What's wrong with HB 3773? A LOT!!! (New Online Petitions added!)

[mannyamador]

Why do you think this agricultural lands are being converted to residential and industrial lands? Its because of the rapid growth of the population.

So following your twisted reasoning, the US must be overpopulated since most new land development is for residential and industrial use. Duh...

You're NOT thinking. There's nothing wrong with using land for residential or industrial use. It's when you convert ALREADY PRODUCTIVE land that it MAY become a problem. So again the problem isn't overpopulation. The problem is lack of planning and greed. None of these will be solved by population control.

As usual, you ASSUME population growth cause spoverty, but CAN'T PROVE IT. That's the typical mindlessness of the population doomsayers...

Alternative Info and Opinion: http://www.phnix.net
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Prolife Phils. http://www.prolife.org.ph

[bad donkey!]

but they are not converting farmlands to industrial, commercial or residential lands are they?Â* they are using lands that are suitable for farming.Â* and they are always expanding there farmlands to compensate for there rapid growing population.Â* As for converting other lands to residential they are using the desert and the mountains.Â* These are the most popular places.Â* Take a look at las vagas it is a rapidly growing city and is stil expanding.Â* Peeople are building houses on mountains and cliffs overlooking the see or othe views.Â* Are this places farmlands? no..They have an efficient way of determining which land is suitable for a particular purpose. They are not converting farmland to residential but they are using ther lands. farmlands stay as farmlands. Have you been to carcar? What is the first thing that you notice around you when you enter the municipality?Â* You see rice fields being converted to residential, commercial and industrial lots.Â* Ask the locals how big is the rice fields before?Â* You can even see a house that has a rice field for a back yard.Â* But the local officials were so smart to allow this to happen.Â* they have to choose instant money over long term food security and income.Â* Most of the fields are dried up bucause it is already too near the highway and houses. Its not only happening in cebu but all over the country.Â* Other provinces are diverting funds for farming to quarying since it generates more cash.

[mannyamador]

but they are not converting farmlands to industrial, commercial or residential lands are they? they are using lands that are suitable for farming.

That's my point! The issue then is NOT "overpopulation. It has never been The issue is proper planning and governance. The latter (especially) has always been a problem in the Philippines and it will not be solved with population control. And the problem will persist.

[mannyamador]

Human Rights Triumphs Over UNFPA Population Controllers
By Joseph A. D'Agostino

Population control forces lost a battle yesterday when the U.S. House
voted by a substantial margin not to restore U.S. funding for the United
Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). In this case, "population control
forces" is particularly suited to identify those pushing UNFPA funding,
since "pro-choice" can in no plausible way describe them.

UNFPA assists Communist China in her population control efforts. No one
disputes this. China's population control program is coercive. Just
about no one -- outside of Chinese government officials -- disputes this
either. So when UNFPA assists and subsidizes China's population control
program, it at least indirectly helps China coerce women into having no
more than their government-allotted quota of children.

Obviously, when you give someone money to do one thing, this frees up
funds that can be used to do other things. So when UNFPA distributes
contraceptives and performs other services in China, this frees up Chinese
population control money to go to the coercive aspects of China's program.
But UNFPA's involvement goes further than this.

In China, women -- and their husbands -- who have more than one or two children
(depending on their situation and the area in which they live) face heavy
fines (called "social compensation fees"), loss of medical coverage,
denial of educational benefits for their children, and loss of employment,
policies that UNFPA has assisted in various ways.

As recently as 2001, UNFPA officials have said nice things about China's
population control program. Time-Asia on August 29, 2001, quoted Sven
Burmester, the United Nations Population Fund representative in Beijing,
as saying: "For all the bad press, China has achieved the impossible. The
country has solved its population problem." AFP had the same fellow
saying on Oct. 11, 1999: "China has had the most successful family
planning policy in the history of mankind in terms of quantity and with
that, China has done mankind a favour."

China has no intention of abandoning her population control policy,
despite her dramatically depressed fertility rate. The State Commission
for Population and Family Planning said in January that, though the
average number of children per family has gone from 5.8 in the early '70s
to 1.8 today (replacement rate fertility would be 2.1), it wanted to
continue its population control program for "a long period." "The big
population remains a major issue for China in the present stage and a key
factor obstructing the country's economic and social development," said a
commission official, according to the state-owned People's Daily.
"Family planning will continue to be a basic state policy that we must
adhere to in a long period." Apparently, Chinese families would choose to
have more children if they were left alone, because the official said, "If
the family planning policy is loosened, the country is very likely to
experience a boost in population growth." The People's Daily editorial
page went even further, calling for the population control program to be
made permanent.

Despite all the evidence of abuses, UNFPA shows no signs of wanting to
leave China. Nor are pro-UNFPA forces in Congress urging it to do so.
UNFPA and its supporters simply claim that UNFPA does not operate in
Chinese counties where coercion exists, and that its presence in China has
had a moderating effect on China's Draconian practices. The evidence
contradicts the first claim, and there is precious little support for the
second, given the continued pervasiveness of coercion in China and that
country's ongoing decline in fertility.

A year after a 2001 PRI investigation determined that UNFPA's efforts in
China were closely tied to those of the Chinese government, the U.S.
Department of State came to the same conclusion. This prompted the Bush
Administration to invoke a legal provision called Kemp-Kasten and direct
international family planning money away from UNFPA. Secretary of State
Colin Powell reaffirmed that decision in a July 15, 2004 letter. "In July
2002, I determined that UNFPA's support of, and involvement in, China's
population-planning activities allowed the Chinese government to implement
more effectively its program of coercive abortion. . .," he wrote. "[A]s
in 2002, UNFPA continues its support and involvement in China's coercive
birth limitation program in counties where China's restrictive law and
penalties are enforced by government officials."

Referring to the defeated amendment introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney
(D.-N.Y.), which would have restored $34 million in UNFPA funding,
pro-life human rights champion Rep. Chris Smith (R.-N.J.) said, "As
violations of human rights go, coercive population control in China is
among the worst and most degrading systematic abuse in human history.
Last December, I chaired a hearing focused on Mrs. Mao Hen Feng -- a Chinese
woman who has been imprisoned and tortured because of her resistance to
coercive population control. The UNFPA was nowhere to be found in her
defense. . . Mrs. Mao-and millions of women like her-needs advocates, not
accommodators and enablers of abuse. We must stand with the victims-the
oppressed, not with the oppressor. At a minimum, we should not lavish
millions of dollars on the friends of the oppressor like the UNFPA."

When we sent an investigative team headed by Josephine Guy into Sihui
County, Guangdong Province, China in the fall of 2001, we found the local
UNFPA official working hand in glove with Chinese population controllers.
"The investigative team was told by officials that UNFPA's representative
in Sihui and Chinese family planning officials work from the same office,
the Sihui County Office of Family Planning," we reported. "PRI
investigators spoke to Chinese officials in this office, and inquired
about UNFPA. PRI investigators were shown by these officials the UNFPA
desk. Photographic evidence of the UNFPA office desk within this office
was obtained by PRI's photographer. Local officials told PRI
investigators that there is no distinction between UNFPA's program in
Sihui and the Chinese family planning program in Sihui."
And what was going on in Sihui at that time? "By many victims and
witnesses of coercion, PRI investigators were told that. . . coercive
family planning policies in Sihui include: age requirements for pregnancy;
birth permits; mandatory use of IUDs; mandatory sterilization; crippling
fines for non-compliance; imprisonment for non-compliance; destruction of
homes and property for non-compliance; forced abortion and forced
sterilization."

Chinese officials claim to have gotten out of the demolition business
since then, and that coercion is a thing of the past, but pregnant women,
on the run from population control officials, continue to seek sanctuary
in PRI's Chinese safe houses because they fear being forcibly aborted.
Even Chinese officials admit that tactics such as "social compensation
fees," loss of employment, and the denial of other benefits continue.
These "fees" range from one-half to ten times the average annual household
income in China.

This time around, the move to restore UNFPA funding went down to defeat on
the House floor 192 to 233, a much larger margin (41) than the tiny three
to five votes in the recent past. Maybe even a few pro-choicers are
starting to believe Chinese women should have the right to choose to bear
children.

Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at PRI.

Steve Mosher is the president of Population Research Institute, a
non-profit organization dedicated to debunking the myth that the world
is overpopulated.

(c) 2005 Population Research Institute.
Permission to reprint granted. Redistribute widely. Credit requested.

[mannyamador]

Into the Woods

Economics and declining birthrates are pushing large swaths of
Europe back to their primeval state, with wolves taking the place
of people.

By Stefan Theil
Newsweek International

July 4 issue - Germans are getting used to a new kind of immigrant. In
1998, a pack of wolves crossed the shallow Neisse River on the
Polish-German border. In the empty landscape of Eastern Saxony, speckled
with abandoned strip mines and declining villages, the wolves found
plenty of deer and rarely encountered humans. They multiplied so quickly
that a second pack has since split off, colonizing a second-growth pine
forest 30 kilometers further west. Soon, says local wildlife biologist
Gesa Kluth, a third pack will likely form, possibly heading northward in
the direction of Berlin.

Wolves returning to the heart of Europe? A hundred years ago, a
burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany's
wolves. Today, it's the local humans whose numbers are under threat.
Wolf-country villages like Boxberg and Weisswasser are emptying out,
thanks to the region's ultralow birthrate and continued rural flight.
Nearby Hoyerswerda is Germany's fastest-shrinking town, losing 25,000 of
its 70,000 residents in the last 15 years.

Such numbers are a harbinger of the future. Home to 22 of the world's 25
lowest-birthrate countries, Europe will lose 41 million people by 2030
even with continued immigration, according to the latest U.N. Population
Division report. The biggest decline will hit rural Europe. As Italians,
Spaniards, Germans and others produce barely half the children needed to
maintain the status quo -- and rural flight continues to suck people
into Europe's suburbs and cities -- the countryside will lose close to
a third of its population, say both the United Nations and the EU. "It's
a triple time bomb," says University of Lisbon demographer Nuno da
Costa. "Too few children, too many old people and too many of the
remaining young people still leaving the village."

The implications of this transformation touch on everything from tourism
to retirement locales to government conservation and agricultural
policies. Our postcard view of Europe, after all, is of a continent
where every scrap of land has long been farmed, fenced off and settled,
where every tree has been measured, counted and named. But the continent
of the future may look rather different. "Big parts of Europe will
renaturalize," says Reiner Klingholz, head of the Berlin Institute for
Population Development. Bears are back in Austria. In Swiss alpine
valleys, farms have been receding and forests are growing back in. In
parts of France and Germany, wildcats and ospreys have re-established
their range.

This sounds like an eco-environmentalist's dream, inspiring loose talk
of a Europe Pastoral -- the return of wide-open spaces and primeval
wilderness to a densely settled landscape. Yet the truth is more varied,
and interesting. While many rural regions of Europe will empty out,
others will experience something of a renaissance. Already, attractive
areas within striking distance of prosperous cities are seeing robust
revivals, driven by urban flight and a rising influx of childless
retirees. From Provence to Piedmont, Kent to the Costa del Sol,
ex-urbanites are snapping up vacation homes, hobby vineyards and horse
farms.

Contrast that with less-favored areas -- from the Spanish interior
across the Alps to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. These face dying
villages, abandoned farmsteads and changes in the land not seen for
generations. Both types of regions will have to cope with a steeply
aging population and their accompanying health and service needs, says
Gunnar Malmberg, a rural geographer at Sweden's Umea University. "Rural
Europe is the laboratory for demographic change."

Visit the Greek village of Prastos for an extreme glimpse of what
Malmberg might mean. An ancient hill town in the eastern Peloponnese,
Prastos once had 1,000 residents, most of them working the land. Now
only a dozen are left, most in their 60s and 70s. With no children, the
school has been closed since 1988. Sunday church bells no longer ring.
"The old people here will die," says visiting ex-resident Petros
Litrivis, 60. "Everything will be abandoned." Without farmers to tend
the fields, rain has washed away the once fertile soil. Of the 50,000
goats that once grazed the hills, only a fraction remain. As in much of
Greece, land that has been orchards and pasture for some 2,000 years is
now covered with a parched scrub that, in the summer, frequently catches
fire.

Rural depopulation is, of course, not new. Thousands of villages like
Prastos dot Europe, the result of a century or more of emigration,
industrialization and agricultural mechanization. "But this time it's
different because never has the rural birthrate been so low,"
demographer Costa says. In the past, for example, a farmer could usually
find at least one of his offspring to take over the land. Today, chances
are he has but a single son or daughter, usually working in the city and
rarely willing to return. In Italy, more than 60 percent of the
country's 2.6 million farmers are at least 65 years old. Once they die
out, many of their farms will join the 6 million hectares (one third of
Italian farmland) that has already been abandoned.

Rising economic pressures will amplify the trend. One third of Europe's
farmland is marginal, from the cold northern plains to the parched
Mediterranean hills. Most of these farmers subsist on EU subsidies,
since it's cheaper to import food from abroad. Already, the EU is trying
to limit costly overproduction by paying farmers not to farm. "Without
subsidies, some of the most scenic European landscapes would not
survive," says Jan-Erik Petersen, a landscape biologist at the European
Environmental Agency in Copenhagen. Take the Austrian or Swiss Alps.
Defined for centuries by orchards, cows and high mountain pastures,
those steep valleys are labor-intensive to farm, with subsidies paying
up to 90 percent of the cost. The Austrians and Swiss pay up so that the
postcard-perfect scenes can continue to exist. Across the border in
France and Italy, subsidies have been reduced for mountain-farming.
Since then, all across the southern Alps, villages have emptied out and
forests have grown back in.

This isn't necessarily the environmentalist's dream it might seem. The
scrub brush and forest that grows on abandoned land might be good for
deer and wolves, but is vastly less species-rich than traditional
farming, with its pastures, ponds and hedges. "Once shrubs cover
everything, you lose the meadow habitat. All the flowers, herbs, birds
and butterflies disappear," says the EEA's Petersen. "A new forest
doesn't get diverse until it's a couple of hundred years old." An odd
alliance of farmers and environmentalists have joined to put pressure on
the EU to "keep the landscape open," as World Wildlife Fund spokeswoman
Catherine Bett calls it. Keeping biodiversity up by preventing the land
from going wild is one of the reasons the EU pays farmers to mow fallow
land once a year. France and Germany subsidize sheep herds whose grazing
keeps scenic heaths from growing in. Outside the range of these
subsidies -- in Bulgaria, Romania or Ukraine -- big tracts of land
are returning to the wild.

For governments, the challenge has been to develop policies that slow
the demographic decline or attract new residents. In some places, such
as Britain and France, large parts of the countryside are reviving more
or less on their own as an increasingly wealthy urban middle class in
search of second homes recolonizes villages and farms. In southern
England, farmland prices have soared, helped along by burned-out
investment bankers become hobby farmers, raising organic produce or rare
breeds of pigs.

Riding this wave, villages like Santo Stefano di Sessanio in central
Italy -- down from 1,700 in the early 20th century to 124 mostly
elderly people today -- are counting on tourism to revive their town.
A Swedish investor has bought an entire section of the village and is
turning the conjoining medieval buildings into a complex of hostels for
tourists and hikers headed for the nearby Abruzzo mountain chain. In
Tuscany, an Italian count has taken the entire empty village of Gargonza
and turned it into a luxury wellness spa. "The nice villages will be
turned into hotels, and the ugly villages will be housing for hotel
employees," imagines Carlo Altomonte, an economist at Milan's Bocconi
University.

That may be a pipe dream. Once the baby boomers start dying out around
2020, population will start to decline so sharply in many European
countries that there simply won't be enough people for every town to
reinvent itself as an exurbanite enclave or tourist resort. It's
similarly unclear how long current government policies can stave off the
inevitable. In northern Sweden, a vast land of thick forests and small
rural settlements, three decades of massive spending haven't halted the
decline. "In Sweden we now talk about civilized depopulation," says Mats
Johansson of the Royal Technical Institute in Stockholm. "We just have
to make sure that the old people we leave behind are taken care of."

Eastern Germany is a case study unto itself. Taxpayers have sunk more
than 100 billion euro into rural areas, without even a blip in the speed
of decline. The countryside is full of subsidized white elephants, from
a bankrupt zeppelin factory in Brandenburg to a never-used Formula 1
speedway close to that part of nowhere in which the wolves now roam.
Oblivious to the demographics, hundreds of rural communities built
vastly oversize water networks and sewage systems, each certain of
drawing new businesses and residents. In nine cases out of 10, a
dwindling number of villagers now face sharply rising costs. Worse, in
some villages there are now too few people flushing for the sewage to
properly flow, requiring costly investments to redimension the pipes.
Shrinking, they've found, can be an expensive proposition indeed.

Some communities are turning by necessity into laboratories of
innovation. In the Swiss canton of Graubunden, where the number of
children has sharply dropped, school authorities in the 1980s
reintroduced one-room schoolhouses in hundreds of hamlets. "Now we're
entering the next phase," says Dany Bazzell of the Graubunden schools
department. "There are so few children that not even the one-room
schools will survive." In depopulating northern Sweden, Umea University
is pushing online learning, giving students an incentive to stay in
their village instead of moving away to college, from where they rarely
return. Even the French have relaxed their famously strict labor rules
for small-town residents, allowing people to combine part-time farm work
with civil-sector jobs (such as teaching).

The biggest challenge, however, is finding creative ways to keep up
services for the rising proportion of seniors. In the countryside,
longer distances can make that tough. When the Austrian village of
Klaus, thinly spread over the Alpine foothills, decided it could not
afford a regular public bus, the community set up the Dorfmobil, a
public taxi-on-demand. It now serves mainly old people without cars or
relatives left to drive them. In thinly populated Lapland, an area of
80,000 square kilometers where doctors are few and far between,
tech-savvy Finns are meeting the rising demand for specialized health
care with Tel Lappi, a service that uses videoconferencing and the
Internet for remote medical exams.

Another pioneer is the Spanish village of Aguaviva, whose residents have
formed what may be Europe's first grass-roots, small-town movement to
welcome foreign immigrants. In Spain's vast interior, one of Europe's
most quickly depopulating regions, many villages are already abandoned,
while 90 surviving ones, including Aguaviva, have banded together as the
Spanish Association of Towns Against Depopulation. In 2000, Mayor Luis
Bricio began offering free airfare and housing for foreign families to
settle in Aguaviva, a mud-brown town of about 720 on the dry plain in
Teruel province. Now, Aguaviva has 130 mostly Argentine and Romanian
immigrants, coddled by locals who are grateful that they came. After
closing all but the last classroom in the 1990s, Aguaviva has hired
another teacher and again boasts 92 school-age kids. "Aguaviva was going
to disappear from the map," Bricio says. "Immigration was our only
solution."

On a continent with an often troubled relationship to migrants, such
bracing realism is an astonishing step. For the most part, though, it's
no solution. Like Europeans themselves, most foreign immigrants continue
to prefer cities, where many of them already live. And within Europe,
migration only exports the problem. Western Europeans look toward
Eastern Europe as a fallback source for easy-to-integrate migrants, for
instance, yet these countries have ultralow birthrates of their own.
Ukraine and Bulgaria will see their populations drop by a third by
midcentury. With the EU alone needing about 1.6 million immigrants a
year above its current level to keep the working-age population stable
between now and 2050, a much more likely source of migrants would be
Europe's Muslim neighbors, whose young populations are set to almost
double in that same time. But that's a hot-button issue few are as yet
willing to address.

Other nettlesome issues are still open, as well. Increasingly, worried
European governments are crafting natalist policies to nudge couples to
have more children, from offering better child care to monthly stipends
keyed to family size. They hope to copy France, which first implemented
such policies in the 1930s and remains one of Europe's very few growing
countries. Trouble is, these measures might raise the birthrate
slightly, but across most of the aging continent there are just too few
potential parents around today.

As for the land itself, right now there's a trend in many areas toward
abandoning less productive land, which is sometimes reforested,
sometimes left to go wild. In the American West, this might have been
part of the natural cycle: people move on and the wilderness grows back.
"But for thousands of years we Europeans are used to having fields and
orchards and pastures around our towns," says Michel Revaz, a Swiss
Alpine biologist. "It's part of our genes." The landscape, he says, is
glued to the European identity, reflecting what the Germans call
"Kulturlandschaft" -- landscape shaped by centuries of human care.
Today's unprecedented population decline, amplified by the shifting
economics of farming, puts the future of many of those
Kulturlandschaften in doubt, just as pressure to cut the subsidies that
fund them rises. Many Europeans are reluctant to just let nature do its
thing. "We still cry when the woods close in," Revaz says. Unless, of
course, you're a fan of the wolves.

(With Toula Vlahou in Prastos, Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan, Mike Elkin in
Madrid, William Underhill in London, Eric Pape in Paris, and Wojciech
Rogacin in Warsaw)

(c) 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
(c) 2005 MSNBC.com
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8359066/site/newsweek/page/4/

[mannyamador]

We should learn from the experience of Europe and Singapore

[mannyamador]

CBCP President's Meeting with Edcel Lagman

My private, one-on-one, dialogue last May 13, 20055 at my CBCP Office with Congressman Edcel Lagman, was friendly, cordial and respectful. It was his secretary who called my Davao Office if he could meet with me.

Most of our conversation focused on the Church’s objections to his bill 3773 which to me are very serious. These objections, as mentioned later in the afternoon on the INQ7. net, were on “morality and spirituality.� These concerns are so serious to me that they need wider, longer, more open and respectful deliberations.

My reference to this word “deliberations� did not refer, as he was quoted by the media, to the final process leading to the passage or non-passage of the bill. To a legislature layman like me, it simply referred to more friendly and respectful discussions like ours so that the stand of the Church would be heard and understood wherever such deliberations are conducted. We never discussed the status or whereabouts of the bill in Congress.

This was the way I understood the congressman when he asked me for endorsement of “deliberations� as we ended up our dialogue.

This is what I endorsed and I assured him to quote me on it. His letter to me the next day confirmed this need of more friendly and respectful dialogues wherever it is conducted.

As a parting word seemingly assuring me of his Catholic background, he said he would categorically oppose the bills on divorce and same *** marriage.

+ FERNANDO R. CAPALLA, D.D.
Archdiocese of Davao
CBCP President

16 May 2005

Alternative Info and Opinion: http://www.phnix.net
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Prolife Phils. http://www.prolife.org.ph

[mannyamador]

On Feminism, Eugenics and "Reproductive Rights"
Interview With Journalist Eugenia Roccella

ROME, JULY 12, 2005 (Zenit.org).- "Reproductive rights" are a means
to wield demographic control in poor countries and to destroy the
experience of being a woman, says journalist Eugenia Roccella.

A 1970s leader of the women's liberation movement, Roccella is the
author of essays on feminism and women's literature. With Lucetta
Scaraffia, she has just published the book "Against Christianity: The
U.N. and European Union as New Ideology," published by Piemme.

In this interview with ZENIT, Roccella talks about the anti-birth
ideology of international institutions such as the United Nations and
European Union.
_________________________________________________
Q: You maintain that so-called reproductive rights are a deception to
foster family planning and genetically selective births. Can you
explain the evolution of "reproductive rights" and how opposition to
births has been transformed into eugenics?

Roccella: What must be clarified in the first place is that so-called
reproductive rights are in reality rights not to reproduce oneself,
and they have been made concrete in governments' control over
feminine fertility by a worldwide policy of dissemination of
abortion, contraception and, above all, sterilization.

It is generally believed that the adoption of these rights by
international organizations has been a victory of the women's
movement. But from the documents one can see that this is not so.

Historically, the right to family planning arose from the pressure of
powerful international anti-birth lobbies -- for example, the
Rockefeller Foundation -- helped by the West's desire to exercise
demographic control over the Third World.

Suffice it to consult the excellent documentation in the book
provided by Assuntina Morresi, which demonstrates how much
associations of a eugenic vein have influenced U.N. policies, through
NGOs such as, for example, the IPPF [International Planned Parenthood
Foundation].

Anti-birth attitudes and eugenics have been closely intertwined from
the beginning: The idea of building a better world through genetic
selection was very widespread at the start of the 20th century, and
enjoyed great credibility even in learned circles. The objective was
to prevent the reproduction of human beings regarded as second-class,
namely, genetically imperfect, even through coercion.

The adoption of eugenic theories by the Nazi regime discredited the
theories and elicited international condemnation. But associations
born for this purpose -- among them, precisely, the IPPF -- have
survived, changing their language and using, in an astute and
careless way after the '70s, some slogans of the women's movement,
such as "free choice."

In reality, international conferences on population, that is, on
demographic control, have always preceded conferences on women, and
have prepared their code words. For example, it was at the Cairo
Conference of 1994 on population and development that the old "family
planning" was replaced by the new definition of "reproductive
rights."

The following year, the definition was uncritically accepted and
appropriated by the Women's Conference in Beijing, without changing a
comma.

Feminism has been, paradoxically, an easy mask to implement control
practices that are often savage and violent on women's bodies,
especially in Third World countries.

In the book, among other things, we illustrate some cases by way of
example, such as the anti-natal policies adopted in China, Iran,
India and Bangladesh, where poverty and the absence of consolidated
democratic mechanisms have made women easy victims of
experimentation, contraceptives dangerous to health, massive
sterilizations and forced abortions.

Q: It is a widespread opinion that the feminist movement has
contributed to the obtaining of women's rights. You maintain,
instead, that there are ambiguities and mistakes. Could you explain
what these are?

Roccella: Feminism is a galaxy of different movements and
philosophies which is absolutely not homogenous.

International organizations have adopted a rigidly emancipating
version which tries to equate men and women as much as possible. This
is translated, for example, in the idea -- never explicitly stated
but always present -- that maternity is an impediment to women's
fulfillment, and not a central element of the gender's identity which
must be valued and protected.

Thus, in the U.N. and the European Union an institutional feminism
has been created based altogether on individual rights and parity,
which has chosen reproductive rights as its own qualifying objective.

There is, instead, a feminine philosophy of an opposite sign -- the
so-called philosophy of difference -- which maintains that the myth
of equality prevents women from thinking of themselves autonomously,
and that the sexual difference, rooted in the body, is not only a
biological fact, but something that encompasses the whole experience
of being woman. With this feminism, the Church has had an open
dialogue for a long time; suffice it to read Pope Wojtyla's letter on
the feminine genius, and especially the most recent one addressed to
bishops and signed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger.

But at present, at the international level, it is the feminism "of
rights" which has prevailed, imposing reproductive rights as a flag
that must be flown always and everywhere. Instead, women's
priorities, in the various geographic areas, are different: In
Africa, there is the urgent and dramatic problem of containing birth
and postnatal mortality. There is also the problem of sexually
transmitted diseases and malnutrition.

In the Muslim theocracies the objective for women is legislative
equality and liberation from the oppressive control over public
behavior -- for example, the use of the burkha. In Europe, the
problems are altogether different, and so on. The U.N. resolutions
stem from the assumption that the offers of abortion and
contraception are, in any context, elements of emancipation,
including empowerment, that is, the enhancement of women's power.

But the concrete cases analyzed in the book show that this is not the
case. In Iran, for example, programs for the dissemination of control
of fertility have been very successful, but women continue to be
regarded as second-class citizens, subject to masculine authority.

Q: On the great topics regarding the defense of life and of the
natural family, the Holy See has often confronted the international
organizations, particularly the United Nations and the European
Union. You entitled one of the chapters in the book "Europe Against
the Vatican." Could you explain the essence of the controversy?

Roccella: The prevailing cultural plan in Europe is a secularist
extremism that regards religions as potential bearers of
fundamentalist demands.

The European Union, however, adopts many precautions, both political
as well as verbal, in the face of the Muslim world. They are
precautions that would be comprehensible if they did not create a
visible imbalance vis-Ã*Â*vis the Vatican, which instead is attacked
with perfect serenity every time it is possible.

The result is that Catholicism appears as the bitterest enemy of
woman in the international realm, because it is opposed to the
ideology of reproductive rights and demographic control.

This cultural operation is resolved in a sort of suicide of identity,
as has already occurred with the mention of the Christian roots in
the European Constitution. ... It must not be forgotten that, from
the beginning, Christianity has had an extraordinary idea of woman,
and it is no accident if the fight for sexual equality has developed
essentially in the Christian area.

Among all the religions, the Christian religion is the only one, for
example, whose rite of initiation, baptism, is open to both sexes.
Within the Catholic realm there is a strong feminist philosophy, and
the two last papacies have given great cultural dignity to this
philosophy.

But all this is silenced by a plan that favors the anti-religious
element. The EU, even if it maintained the same policy, could
modulate in a different way its attitude to the different religious
creeds, fostering motives for agreement.

For example, it would be easy to find instances of unity with the
Holy See on the protection of maternity, on international policies
against maternal and infant mortality and on feminine schooling, or
even on the recognition of women's political and economic rights.

Instead, preference is given to putting all religions in the same bag
and pointing to the Vatican as the enemy par excellence of feminine
emancipation.

Alternative Info and Opinion: http://www.phnix.net
[img width=447 height=60]http://www.phnix.net/phnix_logo02.jpg[/img]
Prolife Phils. http://www.prolife.org.ph

[mannyamador]

Just goes to show the hidden agenda of so-called "feminists" and population controllers.

[mannyamador]

Family's feud with a fascist future
Kathleen Parker
July 1, 2005
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/k...20050701.shtml

If you were a Big Picture sort gazing at America through a wide-angle lens,
you might begin to wonder: Why the big rush to fascism?

For a nation that prides itself on freedom, even seeking to infect other countries,
we're terribly busy undermining our own.

How? Specifically, by destroying the family.

Sanctity aside, the traditional family is the front-line defense of liberty, the Maginot
Line against creeping totalitarianism. Without the primary, autonomous unit of
mother and father -- whose duty is to protect and nurture their offspring --
government inevitably intercedes.

Indeed, it is a goal of totalitarian governments to supplant the family by
undermining parental authority, which Americans and other Westerners seem
increasingly willing to surrender. Gluttons for irony, we surrender freedom in the
name of freedom -- as in liberty and equality for all.

Talk about unintended consequences.

This family dissolution has been gradual and incremental, occurring almost
without our notice. First, we demonized men and made women into martyrs and
victims. We didn't do this halfheartedly, but with gusto. We codified the concept
"men bad, women good" with laws that gave women supremacy over men: child
custody awards in divorce; acceptance of drive-by, sperm-bank impregnation and
single motherhood; and finally, special status in new laws such as the "Violence
Against Women Act."

Violence against women, though indefensible, is presumably no more
unacceptable a crime than violence against men. Nevertheless, we created a
special law just for women -- funded by taxpayers -- that institutionalized female
victimhood and cemented the image of man as predator.

Then, we turned child-rearing over to day-care workers and public institutions
where parental control over the moral content of their children's lives has been
diluted. From *** education to diversity training, public educators increasingly
have decided what and when children should learn, sometimes without parental
approval.

There's nothing wrong with teaching children about human reproduction,
assuming information is phase-appropriate. But human reproduction is taught
values-free because there is no secular moral consensus that fits all families'
cultures.

Nor is there anything wrong with teaching tolerance for other cultures, except it is
often done at the expense of covering Western Civ. An odd omission for a nation
trying to export Western principles. Meanwhile, public education dumbs itself down
for the least common denominator. One pregnant 11-year-old in a school means
that all 11-year-olds should know the fine points of ***.

Thus, parents were outraged last month when sixth-graders in Shrewsbury, Mass.,
were asked various questions about their experiences with oral *** in a survey
designed to help educators plan health education programs.

Finally, we "advance" toward the "de-institutionalization" of marriage, as David
Blankenhorn (president of the Institute of American Values and author of "Fatherless
America") recently described the move toward same-*** marriage (SSM). As SSM
becomes the law of the land in other countries (recently Spain and, pending expected
senate approval, Canada), and perhaps, inevitably, here, power is being ineluctably
shifted from the natural family to the state.

In Canada, Blankenhorn says, the idea of the natural parent has been removed from
marriage law and replaced with "legal parent." In New Zealand, a child legally may
have three parents. By the logic of same-*** marriage, which insists that marriage
is a contract of rights disconnected from *** and procreation, why shouldn't those
three parents be allowed to marry? A question being asked by polygamists
everywhere.

Viewed simplistically as an equal-rights issue, it's hard to argue against same-***
marriage. We want fairness and equality for all. But viewed historically, marriage
isn't an equal-rights issue, nor a legal contract of privileges. The foundational
purpose of marriage always has been a bond of duty cementing the affiliation of
mother and father to the child.

By separating *** and procreation from marriage -- and granting marriage "rights"
to anyone and everyone -- we are curtailing the rights of children to their natural
parents, as well as to protection from the strong arm of the state.

That no family is perfect, that divorce is also an assault on children, that the family
is otherwise under siege by irresponsible and self-gratifying heterosexuals is
irrefutable. None of those facts justifies further erosion of the original and
still-important purpose of securing parents to their dependent offspring.

Today's family portrait as a collage of individual snapshots is not a happy or
promising picture: no fathers; single -- busy and stressed -- mothers; no-fault
divorce and "marriage" that means everything and therefore nothing; children
depressed and dosed in dumbed-down schools where the least common
denominator dictates curriculum.

In such a state, someone has to take charge, for better or worse. When the state
takes over, you can bet on worse.

©2005 Tribune Media Services