexual Abuse Material

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Sign The Petition – Hallmark Shouldn’t Show LGBT ‘Marriages’ To Kids

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Another week, another corporation lost to the “woke” leftist crowd. This time it’s Hallmark’s (2.1) television station, which managed to alienate everyone in the culture wars by accepting a “wedding” ad featuring a lesbian couple…then rejecting the ad…then apologizing for rejecting the ad.

And all this just after the company bowed to activist pressure to feature LGBT propaganda in its movies.

Should we even be surprised at this point? Hallmark officially caved on marriage and religious liberty long ago– it just didn’t make it to the screen until 2019. Chick-fil-A, long considered a corporate bastion for social conservatives, bailed in spectacular fashion. And other corporations can’t get enough of bowing and scraping to the far-left crowd.

Conservatives love to blame leftists for how corporations cave to the new American values of “anything goes unless we say otherwise.” However, the real problem is who we see in the mirror – the people who have allowed the Left to dictate the culture war market.

It’s time for 2ndVote Americans – those who love God, traditional values, and our fellow men and women – to unashamedly show our values. We can start by signing the One Million Moms petition which urges Hallmark to return to being a family-friendly company.

Winning won’t be easy. Traditional Christian and American values are being overrun. 2ndVote Americans have two choices: be the coward Peter who abandoned Christ or be the Peter who bravely led the apostles to victory on Earth and in Heaven. Otherwise, we will find ourselves standing alone one day, wondering how a nation which once proclaimed God on its money now actively persecutes Him and His values.

Yes, it will be hard. Yes, we may lose friends and money. But the biblical martyrs and those who flee persecution in the Middle East have given up far more to gain the Glory of Heaven. We must do the same, for our souls and for the souls of those who without us will be lost here and on Earth.

SIGN THE ONE MILLION MOMS PETITION TO HALLMARK

RELATED ARTICLES:

Updated: Pro-Life Guide to United Way

The Company Contrast – TurboTax

EDITORS NOTE: This 2nd Vote column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Moms of The LGBT

EDITORS NOTE: This 2nd Vote column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Marijuana vaping nearly triples among 12th graders in 2 years

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Marijuana vaping nearly triples in two years among 12th graders

Past-month marijuana vaping among high school seniors nearly tripled (from 5 percent to 14 percent) between 2017 and 2019, the new Monitoring the Future reveals. It nearly doubled in just one year (from 7.5 percent to 14 percent), the largest one-year jump of any drug in the history of the survey.

Seniors’ past-year marijuana vaping more than doubled in two years (from 9.5 percent in 2017 to 20.8 percent in 2019), and their lifetime marijuana vaping nearly doubled (from 11.9 percent to 23.7 percent).

This year – for the first time – the survey monitored near daily marijuana vaping (more than 20 days a month). Some 3.5 percent of 12th graders vape marijuana that often.

Marijuana vaping doubled in two years among 10th and 8th grade students as well:

Among 10th grade students

  • Past-month use rose from 4.3 percent in 2017 to 12.6 percent in 2019
  • Past-year use: 8.1 percent to 19.4 percent
  • Lifetime use: 9.8 percent to 21.8 percent

Among 8th grade students

  • Past-month use rose from 1.6 percent in 2017 to 3.9 percent in 2019
  • Past-year use: 3 percent to 7 percent
  • Lifetime use ; 4 percent to 9 percent

Such dramatic increases in such a short amount of time are worrisome on two counts. Little is known about the impact on the body of vaping anything, including high THC levels or nicotine, into the lungs. The upsurge in severe lung injuries and deaths identified only last August makes the point (see next story). Also, because adolescence is a time of intense brain development, young people are particularly vulnerable to becoming addicted to any drug if they begin using while they are still teenagers.

Nicotine vaping among adolescents presents the same hazard and threatens to undo the significant gains in reducing cigarette smoking among youth. The 2019 survey finds that 35 percent of 12th graders vaped nicotine in the past year, as did 31 percent of 10th graders and 17 percent of 8th graders.

Read NIDA’s release of the 2019 Monitoring the Future here.
Read JAMA research letter here.

Vaping-related lung injury cases from all 50 states continue to be reported to CDC, although they may be slowing down. Thus far, 52 deaths in 26 states have been linked to these injuries. More deaths are being investigated.

All 2,409 patients report a history of vaping. THC is present in most samples FDA has tested, and most patients report a history of THC use.

While Vitamin E acetate is a chemical of interest, patients have used some 152 different THC brands, including Dank Vapes in the Northeast and South, TKO and Smart Carts in the West, and Rove in the Midwest.

There may be more than one cause of the illness.

Read the December 12 CDC Update here.

This week’s podcast: Mahmoud ElSohly – Is marijuana the same as Epidiolex?

Mahmoud A. ElSohly, PhD, is a pharmacologist known for his work on marijuana. He is professor of pharmaceutics in the school of pharmacy at the University of Mississippi where he directs the Marijuana Project which grows pharmaceutical-grade marijuana for research. He is an expert in the processing, testing, and detection of drugs of abuse.

Key Points

  • Epidiolex is a very well-defined pharmaceutical preparation of CBD
  • Difference between it and other CBD is like night and day.
  • Difference between Epidiolex and CBD on the Internet and in stores
  • What is the OTC process?
  • What is biphasic activity?
  • What is low bioavailability?
  • Is there an entourage effect?

Listen to Dr. ElSohly’s podcast here.

Up next week? Marilyn Huestis – How marijuana affects kids

Is marijuana linked to psychosis, schizophrenia? It’s contentious, but doctors, feds say yes

USA Today writes that doctors, federal officials, parents, and young adult marijuana users who have experienced psychosis while using the drug agree that marijuana does indeed cause psychosis, including schizophrenia.

Elinore McCance-Katz, MD, PhD, the US Department of Health and Human Services top mental health official and head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, says hospitalizations for serious mental-health disorders among 18- to 25-year-olds more than doubled between 2012 and 2018. Colorado and Washington State were the first two states to legalize marijuana for recreational use in 2012.

She also cites a July study that shows a 77 percent increase in suicide deaths from 2010 to 2015 among Colorado 10- to 19-year-olds with marijuana in their systems.

“Among people who use marijuana, 10 percent to 20 percent will develop a marijuana use disorder and be at risk for these other kinds of mental and physical adverse events,” Dr. McCance-Katz adds.

Sally Schindel tells the story of her son, who was diagnosed with severe cannabis use disorder, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder with auditory hallucinations, paranoia and anxiety. He committed suicide, leaving his mother a note explaining why: “I want to die. My soul is already dead. Marijuana killed my soul + ruined my brain.”

Read USA Today article here.

Visit The Marijuana Report’s Facebook page

In addition to current issues of The Marijuana Report, we post several more marijuana messages each month on our Facebook page. Search Facebook for nationalfamilies to access it.

Looking for a past issue of The Marijuana Report?

  Find it here.
Did you know

that in addition to The Marijuana Report e-newsletter, National Families in Action also publishes The Marijuana Report website? There you can find summaries of (and access to) scientific marijuana studies, the growth of the commercial marijuana industry, and what families and communities are doing to restrain it. Begin at our Welcome Page to access all the resources The Marijuana Report website offers.

The Marijuana Report is a weekly e-newsletter published by National Families in Action in partnership with SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana).

Visit National Families in Action’s website, The Marijuana Report.Org, to learn more about the marijuana story unfolding across the nation.

Subscribe to The Marijuana Report e-newsletter.

Medicare for All—No Care for You

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Preview: 

  • Democrat presidential candidates are sparring over how much to expand Medicare. Should it be Medicare for all, for people over 50 and children, or for “all who want it”? Does “all” include veterans, Native Americans, and military dependents, who now have their own government program? Does it include everybody who happens to be in the country, legally or illegally? And do the benefits include just what today’s Medicare beneficiaries get, or everything the candidate can think of—dental, eyeglasses, hearing aids, mental health treatment, addiction treatment, “sex-change” surgery, etc.? Does it even include long-term care, which the Affordable Care Act had to discard because it was unaffordable?
  • Medicare for All means government-directed, corporate-managed care. The managed-care “insurance” cartel, giant hospital chains, and private-equity-owned medical practices will make sure that you get your flu shot (likely mandatory), your anti-tobacco lecture, your silver sneakers, your 15 profitable “preventative” drugs, cross-sex hormones, abortion on demand—and eventually your terminal sedation.
  • Beyond that, you’re on your own—if there are any private options left and if you still have any after-tax money.

Democrat presidential candidates are sparring over how much to expand Medicare. Should it be Medicare for all, for people over 50 and children, or for “all who want it”? Does “all” include veterans, Native Americans, and military dependents, who now have their own government program? Does it include everybody who happens to be in the country, legally or illegally? And do the benefits include just what today’s Medicare beneficiaries get, or everything the candidate can think of—dental, eyeglasses, hearing aids, mental health treatment, addiction treatment, “sex-change” surgery, etc.? Does it even include long-term care, which the Affordable Care Act had to discard because it was unaffordable?

Who wouldn’t want that?

In 1965, a lot of seniors did not want Medicare. They were happy with their private coverage, which nearly half of them had. They did not trust government. To assure the success of “his” program, President Lyndon Johnson took away their private coverage. Insurers could not, under contract law, cancel an individual’s policy, say because they got sick, but they could cancel everybody’s coverage—and they did. This was a precedent for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which outlawed the coverage many people had unless it could meet stringent “grandfather” requirements.

“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” was an acknowledged “four-Pinocchios” lie. Elizabeth Warren doesn’t worry about that because she thinks nobody likes insurance. Possibly true, but that doesn’t mean people would choose the government alternative.

With rare exceptions such as a continuation of policies from employers, seniors do not have and cannot get a private plan that duplicates Medicare coverage. They can only get “Medigap” policies to cover deductibles and things Medicare does not cover.

After a huge percentage of the population got “covered” by the government, did things get better? People did get more treatment. Great advances in medical technology occurred—likely unrelated to Medicare. But toxic, unrelenting cost-price inflation began abruptly after 1965 for the first time in 90 years, leading to massive government interventions to put a lid on them. Administrative demands burgeoned—there are now at least ten times as many administrators as doctors. And government eroded the value of people’s savings by inflating the dollar. If you had put $10 in a mattress in 1965, it would be worth only $1.24 today.

Did evil, greedy private insurers go away? No, they competed for government contracts to administer Medicare. As one whistleblower discovered, carriers can get away with $200 million in fraud without even triggering an investigation. Or they went into the Medigap business. AARP, which purports to represent seniors, has received more than $4 billion in “royalties” from UnitedHealth since the passage of ACA. According to a lawsuit Krukas v. AARP, AARP effectively acts as an unlicensed insurance agent that collects what amount to illegal kickbacks.

Medicare Advantage plans are widely touted for offering extra services such as gym memberships. But there’s a dirty little secret: once in, if you get sick your costs soar and it can be very expensive to get out. Also, about a third of such plans have a very narrow network of physicians.

But in traditional Medicare, you get worry-free treatment, right? Not exactly. Government controls are constantly tightening. The ironically named Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 provides that clinicians must refer to “appropriate use criteria” (AUC) when ordering advanced imaging studies like CT scans or MRIs. We’re supposedly in a “testing period” during which payment won’t be denied. However, physicians are already receiving notices from their hospital that they now MUST use AUC when ordering out-patient studies.

If you are admitted to hospital, you will be greeted by a worker checking on advance directives that will enable the hospital to withhold treatment. If your care is expected to cost a lot, and the Prospective Payment System allowed charge won’t cover it, the hospital has every incentive to shunt you off to hospice. This also averts the possibility of a penalty for re-admitting a patient. Hospice is a one-way transfer.

Medicare for All means government-directed, corporate-managed care. The managed-care “insurance” cartel, giant hospital chains, and private-equity-owned medical practices will make sure that you get your flu shot (likely mandatory), your anti-tobacco lecture, your silver sneakers, your 15 profitable “preventative” drugs, cross-sex hormones, abortion on demand—and eventually your terminal sedation.

Beyond that, you’re on your own—if there are any private options left and if you still have any after-tax money.

Is that what Americans want?

© All rights reserved.

Abortion Pills: The Do-It-Yourself, Back-Alley Methods by Patrina Mosley

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It’s been no coincidence that the latest mainstream media, women’s magazines, and even Teen Vogue have been advertising abortion pills as the new wonders of women’s healthcare that can be taken in the privacy of their homes.They even have the audacity to applaud purchasing illegal abortion pills online. A New York Times columnist, a man at that, found that ordering illegal abortion pills online was quite easy during his investigation. Nothing should be scarier than a man ordering abortion pills and then titling his investigation piece “Abortion Pills Should Be Everywhere.” There have been numerous documented incidents (here, here, and here) of women being unknowingly slipped abortion pills by partners who were unwilling to become fathers or by family members who were unsupportive of the pregnancy. The abortion industry markets the abortion pill as straightforward and safe. In reality, chemical abortions are a multi-day traumatic process that comes with over 4,000 documented life-threatening and health endangering risks.

The rate at which chemical abortion is being used is currently at an all-time high. The latest statistics on abortion from the Guttmacher Institute show that 39 percent of abortions in 2017 were chemical (reported as “medical” or “medication abortion”), a 25 percent increase since 2014. This rapid increase in chemical abortions is part of the abortion industry’s long-term strategy to make abortions “self-managed” and unrestricted — despite the profound dangers such poorly-supervised medical care poses to women’s health.

Abortion lobbyists regard drug-based, do-it-yourself abortions as the best way to get around the many state-level pro-life laws being enacted around our country. Such abortions are accomplished through the abortion pill regimen, distributed under the brand name Mifeprex, which is subject to the FDA’s drug safety program — Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) — because it carries such life-threatening risks.

The abortion industry wants to remove the FDA’s REMS in order to have abortion pills available through the pharmacy, the mail, and even on college campuses (also currently being proposed in New York), making do-it-yourself abortions the future of the abortion industry. They have strategically discussed how the absence of the REMS would significantly expand abortion locations and providers, broaden remote prescription (in which a woman is never even examined by the prescriber), and eventually achieve over-the-counter (OTC) status for Mifeprex.

Abortion advocates once claimed that legal abortion would alleviate the danger of “back-alley” abortions for women, but now they want to place the burden of inducing abortions completely on women — despite the fact that the health complications that often result from an induced chemical abortion are eerily similar to those of “back-alley” abortions. They include severe bleeding, infection, retained fetal parts, the need for emergency surgery, and even death. In addition, the woman, who may or may not have health insurance coverage, is expected to bear the additional cost of these “chemical coat hanger” abortion complications.

Yet, abortion activists continue to market the abortion pill as “safe,” “effective,” and “simple” for women with visions of “privacy” and “simplicity.” This is demonstrably false, but it’s the lie they have to sell women so that the abortion industry can cut costs, expand their reach, and remove themselves from the pain and hurt they cause women. With all the documented dangers, it is increasingly evident that the advancement of the abortion industry’s agenda for the Mifeprex regimen is about political, ideological, and financial goals — not care for women.

To read more about the radical implications that OTC abortion drugs could have for women’s health and safety, especially as it pertains to intimate partner violence, sexual abuse and sex trafficking, and accurate patient assessment, see our new publication: The Next Abortion Battleground: Chemical Abortion. If you or a woman you know needs to know the facts about abortion drugs or wants to share their experience of a chemical abortion, please visit Abortiondrugfacts.com.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Comedian Michelle Wolf Says She Felt Like “God” After Having Her Abortion

2020 Dem Michael Bloomberg Allegedly Told Pregnant Staffer To “Kill It,” Planned Parenthood Defends Him

School Tests Parents’ Limits with Prostitute

Sheriff’s Office to Extremists: ‘Get behind Me, Satan!’

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column by Patrina Mosley is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Marriage and Pregnancy Reduce Crime

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There’s a general assumption in public policy discourse that economic policy and social policy are separate universes.

When economic policy is the topic, we think about taxes, government spending, business, jobs, etc. When social policy is the topic, we think about marriage, family, children, abortion, etc.

But, in reality, the line between economic policy and social policy is ambiguous, if it exists at all.

In recent years, for instance, family structure has gotten increasing attention as an important factor to consider in policy discussions about poverty.

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? Find out more now >>

Now we have a new academic paper by economists—Maxim Massenkoff and Evan Rose, both doctoral candidates in economics at the University of California, Berkeley—that makes it even clearer that what we generally think of as social policy can fall into the realm of economic analysis.

The paper—”Family Formation and Crime”—examines the connection between the incidence of pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage, and the incidence of crime.

The conclusion, in the words of the authors: “Our event-study analysis indicates that pregnancy triggers sharp declines in crime rivaling any known intervention. For mothers, criminal offending drops precipitously in the first few months of pregnancy, stabilizing at half of pre-pregnancy levels three years after the birth. Men show a smaller, but still important 25 percent decline beginning at the onset of pregnancy, although domestic violence arrests spike for fathers immediately after birth.”

Marriage, according to the authors, “is a stopping point, marking the completion of a roughly 50 percent decline in offending for both men and women.”

The analysis, again per the authors, is “by far the largest such study ever conducted in the United States.” They tapped information on over a million births and, using data in the state of Washington, matched records on “criminal offenses, births, marriages, and divorces.”

George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok discusses the work on his enormously popular blog Marginal Revolution.

Tabarrok notes his own research on crime deterrence, which shows that in the case of three-strikes laws, the prospect of an additional 20 years to life imprisonment reduced criminal recidivism by 17%. Compared with this, notes Tabarrok, “the effect of pregnancy is astoundingly large.”

Of course, demonstrating statistical correlation and explaining why the occurrences correlate are different things. Why is incidence of pregnancy followed by significant drops in criminal activity in both women and men?

What is it about birth and marriage that contributes significantly to reducing crime?

Tabarrok conjectures it’s about “socializing and civilizing both men and women.”

I would speculate that it is similar to why, when a pregnant woman sees an ultrasound image of the child developing within her, she is less likely to abort that child.

It’s a wake-up call to the awe and mystery of life, which produces a sense of meaning and personal responsibility.

It follows that we ought to be concerned about the decline in Americans’ sense of importance of marriage and children.

In a newly published survey from Pew Research Center, 57% of men and 46% of women said “having a job or career they enjoy” is “essential for a … fulfilling life.”

Compared with this, only 16% of men and 17% of women said marriage is “essential for a … fulfilling life.”

And only 16% of men and 22% of women said children are “essential for a … fulfilling life.”

I love my work and agree that satisfying and meaningful work is rewarding. But I think something is wrong when Americans are saying work is three times more important for a fulfilling life than marriage and children.

The public policy implications of this research showing a drop in crime after pregnancy are not clear. But what is clear is we should be thinking more about how our culture can do a better job conveying the importance of marriage and children.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

Star Parker

Star Parker is a columnist for The Daily Signal and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: Problematic Women: Beginning Motherhood in the NICU

A Note for our Readers:

With the demand for socialism at an all-time high among our young people—our future leaders and decisionmakers—the experts at Heritage stopped and asked a question that not many have asked:

Is socialism really morally sound?

The researchers at The Heritage Foundation have put together a guide to help you and our fellow Americans better understand the 9 Ways That Socialism Will Morally Bankrupt America.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET YOUR FREE COPY NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

2,291 vaping-related lung injury cases in all 50 states, 2 US territories; 48 deaths in 25 states

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These data as of December 3, 2019 were adjusted by removing 175 non-hospitalized cases from previously reported national cases. From this date forward, CDC will report only hospitalized cases but deaths regardless of hospitalization status.

THC is present in most of the samples tested by FDA. While Vitamin E acetate is a chemical of concern, 152 different THC products have been used by patients.

An article in the December 6, 2019 issue of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) provides more information about the kinds of THC products patients have used.

Of 2,291 patients, 1,421 vaped any use of THC, 956 vaped any use of nicotine, and 214 vaped any use of CBD.

More than half used Dank Vapes. The next popular brands were TKO, Rove, Smart Cart, Kingpen, and Cookie. “Cart” refers to the cartridge that is inserted into a vaping device.

Ten percent of patients in the Northeast and West regions reported using Dabwood and Brass Knuckles. From one percent to five percent of patients nationwide reported using the following brands: Off White, Moon Rocks, Chronic Carts, Mario Carts, Cereal Carts, Runtz, Dr. Zodiac, Eureka, Supreme G, and CaliPlug. Use of 134 other products were reported by 1 percent of patients.

While the marijuana industry insists that the THC cartridge brands making people sick are purchased exclusively from illicit, black-market dealers, several individual states report some patients have bought them from licensed dispensaries. Worse, anyone, including underage young people, can buy most of these products without even being asked their age before entering online stores.

Read CDC December 3, 2019 vaping-related lung injury update here.

Read CDC’s December 6, 2019 MMWR article here.

Every person who touches the lives of teenagers should watch “E-Cigarette Microlearning Video,” a 6-minute, 35-second brief produced by the nonprofit American Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. Dr. Brian King of the CDC’s Office of Smoking and Health narrates the video.

We highlight key points here to encourage you to watch it.

It begins with the news that e-cigarette use doubled in just one year (2017-2018) as shown above.

Every other kind of tobacco use has dropped since 2011, while e-cigarette use skyrocketed among kids who never smoked before, but became addicted to nicotine via e-cigarettes.

The primary driver of this escalation in use is Juul.

Several factors contribute to encouraging youth use. The first one is advertising.

Dr. King sums it up this way, “Advertising will bring a horse to water, flavors will get him to drink, and nicotine [and marijuana] will keep him coming back for more.”

The second factor is flavoring.

The third factor is nicotine. And nicotine is not the only thing e-cigarettes contain.

Cartridges containing THC, the psychoactive component in marijuana, can also be inserted into vaping devices. One-third of high-school e-cigarette users vape THC.

The Surgeon General says both nicotine and marijuana act on the brain and can change it. It’s not like you can buy a new brain. No adolescent or young adult should use either drug.

Prevention strategies we know work for cigarettes and other forms of tobacco can be applied to e-cigarettes.

National Families in Action adds:

Cigarettes are legal, but you cannot buy them online. So why can you buy e-cigarettes online?

Marijuana is illegal nationwide. So why can you buy THC vape cartridges online?

Watch “E-Cigarette Microlearning Video” here.

CDC nicotine and marijuana resources

Many resources for parents, healthcare professionals, and communities are available from CDC.

You can find them here and here.

Visit The Marijuana Report’s Facebook page

In addition to current issues of The Marijuana Report, we post several more marijuana messages each month on our Facebook page. Search Facebook for nationalfamilies to access it.

RELATED ARTICLE: My Son Was Addicted to Pot Vaping. Now, Congress Wants to Aid the Industry.

Looking for a past issue of The Marijuana Report?

Find it here.

Did you know that in addition to The Marijuana Report e-newsletter, National Families in Action also publishes The Marijuana Report website? There you can find summaries of (and access to) scientific marijuana studies, the growth of the commercial marijuana industry, and what families and communities are doing to restrain it. Begin at our Welcome Page to access all the resources The Marijuana Report website offers.

The Marijuana Report is a weekly e-newsletter published by National Families in Action in partnership with SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana).

Visit National Families in Action’s website, The Marijuana Report.Org, to learn more about the marijuana story unfolding across the nation.

Subscribe to The Marijuana Report e-newsletter.

SCOTUS: Breaking the (Ultra)Sound Barrier

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When Governor Matt Bevin walks out of his office for the last time tonight, it’s somewhat fitting that the U.S. Supreme Court picked today to uphold one of the most important laws he ever signed — the Kentucky ultrasound bill. The justices, who watched the ACLU appeal all the way to their doorstep, refused to even hear the case. Instead, they deferred to the Sixth Circuit, which didn’t see the harm in showing moms a picture of their babies before they abort. If it’s just “a clump of cells,” who cares? Liberals, that’s who.The last thing the abortion industry wants is for moms to come face-to-face with the personhood of their child. It’s why they’ve poured millions of dollars into fighting heartbeat bills, sonograms, even basic medical disclaimers. When it comes to abortion, technology is — and always has been — the single biggest enemy of the Left. Nothing comes between women and their business more than the truth about these tiny humans in the womb — humans that yawn, smile, suck their thumbs. The imaging is so advanced these days that doctors can track something as small as a baby’s hiccup. It’s a game-changer. Which is exactly why groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are trying to shut down laws like Kentucky’s. It’s hard enough to get moms to destroy their babies. But it’s near impossible once they see and hear how intensely human their children are.

For young moms like Lisa, who never wanted to be pregnant in the first place, it was a revelation. “I didn’t want to go through with having the baby,” she explained. “I didn’t want to face all of the challenges that a single mom would.” And besides, she said, “My life was just beginning,” and this, “makes you feel like your life is over.” She made three appointments to abort her little girl. But every time, she found a reason not to go. Something just wasn’t right. She went back to the pregnancy care center and they offered her a free sonogram. “I heard the heartbeat,” Lisa remembers, “and it made it all real. There was a real life inside of me.” It made her realize that “no matter what I was feeling or thinking at the time, I had a little one to worry about.”

As hard as it was to tell her parents, Lisa was overcome when they found her note and called her crying. “Through tears they told me they would help — no matter what.” It hasn’t always been easy, but her daughter, Selah, has been the joy of her life. A few years later, while her daughter played at the park, Lisa struck up a conversation with a woman sitting by her on the bench. Laura was her name. She said she worked at Life Network. Stunned, Lisa pointed to the blonde little girl on the swings. “The pregnancy center saved her life!” she exclaimed.

It’s a miraculous story — one the folks at Planned Parenthood don’t want to see repeated. In its challenge, the ACLU even argued that giving women these options was somehow a violation of doctors’ free speech. But the Supreme Court didn’t buy it. Just like they haven’t bought other lies about “informed consent” laws. Under Kentucky’s, all doctors are required to do is describe the ultrasound while moms listen to the heartbeat. If the women choose, they can shut their eyes and cover their ears. Even still, the ACLU calls it “unconstitutional and unethical.”

No, what’s unethical is misleading women about the personhood of their baby and the life-long consequences of aborting her. Even now, Laura says, she’s met other young moms who “couldn’t see past their circumstances — a child they’re not ready for, a relationship they’d rather escape.” But then they see their baby’s “heartbeat, fingers, and toes.” She says they see the impact of their ultrasound machine every day. Thanks to the Supreme Court, let’s hope Kentucky can say the same thing about their informed consent law.

Focus Impact Story – Lisa and Selah

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

The Salvation Army a “Hate” Group? Preposterous!

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I feel like I lost a friend when Chick-fil-A apparently decided to throw Christians under the bus to curry favor with the LBGTQ crowd. Not that they could ever be “good” enough to please the radical gays because the goal is not really tolerance….it is forced acceptance and celebration.

But one thing that truly galled me in this whole scenario was the mislabeling of the Salvation Army. To think of the Salvation Army—which does so much good work for people of every race, creed, color, sexual-orientation, whatever—as somehow anti-gay is preposterous.

In a similar vein, a few weeks ago a singer from England initially refused to participate in a half-time show at a football game in Texas because it was to benefit the Salvation Army.

Singer Ellie Goulding, who later relented, said, “I am a committed philanthropist as you probably know, and my heart has always been in helping the homeless, but supporting an anti-LGBTQ charity is clearly not something I would ever intentionally do.”

By what criterion is the Salvation Army an anti-gay hate group? Because they do not let practicing, unrepentant homosexuals become leaders? Should GLAAD or other radical LGBTQ groups be forced, against their will, to have as leaders those who oppose their lifestyle?

What if someone tried to force one of these LBGTQ groups to hire as a leader someone like Omar Mateen, a true anti-gay (and anti-Christian) hater, who shot up and killed dozens of homosexuals and lesbians at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando?

  • Is it hate when the Salvation Army houses the down-and-out, including many homosexuals and lesbians?
  • Or provides food for same?
  • Or job-training to help them find meaningful employment?

By what definition of “hate” is the Salvation Army in anybody’s dictionary a hate group?

This politically correct culture has lost any semblance of moral clarity to label a group like the Salvation Army as a hate group.

When a hurricane hits, the Salvation Army is among the first on the scene to offer help for the hapless victims. The Salvation Army doesn’t discriminate whom they help.

Why do they help anybody? I once had the privilege to interview for Christian television the worldwide head of the Salvation Army, General John Gowans, who has since graduated to glory, having died in 2012.

He told me, “There wouldn’t be a Salvation Army without a Savior….Without Christ, there would be no dynamo behind the Salvation Army; to push it forward and to even to bring it into existence. It depends upon a living Christ to exist.”

The dirty little secret of all this false-reporting of “hate” is that much of it comes from a self-proclaimed watchdog of “hate” in America—the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) out of Montgomery, Alabama.

They have been scaring Northeastern liberals for generations against “hate” in America. The problem is that when the KKK, neo-Nazis, and skinheads (genuine purveyors of hate) became largely marginalized in our culture, the SPLC still wanted to keep the money flowing into their coffers through their direct mail appeals. So they started labeling legitimate Christian ministries as “hate” groups.

A few years ago my own employer, D. James Kennedy Ministries (which, by way of full disclosure, is on the SPLC’s “hate map” as alleged haters), produced a television documentary exposé on the SPLC.

For that program, Dr. Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary, said, “The Southern Poverty Law Center has an aura of respectability because of its history. It came into being because of the civil rights struggle. And they were exposing white supremacist groups.”

“But,” continues Land, “they’ve now taken such a hard turn to the left, they’ve just fallen off the surface of the earth. And they just label people that disagree with any of the multicultural moral relativist views concerning transgenderism, homosexuality, etc., as being a hate group.”

Since the early-2019 resignation of Morris Dees, founding director of the SPLC, and the forced ouster of its president, Richard Cohen, a lot of disturbing revelations about the liberal group have been reported—even among liberal media sources, like an article by a former SPLC employee, Bob Moser, in the New Yorker.

Moser tells how employees would walk past the words from Amos, chapter 5, “… until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” used by Martin Luther King, Jr., etched in marble at the SPLC, and mockingly change them to“…until justice rolls down like dollars.” In short, for many the SPLC is all about money.

It is not hate when you show love, as the Salvation Army does. God bless them. Maybe Chick-fil-A will no longer give to them, but God will provide for this ministry through some other source. But shame on those who would slander the Salvation Army as a “hate group.” Talk about “fake news.”

© All rights reserved.

Transgenderism: Technology and role reversals have made both sexes unattractive

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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.

From my (admittedly not very broad) experience of trans people they actually just want to be the other gender and are actually not interested in destroying gender itself. I sometimes wonder if trans people are being used by the left and that these proposals are actually less about helping a vulnerable minority and more about deconstructing the majority.

Nevertheless, I think we ought to take responsibility for the ways our own behavior may have contributed to the mess we are currently in. I have listed below eight ways in which mainstream behavior of the last hundred years might have influenced or even brought about this current public trend.

Radical feminism

For nearly a century, feminists have spread the idea that men, just by virtue of their sex, are against women and keep them in servile roles. As women achieve more freedoms and rights, now beyond what men have, feminists have only become more insistent about that oppression. Instead of more rights making women happier, polls show an alarming downward slope since the 1970s, precisely when one would have expected women’s lot to have improved by their own estimation.

Any discussion of this fact insinuates that because men’s unhappiness has not fallen as steeply as women’s it must be men’s fault. In light of this, conscientious boys and men who love the women in their lives will undoubtedly begin to distrust themselves, and females may feel the need to avoid femininity and a future of being the inherently vulnerable sex.

Feminism has also forbidden any discussion of the vulnerabilities of men unless it is to make those entirely his own fault or the fault of “the patriarchy”. Feminism has also forbidden any discussion of the inherent strengths of women over men, other women and children. By presenting these parodies of male and female, feminism makes both sexes unattractive.

Society redefines female and male

For more than 50 years women themselves have regarded men’s bodies as normative, using long term hormonal treatments and surgical means to avoid menstruation, achieve non-fertility or to avoid or destroy pregnancies. In a relatively short time women went from being overwhelmed with the necessity of caring for children for nearly half of their lives – and probably helping other women with the necessities of caring for children and the sick and elderly for the other half (during their girlhood and post-menopausal years) – to a very new reality.

Since women now see themselves primarily as people who interact in the markets and pursue serial, non-fruitful encounters with men, should we be surprised when others begin to see us as not that complicated; indeed, easily imitated? Why wouldn’t biological males say to themselves, Well, I can do that!

Life today is generally less strenuous and less dangerous. The rare dangerous event is not likely to be fatal, but is likely to be met with plenty of infrastructure and technology, safety nets, police, first responders, power tools and labor-saving devices. Women contemplating these challenges are less likely than ever to be pregnant or saddled with several clinging young children; as a result they are quicker to look at the historical expectation that men will take care of the hard and dangerous situations and think, Well, I can do that!

The influence of porn

Pornography is enormously influential and those who make money out of it do so by the industry’s continual ramping up of graphic content to produce the next “high”. Porn suggests means of sexual arousal that might not otherwise have been pursued by an individual. Some porn actually suggests feminization to men as a means of sexual arousal, and some anecdotal reports are speculating this promotes and suggests male-to-female transition.

Single motherhood and divorce

Some 40% of all children are born on purpose into single mother households. A single mom is caught in a daily frustrating grind of trying to do the job of two people and likely to get impatient and even tyrannical in that frustration (I am a widow myself and know this situation first-hand). The children no longer have the chance to see a daily example of compromise between men and women and could easily begin to believe it’s not possible. Women and men like this are beginning to open up and tell the sad stories of the potential tyranny of female led households.

A deeply divisive and broken family of origin where mothers and fathers are locked in a perpetual fight and demonization of each other causes deep doubt in children’s understanding of their own gender as good.

Children cannot escape the fact that they are a physical manifestation of both their mother and their father. If one or both parents hate the other the children will internalize this hatred as a hatred of themselves in spite of the parents’ attempts to the contrary. Transsexuality might be a perceived way to personally and physically reconcile the disharmony experienced by the child of a violent and divisive couple. And so a boy could end up wanting to be anything but a male and a girl might seek to avoid being as vulnerable as she perceives her mother to be.

Lost mother-infant bonds

A mother’s love is essential to a person having a sense of themselves as a loveable person just in who they are. This is unique, relative to the father, because a mother is the child’s entire world in pregnancy but also in the first years of life.

If the infant experiences loss, either from a mother’s depressive withdrawal from the infant, or isolation through the mother’s attention being shifted to market production, or some other distraction such as care of another sick child or other worry, the child may not have a deep and abiding sense of their own worth and may not be able to convince themselves that they are loveable just as they are. They may seek a sex change as way of finding love and acceptance they never experienced.

Drawbacks of all-female nurturing

As children are being more and more raised entirely by women instead of both men and women, not just by single mothers but also by teachers, doctors, therapists, social workers, because all the helping professions are predominately female, it is possible that children will take on the knee jerk fears and concerns of unreflective females. According to the data collected in the The Boy Crisis, in a female-led environment children of both sexes may become more risk adverse, and be less likely to learn delayed gratification.

For these reasons they may have lower self-esteem from repeated failure and lack of accomplishment. Boys especially may see competent achievement as something to be avoided so as not to become oppressive. It may become more apparent to modern children that one must remain safe at all costs. If one sex is seen as safer than the other a change may be required.

The need to break the feminist monopoly

Extreme feminism, with its one-sided story that refuses to admit female evil and oppression as surely as it refuses to admit the many positive contributions of men to civilization, has reigned for too long. It leaves one asking: “What must I do to neither oppress or be oppressed if what causes the oppression or the victim status is my sex? To what lengths am I willing to go to avoid oppressing another person or being oppressed myself?”

The trans phenomenon is the ultimate challenge to extreme feminist claims. If women are completely and totally oppressed by men, why would a man choose to be a woman? If women have nothing but suffering under men’s oppression and men get all the breaks, why doesn’t a woman just become a man? Radical feminist insistence upon women’s perpetual oppression is being unmasked now that changing one’s sex is an actual option.

Loss of Christianity

Trans people are suffering people just like everyone. We are all plagued by self-hatred, though it can be expressed in different ways. We all have a great desire to start again, to find forgiveness and redemption. If we present Christianity to the world as a club for the self-righteous rather than a hospital for the broken, if Christians remain untransformed by their own faith, why should they be surprised when people seek transformation and personal integration in other ways?

We should all refrain from indulging in disgust toward human beings, be they other people or ourselves. To my trans friends I want to say:

Forgive me for the ways I created a world in which you feel you must mutilate yourself or hide yourself to be loveable. Forgive me for not being transformed as I should be. I am not sure how to love you best but I am unable to join you in your rejection of yourself. I hope you can also help me the same way. Perhaps not indulging in the self-hatred of another person is part of the definition of friend.

COLUMN BY

KATHERINE BAKER

Katherine Baker is a freelance writer who lives in Western Pennsylvania.

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

‘Abortion on Demand Agenda Is Immoral’: Meet Georgia’s Incoming Senator

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In a televised speech on Wednesday, Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp officially announced financial executive Kelly Loeffler as his pick to be the state’s next U.S. senator.

Kemp—who has mulled over hundreds of applications in the months since Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson announced he would be stepping down—officially unveiled Loeffler as his choice on Wednesday. In a speech at the Georgia State Capitol, the governor said Loeffler would serve in the Senate as a steadfast conservative who would support the Trump agenda.

“Kelly Loeffler will stand with our president, Sen. Perdue, and their allies in the House and Senate to keep America great,” Kemp said, invoking the president’s reelection slogan. “She will end this impeachment circus in Washington, and get Congress back to working for the people of our country.”

Despite Loeffler holding no prior political experience, Kemp chose her because he is betting that she will help bring female voters back into the Georgia GOP fold. Additionally, Loeffler’s strong business background was viewed as an advantage, allowing her to self-fund ahead of what will likely be a tough 2020 election cycle in the state.

Speaking for the first time as a senator-designate, Loeffler made clear her conservative bona fides.

“I’m not a career politician, or even someone who’s run for office. I’ve spent the last 25 years building businesses, taking risks, and creating jobs. I haven’t spent my life trying to get to Washington,” Loeffler said. “I’m a life-long conservative, pro-Second Amendment, pro-Trump, pro-military, and pro-wall,” she went on, which earned applause from the crowd gathered around her.

“I make no apologies for my conservative values, and I look forward to supporting President Trump’s conservative judges,” she said, adding that she is “strongly pro-life” and voiced explicit support for South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s 20-week abortion ban.

“The abortion on demand agenda is immoral,” Loeffler also said, adding, “when it comes to protecting innocent life, I look to God because every life is a blessing.”

Loeffler is mostly known for being the co-owner of Georgia’s WNBA team, the Atlanta Dream. She also serves as the chief executive of Bakkt, a subsidiary of the Georgia-based Intercontinental Exchange Inc. Loeffler is married to the Intercontinental Exchange’s founder and CEO, Jeff Sprecher, and together, the couple has made considerable donations to the Republican National Committee in recent time.

However, she will likely need to keep proving her conservative credentials in the run-up to 2020 elections, where voters will decide if she can finish the remainder of Isakson’s term. The days leading up to her appointment have been marked with Republican infighting, as some party hardliners believe she is not conservative enough for the seat.

Media personalities like Sean Hannity and lawmakers like Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz heavily pressured Kemp to shy away from Loeffler and to pick Georgia Rep. Doug Collins instead. Gaetz went so far as to threaten Kemp with a primary challenger if he chose the businesswoman. Those efforts were not successful in changing the governor’s mind in the end.

Collins, for his part, has not ruled out a 2020 campaign for the Senate seat. He said he will make a decision sometime after Kemp’s announcement.

As for national Republicans, they appear to be coalescing around Kemp’s choice.

“Everybody knows that a generational leader like Johnny Isakson is irreplaceable, but Ms. Loeffler has an impressive record in business and community leadership. I am confident she is well prepared to continue Sen. Isakson’s historic legacy of advocating for veterans, strengthening our national defense, and fighting for middle-class families,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday, adding that she has his “full support” for her 2020 election.

Isakson, who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, announced in August that he would be stepping down at the end of the year.

COLUMN BY

Jason Hopkins

Jason Hopkins is a reporter covering immigration issues for the Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter: @thejasonhopkins.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of this original content, contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.