I sort of suspect this form of birth control wouldn't pass the doctrinal test either--well...maybe for male prostitutes
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The president of a pro-life organization in Argentina is warning that current policies promoting birth control will prevent the country from maintaining a 2.1 annual replacement index.
Roberto Castellano of Pro-Vida said on Feb. 7 the country’s aging population will have a negative impact on Argentina’s economy.
Castellano said that the country's 2010 census data indicates that “the birth control or demographic discouragement policy” that promotes contraception, abortion, the undermining of marriage and the absence of pro-family programs appears to be working.
He warned that the boom in the number of senior citizens will impact the economy and that not enough young people will be paying into the Social Security system to support retirees. This could also result in less foreign investment because of Argentina’s “slim population and consequently small domestic market.”
“Thus Argentina would be relegated to the role of simply providing raw materials for more developed economies, with little or no population to ensure that the surplus of its exports goes towards addressing the external debt,” he said.
Castellano also criticized the adoption of “foreign colonial ideologies” disguised as “sexual rights and reproductive health,” which have “belittled and degraded Argentina.
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This is a similar argument heard in the States. The idea that the aging 'boomer' generation is mostly a pending disaster for the economy and a burden for it's children. Those would be the very children we didn't have in enough numbers in our selfish pursuit of free sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the Spirit of Vatican II. I feel seriously like I missed a whole bunch of fun stuff in my thirty some years of chasing the American Dream. It now looks like I will spend the next twenty years getting to engage in the same pursuit. That's assuming the mental health center I currently work for doesn't go belly up in the next two weeks like management says could happen. Thankfully I have missed the current lay offs, but that's only because the program I work for keeps the state hospital from having to continue to put beds in the hallways due to over crowding. Tough times in the good ole US of A.
And maybe it's the reality of those tough economic times that fuel the kind of generational blaming that's the hallmark of the above article. I have to admit I fail to see the logic in calls for more children in a world that already has some one billion of them living at death's door from poverty and lack of food and water. Perhaps it would be more pro life of Argentina's pro life crowd to bring in more of God's Central American, African, or Haitian poor children rather than castigating it's own people for not birthing enough Argentinians or blaming the older generations for potentially destroying their economy.
It's the same thing we see in the US where our vocal conservative pro life Catholics are using the same sort of arguments in the abortion/birth control/gay marriage/pro family culture wars while also advocating for the removal of millions of productive, if illegal, immigrants. There's a sort of cynical side of me that wonders if we would see the same sort of concern if those millions of illegals were coming from Canada or Australia.
Every time I see this kind of argumentation coming from a so called 'pro life' leader it only confirms for me that the issue isn't life at all. It's using the pro life cause to support old style failed economic theories. The kind that says if we keep an endless supply of consumers in the pipe line we will create an endless supply of wealth. Trouble is sex, even the best God sanctioned procreative kind, doesn't create more resources for humans, just more humans to use up finite resources. Somehow I can't quite shake the feeling that God expects us to figure that one out, even if the so called God fearing head honchos of Walmart for example, hope we don't.
Same old, same old. It's not OK for Planned Parenthood to charge money to provide an abortion. Because that's monetizing people. But it is perfectly fine to charge huge amounts of money to provide adoption services. And I can't count the number of times I've heard 'if Roe v. Wade hadn't legalized abortion, we would not have a problem with Social Security going broke'. Somehow this attitude does not make profits off the wombs of real live women with real human dignity.
ReplyDeleteI don't advocate abortion over adoption. BUT, let's call a spade a spade here. Pro-life is NOT about protecting women or protecting babies. It is about ensuring a certain business model gets a locked-in supply of goods to peddle. There is a bill in the SD legislature right now which illustrates this even more clearly. Under this proposed bill, if a woman decides she wants an abortion, she will have to go see her doctor who must counsel her to ensure she is not being coerced in any way. Then she will have to go to a registered-with-the-state 'crisis pregnancy center' which does NOT provide any sort of abortion or family planning services and has NO medical training/licensing and submit to 'counseling' on how to not have an abortion. The crisis pregnancy center will then give her a certificate saying she successfully completed her evaluation and counseling with them. Only with this certificate issued by the 'crisis center' can she then return to her doctor to have the abortion done. See, these so-called crisis pregnancy centers can't get enough pregnant women to come to them to be provided with adoption services. So they are getting the state to coerce their 'preferred clients' to go see them.
Veronica
Great piece.
ReplyDeleteRest assured that these people are worse economists than they are theologians, and they're terrible theologians.
God fearing corporations? Not really. Some of those companies, or more correctly their owners, are using religion as window dressing, or mouthing platitudes while being just as horrible as the typical secular company. (Interesting that Monaghan's Domino's Pizza doesn't make the list.)
I like the example of the Quaker families who controlled the manufacture of chocolate products for most of the last 200 years. They really put their beliefs into action.
See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8085832/Chocolate-Wars-by-Deborah-Cadbury-review.html
How annoying.
ReplyDeleteArgentina is a highly urbanized state that has kept a steady but low birthrate of 2.3-2.4 since WWII. Urbanized life leads to lower family size due to the increased de facto costs of raising children and improved access to choice. With all of that said, Argentina has nearly twice the birth rate of equally religious Spain or Italy.
Doing a quick search for Pro Vida and Mr. Castellano, it appears his principal internet presence is on EWTN, CNA and blogs which link to them. That would lead me to believe in a Fred Phelps thing, where it's about HIM on the issue, not about the issue.
Though I'll not argue that at least some of the 'movement' is driven by economic greed, I do believe that there are folks out there who believe in the principles behind pro-life. If that's how they honestly feel, then great...have a gazillion kids, adopt, run an orphanage if ya want.
Most of the time, however, it feels that it's folks telling others how to run their lives. Just because you're not fulfilled in YOUR life doesn't give you rights to spoil other people's chance at fulfillment.
Well said. Bill Lindsey has noted the dubious claims that traditionalism is winning younger Catholics. The reality is that the Church in the United States and elsewhere is seeing a lot of young people leave, and these departures are occurring because of the ascendance of authoritarianism and traditionalism in the Church.
ReplyDeleteVeronica, As I am sure you already know, the claims about Social Security bankrupting the US are unfounded. It is a self funded, tax collected institution that is projected as solvent into 2040. There are some problems though when politicians cut the taxes of the very wealthy and pay for it out of SS. No wonder there has never been a trickle down economics. It has rather been a rush in the other direction. So much propaganda!! dennis
ReplyDeleteForget the fact that people who have more babies than they can afford to feed and clothe and school drain money from the welfare system. That totally doesn't count. We only talk about the theories that support our position. Duh!
ReplyDelete@khughes1963 - I absolutely agree. I watched the change in my four years at a Catholic college and online, and then I moved to this town where the new priest (who's from Spain, is the church more traditionalist there?) instituted ridiculous regressive changes to the parish, especially in Mass participation by young women and lay people.
Carla-could the new priest have been from Communion & Liberation, Opus Dei, Focolare, Pius Brotherhood, Legionaries of Christ, Miles Jesu, or one of the other groups gaining power in the church? One other thing, my own personal experience is that Mass attendance has fallen off a lot in my church over the last 11-12 years.
ReplyDeleteI've 'said' it before and I say it now.The conservatives in the churh hierarchy are really not about prolife. The real issue is sex.What makes the hierarchy and some of their close followers so opposed to any form of abortion is the desire to show their spiritual superority by opposing any form of sex activity and thought.
ReplyDelete"Perhaps it would be more pro life of Argentina's pro life crowd to bring in more of God's Central American, African, or Haitian poor children rather than castigating it's own people for not birthing enough Argentinians or blaming the older generations for potentially destroying their economy."
ReplyDeleteGreat point. I thought the same thing before getting to this paragraph.
It is the same old, same old as T'Pel says.
The conservative box world view wants to keep the world enslaved will all sorts of deadly or crippling injustices in every sphere of influence whether it be religious, economic, gender issues, scientific, educational. Their view from the box is anything but pro-life. Pro-authoritarianism and pro-slavery is a more apt description for them.
Dennis, I am not convinced that SS won't be broke by 2040 or so. Maybe because that would be very shortly after I hope to retire. And I do think SS got seriously weakened with the 'tax holiday' for this year. But overall, you are correct. And the trouble has far more to do with politics than with the so-called missing-due-to-abortion 73 million children or whatever the claimed number is.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is: A fair distribution of resources has far more to do with politics than it has to do with birthrates in any given location. I sure do wish more people understood this.
Veronica
Great series of comments. Until pro life advocates seriously address questions of uneven wealth distribution, and the practical consequences of making abortion illegal I'll not be inclined to support their politics.
ReplyDeleteT'Pel,
ReplyDeleteCongresses own Budget office has shown projections of SS solvency into the 2040's, if the system is not tinkered with to cause a problem. I don't like the tax holiday at the expense of SS either. It is a big mistake by Obama. I think it projects a philosophy that wants to break this budget because this entitlement is seen as socialist as it gets. You know the mortal sin of socialism. One of the big lies of Conservative politicians is that the current SS system because it is an entitlement is breaking the system. dennis
Dennis I was thinking during the Super Bowl that it's ironic how some forms of socialism are embraced with great fervor, like the National Football League, while others, like health care, are held in disdain. Which I guess says our collective health is not nearly so important as our collective obsession with football.
ReplyDeleteI would never support this point as argued by people like Castellano, because I do think an awful lot of this really is about trying to recover a social order that was bad for almost everybody and especially for women. However I get the creeps when I hear some of the things that get said in reply. (For example, a few weeks ago, I heard a M.D. call a fetus a "pathology," because its mother is unwed and unemployed. Fortunately, he is a radiologist, not an obstetrician.)
ReplyDeleteIt may be true that children "drain money from the welfare system," but the welfare system is not a very big fraction of the national and state budgets. In the long run, somebody is probably going to pay for heart valve replacements for those of us who have few or no children; so I think we'll more than get our money back. Producing and raising children is hard work, at least as hard as investment banking and law-suits, and not a whole lot simpler as far as I can see. I would not mind paying some reasonable amount of compensation to those who do it. It could hardly be a bigger waste of money than bailing out banks or maintaining the papal wardrobe.
There are so many complaints about my generation, or rather, boomers. (I'm not a boomer, I'm a war baby, which is awfully close.) We didn't make enough babies, aren't we terrible.
ReplyDeleteWell, suppose we did?
And along came the Great Recession.
The economy as it is cannot absorb the people who are here. Much less, the people who aren't, not that the Fetus People are thinking about that.
Had we gone ahead and had babies in the numbers of our parents we would have Egypt at this point with even millions more over educated under paid twenty somethings. I'm not sure a revolution in this country would be so bloodless.
ReplyDelete"No woman should be pressured or forced to have more children than she wishes."
ReplyDelete"Every human child should be unequivocally welcomed into the world."
There is no contradiction here. Rather the opposite, IMHO.