Arizona Lawmakers, Governor Move Toward Harm Reduction

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Arizona’s Governor and lawmakers are displaying an enlightened shift in strategy addressing the overdose crisis. After the state experienced an estimated 48 percent jump in overdose deaths during the first eight months of 2020 (a 32 percent increase in most populous Maricopa County in all of 2020), they decided to embrace harm reduction.

On May 14 the Arizona House voted 48–11 to pass SB 1486, which removed fentanyl test strips from the list of legally prohibited drug paraphernalia, after the Arizona Senate voted unanimously in favor of the bill. On May 19, Governor Ducey (R) signed it into law.

Fentanyl test strips, made by a Canadian biotechnology company, were designed for urine drug screening. The tests strips are not approved for sale in U.S. drugstores or other outlets by the Food and Drug Administration, but harm reduction organizations—including “needle exchange” programs— have been buying them and handing them out to IV drug users who use them “off‐​label” to test heroin, cocaine, and other drugs for the presence of fentanyl. Researchers claim the tests strips are highly accurate and can detect up to 10 analogs of fentanyl. They also find they save lives by causing drug users to use smaller amounts and/​or take a drug more slowly when they detect it contains fentanyl.

When signing the bill into law, Governor Ducey said:

We want everyone who is using drugs to seek professional treatment. But until someone is ready to get help, we need to make sure they have the tools necessary to prevent a lethal overdose.

Speaking of “needle exchange” programs, syringe services programs (SSPs), the term public health professionals use for “needle exchange” programs, are endorsed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the American Medical Association. In January 2020, then‐​Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams and Professor Ricky D. Bluthenthal of the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine spoke at the Cato Institute on the benefits of syringe services programs. They are proven to reduce the spread of HIV, hepatitis C, and other infectious diseases. They also serve to reduce overdose deaths because one of their services is to distribute the overdose antidote naloxone as well as fentanyl test strips and other drug‐​testing materials. Dr. Adams pointed out SSPs offer the added benefits of screening IV drug users for hepatitis and HIV so they can get treatment, and bringing many of them into rehab programs……

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Continue reading this article at Cato Institute.

A Braver, Newer World Of Mail-Order Abortion

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In the U.K. and U.S., COVID-19 has provided an excuse for even more accessible abortion. In America at least, it seems the Catholic Church might fight back.

The reshaping of society by COVID-19 has generated plenty of discussion, but not much of that chatter has included the ushering in of mail-order abortion.

In April last year, the Biden administration waived, on the basis of the unfolding pandemic, the requirement for women wanting an abortion to visit a doctor’s office or clinic, thereby facilitating abortion pills via telemedicine and mail delivery.

In the U.K., a similar thing had already happened in March through the most significant change to abortion legislation since the 1967 Abortion Act. The U.K. Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) published legislation that would allow a woman to have an abortion at home without medical supervision.

With media attention in both countries focused on the start of lockdown measures—not that most mainstream media are particularly keen to engage with abortion beyond fixed narratives of its inalienable rightness and necessity—both changes slipped through under the radar, going largely unnoticed and uncommented on.

In April, the Biden administration also lifted restrictions on federal funding for research involving human fetal tissue and rescinded a Trump administration policy barring organizations such as Planned Parenthood from receiving federal family planning grants if they refer women for abortions.

Biden’s abortion advocacy is striking given he is the first Catholic president in office since John F. Kennedy 60 years ago, and he is not shy about wielding his Catholic credentials, despite being very much at odds with the Catholic Church’s strict anti-abortion stance.

From the very start of his presidency, Biden hasn’t held back, as indicated shortly after his inauguration by one of his first tweets as president on 22 January: “As we mark the 48th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the work ahead. From codifying Roe to eliminating maternal and infant health disparities, our Administration is committed to ensuring everyone has access to the health care they need.”

That urge to codify has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Last November, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, the USCCB’s president, decided to form a working group to address the “complex and difficult situation” posed by Biden’s stances on abortion and other issues—such as marriage, gender and sexual ethics—that clash with official Church teaching.

The group proposed drafting a document—assigning the task to the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine—to clarify the Church’s stance on whether you can receive Holy Communion if you persist in publicly advocating for abortion. It’s been a conundrum for Church authorities for decades in the face of modern society’s strident pro-abortion stance—there have been an estimated 60 million abortions in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade in 1973—and now has been brought to a head through Biden’s ascension to the land’s highest political office.

“Because President Biden is Catholic, it presents a unique problem for us,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann, chair of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, recently told the Associated Press. A permissive stance on abortion from any public figure constitutes “a grave moral evil,” Naumann explained, hence it is necessary to publicly rebuke Biden on the issue. “It can create confusion,” Naumann added. “How can he say he’s a devout Catholic and he’s doing these things that are contrary to the Church’s teaching?”

Nancy Pelosi, the first woman in U.S. history to serve as speaker of the United States House of Representatives, could also be affected by any injunction on receiving Communion. She is vocal about the importance of her Catholic faith while roundly criticized by many American Catholics for not speaking out against abortion.

While Church teaching clearly maintains that Catholic politicians should not “check their faith at the door,” says David Cloutier, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., there isn’t a corresponding expectation that they somehow impose Catholic doctrine or teaching in an absolute manner.

Saint Thomas Aquinas accepted that civil laws cannot perfectly be framed to reject all evils, but only the most damaging evils, Cloutier points out. This tradition, he explains, has developed an understanding of acceptable forms of “cooperation with evil” that can be tolerated for proportionately good reasons.

“What the Catholic politician must avoid is what is termed ‘formal cooperation with evil,’ wherein one’s action shares the sinful intent of others, or does not make sufficiently clear that one is tolerating an evil rather than endorsing a good,” Cloutier says. “Moreover, even apart from formal cooperation, one must consider how socially damaging a particular permissive law might be.”

To take on the American president is a bold move by the bishops, to say the least, especially with U.S. Catholic Church authorities being up to their necks in the scandal of historical sex abuse. But it appears U.S. bishops have every intention of doing just that. It’s in stark contrast to religious leaders in the U.K.—both those of the Catholic and Anglican churches—who rolled over during COVID-19 and lockdowns, capitulating to every whim of draconian governmental policy. They didn’t say much about the U.K.’s new abortion policy either.

“It seems to me that many of the church leaders believe that if we, as a Church, be nice and avoid all these areas that go against the cultural or political orthodoxies of the day…somehow people will flock to us and the churches will be full,” Paul Coleman, executive director of free-speech legal advocates ADF International, said in a recent episode of the Spectator magazine’s “Holy Smoke” podcast, which focuses on important and controversial topics in world religion.

This “prevailing view we are getting from the church leadership” that doesn’t appear at all dissuaded by all the evidence that it isn’t working, in turn “makes it harder for the people sitting in the pews,” Coleman explains. “Because if they are not seeing an example, it’s so much harder for them to have the courage to speak out in whatever context they are in, whether it’s business or the school they teach at, or what have you.”

The move to mail-order abortion in the British context feels like something from the mind of Aldous Huxley. In the British writer’s famous 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, Huxley offered a genetically engineered future in which life is pain-free but meaningless. It was a warning of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. One illustration of this theme is the rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention, including the surgical removal of ovaries and use of cloning. But it was all fiction, so what was the worry?

By 1957, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he compares the modernizing world of the time with his prophetic fantasy and also with that offered in 1949 by George Orwell through his more brutal dystopian depiction in 1984, which can be seen as a reply and an update, as Orwell saw it, to Huxley’s earlier warnings. Coming after the slaughter of World War II, it wasn’t surprising that Orwell saw totalitarianism having a much more violent face. But in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley argues convincingly based on the accompanying evidence that it appears the world is moving more toward his type of soporific scientific dictatorship in which a passive population is subdued through scientific and psychological engineering.

“Pressure had been mounting on the [U.K.] government on this issue for years until March 2020 when the abortion lobby saw the opportunity it had long been waiting for,” Andrea Williams, director of Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Centre, wrote in a recent article for the Critic magazine titled “One year on from home abortions.” She notes how, following the move by the DHSC, her organization immediately began to pursue a judicial review of the U.K. government’s decision and that evidence soon emerged that the new service was “unchecked and women were being put at risk.”

“Disclosed documents in our legal case have revealed the direct access key players in the abortion industry have to senior civil servants at the heart of the DHSC,” Williams says. “They wield significant influence, do not take no for an answer, and have repeatedly applied pressure on the government to allow DIY home abortion telemedicine service.”

The USCCB hold their next national meeting in June, during which bishops will vote on whether the Committee on Doctrine should continue working on the Communion-related document, with a two-thirds majority needed, to facilitate an eventual public release. That looks more than likely, according to the Associated Press, as even bishops critical of the initiative—worried the USCCB’s emphasis on abortion undermines its ability to find common ground with Biden on issues Pope Francis has highlighted such as climate change, immigration, and inequality—are predicted to give overwhelming approval for the move. Whether that then leads to public debate and any form of reckoning over such a dramatic shift in the U.S. abortion landscape remains to be seen. It doesn’t seem to be happening in the U.K. yet.

“From the beginning this has been about exploiting the biggest crisis this country has faced since the Second World War,” Williams says. “It was an opportunity to achieve the abortion industry’s long-term goal of abortion-on-demand.”

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This article was published on May 18, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

 

Life Wins! Governor Signs SB 1457!

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A Statement from Center for Arizona Policy President Cathi Herrod, Esq

Today, Arizonans win. Arizona children diagnosed with disabilities prior to birth will no longer be discriminated against. Arizona women will be ensured commonsense safeguards if they choose the abortion pill. Arizona taxpayers will not be forced to support abortions at public colleges and universities, and the laws of Arizona will be interpreted to value all human life.

Governor Doug Ducey signed one of the most significant pro-life bills in recent history today. Preborn babies will be saved the day SB 1457 goes into effect.

The Governor and Arizona pro-life lawmakers, led by sponsor Senator Nancy Barto, stood up for the lives of the vulnerable in the face of heavy, misleading opposition. Their dedication to the value of life is evident in the tenacity that brought back SB 1457 from what appeared to be the end of the bill on the Senate floor.

You may remember SB 1457 failed to pass a few weeks ago based on minor language concerns. With those concerns addressed last week, every Republican lawmaker voted in favor and every Democrat voted against this life-affirming bill. The slim victory was enough to send SB 1457 to the Governor, who wasted no time signing it into law today.

Arizonans can be proud of a state that leads the way in protecting the preborn and caring for women facing unplanned pregnancies.

Today’s victory serves as a reminder that elections matter. Last November, Arizonans elected a pro-life majority to serve at the State Capitol. Though the margin is a slim, one-vote majority in each chamber, it was enough to make the difference for life!

Please contact Governor Ducey and thank him for his commitment to signing pro-life legislation in Arizona.  Call him at (602) 542-4331 or email him a quick “thank you.”

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This statement was published on April 27, 2021 by the Center for Arizona Policy

Swedish Hospital Bans Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones for Gender Dysphoric Youths Under 16. We Should, Too.

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Sweden, arguably one of the most politically and socially liberal countries in the world, has nonetheless taken a giant step toward protecting gender dysphoric minors and their mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine reported on Wednesday that the Astrid Lindgren’s Children’s Hospital—an arm of the one of the most renowned hospitals in Sweden, the Karolinska University Hospital—recently released a policy statement that included new guidelines for the care of youths with gender dysphoria under the age of 16.

The guidelines, which took effect April 1, are profound: They contradict many of the assertions of the transgender lobby, which encourage parents and children to accept that cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are normal, healthy treatments for minors with gender dysphoria and should be pursued with little hesitation.

In the unofficial English translation of the original Swedish text provided by the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, the statement from the Children’s Hospital reads in part:

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In December 2019, the [Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services] published an overview of the knowledge base, which showed a lack of evidence for both the long-term consequences of the treatments, and the reasons for the large influx of patients in recent years.

These treatments are potentially fraught with extensive and irreversible adverse consequences, such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis.

This makes it challenging to assess the risk/benefit for the individual patient, and even more challenging for the minors and their guardians to be in a position of an informed stance regarding these treatments.

The guidelines appear to lean on the U.K. High Court’s Dec. 1 ruling in the Keira Bell case, saying it “established overarching problems associated with puberty-blocking treatment,” adding:

Further, the ruling specifically establishes that it is highly unlikely, if at all possible, for an individual under the age of 16 to give informed consent to this treatment.

Influenced by that ruling, the Children’s Hospital said that “it has been decided that hormonal treatments (i.e., puberty-blocking and cross-sex hormones) will not be initiated in gender dysphoric patients under the age of 16.”

Patients between the ages of 16 and 18 may only receive treatment within clinical trial settings approved by the Ethical Review Agency/Swedish Institutional Review Board. The Children’s Hospital said it would be doing a “careful individual assessment” of patients currently receiving puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to determine whether those treatments should continue.

Those new guidelines mean the Children’s Hospital has stopped following what the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine called the “Dutch Protocol,” which it says “allows for administration of puberty blockers at age 12 (and increasingly, as young as 8-9, at the early stage of puberty known as Tanner 2), and cross-sex hormones at the age of 16.”

Even to liberal Sweden, that seemed astoundingly young.

The new protocol also makes Sweden the first country to officially deviate from World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidance, which continues to promote puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on children under age 16.

It’s hard to fathom that left-wing ideology in American culture, dragging the medical community with it, has ceded so much ground to LGBTQ activists that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are even discussed as options—let alone healthy ones—for children.

For years, medical professionals didn’t even know what puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones would do to a child. Little research was available because it had rarely been tried, tested, and evaluated, yet now the medical community—bolstered by leftist ideologues—push them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics endorses a “gender-affirming” approach that includes supporting insurance plans that include coverage for, “when appropriate, surgical interventions.”

Caution seems far more prudent when it comes to a child’s growing body, especially through puberty, but when it comes to transgenderism, prudence, research, and facts have been actively cast aside. Patience, talk therapy, and time are rarely discussed as viable options within the LGBTQ community.

On this issue, much of the medical community, and culture with it, has surrendered to the pressure of the LGBTQ lobby, which usually suggests that the only “cure” to gender dysphoric symptoms a child has is a medical transition via cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Unfortunately, often the end result is akin to that of someone like Bell, whose case the Children’s Hospital guidelines alluded to (but without mentioning her name). She began a transition at the behest of medical professionals, and now lives as a biological female without breasts and regrets her decision.

Lawmakers, concerned parents, and medical professionals who seek to err on the side of caution need to come together and push for statewide bans of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children under 18 years of age.

As the new Swedish Children’s Hospital guidelines stated, the medical evidence against utilizing these treatments is compelling. They are drastic treatments that deliver irreversible, life-altering results.

In April, Arkansas became the first state to ban cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for minors. Other states should follow suit. Children’s minds and bodies must be protected before it’s too late.

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This article was published on May 7, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

The US Government’s Debt-to-GDP Ratio Is Worse Than Greece’s Before the 2008 Crash (And It’s About to Get Worse)

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The US is in uncharted debt territory. That should worry us.

President Biden on Wednesday pitched a new plan to Americans before a joint session of Congress: more spending.

The just-released $1.8 trillion plan, presented just weeks after Biden signed a $1.9 trillion in COVID relief spending into law, includes “free” community college as well as universal preschool for all three and four-year-olds.

“Mr. Biden could usher in a new era that fundamentally expands the size and role of the federal government,” The New York Times reported.

The announcement comes months after the Congressional Budget Office released a report projecting a $2.3 trillion deficit in 2021.

Biden’s plan will almost certainly make the deficit worse. Though the plan contains various tax increases to fund its programs, the taxes are likely to fall well short of government outlays, economists, say.

“The laws of economics are more rigid than the laws of the federal government, and these tax hikes are unlikely to yield the windfall Biden expects,” Joshua Jahani, the managing director of Jahani and Associates, noted in a recent NBC News article.

As a result, the $28.2 trillion national debt will swell even faster. Worse, when unfunded liabilities are included in the balance sheet, as private companies are legally required to do, the debt exceeds $120 trillion.

How much risk these obligations present is unclear.

There is a school of thought that suggests these debts pose no serious risk. After all, in theory, a government can roll over its debt indefinitely. However, in a recent article for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, economist David Andolfatto noted that ultimately the government doesn’t decide how much debt is bearable. The market does.

“There is presumably a limit to how much the market is willing or able to absorb in the way of Treasury securities, for a given price level (or inflation rate) and a given structure of interest rates,” Andolfatto wrote. “However, no one really knows how high the debt-to-GDP ratio can get. We can only know once we get there.”

A Dangerous Level of Debt?

Andolfatto is right that no one really knows the debt tipping point. But it’s worth noting that the US debt-to-GDP ratio—essentially a country’s debt compared to its annual economic output—was 129 percent at the end of 2020. In other words, the official US debt was nearly a third larger than the entire US economy.

That is considerably higher than Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio in 2010 when it received a bailout from the International Monetary Fund to avoid defaulting on its obligations.

The United States is not Greece, of course. Its economic potential is far greater, and it is operating under a currency it controls. But there’s no denying that the US is in uncharted territory. Today, the federal government debt-to-GDP ratio is higher than it was at the conclusion of World War II, when the nation assembled one of the largest armies the world has ever seen. Perhaps even worse, the government is piling on debt faster than ever.

Eventually, as Andolfatto notes, the market may very well decide enough is enough, and the demand for Treasury securities will dry up. Indeed, this is likely one reason cryptocurrencies are suddenly flourishing.

In seemingly the blink of an eye, cryptos have gone from being discussed in the corners of Reddit rooms and university lounges to a market of more than $2 trillion. It’s no exaggeration to say cryptos are now mainstream; they are being gobbled up by hedge funds and star athletes signing 10-figure contracts.

And it’s not hard to see why. The market is hedging. Like rats on a sinking ship, many are eyeing an exit, sensing that the dollar’s day may finally be coming to an end as its value is eroded by mass pumping.

In a popular 2016 article, author Richard Ebeling explored how central planners in ancient Rome destroyed the economy.

A lot of what Ebeling describes—debt, massive spending, inflation, and price controls destroy—sound eerily familiar to modern ears. And Ebeling naturally explores the age-old riddle: why did Rome fail?

For centuries, as any history buff knows, thinkers from Edward Gibbon to Peter Heather and beyond, have asked this question. The answers vary. Some blame barbarians, others immigration. Some claimed Christianity was at fault, while others point to disease or the weakening of Roman legions.

All of these theories are interesting and worthy of examination, but I’ve found no single better explanation than the one offered by economist Ludwig von Mises who concluded Rome’s decay stemmed from its rejection of individualism and free markets.

“The marvelous civilization of antiquity perished because it did not adjust its moral code and its legal system to the requirements of the market economy,” Mises wrote.

He continued:

“A social order is doomed if the actions which its normal functioning requires are rejected by the standards of morality, are declared illegal by the laws of the country, and are prosecuted as criminal by the courts and the police.

The Roman Empire crumbled to dust because it lacked the spirit of [classical] liberalism and free enterprise. The policy of interventionism and its political corollary, the Fuhrer principle, decomposed the mighty empire as they will by necessity always disintegrate and destroy any social entity.”

The American president and statesman John Adams once reportedly said there are two ways nations are destroyed.

“One is by the sword and the other is by debt,” Adams reputedly said. (Though the quote is widely attributed to Adams, it’s not supported by written documentation.)

There is no question debt is a serious problem. (Just ask the ancient Romans and modern Grecians.) But if Mises is correct, the explosion of debt may merely be a symptom of a much larger problem: a collapse of the spirit of liberty and the growth of a system hostile to free enterprise.

We should learn from one thing we have that the Romans didn’t: their ominous example.

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This article was published on May 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from FEE, Foundation For Economic Education.

Planned Parenthood’s Denunciation of Founder Rings ‘Hollow’ to These Black Pro-Life Leaders

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Black pro-life leaders condemned Planned Parenthood’s “hollow” denunciation of Margaret Sanger after Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson distanced the organization from Sanger’s “association with white supremacist groups and eugenics.”

Human Coalition vice president Benjamin Watson, a former NFL athlete, said Sunday that Planned Parenthood’s denunciation of its founder rang “hollow” in light of the organization’s current work.

“Whether they personally identify with Sanger’s ideology or not, they continue to carry out her mission, by serving as the leading executioner of our children,” Watson said. “The same Sanger they claim to disavow would applaud their efforts and results, as a disproportionate percentage of black children have been killed in Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics.”

“Acknowledging a racist history does not absolve them of the blood on their hands, as they continue to take full advantage of victims of the racism they decry,” Watson said.

Black pro-life leaders condemned Planned Parenthood’s “hollow” denunciation of Margaret Sanger after Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson distanced the organization from Sanger’s “association with white supremacist groups and eugenics.”

Human Coalition vice president Benjamin Watson, a former NFL athlete, said Sunday that Planned Parenthood’s denunciation of its founder rang “hollow” in light of the organization’s current work.

“Whether they personally identify with Sanger’s ideology or not, they continue to carry out her mission, by serving as the leading executioner of our children,” Watson said. “The same Sanger they claim to disavow would applaud their efforts and results, as a disproportionate percentage of black children have been killed in Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics.”

“Acknowledging a racist history does not absolve them of the blood on their hands, as they continue to take full advantage of victims of the racism they decry,” Watson said.

In the Saturday New York Times op-ed, McGill Johnson touched on Sanger’s support for eugenics as well as the speech Sanger gave to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan. The Planned Parenthood president did not make mention of Sanger’s “Negro Project,” an initiative aimed at giving black women access to birth control.

“We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation,” Sanger wrote in 1939 of the black community.

McGill Johnson wrote that “up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions,” but noted that whether Sanger was a racist is “not a simple yes or no question.”

“We don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices,” the Planned Parenthood president said. “What we have is a history of focusing on white womanhood relentlessly.

“Whether our founder was a racist is not a simple yes or no question,” McGill Johnson said. “Our reckoning is understanding her full legacy, and its impact. Our reckoning is the work that comes next.”

Dr. Deborah Honeycutt, board chair of Human Coalition Action, said that “Planned Parenthood has contributed to the harm of women of color for decades,” saying that McGill Johnson’s “so-called ‘reckoning’ does nothing to change that truth.”

“They have failed to confront the white supremacy within its organization, as they continue to aggressively prey on black and brown communities with abortion,” Honeycutt said. “Destroying human life contributes to a culture of death and injustice, and Planned Parenthood will always be known for killing a generation of minorities, just as Margaret Sanger dreamed that it would.”

In a 1939 letter, Sanger described her plan to reach out to Southern black ministers and leaders in order to quell suspicions about the birth control clinics she was opening. Sanger explained that she thought the “Negro population” would be more amenable to learning about birth control from black leaders.

“While the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table,” Sanger wrote in 1939. “They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results.”

Sanger added that the doctor’s work should be only with the “Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County’s white doctors.”

“His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us,” Sanger said.

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” she wrote.

Sanger also emphasized a strong interest in furthering eugenics through birth control on many occasions.

“Birth Control, on the other hand, not only opens the way to the eugenist, but it preserves his work,” she wrote in a February 1919 article titled “Birth Control and Racial Betterment.” “Furthermore, it not only prepares the ground in a natural fashion for the development of a higher standard of motherhood and of family life, but enables the child to be better born, better cared for in infancy, and better educated.”

Birth control did not mean “contraception indiscriminately practiced,” but instead the elimination of defective “human weeds,” Sanger wrote in 1923.  She also described eugenics as “the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems,” in a 1921 article.

“I am glad that Alexis McGill Johnson is finally acknowledging what many black leaders have said for decades—Margaret Sanger harbored racist and eugenicist views,” Human Coalition Action Executive Director Rev. Dean Nelson said in a statement. “The problem with Margaret Sanger is more than just her ‘association’ with white supremacist groups and eugenics, it’s the implementation of those views in creating the largest abortion provider in America targeting people of color.”

“You cannot acknowledge the racist person and history without admitting to the racist vision that has resulted in nearly 80% of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities being located within walking distance of minority neighborhoods,” Nelson said.

Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Caller News Foundation.

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This article was published on April 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Daily Signal.

This Lawsuit Threatens the Rights of Faith-Based Schools to Operate According to Their Beliefs

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At the end of March, an LGBT activist group sued the U.S. Department of Education, demanding that a key religious exemption be taken away from faith-based schools.

If successful, college students would be forbidden from using their federal tuition assistance at schools that proclaim widely held religious teachings on marriage, gender, and sexuality. In other words, any Christian university that has a code of conduct prohibiting sex outside of marriage or that protects fairness in sports by declining to let biological males compete on women’s sports teams could lose federal student aid.

That’s why ADF has moved to intervene in this lawsuit to defend these faith-based colleges and universities—and the students they serve.

Punishing people and institutions of faith because they exercise their religious beliefs is unconstitutional. And that’s why this lawsuit should concern every American.

The fact is that religious colleges and universities are motivated by their faith in everything they do. It motivates them to provide their students with an excellent education. It motivates them to serve their surrounding communities. It motivates them to hire employees that will partner with them in their religious mission.

On top of that, students who attend religious schools largely do so because they wish to attend schools that share and support their beliefs. If students lose federal aid simply because they decide to attend a religious school, hundreds of thousands of them nationwide would be forced to make a choice: lose their student aid or attend a different school altogether.

All these schools ask is for the right to operate consistently with their beliefs—the very beliefs that inspire everything they do.

That shouldn’t be too much to ask. After all, the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act protect this very right.

But this lawsuit would change all that. Religious schools would face the impossible choice of losing students who would be denied needed federal financial assistance or abandoning their beliefs. And it would slam the door of opportunity in the face of students who want to pursue higher education at colleges and universities that share their faith.

No court should grant a radical request to rewrite federal law to target religious colleges by stripping them, and their students, of much-needed financial aid. If this lawsuit is successful, it will be the students who suffer the consequences.

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This article was published April 12, 2021 and is reprinted with permission from Alliance Defending Freedom.

Federal Government Caught Buying ‘Fresh’ Flesh Of Aborted Babies Who Could Have Survived As Preemies

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Americans should be outraged their government participates in the wide-scale human trafficking operation that created a market for harvesting the organs of murdered infants.

This article contains disturbing information about human dismemberment.

Last week, legal accountability group Judicial Watch dropped a bombshell: a nearly 600-page report proving the U.S. government has been buying and trafficking “fresh” aborted baby body parts. These body parts, purchased by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to “humanize” mice and test biologic drugs in scientific experiments, came from babies up to 24-weeks-old gestation, just weeks from being born.

While Americans may be used to hearing pro-lifers beat the warning drum on abortion groups harvesting baby bodies and selling them for research, (who hasn’t heard of the lawsuit against David Daleiden, who exposed Planned Parenthood haggling over baby lungs and livers at dinner parties?) this time, the U.S. government was the one trafficking baby parts.

Recent emails uncovered by Judicial Watch between FDA employees and the California-based Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) prove the agency spent tens of thousands of dollars buying aborted babies for unethical scientific experiments between 2012 and 2018. In 2018, the Trump administration terminated the contract, halting government fetal tissue research due to concerns the contracts were unlawful. Judicial Watch’s new FOIA Request adds 575 pages of records to its existing 2019 lawsuit against the agency.

Caught Red-Handed

This is not the first time ABR has been in the spotlight, as the company was under congressional investigation for its long-standing involvement in fetal tissue trafficking. One of the oldest fetal tissue procurement firms, the company makes millions every year by harvesting organs like lungs, livers, eyeballs, and brains from aborted babies and re-selling them at a profit.

Emails between FDA officials and ABR employees reveal disturbing conversations as they collaborate to buy and sell aborted fetuses. Records indicate ABR was paid $12,000 upfront per baby, some survivable out of the womb, between the gestational age of 16-24 weeks. Most purchases are for intact thymuses and livers shipped “Fresh; on wet ice.”

With the callousness of picking a cut of meat from a butcher shop, an FDA doctor requests tissue samples be procured from a baby boy, as they claim “It is strongly preferred to have a male fetus if at all possible … [but] undetermined sex or female is better than no tissue.”

Even more appalling is an ABR employee complaining about the difficulty of identifying the sex of aborted babies. “We only check external genitalia and if it’s not there … we have no way of telling.” The fact techs are unable to identify the sex of aborted babies is no surprise to those familiar with the barbaric nature of abortion procedures, which require clinic staff to piece together mangled remains of babies after their limbs and organs are torn apart.

As if these casual orders weren’t horrific enough, more emails confirm that the FDA bought organs of babies who were aborted well after 20 weeks gestation, after the time a baby usually can survive outside the womb. If nothing else, this confirms the reality of late-term abortions in the United States, which pro-abortion cheerleaders have denied for decades.

When an ABR employee reassured the FDA they were working with doctors who performed late-term abortions, he admitted some tissue was unusable from a procedure that injects a poison called digoxin into the baby, destroying its cells and tissues. Once the chemical has done its work, an intact, dead baby is delivered. This method makes fetal tissue specimens unusable in experiments; with digoxin off the table, the likelihood partial-birth abortions were used is sickeningly high.

These conversations should shock even those who are pro-abortion, most of whom believe in significant term restrictions. Babies at this level of development possess all characteristics necessary for surviving life outside the womb and premature children born as young as 21 weeks go on to lead healthy, thriving lives.

An Atrocity Against Human Dignity

These gruesome excerpts are just a sample of records substantiating the 2019 lawsuit Judicial Watch filed against HHS, which houses the FDA. In March this year, a federal court ordered the agency to release records it withheld about purchasing organs of aborted babies, saying it found “reason to question” the transactions violated federal law.

The court’s decision found that the U.S. government bought second-trimester livers, thymuses, brains, eyes, and lungs for hundreds of dollars apiece from ABR, stating ABR could collect “over $2,000 on a single fetus it purchased … for $60” and “the federal government participated in this potentially illicit trade for years.”

Americans should be outraged their government participates in the wide-scale human trafficking operation that created a market for harvesting the organs of murdered infants. In no humane society could such a violation of the human body and dignity occur, in which babies’ eyes are “harvested immediately upon death,” organs marketed based on sex, and personhood attributed to mice but not children.

Until demanded otherwise, our society is complicit in the unchecked abuse and commodification of preborn children. Moral urgency is incumbent on us to condemn these atrocities sanctioned by the federal government’s lead medical researchers and fight to stop them. We may lose more battles before we win, but we cannot say we never knew.

*****

This article was published on April 15, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

The Real Lessons of Fukushima

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Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

A decade has passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the name Fukushima is etched into history. But few people know the truth of what happened. The phrase, “the lessons learned from Fukushima,” is well-known. But how do people implement them, if they don’t know what happened, or what lessons they should actually learn?

It was after lunch on 11 March 2011 that a giant earthquake occurred 72 kilometers (45 miles) off the Oshika Peninsula in Japan. It registered 9.0 on the Richter Scale, making it the largest ‘quake ever recorded in Japan. The undersea ground movement, over 30 km (18 miles) beneath the ocean’s surface, lifted up a huge volume of water, like an immense moving hill. Meanwhile, the ground shockwave traveled toward the land at high speed. It struck Japan and shook the ground for six terrifying minutes.

The shock wave traveled under 11 nuclear reactors, including two separate Fukushima complexes: Fukushima-Diani and Fukushima-Daiichi. (Diani means ‘Complex 1’ and Daiichi ‘Complex 2’.) All 11 reactors shut down, as they were designed to do, and no doubt all the reactor operators breathed a great sigh of relief. It was premature.

The mound of seawater was still traveling. As the water “hill” entered shallow water, nearer the land, it was lifted up into a towering wave as high as 40 meters (130 feet!) in places.  Then, some 50 minutes after the earthquake, the tsunami struck the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power station. Some kilometers away, when the water struck the Fukushima-Diani nuclear power station, it was “only” 9 m (30 ft) high, which was not as devastating as at Daiichi. Diani did not make it into the news.

The water jumped the protective sea walls at Fukushima-Daiichi. The sighs of relief from a half-hour before turned into concern and dread. Over at the Fukushima Diani power station, 12 km (7 mi) to the south, water also caused damage to machinery, but the reactors were not harmed. There was no risk of radiation release, so the Diani power station was of no interest to the international media. Diani was safely shut down to “cold shutdown” after two days.

As a result, over the past decade, any reference to “Fukushima” has meant only the Daiichi power station and not the other one.

The devastating tsunami swept up to 10 km (6 mi) inland in places, washing away buildings, roads, and telecommunication and power lines. Over 15,000 people were killed, mainly by drowning.

Although all the nuclear reactors had shut down to a state known as “hot shutdown,” the reactors were still very hot and needed residual cooling for many hours after the urgent fast shutdown. People instinctively know not to put their hands on the engine block of a car right after it has been switched off. Nuclear reactors are the same and need to cool down until they reach the safe state known as “cold shutdown.”

A nuclear reactor has pumps that send water through the reactor until it cools. But the Fukushima electrical pumps failed because the tsunami had washed away the incoming electrical lines. So the reactor system automatically switched to diesel-driven generators to keep the cooling pumps going; but the water had washed away the diesel fuel supply, meaning the diesels worked for only a short while. Then it switched to emergency batteries, but the batteries were never designed to last for days, and could supply emergency power for only about eight hours.

The hot fuel could not be cooled, and over the next three or four days the fuel in three reactors melted, much like a candle melts.

The world media watched, and broadcast the blow-by-blow action. Japanese authorities started to panic under the international spotlight. The un-circulating cooling water was boiling off inside the reactors resulting in a chemical reaction between hot fuel exposed to hot steam. This led to the production of hydrogen gas. As the steam pressure rose, the engineers decided to open valves to release the pressure. That worked as planned, but it released the hydrogen as well.

Hydrogen, being light, rose up to the roof, where the ventilation system was not working, because there was no electricity. After a while some stray spark ignited the hydrogen which exploded, blowing the lightweight roof off the building right in front of the world’s TV cameras.  The Fukushima news just became much more dramatic. Authorities were desperate to show the world some positive action.

They progressively ordered the evacuation of 160,000 people living around the Fukushima neighborhood. That was a mistake. As days and weeks passed, it materialized that not one single person was killed by nuclear radiation. Not one single person was even injured by nuclear radiation, either. Even today, a decade later, there is still no sign of any longer-term radiation harm to any person or animal. Sadly, however, people did die during the forced evacuation.

So one of the lessons learned from Fukushima is that a huge amount of nuclear power can be struck by the largest earthquake and tsunami ever recorded, and nobody gets harmed by nuclear radiation.

Another lesson learned is that an evacuation order issued too hastily did harm and kill people.

World Nuclear Association Director-General Dr. Sama Bilbao y León said: “The rapidly implemented and protracted evacuation has resulted in well-documented significant negative social and health impacts. In total, the evacuation is thought to have been responsible for more than 2,000 premature deaths among the 160,000 who were evacuated. The rapid evacuation of the frail elderly, as well at those requiring hospital care, had a near-immediate toll.” [emphasis added]

She added: “When facing future scenarios concerning public health and safety, whatever the event, it is important that authorities take an all-hazards approach. There are risks involved in all human activities, not just nuclear power generation. Actions taken to mitigate a situation should not result in worse impacts than the original events. This is particularly important when managing the response to incidents at nuclear facilities – where fear of radiation may lead to an overly conservative assessment and a lack of perspective for relative risks.”

Thus, a decade later, we can contemplate the cumulative lessons learned. Above all, they are that nuclear power is far safer than anyone had thought. Even when dreaded core meltdowns occurred, and although reactors were wrecked, resulting in a financial disaster for the owners, no people were harmed by radiation.

We also learned that, for local residents, it would have been far safer to stay indoors in a house than to join the forced evacuation. We also learned that governments and authorities must listen to the nuclear professionals, and not overreact, even though the television news cameras look awfully close.

Fukushima certainly produced some valuable lessons. Governments, news media, and the public need to learn the correct lessons from them.

*****

This article was published March 27, 2021 and is reproduced by permission from the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow.  The author is an award-winning nuclear physicist. 

A Qualifying Test for Experts on Race and Diversity

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Judging by what they say and write, reporters, commentators, academics, and directors of diversity and inclusion see themselves as experts on race and diversity.

Many of them see racism and inequalities everywhere, based on the official but contrived racial categories of African American, Hispanic, White, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American.

The following test will determine if they are indeed experts on race and qualified to be the arbiters of which groups should be beneficiaries of diversity initiatives.

The five-question test is based on the make-up of my and my wife’s extended families.

Question One: A relative of ours is a mix of Swedish and Scots-Irish descent. She has two children by an East Indian. What race are the children?

Question Two: Two other relatives, a husband, and wife, adopted an orphaned girl from China. The working-class parents, who are a mix of Swedish and Scots-Irish, already had an African American as a son-in-law. When their adopted daughter applies for college, should she get extra admission points for her race?

Before answering, you should know that the couple is Mormon—you know, the religion that sophisticates and intellectuals make fun of and see as white and racist.

Question Three: A close family member is engaged to a delightful woman who is part Filipino and part Italian. He’s a mix of Italian, Swedish, and Scots-Irish. When they have children, will the children be considered minorities?

Question Four: What race and color are Italians? Hint: The Italian peninsula has been crisscrossed over millennia by North Africans, Persians, Syrians, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Lombards, Berbers, Normans, Franks, Gauls, and, over a hundred thousand years ago, by Neanderthals. Each group that tromped through mixed its chromosomes with the existing population.

Question Five: Since all Homo sapiens have a common African ancestor, doesn’t that mean that all humans are African?

My family, like most American families, doesn’t give a damn about the race of family members, or anyone else for that matter. After all, race is a social construct with no basis in genetics. We just care that children are raised to be moral and to be good neighbors and citizens.

But since reporters, commentators, academics, government apparatchiks, and directors of diversity and inclusion are fixated on the aforementioned six racial categories and see themselves as experts in history, sociology, anthropology, economics, ethnographies, and demographics, they no doubt know the answers to the test. Therefore, I respectfully ask them to please submit the answers so their expertise can be confirmed.

While they’re at it, maybe they can answer two bonus questions.

Bonus Question One: There are thousands of unique ethnic groups in the world, encompassing various nationalities, religions, socioeconomic classes, ideologies, skin shades, and histories of being victims and victimizers. All of the diverse ethnic groups in America are numerical minorities because none of them makes up more than 50% of the population.

Can you identify all of the distinct ethnocultural groups that fall under each of the official racial categories of African American, Hispanic, White, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American? If not, then just list one hundred of the ones that fall under the White category.

Bonus Question Two: Below is a list of the nationalities that rank in the top ten of household income in America. Explain how this proves that America is a racist, exclusionary society of white privilege.

1. East Indian Americans
2. Taiwanese Americans
3. Australian Americans
4. South African American
5. Filipino Americans
6. Austrian Americans
7. Chinese Americans
8. Japanese Americans
9. Nepalese Americans
10. Singaporean Americans

Thank you in advance for your answers. My apologies if your circuits have blown from being asked to think too deeply.