An Italian Murder

Italian authorities know what infanticide is, even if President Obama does not.

ht: Michael Liccione

Egg "donation" and the Trafficking of Women

I can't see any way around it. The more I read on the subject, the more I am convinced that this new phenomenon is just the same old sex trade.

Whether you call it "Egg Donation", "Body Shopping", "Sex Trafficking" or the thoroughly odious, "Reproductive Tourism" we are, with a few exceptions, talking about the rental, sale, use of one woman's body (usually relatively disadvantaged) for the pleasure of another person (relatively advantaged). The exceptions are two - first, the healthy, intelligent, tall, beautiful and blond college co-eds who are marketed to specifically to make their eggs available for some "deserving" couple who wants a baby - but only a certain kind of baby. The second exception is when these co-eds finance their Ivy League educations by selling their eggs to some research firm. Either way, they are selling their future fertility and health for the sake of something (their college education) which is what may end up keeping them warm at night.

Otherwise the trade is largely accomplished by exploiting poor women from Eastern Europe and India for the benefit of wealthy westerners - heterosexual and homosexual. Nothing new about that, is there? Bulgarian girls are recruited to clinics in places like Cyprus where they are paid a tenth of what a young woman would be paid in this country then they prostitute themselves in other ways until they can undergo the donation routine again. Indian women rent their wombs in order to buy a house for their families. One clinic in Texas offers not only sperm and eggs listed by characteristics of donors - but also tiny frozen babies (known in scientific jargon as embryos) you can pick with the likely hair color of your choice.

It's not pretty. Over the next weeks and months, you will begin to see more and more of the ugly, immoral, sinfulness of it all. The first half-dozen or so posts are in the works and will be appearing over the next few weeks. They are:

• A review of the UN Protocol on Trafficking in Persons
• Reproductive Tourism
• A review of, Body Shopping by Donna Dickenson
• The health risks to egg donors
• The economics of trafficking
• The commodification of babies

Stick with the series and I hope to include further reading suggestions or actions that can be taken to combat the trade at the end of each post.

Please sir, may I have some more?

It's seems the world is getting madder by the day. Not as in angry but as in clinically insane. Just from recent news and happenings, here are the six madnesses I've run across:

1. Though it is the last week in April, parts of Colorado are under Winter storm warnings today. Here in the Denver metro area we went to sleep to the sound of rain and woke up to the lack of sound -- of snow. Shhh, don't tell AlGore.
2. Tim Tebow is coming to Denver as a result of the NFL draft. This is good news, especially as he seems decades more mature than the majority of our last half-dozen or so QBs. One can also hope that the proximity to FOTF (less than an hour south of the Bronco's training facility) will provide for enough cross-influence that the next Super Bowl ad will actually have some content worth watching.
3. Riverdale High School and the Archie comics are getting their first gay character. According to the news stories, this is finally a man Veronica can't have at the crook of her little finger. But really, how likely is it that he can actually beat Jughead in a hamburger-eating contest? -- which is how he is, apparently, to be introduced.
4. Government Motors, pardon me, General Motors is paying back its bail-out money with . . .wait for it, wait for it . . .TARP money. Oh, the irony!
5. I'm sure most of you have heard by now about the SEC's porn problem. Part of me wants to side with Mark Steyn on this one. Perhaps if all the government regulators were watching more porn the economy would be in better shape.
6. And the sixth and final madness, which is the reason for the post's title: The world's three largest employers are:

1. The Chinese Army

2. India's National Railways

3. Britain's NHS

--- Oh yes, sir, may I please have some more?

Pathetic, disgusting lies

I am ashamed to say, I was a frequent contributor to this forum (linked removed) in one of its earlier incarnations. Even then, I found it thoroughly frustrating to attempt to steer them away from this sort of thing. It's become mostly boring to browse through. But then, every once in a while, they let their slip show. They post something in the public forums that should be in the ultra-secret-private-protect-our-fragile-members-and-their-libels-from-public-interaction-forums.



This (link removed) is one such post. They've already discussed taking it to one of those private forums. So, if they do so before you see it, you need only know they are doing their level best to link the sort of Muslim extremism that results in acid attacks on women with the Church's constant witness and teaching on men and women in marriage and in the Body of Christ.



Only by shining the light can we overcome the darkness -- or at the least, force it into increasingly smaller corners.

Worried about ruining unBiblical surprises?

I know this is scary, but the CBE blog is taken up these days with posts and discussions in preparation for an upcoming issue of Mutuality on the subject of "dating".

The latest post, Proposals, Parents and Purchases is by a married couple who have already co-authored an article on the subject in a previous issue. In this blog post, they relate that, "as we noted in the article, often we followed more traditional ways of doing things. Sometimes we wanted to – but often we knew of no other option."

Then, in the section on Proposals, they write the following which brought me up short and actually made me smile, "Would it be possible for a couple to sit down together and collectively make the decision to move forward into engagement? Would this method ruin the “surprise” factor of a proposal, and if so, is it a sacrifice worth making?"

My goodness but this grand project to remake the sexes is a difficult matter, isn't it? They wanted to do things "mutually" but sometimes didn't know how? And really, if they have to ask if collectively making the decision to "move forward into engagement" risks ruining the surprise factor in a traditional scenario -- are they really that Egalitarian after all?

I mean, if all this male supremacy folderol is really an unbiblical and worldly racket for the protection of male privilege, why would doing away with the "surprise" even be a sacrifice?