Abortion is one of the greatest tragedies that faces mankind across the globe. The Guttmacher Institute reports that 56.3 million induced abortions were performed worldwide between 2010 and 2014. That is an increase of nearly 6 million compared to 1990-1994.[1] These numbers represent 25 percent of pregnancies globally, meaning that a quarter of all children […]
Read MoreEvidence from a Randomized Staged Field Experiment in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala Asociación Puente (AP) is a Guatemalan non-profit organization, which seeks to reduce extreme poverty and prevent malnutrition through the development of skills in women who live in extremely poor rural communities with unmet basic needs. Between 2011 and 2014 the organization implemented the community […]
Read MoreThis past summer, I attended my 50th high school class reunion, in my hometown, Des Moines, Iowa. A near-classmate of mine at Theodore Roosevelt High School was Bill Bryson, who went on to become a bestselling author of volumes such as A Walk in the Woods and A Short History of Nearly Everything. Among these […]
Read MoreA Comparative Analysis from a Global Perspective Nowadays, the general debate about family apparently revolves around a crucial question: Is the family founded on a marriage between one man and one woman still a resource for the individual and for society, or is it a bond from the past that hinders individual emancipation and the […]
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“This holiday season,” opens a recent story from Bloomberg, “many Americans may need a flow chart to figure how they’re all related.” In an attempt to “quantify” such trends, American researchers recently turned their focus to just how many stepfamilies exist in this country. They found that, among adults over 55 years of age, a full third have a stepchild.
Read MoreTwenty-first-century progressives revere the 19th-century French novelist Émile Zola as one of their own—a daring writer whose often shockingly explicit writing challenged conventional sexual and moral proprieties. But a new study of Zola’s last years reveals that it is actually progressives who might find themselves most scandalized by some of the views the novelist expressed […]
Read MoreWhen 20th-century feminist utopian Charlotte Perkins Gilman looked at home cooking, she saw only a primitive tangle of inefficiencies. It is far more efficient, she opined, to have professionals prepare meals using modern culinary equipment suitable for quantity production. What Gilman failed to see, however, were the considerable benefits that come with home-cooked family meals. […]
Read MoreLong known as a land of Confucian social solidarity, Japan has felt the influence of American-style individualism in recent decades, an influence corrosive of marriage and family life. Indeed, in a recently published study, social psychologist Yuji Ogihara of Kyoto University and the University of California, Los Angeles, measures the increasing strength of such individualism […]
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The Political Theory of the American Founding Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom Thomas G. West Cambridge University Press, 2017; 428 pages, £26.99 I begin with praise for Professor West’s treatment of family questions in his book, The Political Theory of the American Founding. As he notes, there is a curious […]
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The ‘Conscience of Europe?’ Navigating Shifting Tides at the European Court of Human Rights Robert Clarke, Ed. Kairos Publishing, 2017; 240 pages, £17.97 (As Dr. Portaru is one of the authors whose work is contained in this volume, this essay is meant as a presentation of the book, rather than a formal review.) The European […]
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