Tuesday, September 28, 2021



China set to clamp down on abortions for 'non-medical purposes' amid slowing population growth

China has made a reduction in the number of abortions performed for "non-medical purposes", a strategic goal in new guidelines that the country's cabinet says are aimed at improving women's reproductive health.

Between 2011 and 2020, China's population growth was the slowest since the 1950s

China has already enacted strict measures aimed at preventing sex-selective abortions and health authorities also warned in 2018 that the use of abortion to end unwanted pregnancies was harmful to women's bodies and risks causing infertility.

The State Council said the new guidelines, which were published on Monday, would aim to improve women's overall access to pre-pregnancy health care services.

The guidelines also state the need to improve knowledge of reproductive health and prenatal and postnatal care "to promote healthy pregnancy and reduce unwanted pregnancies".

Think tanks and policy researchers have identified China's declining birth rate as a major social policy challenge in the coming decades.

Although China remains the world's most populous nation, the latest census showed population growth from 2011 to 2020 was the slowest since the 1950s, and was expected to slow even more within a few years.

After years of trying to limit population growth, Beijing is now promising new policies aimed at encouraging families to have more children.

It said in June that it would now allow all couples to have three children instead of two.

Han Xiaoan, 34, a mother of two children living in central China's Henan province, told the ABC it was "very hard to understand abortion for non-medical needs".

"But, it's ironic how the government intervenes into our families depending on what they need," Ms Han said. "When they need to slow down the population growth, the government brings women to force abortions. "Now they are changing their policies."

Li Hongxia, a 55-year-old doctor living in China's southern province of Guangdong, told the ABC she supported the announcement because of some medical tragedies in China before. "There were women who were forced to have abortions in the past because they had breached the one-child policy," Ms Li said.

"Now, the one-child policy is no longer existing, it's a great move to make our medical practices more regulated."

However, Ms Li said China needed to improve the quality of sex education at high school because the country's youth groups deserved a better curriculum to understand contraception and protection for women.

"It is more important to make sure young people are able to access better knowledge about contraception in their classroom," she said. "You can't avoid unwanted pregnancy in the future if you don't tell them how to do birth control.

"In this case, the new policy won't make any sense."

Policies designed to reduce the financial burden of raising children are also being introduced.

Yi Fuxian, the author of Big Country with an Empty Nest, said the announcement was part of Beijing's aim of reducing premarital pregnancies or unwanted pregnancies among underage women.

The senior scientist in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told the ABC that though details of Beijing's policy was not officially issued yet, the government's attitude towards abortion "should be related to the population policy".

"In the past, China regarded population as a burden and implemented the one-child policy, which not only encouraged individuals to have abortions but also involved the government in forcing abortions," Dr Yi said.

"Flyers from abortion service providers used to be all over the streets across the country. "Abortion is as casual as dining out. Both formal and informal hospitals dare to provide the service. The whole social atmosphere is full of contempt for life and disregard for the health of pregnant women.

"Now that the population policy has begun to change and is gradually shifting from 'treating the population as a burden' to 'respecting life', abortion is bound to be regulated and not treated as a trifling matter, as it was in the past."

Dr Yi said the international community should respect the changes. "Although China will regulate abortion, it will not be as strict as it is now in the US and Australia and even more impossible to prohibit abortion," Dr Yi said.

"Individuals will still have a lot of freedom while protecting life. There is still a great deal of freedom for individuals to protect their lives. The outside world should not over-interpret this."

However, Zhai Zhenwu, the director of the China Population Association, told the ABC that though Beijing announced it only this week, reducing non-medical need abortion has been practised for more than seven years. "It was practised well before the implement of two-child policy, so it's not a new concept," Mr Zhai said.

"The aim is to reduce the risk of women's reproductive health and unmarried pregnancies and to increase women's awareness of self-protection and contraception.

"Unlike Western societies, unmarried pregnancy is still a taboo in Chinese society, so this notice is more of a guideline.

"The main purpose is to improve the sex education for young men and women, and bring better contraceptive knowledge to protect themselves."

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Rubio bill would empower Americans to ‘fight woke corporate elites’

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced the Mind Your Own Business Act, which would enable shareholders to hold woke corporations accountable.

Specifically, the legislation would require corporate directors to prove their “woke” corporate actions were in their shareholders’ best interest in order to avoid liability for breach of fiduciary duty in shareholder litigation over corporate actions relating to certain social policies. It would also incentivize corporate management to stop abusing their positions to advance left-wing social policies by increasing their personal liability to shareholders for breaches of fiduciary duty resulting from those policies.

Rubio told Fox Business News, “If a company is going to boycott a state or pull a product off the market because it has an American flag on it and they are concerned that might offend some people, or if a company is going to make these decisions under pressure from either the woke culture or some employee uprising internally, then they should have to justify to their large shareholders why they’ve done it and why that’s in the best interest of the company.”

Rubio added that he wants to end corporate policies of “kowtowing to pressure from China or pressure from the woke cancel culture in America.”

In a Fox Business News guest column, Rubio wrote, “No more legal tricks that shield these corporate executives from accountability. If they really believe that being woke is good for business, they should have to say so—and prove it—under oath in court.”

Americans for Limited Government (ALG) has been a leader in fighting woke corporate tyranny. President Richard Manning said his group “strongly supports Senator Rubio’s leadership on this important issue.”

Manning added that “woke corporations seem to be jumping over each other to prove who is willing to give more money or change corporate direction to accommodate a loud group of far left activists who are characterized as ‘stakeholders.’ Pensioners, those who hope to retire someday and other investors, have a right to expect that the companies they own are acting in their interests and not being the pawns of people whose goal is to destroy the free market system.”

The National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP), a free-market group that has partnered with ALG in the fight against corporate tyranny is also backing the Rubio bill.

“This is an important first step toward reining in the most aggressively politicized American corporations.” said Scott Shepard, FEP director.

Shepard explained why this bill is particularly important in today’s business climate:

Increasing numbers of corporate executives have indulged their own personal policy preferences at company – shareholder – expense, taking controversial, inflammatory and oft-times discriminatory and illegal positions on behalf of their companies. They sometimes claim that these actions are justified because the actions will, in some hazy way, benefit the company’s bottom line at some distant or unspecified time. But in the rare instances that they provide any evidence to support those claims, the evidence itself so biased and incomplete it only proved the point that their actions were not related to the company’s bottom line.

In other instances, corporate executives have justified their use of corporate assets to advance their personal policy preferences with claims that some group of stakeholders (e.g., employees, customers) have “demanded” that the action be taken. Various constituencies demand all sorts of things that business owners rightly ignore. In acceding to only some demands, the executives are employing their own policy preferences. Moreover, these executives make no effort to poll (in safe and unbiased conditions) their stakeholders to ascertain those stakeholders’ genuine interests and then to establish policy that genuinely and fully reflects that whole panoply of interests. Instead, they amplify the demands that suit their preestablished personal policy preferences, while suppressing dissent in many ways.

Rubio’s Mind Your Own Business Act is a private-sector solution to the problem of woke corporations. Specifically the bill:

Requires large public companies listing on national stock exchanges to provide shareholders with significant holdings with certain privileges with respect to claims for breach of fiduciary duty under covered circumstances.

Covered circumstances include if a company takes an action on a primarily non-pecuniary basis in response to State law, boycotts a class of persons or industry on a primarily non-pecuniary basis, or uses primarily non-pecuniary public reasoning for an action.

Corporate defendants would be bound by presumptions that pecuniary interest does not include common defenses used to defend exercises of business judgment, including the media image of the company or employee morale.

Ensures that for claims of breach of fiduciary duty against management brought by shareholders under these covered circumstances, management would have the burden of proof and, if found in breach of their duties, be liable without indemnification by the company for a minimum amount of damages and attorney’s fees.

National Center Executive Vice President Justin Danhof, Esq., who directed FEP for nine years, applauded Sen. Rubio for swimming against the tide.

“There are very few leaders willing to stand up to the corporate elites who are corrupting our culture with all manner of woke policy positions and corporate posturing meant to please the Davos crowd,” said Danhof. “That’s what makes Senator Rubio’s actions stand out, and why conservatives, particularly conservative investors, should laud this legislation.”

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Up Is Down And Fiction Is Truth. Welcome To The Fake Reality Of The Left

I watch in bewilderment when I see educated people pledge allegiance to the Left and the insanity for which it stands. I see decent, law abiding people putting the Democratic Party ahead of their own country. Reality, which can clearly be seen by any normal person, is seen as something totally different by some. How can that be? How can scientific advice from one set of researchers be considered the truth but scientific advice from another set of equally talented researchers be dismissed as fake?

How can someone see a city being burned to the ground and senior citizens brutally attacked and then delude themselves into thinking it's a peaceful protest? How do they justify the cancel culture and then say they support free speech? Or, in the disgusting case of Bette Midler, how can they defend this washed up actress viciously and disgustingly attacking Melania Trump's accent but claim to love immigrants and multiculturalism?

It's all quite confusing.

Until you spend some time in the land of the Left, and then it becomes much more clear. Before I go on, let me just explain that I lived in that land for several years. I was never a great Leftist, but I supported many things that liberals and the Left supported in the earlier years, like internet neutrality, the end of endless wars, and equal rights for all. But over time, things changed, and liberal organizations began veering very hard to the Left. Almost overnight, it seemed, tolerance disappeared. Discussing ideas and disagreeing with official positions was something you did at your own risk.

I saw firsthand you could be asked to leave someone's home just for having a different opinion than they had. I saw a good friend go into a near rage when he learned I owned a handgun. I still remember the glaring anger in his eyes over such a simple thing. You would think I told him I killed babies for fun. Wait, I probably would have been congratulated for that. We got past that moment, for a while, but I became increasingly frustrated by unknown and unseen forces dictating what I should and should not believe. For example, I'm all for gay and lesbian rights, not super rights, just equal rights. But then it became known that bisexuals had to be included. OK. I can live with that.

But soon after, transgender people where thrown into the mix, so GLB became GLBT. A lot of gay people were not okay with that but it's not like there was a vote or anything. It was just a command from beyond that people eventually accepted. And then "Q" was added and that really confused people. Q stands for queer but who are they? How are the Q's different from the GLBT's? Things were getting weird, but again, there was no vote on the matter. Accept it and shut up. Some people did shut up but then bullying began and it became obvious that compliance was going to be enforced. It was sort of an organic compliance.

There was no single person or group organizing the bullying. It just seemed to emerge from the liberal collective. From there, on all kinds of issues, compliance became the rule, with bullying and shaming used as weapons. Attacks on people's jobs and families came next. And that morphed into the entire cancel culture which has done immeasurable damage to our society.

So we're back to my first paragraph, wondering how all this madness took root and why apparently sane people are taken in by it all. Well once you've been in it and escaped, as I have, it becomes very obvious what's going on. It's propaganda, just like the Left has been using since Karl Marx first picked up a pen. It's everywhere, spreading around the globe like a deadly virus but now it's digital, moving at the speed of light. It's on thousands of websites, and they all stick to the same narrative which reinforces their lies so that the lies look like the truth.

If all the top liberal websites say the sky is green, and they say it over and over and shame anyone who still sees it as blue, eventually everyone will agree and admire their new green sky. No amount of scientific data will convince them otherwise.

The Left has turned lying into an art form. Generally speaking, whatever they say is the opposite of the truth. They claim to support a free democracy, yet their candidates are harsh authoritarians. They compare Trump to Hitler, yet all over the nation, indeed all over the world, elected officials from the Left are the ones taking away freedoms, locking down populations and destroying jobs using a virus as an excuse, and forcing "hate crime" laws upon us to control not only our behavior but also our thoughts.

They paint conservatives as Nazis which is completely contrary to what conservatives actually believe in. But they don't care about the truth. They have an agenda and if they have to lie that's completely acceptable to them. How they get there doesn't matter. They'll slander you, physically attack you, ruin your life, burn down your city, or even kill you. History shows that's true. They don't care about the damage or the harm or the pain they inflict.

These are dangerous people.

I was researching free speech earlier today and one of the search results was for a group called "Free Speech TV" and naturally I wanted to check it out to see if it was a good resource. In reality it's a hard Left propaganda site pretending to support free speech. The entire site is anti-Trump, pro-Socialist garbage. There's not one ounce of criticism toward any candidate from the Democratic Party. It should be named "We Hate America TV" but that would be honest and the Left is never honest.

Consider Amy Goodman, the Communist who hosts the radio show "Democracy Now". Her entire show complains about America, promotes Marxism, and defends everything ever done by the Palestinians. Black Lives Matter is another fraudulent organization. Go to their website and see what they really stand for. They don't care about black people. BLM exists to promote Marxism and they use racism as a cover to gain public support.

Half the homes in my neighborhood have "Black Lives Matter" signs in their yards and are occupied by white liberals who probably have no idea what they're really supporting. I give BLM credit for their branding, though. You can't criticize them without looking like a racist, even if your intent is to expose them as the racists that they actually are. And if you say black lives matter, in the most generic way possible, you're still promoting a racist Marxist organization. So good job, BLM, on your branding, but you're still a horrible, hate filled organization.

Space permitting, I could list hundreds of authoritarian, socialist, freedom-hating organizations and websites that hide behind wonderful sounding names that could compel you to support them. Often their true goals are far more sinister than their websites suggest.

But I'll give them one break: they have to lie. If they told people the truth, no one would support them. Lying is the only way the Democratic Party can win an election. Brainwashing kids in school is the only way students can be convinced that America is so evil that it's OK to commit domestic terrorism and risk decades in prison.

The Left lies. It does it all day, every day. It never stops. So when your neighbor or relative puts up a BLM sign in their yard or starts complaining about that fascist in the White House, stand your ground but have a little pity too. The propaganda they're exposed to is relentless and very powerful. It becomes their reality. Up becomes down. Fiction becomes truth. And what they call freedom is actually enslavement.

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State Police Force Faces Mass Resignations Over Vaccine Mandate

The increase in vaccine mandates among certain professions has driven a number of American workers to seek new employment, including a number of healthcare workers in New York State. In fact, the exodus in NYC could be so significant that the National Guard and foreign doctors may need to be brought in to fill the gap.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Massachusetts, it’s the police force that could soon be gutted.

The State Police Association of Massachusetts (SPAM) said dozens of troopers have submitted their resignation papers as a result of the state’s COVID vaccine mandate.

The state is requiring all executive department employees to show proof of vaccination by October 17, or risk losing their jobs.

The Union released a statement in which they suggested that these officers would seek employment in places with “reasonable” practices instead.

To date, dozens of troopers have already submitted their resignation paperwork, some of whom plan to return to other departments offering reasonable alternatives such as mask wearing and regular testing.

The State Police are already critically short staffed and acknowledged this by the unprecedented moves which took troopers from specialty units that investigate homicides, terrorism, computer crimes, arsons, gangs, narcotics, and human trafficking, and returned them to uniformed patrol.

The debate over vaccine mandates has been a heated one here in the United States, and with the federal government now solidly pushing for more of these regulations to go into place, there is no end in sight for the argument.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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