Ruth Institute Blog

by Louise Kirk

Most sex education fails because it does not prepare children for life. A successful values programme is changing all that.

In 2010 plans were afoot to make sex education compulsory in the UK from the age of five. The policy, strongly supported by the last UK Labour Government, just failed to reach the statute book when a general election was called. The present Coalition Government is under similar pressure to introduce earlier and more prescribed sex education, but decided to consult the public before acting. Read more…

by Izzy Kalman

Bullying-related suicide will not decrease as long as we glorify the victims with magazine covers and laws in their name.

It’s relentless. Virtually every week the media informs us about another new tragedy of a young person taking his or her own life because they could no longer tolerate being bullied. Our country has been intensively combating bullying for a dozen years, since the Columbine shooting brought the problem of bullying to the nation’s consciousness. Why are all of our efforts failing? Why are so many kids committing ‘bullycide,’ as the phenomenon of bullying-related suicide is being labeled. (The term is actually a misnomer, as linguistically ‘bullycide means’ ‘killing a bully.’) Read more…

[And if the line in the sand is moved from 24 weeks in utero to at birth, what's to say it won't be moved to 1 month after birth, 2 months, even two years as some nutter suggested? I couldn't help but post the entire article. It's just too good. And it's short anyway.] Read more…

by Mariette Ulrich

My “Beyond Satire” meter is, once again, registering in the red zone. I’m not sure why this story made the news; maybe because we’re talking Britain and not India or China.

Women are being granted illegal abortions by doctors based on the sex of their unborn baby, an undercover investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals. Read more…

by Charlie Butts

Both the Girl Scouts and Planned Parenthood have dismissed Rep. Bob Morris‘ (R) concerns as baseless. But Mike Fichter of Indiana Right to Life tells OneNewsNow neither organization should have been so fast with the denials. Read more…

by Marcus Roberts

Today I bring you the last in a three-part blog series on Nicholas Eberstadt’s article in the New Atlantis entitled “The Global War Against Baby Girls”.  On Friday, we talked about the problem of female feticide in China. On Monday, we looked at the problem elsewhere in the world. Today, Ebertadt article looks at the global effect of this problem and whether there is any hope for the future. Read more…

by Marcus Roberts

No, no, I cannot see into the future. Nor do I have a hotline to the UK Telegraph’s investigative reporting team.  It was just sheer dumb luck that the day after I finished a three part series looking into the worldwide phenomenon of sex-selective abortions (see the last three “Demography is Destiny” posts) the story broke in the UK that abortionists were allowing women to abort their babies on the ground of gender. Pregnant women went to various abortion clinics with a reporter posing as a supportive relative who was secretly filming.  There are interesting ethical issues here about the use of secret filming and entrapment.  Or are there? Is this any different from normal “target” style shows that secretly film different customer service representatives to see how they act? Read more…

by Peter Jon Mitchell

The Ontario government has vastly over-estimated its ability to solve problems like school bullying. Don’t families have a role in this?

There are some problems for which politics is a blunt and unwieldy instrument. Bullying may be such an issue. No one knows whether tackling the community level problem of bullying through rigid government legislation will be effective, but that hasn’t stopped the Canadian province of Ontario from trying. Read more…

by Marcus Roberts

Today I will continue to look at the article by Nicholas Eberstadt in the New Atlantic entitled “The Global War Against Baby Girls”.  On Friday I examined the first part of the article which focussed on the huge imbalance in the Chinese SRB (sex ratio at birth).  Now, I want to turn from the world’s largest country to other countries that are part of this insidious “global war”.  While China has had the one child policy for the last 30 odd years, Eberstadt’s article makes it clear that that is not the only reason for a marked preference for boy babies: Read more…

By JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage. Read more…

As I was getting dressed one morning, my two-year-old daughter walked in and said,

Keep reading.

I sent my six-year-old daughter to deliver some lemons and oranges from our yard to the widow next door. Worried that she might rudely deliver the fruit and leave without a word, I called to her, “Don’t forget to say, ‘You’re welcome.’”

When my daughter returned, she gave me the full report:

Keep reading.

Another story Dr. J predicted. There is no just solution to these disputes.

A two-year-old boy with “three parents” – his lesbian mother, her partner and a gay father – is at the centre of an Appeal Court test case on the status of “alternative” families. Read more…

by Helen Alvaré

December 6, 2011 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/12/4397

The Supreme Court was more right than it knew during the past two centuries as it identified the state’s interest in marriage as children and their formation. The first in a two-part series. Read more…

The two most hateful, fearful, and odious words in the English language are: potty training.

Even though you’re not on TV or in a movie, you sometimes hear yourself saying, “It’s quiet….Tooooo quiet.” Read more…

When I was little, I, like all little boys (okay, and big boys) hated washing dishes. When it was my turn to clean up after dinner, instead of washing the plates and silverware, I…

Keep reading.

by Margaret Somerville

Indignation over sex-selection shows that abortion is not just a private matter.

Over 100,000 abortions take place each year in Canada, which, uniquely among Western democracies, has no law restricting access to the procedure. It is legal throughout pregnancy, although the vast majority of physicians will not carry it out after viability of the fetus (the time at which the fetus has a chance of living outside the womb, which the Canadian Medical Association sets at 20 weeks gestation), except for serious medical reasons. Other exceptions to the 20 week limit do, however, occur and are probably not uncommon. Read more…

No doubt there will be uncharted health consequences for these girls down the road. But as we’re already seeing from abortion-breast cancer link studies, the people in authority don’t care.

by Carolyn Moynihan

It was always obvious to any sane adult that giving contraceptives to teenagers would do next to nothing to stop them getting pregnant. In fact, contraceptive education and supply to schoolgirls has been accompanied for decades by rising numbers of pregnancies in the UK, making Britain, notoriously, the teenage pregnancy capital of Europe. Read more…

Most parents offer their children a piece of candy or a small gift when potty training. Not me. I said, “What do you want, kid? A Cadillac? A trip to Hawaii? I’ll give you anything if you use the potty. Just name it.” Finally we settled on…

Keep reading.

by Abby Johnson | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 11/28/11 11:08 AM

Since becoming pregnant, I have learned a hard reality. I have private insurance because I am self employed. I knew that my insurance plan did not offer maternity coverage. Read more…