Category: Marriage & Family

…is the end of legal marriage, argues Stanley Kurtz.

Well, there are now four Veres in our household. This past Wednesday, as the President signed the ban on partial-birth abortion into law, Angéla Zoë Vere weighed into the world at seven pounds, nine ounces. Both Sonya and the baby are doing well, and Jasmine is settling into her role as big sister. It was a wonderful culture of life moment all around. We were also blessed to be under the care of a pro-life ob-gyn who had come highly reccomended by some friends of ours (a doctor and a lawyer). This couple is quite active in the pro-life movement and only frequent pro-life doctors. While in the hospital, we were surprised to discover that the nurses consider him the best ob-gyn in the area and their favorite to work with when it comes to delivering babies.
Over the past year, Sonya and I have come to appreciate the blessing a pro-life doctor is throughout the childbirth process. Both Sonya and I found it really comforting to know that the doctor delivering our baby (the same doctor who worked with Sonya to get her system back up last winter) shares our view of life.

Psychiatry professor Robert Spitzer of Columbia is back in the news: some time ago, he interviewed 200 volunteers who reported a change from homosexual orientation to heterosexual orientation with the help of various therapeutic means, and often with a religious motivation for the effort. His report has now been published, and NARTH has a summary.

In some cultures, it’s still conventional that fathers aren’t present at childbirth, but in the technological West, when women started having to bear their children in a room full of strangers, it became accepted and even expected that fathers would attend and assist at births, somewhat as an advocate for the mother vis-a-vis the medical professionals.
So says obstetrician Dr. Michel Odent. However, his experiences have led him to believe that in many cases the father’s presence and his excitement make labors longer and more difficult for the mother.

With words, most modern women are adamant that they need the participation of the baby’s father while they give birth; but on the day of the birth the same women can express exactly the opposite in a nonverbal way. I remember a certain number of births that were going on slowly up to the time when the father was unexpectedly obliged to get out (for example to buy something urgently before the store is closed). As soon as the man left, the laboring woman started to shout out, she went to the bathroom and the baby was born after a short series of powerful and irresistible contractions (what I call a “fetus ejection reflex”).

The full article is available online.

Maggie Gallagher wonders whether the family is still declining:

How many children are living in intact families, with their own married biological or adopted parents?
At a fascinating Health and Human Services-funded conference last week in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Poverty Center, we finally got the answer. And the news is good. The analysis of the National Survey of America’s Families (a survey of 40,000 nationally representative families) was done by Urban Institute scholars Gregory Acs and Sandi Nelson:
Between 1997 and 2002, the proportion of children under 6 living in intact married families actually increased. So did the proportion of all children in low-income households (the bottom quarter) by close to 4 percent.
It’s encouraging evidence that the apostles of despair are wrong: The decline of marriage is not inevitable. Social recovery is possible. In fact, it is under way.

(Now, if only we could get Maggie to do something about that awful photo of herself.)