Britain’s Unwed Future
Marriage seems to be becoming an obsolete concept while moral and religious values seem to be eroding quickly among the youth of the United Kingdom. According to the BBC, quoting the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the proportion of children born out of wedlock in the UK has gone from 12% in 1980 to 42% in 2004, if this trend continues, by 2012, over half of all UK babies born will be born out of wedlock. This number brings Britain’s illegitimacy rate to the fourth highest among European countries, following Sweden, Denmark and France.
Subsequently, single-parent families and smaller families are on the rise: Household size fell from 2.9 in 1971 to 2.4 in 2005, while the actual number of households increased by 30%.
The percentage of non-married people under 60 living together without the benefit of marriage rose from 11% in 1986 to 24% in 2004 for men and 13% in 1986 to 25% in 2004 for women. The ONS stated that one-person households mainly comprised older women, who tended to live longer than men, during the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years there has been a trend for people in the UK to live alone at younger ages.
According to ONS editor Hayley Butcher, “Although most children are born to married couples, this substantial rise in births outside marriage is a reflection of the rising trend in cohabiting parents.”
The unethical trend also has caused concern among church leaders in Britain. According to Dr. Peter Brierley, a former government statistician now specializing in religious trends and executive director of Christian Research, “If we get to the stage where more than half of children are born outside marriage, we are fundamentally changing the basis on which society has worked for centuries.”
See the Source: “Births out of wedlock ‘pass 40%’,” BBC, 21 February 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4733330.stm and Jonathan Petra, “Majority of births will soon be out of wedlock,” Telegraph, 21 February 2006
RESTRICTING ABORTION
We will soon see whether the reshaped U.S. Supreme Court will restrict abortion rights as the Court recently said it will rule on the legality of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. The justices agreed to decide whether the law is unconstitutional as it does not include the exception to protect the health of a pregnant woman.
The law represents the first nationwide ban on an abortion procedure since Roe v. Wade and has the potential to mark a turning point in abortion law for the court. The case will be argued during the court’s upcoming term that begins in October.
See the Source: James Vicini, “Reshaped US high court to decide abortion law,” 21 February 2006, Reuters, http://today.reuters.co.uk/newsnewsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-02-21T212347Z_01_N21411932_RERUKOC_0_UK-USA-COURT-ABORTION.xml&archived=False
India’s Depopulation Program
It isn’t only in China where coercion is used to force sterilization to reduce population size. According to the AsiaNews agency of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, a district judge in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh recently issued an order forcing teachers, public servants and village leaders to fill a “sterilization” quota or face dismissal, suspension or transfer.
Teachers expressed their shock, AsiaNews reported with the comments of Ravi Prasad Chaurasia, a primary school teacher: “We are treated like bonded laborers. Are we supposed to teach students or ask them to bring their parents to medical camps for sterilization? It is shameful, but who is going to listen to us?”
Under the court order, some public employees are required to find 10 people for sterilization, said AsiaNews. Targets for others, such as village leaders, have not yet been made known, “but some of them have already started to recruit victims,” the news agency continued.
The Catholic Church “strongly condemns this sterilization plan which is contrary to God’s laws and morality, and [which] must be stopped without delay for the good of the nation,” said the secretary-general of the Indian bishops’ conference, Archbishop Stanislaus Fernandes of Gandhinagar.
“The Church cannot accept a barbarous practice like sterilization,” Father Babu Joseph, director of the episcopate’s Media and Communications Department, said. “It promotes instead natural methods of family planning which is the only path for a responsible population policy.”
See the Source: “Church in India Condemns Judge’s Sterilization Order,” ZE06022301, Zenit.org. 23 February 2006, http://zenit.org/English/visualizza.phtml?sid=84990
