Ruth Institute Blog

My son was notoriously bad at cleaning up after himself, and doing household chores in general. No amount of nagging or bribery worked. Then suddenly I began coming home and finding the house clean, dishes washed, room clean, laundry folded; whatever I had asked him to do, it was done! I was so proud of him, but when I asked him what was the cause of his sudden change in attitude, he only shrugged. I was hoping my talks had finally paid off or that he had discerned a higher calling requiring order and obedience. It was only when I questioned one of his younger siblings, that I got the truth.

Keep reading.

by John Rosemond

About 40 years ago, as divorce was becoming commonplace, America began waking up to the importance of fatherhood. Up until then, the literature on child rearing was almost exclusively mother-oriented. Fathers didn’t count for much. After all, Freud had pretty much ignored them, hadn’t he? Read more…

I mean, for real? And this was from a month ago. How many people have heard of this?

Watch the youtube video.

by Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist

Since the introduction of oral contraceptives in the early 1960′s, use of The Pill, as it is generally known, has soared to approximately 7 in 10 women of childbearing age.    Among young women ages 18-24, use of oral contraceptives is especially high, reaching two-thirds in 2008. Read more…

By MEG JAY

AT 32, one of my clients (I’ll call her Jennifer) had a lavish wine-country wedding. By then, Jennifer and her boyfriend had lived together for more than four years. The event was attended by the couple’s friends, families and two dogs.

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?” Read more…

by Jennifer Roback Morse

April 4, 2012 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/04/5073

The primary business of the state is justice. Because children cannot be autonomous, adult society has an obligation in justice to provide institutional structures that protect their most basic interests. Read more…

Writhing and screaming in a hospital room is ultimately your idea of a good time.

You often hit the bottle late at night, but it has nothing to do with alcohol.

Somewhere in your home there is a pail filled with carefully wrapped human waste.

Keep reading.

My son was notoriously bad at cleaning up after himself and doing household chores in general. No amount of nagging or bribery was working. Suddenly I began coming home and finding the house clean, dishes washed, room clean, laundry folded; whatever I had asked him to do, it was done! I was so proud of him, but when I asked him what was the cause of his sudden change in attitude, he only shrugged. I was hoping my talks had finally paid off or that he had discerned a higher calling requiring order and obedience. It was only when I questioned one of his younger siblings, that I got the truth.

Keep reading.

by Dr. Rebecca Peck

Pennsylvania State Rep. Babette Josephs, a Philadelphia Democrat, recently attacked her pro-life women colleagues in the state legislature for supporting a bill that would allow women a chance to see an ultrasound of their unborn child before an abortion, calling them “men with breasts.” But who are the real “men with breasts,” Dr. Rebecca Peck asks. Read more…

An email from Helen Alvare

Thought you might like a brief update on the religious freedom front in connection with the HHS mandate on contraception and early abortion drugs.
The White House and HHS would certainly prefer that this issue go away until August 2013 when the mandate is currently scheduled to go into effect. But several federal lawsuits claiming violations of the Free Exercise Clause and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act are proceeding. The marvelous religious freedom law firm, the Becket Fund, is pursuing several cases. Information on these is available at http://www.becketfund.org/hhs/ Read more…

With host, Johnette Benkovic Read more…

Watch the news clip.

Basically, a 17-year-old student artist painted a mural representing the journey of a man’s life from school to graduation, to getting married and having a baby. One student and one parent complained that this was offensive because he married a woman. The principal had the janitor paint over the marriage part. Fortunately, the superintendent overruled this, saying the student can repaint.

Let’s just face it, folks, nobody can please everybody. And besides, since when is a picture of a man marrying a woman offensive? Men have been marrying women since the beginning of time. Clearly, there’s nothing wrong with that.

by Carolyn Moynihan

Australian doctors are calling for an inquiry into what has been labelled the “premature sexualisation of children in marketing and advertising”, with the Australian Medical Association arguing the practice is detrimental to child health and development. Read more…

More disturbing news.

by Michael Cook

Respect for autonomy is one of the most convincing arguments for euthanasia. It was the theme of a strong defence of legalising it in Australia in the Journal of Law and Medicine by Margaret Otlowski and Lorana Bartels in 2010. They concluded that “ in a secular society with an ageing population” legalisation is inevitable. Read more…

by Sheila Liaugminas

The individual mandate requring citizens to purchase something was challenged from the beginning in state and appellate courts, and opening argument were just heard before the US Supreme Court. The HHS mandate requiring citizens to purchase something that violates their conscience is being challenged in a first round of lawsuits with more joining by the week. Read more…

by Pravin Thevathasan

An international conference of psychiatrists is ignoring the clamorous debate over the psychological consequences of abortion.

That there are psychological consequences to having an abortion have been accepted by many in the pro-life and pro-abortion camps. The psychiatrist Professor Ian Brockington has commented: “Some [post abortion] mothers feel like criminals and brood over the dead foetus. Some find it hard to look at small babies and burst into tears when they see babies or when abortion is mentioned.”(1) Read more…

On March 30, an MSNBC news anchor accused the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) of “race-baiting” for (among other charges) writing in a 2009 in-house document, “We … need to … interrupt the attempt to equate gay with black, and sexual orientation with race; we need to make traditional sexual morality intellectually respectable again in elite culture.” Read more…

Becky Yeh – OneNewsNow California correspondent

Internal documents from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) show that the group sought to pit African-Americans and Hispanics, two key Democratic constituencies, against homosexuals in order to win the campaign for marriage in Maine. The documents date from 2009 and were recently unsealed by court officials in Maine, where the group ran a successful campaign to ban same-sex “marriage.” Read more…

by Ian Smith

Victoria can be a world leader with information on donor conception.

CLEM Newton-Brown (The Age, March 29) has it right when he says of donor conception as practiced in the 1980s that this was an experiment that we got wrong and which we now need to correct. Read more…

by Wesley J. Smith

The Center for Bioethics and Culture has a good film out called Anonymous Father’s Day, which deals with the emotional impact on children of sperm donors from not knowing anything about their biological fathers.  This too is a form of reproductive commodification and the consequences in the lives of the people created are more intense than I certainly would have thought.  Of course, that isn’t the only way of being an “anonymous father,” but the film brings up issues I had not considered before seeing it.  It is well worth your while. Read more…