Abortion is wrong but not contraceptives?

[manualman]

I’m used to people assuming I’m a nut for my position on this issue, so I like to cite hostile sources:

un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf

Here’s a nice excerpt:
“Long-range fertility in Europe, unlike in most other cases, is expected to be clearly above current fertility. Is it reasonable to expect fertility to rise from current levels? It is impossible to tell, but one can consider the implications if it does not.
Fertility stays at current levels in the constant projection scenario, which leads to incredibly large numbers for world population. For the European population, however, it leads instead, in the long run, to startlingly low numbers. By 2300, Western, Southern, and Northern Europe would each have only 28-30 million people, and Eastern Europe would have only 5 million. The European Union,
which has recently expanded to encompass 452- 455 million people (according to 2000 or 2005 figures) would fall by 2300 to only 59 million.
About half the countries of Europe would lose 95 per cent or more of their population, and such countries as the Russian Federation and Italy
would have only 1 per cent of their population left. Although one might entertain the possibility that fertility will never rise above current levels, the
consequences appear sufficiently grotesque as to make this seem improbable.”

Nice, huh? By their own admission, if current European cultural/demographic trends continue, European culture as we know it will be annihilated. But shucks, that seems too ugly to be true, so without examining the structural causes of low Euro fertility rates, we’ll just assume that they come back up to sustainable numbers. Other alternatives are too ugly to contemplate. Real rigorous science there, huh?

What they fail to comprehend is that there ARE cultural reasons that Europe has suicidal fertility rates, those cultural values are being vigorously exported globally to great success and that there is no rational reason to believe that culture will be easily changeable again when it suits the bureacrats to have it so.

By the UN’s own admission, the Euro fertility culture would drop its population by 95 percent by 2300, yet this is precisely the sexual culture and worldview they continue to push on the entire world.

Common sense indeed.

 

[Warrior1979]

IBy the UN’s own admission, the Euro fertility culture would drop its population by 95 percent by 2300, yet this is precisely the sexual culture and worldview they continue to push on the entire world.

Common sense indeed.

Common sense dictates that statements like the above are not based in reality and are used as attention grabbers.

The simple fact is that those that don’t have children will go out of existence, to be replaced by those that have many children. To reduce the population by 95% in approximately 200 years, it makes the assumption that a tiny fraction of 1% have an above-average replacement rate (more than two children). These assumptions are purely speculative, and are not based on reality.

 

[Infiltrator]

Abortion is killing a human being - contraception is not starting a life.

Thou Shalt Not Kill.

 

[manualman]

The simple fact is that those that don’t have children will go out of existence, to be replaced by those that have many children.

Assertion flatly contradicted by recent historical evidence. You assert that kids that grow up in larger families will grow up and have larger families and that the childles type will die out. Let’s see if this is true in recent history.

Boomers were largely raised in bigger families. They proceeded to have the smallest family sizes in American history. Assertion contradicted by history.

This historical context demonstrates clearly that while family legacy and culture plays a role in generational fertility patterns, that role CAN and has demonstrably been interrupted quite rapidly by forces external to family history.

So the pressing question becomes: Why have fertility rates dropped so drastically across every wealthy industrialized culture? The answers appear obvious and have become deeply ingrained in our culture’s structure:

1. Income opportunities are increasingly limited to those with higher education, almost requiring delays in the age of marriage.
2. Costs of living standards have forced most families into dependence on two incomes, severely economically punishing those women who have children.
3. Secularization has reduced the cultural definition of marriage from sacred covenant to contract that can be broken upon mutual agreement, with resulting vast increase in divorce rates, further reducing lifetime fertility rates.
4. Personal exemptions in taxes have not been adjusted for inflation in decades, effectively reducing the tax subsidy once enjoyed for raising kids (partially offset by recent child tax credits).
5. Contraception mentality has short circuited the connection between sex and babies that God built into us that would otherwise have been enough to overcome much of 1-4 above.

In short, our economy has become one in which it takes nearly heroic virtue to decide to have kids, much less more than 2 of them. The deck is stacked steeply against parenting. It is naive on the part of the UN population projectors to blithely assume that fertility rates will increase beyond their current levels in developed nations until / unless something is done to offset the cultural factors that have produced the current low rates in the first place.

 

[Warrior1979]

In short, our economy has become one in which it takes nearly heroic virtue to decide to have kids, much less more than 2 of them. The deck is stacked steeply against parenting. It is naive on the part of the UN population projectors to blithely assume that fertility rates will increase beyond their current levels in developed nations until / unless something is done to offset the cultural factors that have produced the current low rates in the first place.

It pure speculation to believe that 200 year from now the fertility rate will be exactly the same as it is today, or less, and the population will be 95% less. They are attention grabbing numbers, but the fact is they are based on nothing but speculation.

People are making assumptions purely based on numbers, which ignores a great many other facts. For example, it has to be assumed that human society will remain exactly in the current form, otherwise the projection is not valid. You don’t believe that, nor do I.

 

[manualman]

Do you get the sense that we’re the only two left still reading this thread?

 

[LittleDavid]

Do you get the sense that we’re the only two left still reading this thread?

Make it three people! And of course everyone talks about this issue as if the human species is the only one that matters on this planet. Please take a look at this website…www.whole-systems.org/extinctions.html. Animals are going extinct like never before because we are taking away their habitat. Populations may rise and fall, but once a species goes extinct, it’s gone. You people who say,“populations will be down by 2300”, might be right, but using the current trends, 22% of the animal species alive today will be extinct by 2022.(maybe things will change and those predictions will be wrong…I hope so) I recently came back from China where overpopulation IS a problem. The air is so dirty there that in the 10 days there the visibility was rarely over a mile or two…it’s like a 24hr./7days a week fog…never bright sunshine…it was depressing.

 

[manualman]

Is it the population of China that pollutes so badly or is it the business community there striving to satiate the West’s voracious hunger for dirt cheap goods, unburdened by the cost of responsible energy and production?

 

[Abu]

LittleDavid
The air is so dirty there that in the 10 days there the visibility was rarely over a mile or two…it’s like a 24hr./7days a week fog…never bright sunshine…it was depressing.[China]
manualman
Is it the population of China that pollutes so badly or is it the business community there striving to satiate the West’s voracious hunger for dirt cheap goods, unburdened by the cost of responsible energy and production?

It is simply the inability to understand, make and follow the sound laws which would prevent the real pollution for the health and welfare of the society. What can you expect of those who mandate abortion of females and limitation of family size by murder? Don’t you know also of the abysmal rate of deaths in their mines?

The Catholic Church built Western civilization on faith and reason and no other religion had the basis in theology to be able to develop that concept.

A “business” community, or any other community, lives and acts by the morals of the people who comprise it. That is precisely why Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that “Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically human relations…Therefore it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but individuals, their moral conscience and their personal and social responsibility.” (Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI, 2009, #36).

 

[Warrior1979]

Do you get the sense that we’re the only two left still reading this thread?

I’m not really reading it anymore…just correcting errors.

 

[Warrior1979]

It is simply the inability to understand, make and follow the sound laws which would prevent the real pollution for the health and welfare of the society. What can you expect of those who mandate abortion of females and limitation of family size by murder? Don’t you know also of the abysmal rate of deaths in their mines?

Just think…just a generation ago this was the culture that was encouraging mothers to have as many babies as possible, with mothers have more than 10 children be honored.

Fact is, the Chinese know exactly what they are doing. Pollution control and massive regulation discourages investment. They’d rather slide on the pollution control and keep people employed. They’d rather have dirty air and employment than clean air and an unemployed younger generation.

The Catholic Church built Western civilization on faith and reason and no other religion had the basis in theology to be able to develop that concept.

Chinese culture is older than western culture.

 

[Abu]

God, by redeeming mankind through His Son, Jesus the Christ, and establishing His Church, ushered in a new covenant for a new era – that’s precisely why we now have the ability to do what couldn’t be done before, and have done so.

The disasters come from those who don’t or won’t follow the precepts established by Christ.

In Science and Creation Father Stanley Jaki lists seven great cultures in which science suffered a “stillbirth” – Arabic, Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, and Maya – they did not have the Catholic conception of the divine. Fr Jaki emphasises that “nature had to be de-animized” for science to be born. (Creation and Scientific Creativity, Paul Haffner, Christendom Press, 1991, p 41). “During the twelfth century in Latin Europe those aspects of Judeo-Christian thought which emphasized the idea of creation out of nothing and the distance between God and the world, in certain contexts and with certain men, had the effect of eliminating all semi-divine entities from the realm of nature.” (How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Dr Thomas E Woods, Regnery, 2005, p 93).

“The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it is necessary to fully appreciate his handiwork. Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles.

“These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else.” The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark, Random House, 2005, p 22-23].

 

[Warrior1979]

A Catholic will always see things from a Catholic point of view. Collapse or stillbirth also occurs in the west: Israel, Rome, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, etc. Currently, Europe and The U.S. are about to collapse under the weight of their debt.

“The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God.

I’m sorry, but this is objectively false. Science was well advanced in eastern cultures while those in western cultures were living like barbarians.

 

[Abu]

Warrior1979
I’m sorry, but this is objectively false. Science was well advanced in eastern cultures while those in western cultures were living like barbarians.

Typical and what we’ve seen so often here – a prejudice without fact.

 

[Warrior1979]

Typical and what we’ve seen so often here – a prejudice without fact.

You might want to read up on some history of other cultures…it’s fascinating.

FWIW, I have no prejudices, or at least I try to avoid them as much as humanly possible. Prejudices distort facts and opinions.

 

[Nate13]

I’m not really reading it anymore…just correcting errors.

And being pessimistic as usual

 

[LittleDavid]

Abortion is killing a human being - contraception is not starting a life.

Thou Shalt Not Kill.

The topic of this whole thread is,“Aborition IS WRONG but NOT contraceptives?” So are you suggesting that contraception (not starting a life) is KILLING a life? If so what scripture are you going for here??

 

[ahs]

The topic of this whole thread is,“Aborition IS WRONG but NOT contraceptives?” So are you suggesting that contraception (not starting a life) is KILLING a life? If so what scripture are you going for here??

Hi. I just wanted to clarify by using Church Teaching without opinion. Contraception is wrong because:

*“every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” is intrinsically evil:158

Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality…* (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2370)

More depth on “why” in CCC 1652-1654 and 2366-2400

 

[LittleDavid]

Species extinct since 1800:

1950= 5,000 species
1960= 7,000 "
1970= 9,000 "
1980= 12,500 "
1990= 18,000 "
2000= 26,000 "
2010= 37,000 "

main cause = habitat loss due to human population growth.

source = www.whole-systems.org/extinctions.html

 

[Abu]

The truth is not an opinion, view, prejudice, wish, desire. We’ve had more than enough of such feelings here. As we’ve seen, the truth of the development of science is only because of the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and that this has not and cannot be refuted.

LittleDavid
So are you suggesting that contraception (not starting a life) is KILLING a life? If so what scripture are you going for here??

This is a good example of not realising that it is only because of the Catholic Church that we have the Sacred Scriptures as the Word of God, and that She interprets what She has given us as She has the mandate from Christ to teach all nations.

BTW God killed Onan because of contraception.(Gen. 38: 9-10)