Dads are crucial. We’ve known this for a long time. For example, former president Barack Obama, despite advancing many policies that undermined the family, remained an outspoken voice on the importance of loving, involved fathers. According to all the evidence, he was partly correct. Kids need their fathers, but do best when their fathers are married to their mothers.
Last month, in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, philosophy professor Anna Smajdor from Norway proposed that the global medical community should consider what she called “whole body gestational donation.” Women in a permanent vegetative state or who are declared brain dead could be used, she suggested, as unconscious surrogate mothers for people who, as the paper states, either “wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to gestate.” According to Smajdor, though what she is proposing may sound shocking, it is really no different, at least not in any qualitative ethical way, from organ donation and other assisted reproductive technologies.
According to a Pew Research study, a small portion of parents believes it is important to pass their faith down to their children.
Last fall, cultural observer and former BuzzFeed writer Anne Helen Petersen published an e-book about the difficulties of motherhood during the pandemic. Based on interviews with 1,000 women, her conclusions were telegraphed in the title: The Moms Are Not Alright. I think most parents would agree that parenting during a pandemic is, well, not ideal.
However, according to scholars Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang in a recent article in The Atlantic, married mothers fared quite well during the pandemic, including indicating a greater degree of happiness than their single counterparts.
In internet lingo, to “say the quiet part out loud” means to reveal one’s true intentions or motives that were supposed to remain publicly unsaid. Recently, a couple of prominent organizations that deal with children have “said the quiet part out loud” when talking about parental rights.
A member of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a proposed constitutional amendment this week that would establish a "fundamental right" for parents to "direct the upbringing, education, and care" of their children.
Parents have every reason to demand transparency in school curriculums, even if contemporary curriculums did not assume ideologies that undermine Christian faith and values. But they do, as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has documented in its Parents Toolkit on Critical Theory. At the very least, parents should be able to opt out their kids, but they have to know when and what’s being taught in order to make the request.
Parents are in charge of educating and protecting their children, not the state. More than ever, it is vital that parents take this right seriously. The Promise to America’s Parents is one way to do that.
A congressional bill that would allow pregnant women to receive child support beginning at conception is receiving wide praise from the pro-life community.
In an interview with Christian Headlines, CCM singer Colton Dixon opened up about how becoming a father helped him to better understand God's love for us.
