Tag: Family

family walking on path

The feminists’ assault on the family hurts children most

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In the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘progressiveness’, the family has been dismantled, fathers marginalised, and children quietly reshaped to fit adult belief systems; the consequences are catastrophic.

by Melania Gill at The Conservative Woman

THERE is no such thing as a baby,’ wrote renowned paediatrician Donald Winnicott in 1942. ‘There is a baby and someone.’

His meaning was simple and profound: an infant does not and cannot exist in isolation. It is attached. In the 1960s John Bowlby’s great insight into child psychology known as ‘attachment theory’ explained why. Over the last few decades neuroscientific research has confirmed the observations his theory (of attachment, maternal deprivation and separation anxiety) were based on. A baby comes into being initially through its attachment to its mother – ideally through attuned care, emotional presence and the steady regulation of distress by either parent. This infant dependency is not a flaw to be overcome, it is the foundation of its development. 

Yet it is precisely this truth that contemporary feminist ideology and thinking denies. As science has clarified and confirmed the importance of connection, social practices have moved in the opposite direction. Practices that formally cut or break this connection, from abortion to institutionalised early day-care through to family separation, have increased or been normalised in recent years. Decisions that are framed in terms of autonomy share a common feature: the deliberate severing of human dependency at its most vulnerable points. 

We are living through a cultural moment that denies such dependency, sees attachment as danger, and relational need as oppression. In the name of ‘liberation’ and ‘progressiveness’, the family is dismantled, fathers marginalised, and children quietly reshaped to fit adult belief systems. What is presented as progress increasingly resembles something else: a refusal to accept the basic conditions under which human beings develop at all. The casualties from this are not abstract. They are children. 

Decades of developmental neuroscience show that the human brain is shaped through early emotional relationships. The neuroscientist Allan Schore’s work demonstrates that the systems responsible for emotional regulation, empathy, stress tolerance and social understanding develop in direct response to the quality of caregiving. Brain development is not merely biological; it is relational. 

When caregiving is emotionally attuned, a coherent sense of ‘self’ forms. The child learns that feelings can be experienced without catastrophe, that relationships survive disagreement and that dependence does not mean annihilation. When caregiving is mis-attuned, when parenting is driven by unresolved anger, trauma, grievance or rigid belief, particularly in cases involving parental alienation, something else happens. Children learn which emotions are safe and which are dangerous. They learn which parent must be protected and when, which feelings must be hidden and which version of reality is safest to adopt. Over time, the child’s inner life thins. They stop discovering who they are and start performing who they need to be. Across nearly 20 years of family assessment, I have repeatedly seen this occurring even when there is no overt cruelty. Often it is quiet: originating in a parent who can’t tolerate ambivalence or who requires their child to mirror their emotional reality. 

Unresolved anger and distress from childhood relational harm is rarely expressed directly; rather it’s projected outward on to those whom cultural narratives have already positioned as dangerous or blameworthy – men or fathers, for example. In present ideological climates, they frequently serve this function. The child becomes the carrier of this projected anger. What looks like confidence or moral clarity is, in reality, fear held rigidly in place. 

Such children can speak with striking certainty about adult matters they cannot possibly understand. They repeat slogans rather than thoughts, show contempt where curiosity should be, and appear strong while lacking emotional depth. What looks like independence is a self that has had to harden too early; a fundamental and unconscious lack of trust in all relationships. 

Underlying this is a failure of early emotional attunement. When children are not accurately seen, soothed, or mirrored by primary caregivers, the brain systems responsible for emotional regulation and identity integration do not fully mature (Schore, 2015; Fonagy et al, 2002).

The result is chronic, often unrecognised anger and emotional instability. During adolescence, these vulnerabilities may manifest as identity confusion, distorted memory, intolerance of dissent, and defensive self-enhancement (Erikson, 1968; Kernberg, 1975). The thousands of reality-based professionals working on family law cases across the world witness this time and again in depressingly increasing numbers. 

Dependency is not weakness; it is the engine of development. Children become independent through relationship and connection, not in defiance of them. Yet much contemporary ideology rests on the opposite premise: that needing others is oppression, that attachment is danger, and that autonomy demands severance. Here, radical feminism reveals its deepest psychological error. By reframing attachment as a flawed concept and dependency as harm, it renders parental care, especially paternal care, suspect. Fathers become optional, even inherently dangerous. It creates a ‘case’ for chopping off half of a child’s relational world. By prioritising adult identity claims over children’s developmental needs, it inverts the moral order and takes over culture. 

Unsurprisingly, societies that celebrate this model now face collapsing birth rates, rising loneliness and escalating psychological distress. Extinction-level fertility is not only an economic warning; it’s a psychological one. It signals a culture that has lost faith in continuity and is heading for oblivion.  

It’s impossible to ignore that this same distorted psychological ‘logic’ underpins both radical feminism and contemporary transgender ideology, despite their surface-level conflicts. At their core, both reject biological givens, evolutionary continuity, and developmental constraint in favour of self-definition unconstrained by body, relationship or reproduction. When realities are treated as oppressive rather than formative, identity becomes unmoored. This creates fertile ground for narcissistic adaptation.

For children and adolescents already struggling with mis-attuned parenting or fragile identity formation, ideologies that promise absolute self-definition offer powerful relief. The projection of unresolved childhood attachment anger becomes a demand for justice. Self-righteous certainty replaces curiosity. Any challenge is reframed as harm and aggressively denied using howling moral outrage and ‘cancellation’ of those who disagree.

From a developmental perspective, this is profoundly anti-evolutionary and truly dystopian. A society that denies sex, embodiment, reproduction and dependency is not merely redefining identity, it is splitting itself from continuity. The result is fragility: identities that cannot tolerate disagreement and relationships that cannot survive difference. And there is a chilling historical parallel. 

What we see now is not biological eugenics, but a cultural analogue: deciding which family bonds are expendable, which parents are suspect, and which children must adapt to ideologically curated environments.

Fatherhood becomes a developmental risk by presumption. Children are expected to reorganise themselves accordingly. They call it liberation; ‘back in the real world’ we know it as catastrophic damage to families and children on an industrial scale. 

History shows that systems convinced of their moral superiority struggle to see the harm they produce. Once children become symbols rather than developing minds, the line between safeguarding and social engineering disappears. The appalling outcomes are being and will be written into the psychology of the next generation. When a culture teaches its children that they need no one, it should not be surprised when they grow up unable to love, trust, or carry the future they were meant to inherit.

The family is not a patriarchal relic. It is the primary psychological infrastructure of all societies. Undermine it, and everything downstream weakens. Winnicott was right: there is no such thing as a baby alone, a child, or in fact anyone. And there is no such thing as a society that survives the denial of dependency.

By Melanie Gill. This article first appeared at The Conservative Woman and is republished here with permission.

Melanie Gill is a UK-based attachment specialist, psychologist and forensic consultant, working as an expert witness in complex family proceedings for nearly two decades. Despite an ongoing feminist-inspired campaign to ‘cancel’ her from her family court work she continues to campaign for children and families and remains passionate about bringing psychological science and knowledge into policy and family law.

The Conservative Woman is one of Britain’s fastest-growing websites and is committed to explaining and promoting the virtues of people’s instinctive social conservatism and its importance for children’s wellbeing.

Gen Z social media

Gen Z, social media, and envy

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Social media causes desensitisation to things that should disturb us and hypersensitivity to things that should not disturb us. It afflicts Gen Z with a toxic culture of envy.

My generation, Gen Z (born between 1996 and 2010), finds itself in the throes of individual depression, pessimism about the future, and a strong tendency not to take personal responsibility. As a 20-year-old college student, I have witnessed this firsthand. I believe much of the problem can be traced to social media and its creation of a make-believe world, a world defined by pronounced social envy.

Only 39 percent of Generation Z aged 18-29 believe that achieving the American dream is still possible, while 60 percent do not.1 It is disheartening, to say the least, that a large majority of our youth do not believe in the American tradition of achieving success through hard work and determination.

Gen Z has grown up in a different world from previous generations—an online world, one that immerses them in fantasy. Fantasy leads inevitably to disappointment as this made-up online world creates unrealistic expectations for the real world.

Abundant research shows that social media is harmful to youth. Social media use is correlated with rising instances of self-harm and suicidality in boys and girls.2 At the same time, American girls use social media far more than boys.3 While boys are off playing video games or consuming online porn, girls succumb to toxic self-comparison at a time when they are most confused about their identity. This allows them to be taken advantage of by predators, by influencers espousing extreme ideology, and by other women who tell them to prioritise themselves above all others.

The results of this gender gap are ominous for the future of America. More young men than young women report wanting to have children.4 At a time when America’s birth rate continues to plummet below replacement, Gen Z is dropping the ball on family formation. It is not just apathy towards having a family. Gen Z is growing more anti-capitalist, more anti-natalist and more callous about the deaths of others. Reactions on social media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s horrific assassination come to mind.

Social media causes desensitization to things that should disturb us and hypersensitivity to things that should not disturb us. It afflicts Gen Z with a toxic culture of envy.

The inside view

Generation Z’s ailments are clear from the outside, but even more so from the inside. It is important to note that the author is a member of Gen Z himself, born just a few years after the turn of the millennium. I have been spared the despair of my generation because of my family.

Raised in a large family with close bonds with my siblings, I was never alone in the sense that many Gen Zers report themselves feeling. My parents ran a household that was strong in moral teachings and founded upon family values. Furthermore, my parents had the foresight to withhold social media from my siblings and me far longer than most of our generation. We were not subject to the culture of envy that we watched our friends endure. I made it all the way to my 19th birthday before I became curious, suspecting that social media might prove useful or practical as an adult in college.

I deleted all my accounts in less than a year. My experience on social media was far from anything I had expected. Perhaps I was naive to expect pictures of pleasant scenery and the occasional post about a family trip. But I could not have foreseen the extent to which social media is riddled with depravity, dishonesty and delusion. What I saw as an outsider to my own generation made plain precisely why my close friends and peers seemed so distant and anxious. It was clear why they had lost faith in themselves, their communities and the American dream.

The reason social media has had such a horrendous effect on American youth is that, fundamentally, social media is not what it seems. The photos and videos that are posted online are often edited into an unrecognizable version of the truth. What is presented as a casual selfie is often an hours-long commitment that requires professional equipment, painstaking attention to detail and constant revision. Instead of honest photos, our youth sees perfection. But it is perfection presented as something attainable. Or rather, something that seems attainable, but isn’t attainable in reality. This is the root of Gen Z’s envy.

Incessant comparison

Social media’s inherent culture of envy is bad enough. But what makes it particularly dangerous to Gen Z is that members of my generation are obsessed with comparing themselves to their peers. Gen Zers average about nine hours of screen time every day.5 It is not unusual to have a screen time of 10 or even 14 hours a day. Some of my friends can spend 20 hours a day looking at screens.

Social media takes up a significant amount of these appalling screen times. Sixty percent of Gen Z spends at least four hours a day on social media, and 22 percent report spending seven or more hours a day.6 Time spent on social media is time not spent socializing, working, exercising, reading, spending time with family, and more. Rather than engage with the real world as much as possible, a sizable majority of Generation Z spends the greater part of their day in an online fantasy.

Living in the fictional world of social media is a major cause of Gen Z’s pessimism, and Gen Z’s members know it. About 83 percent of America’s youth have tried to limit their social media use, albeit largely unsuccessfully.7 Gen Z recognizes the harms of social media as a group. But while 48 percent of teenagers agree that social media is harmful to people their age, just 14 percent believe that social media affects them personally.8

What these statistics reveal is an element of denial. The youth culture’s expectation of perfection requires hiding imperfections. But upon a closer look, it becomes clear that this perfectionism is a symptom of envy. The desire to be as affluent, powerful, attractive and popular as influencers on social media comes from spending too much time in the online world. Carefully curated posts that are funneled to the right audiences create an infinite network of nested mini-worlds in which our youth have become lost. The resulting lack of direction is part of why Gen Z feels so pessimistic. Generation Z’s pessimism expresses itself in many ways: class resentment, hetero-pessimism, apathy and sensitivity.

Class resentment is the byproduct of economic forces on social media. Online sites kick consumer culture into hyperdrive. It begins with extravagant displays of wealth. Influencers who advertise perfect dress, flawless appearance, ideal travel experiences, luxurious homes and fine dining inevitably attract viewers for the simple reason that wealth is desirable. Considering that Gen Z is significantly more dissatisfied with their economic situation than other generations, it is no surprise that young people are drawn toward such content in large numbers.9 Much of Generation Z sees what they want but cannot have, for hours at a time each day.

Displays of unrealistic wealth

Individual envy is then amplified into pessimism. Social media algorithms recommend to users what they are most likely to click on. The more outraged users are, the more likely they are to become even more outraged and to be connected to other users who reinforce their indignation. Since Gen Z is uniquely susceptible to economic pessimism, they are at a greater risk of falling victim to this outrage. As time passes, young social media users fall farther down the rabbit hole, becoming more radicalised and more pessimistic.

The consequence is a strong current of anticapitalism and economic pessimism that views the American system as fundamentally unfair. And so long as they remain isolated in their online echo chambers, my peers will continue to be overexposed to the shortcomings of American capitalism and underexposed to its many benefits.

The hyper-individualization of Gen Z encouraged by social media applies to dating and family dynamics as well as economic concerns. Just as algorithms radicalize the youth into anticapitalism, they do the same for hyperfeminism.

Recent surveys continue to show that young women are ranking their career and individual interests ahead of starting a family.10 This is unsurprising given the prominence of anti-male trends on social media. As of late, a proliferation of social media posts with the hashtag childfree suggests that childlessness as an identity is growing.

There are also movements encouraging women to become “boysober” and swear off all emotional and physical relationships with men.11 Some women online are using the term “mankeeping,” which is primarily used to complain about the burdens of supporting their partners through hard times. Popularized in 2016, the MenAreTrash movement swept social media platforms and gained rapid popularity for disparaging men and heterosexual dating in any way possible.

Toxic feminism

The online environment culminates in a general pessimism about dating and family called “hetero-pessimism.” Originally coined in 2019, hetero-pessimism refers to a movement where women are ashamed of being straight and view “heterosexuality as a prison within which they are confined against their will.”12 Gen Z women are especially vulnerable to trends like hetero-pessimism.

Again, considering the radicalising nature of social media algorithms, it is easy for girls to fall for ideas that promote individualism and the prioritisation of self over pair-bonding or community. As a result, teenage girls sometimes enter the dating scene with unrealistic expectations because of exposure to fake relationships on social media. Young men who encounter such women are then treated to a rude awakening where they are expected to act as an accessory to a woman who is more interested in superficial pleasures and material wealth than true partnership.

It is worth pausing to emphasize that this is a somewhat extreme characterization of a complex phenomenon. Not all young women who use social media are anti-male. Yet, anti-male sentiment weaves itself into social media in various ways.

social media

More widespread than hetero-pessimism is the creation of echo chambers by social media algorithms that amplify and radicalise opinions and perspectives.

Consider the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. In the era before social media, it may be true that the victim of such a horrific and violent act would have received near total sympathy from the American public, including its youth. Regardless of whether this was the case in the past, it is certainly not true now.

Apathy—and in some cases jubilation—from the left over the murder of Charlie Kirk is not originally because of inherent cold-heartedness and cruelty. It is because of desensitisation. This is an important distinction. Desensitisation by social media is what leads to coldheartedness and cruelty when left unchecked. Such apathetic and jubilant individuals did not express sympathy because that is not what they were shown. Social media algorithms likely predicted that such viewers, especially some progressive youth, would not have clicked on such content. Instead, they were fed increasingly extreme posts that dismissed or mocked the death of Charlie Kirk. And in viewing such posts, their views were validated and radicalised instead of moderated.

The condoning of Kirk’s assassination that spread across the internet is emblematic of a growing apathy towards the plight of persons outside each individual’s social media bubble. Within these anonymous echo chambers, algorithms supercharge this apathy into a callous joy that is not just inappropriate, but dangerous.

The tyranny of online policing

Online policing of political correctness reached a fever pitch during the Covid-19 pandemic, when American society was as far from the real world as it had ever been. This had a detrimental effect on Generation Z, given that they came of age around the use of chosen pronouns, progressive terminology like “safe spaces,” and leftist ideology that accused most social and economic institutions of being inherently bad. So rather than work to develop empathy for those different from them, Generation Z was immersed in a ruthless online culture that focused on the faults of those who were different from them, instead of what we have in common as Americans.

Generation Z is steeped in a fabricated version of reality that amplifies outrage, promotes individualism and heightens our differences. The culture of envy engendered by social media has made our youth so pessimistic that many of them no longer believe in the American dream. Who can blame them? Because of social media, much of Gen Z is entering adulthood unchallenged, un-self-aware, and unable to see that they are part of something greater than themselves.

As a member of Gen Z, I place my hope in those of us who are strong enough to stop looking at our screens and start looking at all that is happening around us. For when we do so, we begin to see that the beauty of reality is far more rewarding than any online illusions of perfection.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website:  www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

  1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/02/americans-are-split-over-the-state-of-the-american-dream/ ↩︎
  2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6278213/ ↩︎
  3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9176070/ ↩︎
  4. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/among-young-adults-without-children-men-are-more-likely-than-women-to-say-they-want-to-be-parents-someday/ ↩︎
  5. https://www.hiddengemsaba.com/articles/average-screen-time-statistics ↩︎
  6. https://theharrispoll.com/briefs/gen-z-social-media-smart-phones/ ↩︎
  7. Ibid ↩︎
  8. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social-media-andmental-health/ ↩︎
  9. https://www.mtlc.co/how-to-handle-the-optimism-pessimism-paradox-of-gen-z-at-work/ ↩︎
  10. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/among-young-adults-without-children-men-are-more-likely-than-women-to-say-they-want-to-be-parents-someday/ ↩︎
  11. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/style/boysober-celibacy-hope-woodward.html ↩︎
  12. https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/ ↩︎
Homeschooling

Homeschooling in America: from fringe to future

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The number of families homeschooling in the United States has doubled in the past five years, meaning it is becoming a mainstream alternative to the traditional model of schooling.

Imagine a girl, about age 15, sitting in the cozy four-season room of her home. She might be clutching a Jane Austen novel in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. A yellow school bus passes the home and stops at the corner of her lot. Children tumble out, some her age, but many much younger. They just finished the school day, having arrived at 7 a.m., and did not arrive home until about 3:30 p.m. They will have roughly two hours of homework.

The girl started her school day around 10 a.m. She woke up naturally, had the time to prepare and eat a nutritious breakfast, and then powered through her schoolbooks at the kitchen table. Today she focused on her chemistry, Latin and language arts. She completed her school day after roughly three hours of work.

Her siblings worked alongside her. Their mother, doing her household chores, periodically checked in to see how her children were doing. After the girl finished her schoolwork, she went on a walk with a fellow homeschooled friend.

She is enjoying her leisure time with her novel, and tonight she will go to tennis practice at the local community center. She has no homework and will be in bed by 10 p.m. She aspires to be a nurse, and next year will begin classes at her local community college, which will eventually count toward her nursing degree.

This young girl is homeschooled, and her future is bright. By the end of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, every state in the U.S. had some form of compulsory schooling law. Homeschooling was largely discouraged and unregulated until the 1970s and 1980s. Those who chose to homeschool were generally Christian conservatives or secular freethinkers. Homeschooling was a fringe movement that was met with official resistance. Families that did homeschool faced truancy charges and were taken to court.

Homeschool advocates sought judicial protection, citing the Supreme Court decision of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), in which Amish parents challenged a state law requiring children to attend school until the age of 16.1 The Court ruled that forcing Amish children to attend high school violated their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The case centered on ending formal education after eighth grade, and it established a crucial precedent affirming parents’ rights to direct their children’s education. While few today advocate ending formal education after eighth grade, the case laid a legal foundation supporting homeschooling as a legitimate and personalized educational path.

Pandemic pivot

By 1993, all 50 states legalized homeschooling, but the oversight varied greatly by state. As a result of this legalization, the number of homeschooled children grew from 15,000 in the 1980s to an estimated 2 million just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.2 Homeschooling was on the radar, both legally and statistically, but it was not something most families seriously considered.

The Covid-19 pandemic took the world by storm, and education was certainly affected. Spring 2020 emergenc school closures sent educators and parents alike scrambling to maintain the semblance of a school education at home. In the first weeks, when the closures were expected to be brief, students were often given packets of worksheets or would meet with their classes virtually for an hour, with the rest of the day dependent on parental oversight.

As the fog of uncertainty lifted to reveal a longer road ahead, schools and parents adapted to make the school
day more structured. In most instances, students were provided with electronic devices, and virtual learning went on throughout the day. The virtual learning was balanced by individual work to be reviewed by the parent or teacher after the fact. Later in the pandemic, this virtual learning combined with in-person learning to create a hybrid model. Today, the Covid school shutdowns are almost universally reviled as a failure of educational policy.

Many parents grudgingly went along for lack of choice. For the first time, they balanced being co-teachers in their child’s education with their own careers and responsibilities. Some came face-to-face with their children’s curriculum, only to cringe at what they saw.3 Others found they liked spending the days with their children and being hands-on in the learning process. These parents began to see homeschooling as a genuine option.

A dramatic increase

In 2019, prior to the pandemic, homeschooling statistically represented only a small movement— just 3.4 percent of school-age children were homeschooled.4 At the peak of the pandemic, most children experienced their schooling at home, while some were withdrawn from their registered school of attendance to be homeschooled. In 2020-21, 6 percent of American students were reported to be homeschooled.5 More recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey show that 6.3 to 7.9 percent of school-age children were homeschooled in 2024, comprising 3.4 to 4.3 million children.6 In just five years, the number of homeschooled children in the U.S. has doubled.

The pandemic fueled the start of this growth, and perhaps without parents having found themselves in the role of co-teachers, it would not have been so rapid. Yet, several years after the pandemic, the number of homeschooled children continues to grow. Homeschooling is no longer a fringe choice. It has become a significant educational method in the United States.

When considering homeschooling, many assume that the format of the school day is modeled after a traditional classroom. While it can fit that description, this is far from the approach most families take. Homeschoolers are a diverse group. Demographically, it runs the full gamut of religion, political affiliation, income, education levels and ethnicity. Naturally, the educational approach will vary greatly depending on family resources and priorities. Some of the more common approaches include:

Classical Education: Classical education aims for a structured approach with emphasis on grammar, logic and rhetoric through studying great books, history and language. Generally, families following this approach will purchase their curriculum through a company such as Mother of Divine Grace or The Well-Trained Mind Academy.

Charlotte Mason: A British educator from the late 19th century, Mason emphasized a gentle, literature-rich method of learning. This philosophy cultivates a love of education through “living books,” nature and the arts. “Living books” are engaging works that bring subjects to life, in stark contrast to dry textbooks.

Montessori: Based on the philosophy of Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori, this method is child-led and focused on fostering independence and practical life skills in a tactile environment. This method is particularly popular among parents of young children.

Unschooling: As the name suggests, this method largely rejects the concept of structured learning and is led entirely by the child’s interests and motivations.

Hybrid Homeschooling: involves a mix of in-home instruction and outside classes, generally provided through a private, part-time school. Students will learn at the school for a portion of the week and are provided a curriculum to follow at home under the direction of the parent for the remainder of the week.

Benefits of homeschooling

Most families probably use a combination of these approaches to best fit the needs of their children. These methods are best combined with ample usage of extracurricular and social opportunities for children.

The benefits of homeschooling are abundant for most families. Katie Fitzgerald, a mother of five in Maryland, states: “My children are authentically themselves. They have time and space to pursue their God-given gifts and the support and encouragement to persevere in them. They are well-spoken and confident around children and adults.” This may be one of the more common reasons parents cite when they make the choice to homeschool. They want their children to be confident and free thinking: in the world, but not of it.

Some parents remember a school experience that was punitive if they were of the rowdier type, while others recall sliding under the radar if they were quiet: their strengths or weaknesses may have gone unnoticed if they kept their head down and followed instructions. Gifted students were often bored and unchallenged, while struggling students felt embarrassed and left behind.

To homeschool is to offer a unique solution to each child, each circumstance, each ability level: that is, to meet them where they are and help them to excel. Whereas the traditional school setting is focused on the collective, the
homeschool experience is focused on the individual, so that as an adult, he or she might be a healthy member of the community.

Individual attention, flexibility

Lorryn McGarry from Oklahoma homeschools six children and enthusiastically reports: “My children get their childhood back. For millennia, children have been taught for a few hours a day, and the rest of the day is for exploring and climbing and playing. Through homeschooling, this is how I give this centuries old, developmentally appropriate structure back to my children. They are each other’s greatest playmates.” Lorryn alludes to another great benefit of homeschooling, which is the flexibility of the day.

Much of the school day in a traditional setting is not dedicated to active learning, but to busy-work, transitions
and behavior management. A homeschooled child can achieve these same active learning hours at home under
the guidance of a parent and forgo some of the less necessary activities. Instead, the world is their oyster! As they get older, some students can begin taking courses for college credit. Students can sharpen skills they are interested in such as art, music, crafts or athletics—and without sacrificing family dinners or relaxation on the weekend.

Children who were homeschooled for the long term (eight or more years) generally report higher levels of optimism, gratitude and life satisfaction as compared to their peers.7 They are also less likely to report symptoms associated with depression and anxiety.8 In terms of academics, they tend to outperform their public school peers by 15 to 30 percentile points on standardised tests, indicating that, on average, homeschooling is more efficient than public school.9 If homeschooled students generally have better mental health and academic outcomes, what is the argument against homeschooling?

Principal critiques

Perhaps the loudest concern voiced by those opposed to homeschooling is the question of socialisation. They worry that if children aren’t interacting with their peers all day and following the structure of a typical classroom, they will be unable to cope once they leave the nest as adults. Something these naysayers fail to consider is what the world looks like outside of the nest.

Your average adult spends the day surrounded by adults of varying ages, often of different ethnic and economic backgrounds. Compare this to the typical public (or even private) school student. Their peers were born within nine months of their own birth date and often come from similar economic backgrounds. Let’s not forget that
school districts are funded by the property tax of the surrounding area, and that to attend most private schools, you must be able to afford the tuition. This sounds considerably more homogeneous than the world that awaits them upon graduation.

By contrast, homeschoolers who are exposed to extracurricular activities (such as a cooperative group, or even regular trips to the local library or playground), are regularly interacting with a wide range of ethnicities, religious backgrounds, economic levels and ages. From a younger age than their peers, they are learning how to collaborate and interact with people who are different from them. Of course, if a family approaches homeschooling from an isolationist mindset, their children may struggle socially. Homeschooling families must be conscientious about integrating their children into the world early and often, or they run the risk of giving homeschoolers a bad name.

The other concern involves educational blind spots in the parent acting as educator, otherwise explained as the inability to teach a subject at the level necessary. This is less likely to be a problem when teaching a young child phonics or arithmetic but is far more likely to be a concern with high-school-level instruction in foreign languages, math or science. This is solved by outsourcing the subject: by hiring a private tutor, sending the child to a class taught by an expert, or utilising online learning.

The road ahead

Homeschooling in America has always existed alongside a wide spectrum of regulations. Some states impose multiple layers of oversight, requiring parents to file curriculum plans, submit test scores or undergo evaluations. Other states demand very little documentation. Yet, even in states historically considered relaxed, attempts to tighten control can surface.

A recent example is Illinois, where a proposed Homeschool Act (H.B. 2827) would have imposed some harsh penalties, including criminal charges for submitting incomplete paperwork. Parents mobilized in opposition, and the bill was defeated earlier this year. This underscores both the ongoing vulnerability of homeschool freedoms and the steadfast commitment of families to defend them.10

Taxpayers spend an average of $16,446 per pupil in public schools.11 With 3.1 million homeschooled
students in 2021-22 and the cost of their education largely shifted to their parents (who spent an average of $600 per student), $51 billion was saved for taxpayers.12 This significant cost savings may not continue in the future as school choice options spread to more and more states.13

However, most homeschooling families have no financial aid to cover their children’s homeschooling costs, and many prefer it this way. More government dollars may equate to more government oversight, which generally gives families less autonomy over their curriculum and pacing. As homeschooling continues to grow in numbers, it will be interesting to observe how both state and federal laws adapt.

Homeschooling is no longer a fringe experiment. It is an increasingly mainstream educational path rooted in the
belief that parents are best equipped to guide their children’s learning and development. As laws evolve and
educational options expand, one thing remains constant: The home continues to be a powerful place of formation. In homeschooling, families are reclaiming their children’s education and finding joy in the process.

For families who are new to homeschooling, see the final endnote below for some reputable online resources to help you get started.14

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website:  www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

  1. Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). ↩︎
  2. Albert Cheng and Daniel Hamlin, “Contemporary Homeschooling Arrangements:
    An Analysis of Three Waves of Nationally Representative Data,” Educational Policy
    37, no. 5 (July 2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/08959048221103795. ↩︎
  3. See, e.g., Mindszenty Report, September 2023 and July 2021, for discussions of
    the pervasive infiltration of transgender ideology and critical race theory into U.S.
    schools. ↩︎
  4. https://hslda.org/post/homeschooling-continues-to-grow-in-2021 ↩︎
  5. https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/ ↩︎
  6. https://admissionsly.com/homeschooling-statistics/ ↩︎
  7. https://readlion.com/op-ed-long-term-homeschoolers-enjoy-most-favorablelevels-of-mental-health-study-finds/ ↩︎
  8. Ibid ↩︎
  9. https://homeschoolingbackgrounder.com/average-academic-performancehomeschooled-students/ ↩︎
  10. https://edreporteronline.org/documents/august2025 article 3.cfm?utm source=email&utm_medium=email%20 marketing ↩︎
  11. https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/ ↩︎
  12. Ibid ↩︎
  13. Regarding the spread of school choice options in the U.S., see, e.g., Mindszenty Report, July 2023 ↩︎
  14. Heart of a Mother: Offers a broad overview of guidance and curriculum recommendations specifically for Catholic families. https://www.heartofamother.net/curriculum.
    Homeschooling 101: A breakdown of essential subjects to teach at various age levels. Home School Legal Defense Association: A comprehensive source for state laws and legal guidance for homeschool in the United States. https://hslda.org/legal ↩︎

Premature baby in NICU

Tiny but mighty: Tenayah’s story shows the truth of life at 22 weeks

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Tenayah’s tiny body tells us something louder than any argument: that hers is a real life. Let us recognise that every baby in the womb is as real as she is.

When little Tenayah Gimbert arrived into the world, she weighed just 409 grams and was scarcely larger than her mothers hand.1 Born at 22 weeks and 3 days her odds of survival were slim. Most babies born so early do not make it. Yet thanks to the extraordinary care at Brisbane’s Mater Mother’s Hospital, Tenayah is not only alive, but thriving. At just 128 days old, she has shown no signs of major complications, avoided surgery, and is now tipping the scales at a healthy three kilograms.

Screenshot from Sunrise on 7 Instagram account

Her story is rightly being hailed as a miracle, but is also something more. It is a reminder that even at 22 weeks, what we are speaking about is not a “bundle of cells” or merely a “foetus”. We are speaking about a baby – tiny and fragile but as real and human as any child in a postnatal ward. 

The humanity of the unborn

To truly grasp the miracle of Tenayah’s life we must first recognise who she is and what every child in the womb is. She is unmistakably human. At 22 weeks, a baby has a beating heart that has been working since six weeks. Her brain is active, sending signals that control movement, swallowing, and even primitive sleep cycles. She has eyelashes, eyebrows, unique fingerprints, and tiny fingernails. She can move her arms and legs with purpose, responding to touch and sound. Her lungs are forming, her skin is thin but already covering a complete, small body. In fact, her proportions are recognisably those of a newborn – only smaller.2

Parents who see ultrasound scans at this stage often describe the shock of recognition, their child sucks a thumb, hiccups or stretches out a hand. These are not impersonal medical images, they are windows into the life of a son or a daughter who has a purpose in this world. 

When Tenayah was born prematurely, no one mistook her for anything other than a baby. Nurses wrapped her in blankets, doctors fought for her survival, and her parents were in awe of how well she was doing. Her size did not diminish her humanity; it only underscored her fragility. She was not a ‘potential person’ suddenly made real by her early birth. She was the same child she had been the day before, only now visible to the world outside the womb. 

This is why stories like Tenayah’s matter so deeply. They strip away the euphemisms that cloud our moral vision. Words like “foetus” or “tissue” may be clinically accurate, but they can be used to obscure rather than clarify. The reality is very clear: at 22 weeks we are looking at a baby who is capable of life outside the womb – and whose humanity does not depend on location. 

Mater Hospital: saving lives not ending them 

In recent months, the Mater Brisbane Hospital was heavily criticised in the media for refusing to provide abortions, accused of putting religion before women.3  Yet this very same hospital is one of only four in Queensland equipped to save babies born on the edge of viability. Without the skill and care of the team at the Mater, Tenayah would almost certainly not be alive. 

The contrast could not be clearer. The Mater is condemned for refusing to end lives at the very same time it is demonstrating its extraordinary ability to preserve them. 

The law in Queensland

The inconsistencies in abortion policies in Queensland is very evident. Under Queensland law, abortion is lawful on request up to 22 weeks gestation, with no reason required. Beyond that point, abortion is permitted right up until birth, provided two doctors agree it is appropriate.4

That means that at the age Tenayah is being celebrated as a miracle of modern medicine, other babies at the same stage of development can legally be aborted, and if before 22 weeks, on request with no reason required. It is difficult to reconcile this contradiction: in one hospital ward, a 22 week old baby is being fought for with every resource available, while in another, a 22 week old baby is being aborted. 

Survival rates for very premature babies

Often at 22 weeks we would be told the chances of survival are very slim. But Tenayah’s life shows that behind every number is a child worth fighting for. 

  • In Australia and New Zealand, five in ten babies admitted to the NICU at 23 weeks survive. This jumps up to seven in ten babies who survive at 24 weeks.5

These aren’t just statistics. They are children, thousands of them across the world, who now grow up to attend school, play and live full lives because someone believed they were worth saving. 

And so the question becomes unavoidable. If five in ten babies born at 23 weeks gestation given care in Australia survive, how can we possibly turn around and say that babies of the same age in the womb are disposable? 

Medicine is racing ahead, stretching the margins of viability further back every year. Yet our laws disregard that completely, allowing Queenslanders to kill unborn babies at any stage. It is in some ways a cruel irony that we can cheer on the survival of a 22 week old baby in one room while providing for the destruction of a life in another. 

A hopeful ending 

Tenayah’s story is one of courage – her parents’, her doctors’ and her own. But it is also a challenge to us as a society, it shows how real life is at 22 weeks. It is life that we must fight to protect at every stage. 

As we celebrate her survival, let us recognise that every baby in the womb is as real as she is. They all deserve the chance to live, whether born early in the delivery room or still growing in the safety of a mothers womb. 

Tenayah’s tiny body tells us something louder than any argument – that this is life we are talking about. Real human life. Life that is so worth protecting.

by Hannah Newton. This article first appeared at Cherish Life and is republished here with permission. Cherish Life Queensland was founded in 1970 (as Right to Life Queensland), to advocate for the right to life from conception until natural death and remains one of the largest pro-life organisations in Australia.

  1. Jackie Sinnerton, ‘Tenayah Gimbert: The premature baby defying the odds’. Courier Mail. https://www.couriermail.com.au/health/family-health/pregnancy/tenayah-gimbert-the-premature-baby-defying-the-odds/news-story/f27f42789309f2edd1a9215070bf9d96?campaignType=external&campaignChannel=syndication&campaignName=ncacont&campaignContent&campaignSource=the_courier_mail&campaignPlacement=edm&net_sub_id=284386009&type=free_text_block&position=1 Accessed 11 September 2025. ↩︎
  2. Cleveland Clinic, ‘Fetal Development’. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/7247-fetal-development-stages-of-growth Accessed 11 September 2025. ↩︎
  3. Emma Pollard, [23 July 2025] ABC News, ‘Mater Hospital’s religious abortion ban left couple feeling ‘abandoned’. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-23/mater-hospital-religious-abortion-ban-couple-feeling-abandoned/105532550 Accessed 11 September 2025. ↩︎
  4. Queensland Government, ‘Termination of Pregnancy’. https://www.qld.gov.au/health/children/pregnancy/termination-of-pregnancy Accessed 11 September 2025. ↩︎
  5. Queensland Health Parent Information, Queensland Clinical Guidelines. Babies Born very early. https://www.health.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0025/1007935/c-xtreme-preterm.pdf Accessed 11 September 2025. ↩︎

Marching for LGBTI human rights

US Human Rights Report leaves out LGBTs

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Although it may be hard to argue that Trump’s foreign policy really is “America first”, it is encouraging to see that his administration is sensibly ignoring the woke causes that fracture society along the lines of victimhood status.

By Iulia-Elena Cazan, C-FAM

The just released U.S. Annual Human Rights Report has omitted references to homosexual/trans. Leading homosexual/trans advocacy group calls the pending report “a travesty and subversion of Congressional intent.”

Every year, the U.S. State Department releases a report assessing the human rights situation in every country. While the report is Congressionally mandated, its scope and focus can change from one U.S. administration to another, depending on the administration’s priorities and interpretation of human rights.

The Washington Post wrote that this year’s “draft reports examined by the Post contain no reference to gender-based violence or violence against LGBTQ+ (sic) people.”

Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International criticized the document for “downplaying” certain human rights violations faced by “marginalized populations, including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ (sic) people throughout the world.”

Klasing criticized U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio for attempting to “limit the scope” of the report. She says Rubio instructed the drafters of the report “to cut everything not legislatively mandated” and that the “Trump administration has turned this report into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices.”

Last year’s U.S. Human Rights report, released under the Biden Administration, lists Amnesty International, OutRight International, the International Lesbian and Gay Association – Europe (ILGA-EUROPE), among other groups, as resources on the topic of “Acts of violence, criminalization, and other abuses based on sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.” The Biden report maintained a special section for human rights violations based on one’s gender identity and criticized several countries for not allowing homosexual/trans couples to adopt children.

Narrowing the scope of the report and deleting controversial references to rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity is consistent with Trump’s foreign policy, which is opposed to gender ideology and states that gender identity “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”

In a statement delivered at an event co-hosted by C-Fam (publisher of Friday Fax) earlier this year, the U.S. representative said that the U.S. mission has engaged in “tough negotiations in a wide variety of U.N. resolutions, fighting against gender ideology, and calling votes if necessary, to advance President Trump’s America First foreign policy.” Since Trump took office, the U.S. Mission to the U.N. has consistently rejected any references to gender ideology in U.N. documents and programs.

References to sexual orientation and gender identity remain highly controversial at the U.N. and are rejected by many UN Member States whose moral, cultural, and religious values stand in opposition to a progressive interpretation of human rights. These countries often adopt an originalist interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and criticize Western countries and some U.N. bodies for extending the UDHR beyond its scope.

According to the Washington Post, a senior State Department official said [this year’s] “Human Rights report focuses on core issues” and that “the Trump administration will bring a new focus to some issues, including freedom of expression.”

By Iulia-Elena Cazan

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

Some people are still choosing to have a large family

The larger the family, the greater the gift

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There are a number of factors which have led to the decline in family size, yet there are still those who understand that becoming a parent has a personal benefit, as well as a societal one.

The U.S. fertility rate dropped to an all-time low in 2024, according to recent CDC data. Our country’s fertility rate now stands at fewer than 1.6 births per woman, well below the 2.1 children per woman needed to achieve population replacement. Effectively, this means that we’re unable to replace – let alone grow – our population through reproduction. Once the trend toward population shrinkage begins, it’s difficult to reverse.

The problem is global. Twenty-three nations are set to see their populations halve by 2100, according to the BBC. Population collapse could fundamentally reshape societies as they grapple with the impacts on economics, military readiness, healthcare, and culture. Human beings remain the most important resource for any civilization – and we’re on track to run out of them.

So why is the global population, by and large, not replacing itself? A lot of factors contribute to this trend, and, at the end of the day, it remains somewhat mysterious. But we can point to some concrete reasons, outlined in Ross Douthat’s book, “The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.”

Douthat first notes the major economic and cultural shift from agrarian to industrial and urban living. This change from farm to factory to firm “made children less valuable as extra household laborers and made an intense educational investment in each child make far more economic sense – which in turn raised the costs of childrearing for the ambitious and successful.”

In the past, farms – and to some extent, factories – needed large numbers of laborers, who could be relatively uneducated, incentivizing farming families to have more kids. Today, our economy prizes automation and AI, with just a limited number of tech whizzes needed to keep the whole thing running.

The introduction of contraceptives is another factor Douthat raises. These made it possible for people to separate sexual activity from its natural procreative end, and that trend was only exacerbated by the sexual revolution of the 1960s in which sexuality was reframed as purely the pursuit of pleasure, rather than a life-giving act meant to take place within matrimony.

Feminism also urged women out of the home and away from childrearing, while the rise in divorce undercut the longevity of marriages, discouraging couples’ attempts to build large, stable families.

Additionally, the secularization of society removed religious support and motivation for extending the gift of life, while an increasingly comfortable and consumerist society encouraged self-centeredness and physical enjoyment over self-sacrifice. Further, since the sexual revolution, men and women struggle more to establish relationships with each other in the first place, even though most people still say they want relationships, marriage, and children, according to Douthat.

By some accounts, the declining birthrate is symptomatic of societal anxiety over finances. “People are marrying later and also worried about their ability to have the money, health insurance and other resources needed to raise children in a stable environment,” CBS reports. Yet financial constraints to childrearing seem more of a cultural perception problem than actual poverty, given that generations of our forebears successfully raised larger families on less wealth.

According to a Pew survey from 2024, finances aren’t the main reason people are avoiding procreation. For adults aged 18-49, the most common reason given is “I just don’t want to.” This is often because they want to focus on other things, like hobbies, interests, and careers. Interestingly, the third most common reason provided was “concerns about the state of the world.”

These responses suggest that the biggest determining factor in the birth dearth has to do with societal attitudes towards what is most important in life, and whether or not the world is headed in a positive direction. The ideologies most young Americans are formed in focus on personal fulfillment and career achievement over the sacrifice entailed in giving back to society (and one’s own offspring) through childrearing.

Further, since the breakdown of traditional ideas about religion and truth, the world has suffered from a crisis of meaning, epitomized by nihilist philosophers such as Nietzsche. Tragically, mainstream thought has largely turned away from belief in objective truth, and with it, the belief that life has inherent meaning and value.

Ultimately, our failure to reproduce stands as a sign of a profound cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in the value of life itself. Anyone who truly understands the value of life longs to share it through children. Anyone who doesn’t will see little point in reproducing.

Fortunately, some young people are rejecting this anti-life zeitgeist. In certain communities – especially devout religious ones – couples are choosing to have large families, finding greater joy and fulfillment in the process than any hobby or career could provide. [NOTE: In Hungary, the Orban government’s pro-natalist policies have had some measure of success in boosting the birth-rate. This is something that should be investigated by Western policy-makers. Read more here– Ed.]

Each new life is like the creation of a whole new world. With each child, parents give someone else the gift of experiencing the world and all that life has to offer. What could be more meaningful than that? It is in the act of giving that we also receive the most. The more we give, the more we are ourselves fulfilled – and there’s no greater gift to give than life. Many young parents today are realizing that parenthood is not only a boon to their children and society, but also a blessing to themselves. And the larger the family, the more abundant the gift.

by Walker Larson. The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

Assisted suicide

Assisted Suicide: are we failing our loved ones?

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The rapid increase in the number of euthanasia and assisted suicide regimes may, in part at least, point to a failure by families and other support networks to show vulnerable people they are truly loved and valued.

Advocates for euthanasia and assisted dying often cite the stories of those who experienced or witnessed others experiencing the debilitating symptoms of life-limiting diseases like cancer or motor neurone disease. They speak of the loss of mobility, or intolerable pain as reasons why people choose to take their own lives. 

Reading between the lines, the motive for some making this choice may be wanting to exert control over a situation that is, to a large degree, beyond human control. Some even readily admit that this is the reason behind their choice. Yet for others, choosing to deliberately end their lives may be a sign that they were failed by those who had the greatest responsibility for ensuring their wellbeing.

A cry for help

In her article on assisted suicide, Canada’s Assisted Suicide Regime Is the West’s Cry for Help, Kathryn Lopez draws attention to the underlying reasons for the expansion of euthanasia laws in the West. She notes the experience of one patient who had requested assisted suicide until he realised that it was the feeling of being abandoned by his family that was making his feel that way. Once the realisation was made, the idea of killing himself no longer held any attraction.

Lopez also writes of an order of religious nuns who nurse patients at the end of their lives. She says the nuns have found that their loving attention and literal end-of-life “care” means that their vulnerable patients never request to be euthanised.

That the burgeoning euthanasia industry reflects a failure to care for the vulnerable is reflected in statements by medical professionals. One of those is Dr Bojana Beovic, president of the Medical Chamber of Slovenia. Assisted suicide was recently legalised in Slovenia following a referendum and was opposed by Dr. Beovic. She notes that this kind of law ignores the reasons why vulnerable people choose assisted suicide, offering them death instead of assistance with solving their problems. She says, 

“Their life is coming to an end, they are elderly, they do not feel they are useful in society, and the best thing is that they leave this world and their family members. The law is formed in a way that there is no method that is acceptable to the patient himself for relieving his troubles and improving his state”.

Alarming abuses and statistics

Questions about family support and safeguarding measures become more urgent when current statistics are analysed. In jurisdictions where assisted suicide is legal, those statistics are alarming. For example, in New Zealand, assisted suicides and euthanasia have seen a 37% increase over the past year, and now account for 1.25% of all deaths. Notably, fewer doctors are willing to provide assisted suicide and euthanasia, with the number falling by twenty over the past two years. Could it be that doctors realise they are not acting in their patients’ best interests by suggesting they kill themselves?

In the Netherlands, a staggering 10,000 people per year are being put to death by euthanasia or assisted suicide. This includes children under the age of 18 and even babies under 12 months. Psychiatric patients are increasingly requesting assisted suicide and non-terminal, elderly subjects have become common.

Yet even the Netherlands lags behind Canada in terms of sheer numbers, with 15,000 deaths being recorded there in 2023. Kathryn Lopez cites terrifying examples of Canadians who have been put to death for merely experiencing mental illness or homelessness, with even deafness being grounds for Medical Assistance in Dying  (MAID). This prompts us to question why families and friends are not ensuring that their loved ones are being protected from overzealous or unscrupulous advocates of euthanasia and assisted suicide. As well as reducing the desire for an early death, close interpersonal relationships should provide a built-in safeguard for vulnerable people.

This becomes even more important as the evidence of systemic failures in safeguarding against abuses grows. A Freedom of Information investigation in British Columbia recently revealed that the oversight unit of its MAID programme is recording a huge number of mistakes and safety violations.  This includes a rate of error among assessments for assisted suicide at almost 5%, meaning that in one year around 135 people who failed to meet the criteria were put to death. Also recorded in its files are thousands of paperwork errors and a significant conflict of interest involving a senior MAID administrator.

Left behind

It is not always the patients who choose assisted dying that are the victims in this scenario. Just as with a non-medical suicide, loved ones are often left behind to deal with the aftermath. 

A recent tragic story exemplifies the trauma suffered by those who aren’t aware of their loved ones’ intention to take their own lives. A British woman who committed assisted suicide at a Swiss clinic had told her family she was going on holiday. Even her partner was unaware of her intention. The family was notified after the fact by a text message notifying them that their mother’s ashes would be sent to them by post. The family is concerned that the woman may not have been in her right mind when she made the decision and is seeking action against the assisted suicide provider.

Under proposed assisted dying legislation in the UK, there is no obligation for families to be involved in their loved one’s decision. Speaking about the case, a spokesman for UK Right to Life noted that, “It is precisely those in the best position to provide support in living, the family, who are not required to be involved at any stage and who may only find out about the death of a loved one after it has already happened”.

Even among those who approve of assisted suicide, there lurks the suspicion that the needs of their loved ones were not being met. Family members left behind allude to unknown levels of pain or unnoticed feelings of loneliness or of being a burden. These are serious regrets for people to harbour after an irreversible decision like assisted suicide.

We must learn from abortion

Kathryn Lopez points to a normalisation on the part of medical authorities who want to make suggesting an early death for a loved one as mainstream as the choice to abort one’s own child. Indeed, as with abortion, the media is also playing a large role in pushing the pro-euthanasia narrative. Yet, as with abortion, cracks in the system are already evident, as is the deep regret of those who failed to protect their loved ones in their time of greatest need. 

It is to be hoped that this latest attempt at playing God will be halted before it plays out to the same extent as has abortion, which has ravaged society by its cruel disregard for human life. The antidote to both these scourges is a return to a truly sacrificial love which sees through temporary crises to the hope of a better life beyond.

by Kathy Clubb

UN human rights official

UN human rights official rejects gender ideology

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A top UN human rights official is making waves and helping to protect women by rejecting gender ideology and defending biological sex.

A war of words has broken out at the UN as the top UN human rights official for women told governments to define gender based on biological sex. She also told governments to stop using gender-neutral language when referring to women. “You cannot protect what you cannot define,” said Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls.

“I never imagined the day would come where the mandate would deem it necessary to prepare a report affirming that the words ‘women’ and ‘girls’ refer to distinct biological and legal categories,” said Alsalem as she presented her explosive new report at the 59th Session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Alsalem said the topic of her report provoked “visceral reactions” and that powerful governments and UN agencies tried to discredit her.

The report on “sex-based” protections for women in international law is the biggest blow to gender ideology since the concept of “gender” was first added to UN policy. The report says gender ideology violates international law and harms women and girls. It also calls out governments for attempting to erase references to “mothers”, “women,” and “girls” in policies and programs.

Alsalem called on governments to preserve sex-based categories in language, policies, and data. She said a failure to do so has “devastating” consequences for women because it leads governments to overlook their unique vulnerabilities and exposes them to increased violence and discrimination.

“Erasing women and women-specific language and needs based on their sex is not only wrong. It is demeaning. It is regressive and constitutes one of the worst forms of violence against women and girls that they can experience,” Alsalem said. Gender-neutral terms promoted by Western governments and UN agencies in recent years include referring to mothers as “pregnant or birthing persons” and referring to women as “bleeders” and “persons who menstruate.”

Alsalem explained that international law protects women based on their biological sex, not their subjective self-identification and that “gender identity” is not a protected legal category. She said that women are entitled to specific protections from violence, including women-only spaces, and that individuals who subjectively self-identify as transgender do not have a right to these same protections based on their subjective self-identification.

The largest area of UN policy and programming where gender ideology has made an impact is “violence against women and girls”. Discarding decades of sex-based laws and policies to protect women, over the last two decades Western governments have promoted the new category of “gender-based violence,” which is not contained in any UN treaty. These policies conflate gender with LGBT issues, thus diluting the focus on women.

The European Union told Alsalem that the gender approach was required under international law. Switzerland and the Netherlands called Alsalem’s approach regressive. Colombia, speaking on behalf of 37 countries, mostly from Europe and Latin America, told Alsalem that her approach was a “step back” for human rights.

Canada said that “gender is a social construct, not confined to anatomy, and vital for understanding how discrimination and violence operate in diverse contexts.” Germany said that “binary classifications and exclusionary terminology can marginalize groups such as LGBTQI+ persons, sex workers, people with disabilities, and those experiencing homelessness.”

Leading UN agencies, including UN Women, UNFPA, WHO, and UNICEF, also rejected Alsalem’s recommendations. They claimed that polices and gender-neutral “gender-based violence” programs are required by international law.

Alsalem pushed back against her critics. She said that biological sex was not “taboo or an outdated concept, but an “innate, immutable, and fundamental aspect of human existence for women and for men alike.”

The Holy See, Kuwait, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Sudan expressed support for Alsalem.

Alsalem has also received pushback at the UN and beyond for her stance against prostitution, and conversion therapies, and for defending women-only sports.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D and Iulia-Elena Cazan

C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

difficult delights

Teaching children to embrace the difficult delights of life

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Reading for pleasure has lost popularity with the rise of a digital culture: it can be restored if communities promote more traditional ‘difficult delights’.

I browsed the shelves for as long as my mother would allow when I visited the library as a child. When her patience – or our available time – finally petered out, I brought seven or eight books up to the library counter to check out – a healthy mix of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery, and classics. The librarian often raised an eyebrow or chuckled at my stack of books, but my mother knew I would usually read them all.

I tore through books in my childhood and teenage years. But I wasn’t alone. My siblings read a similar amount, as did some in my friend group, especially those with little to no access to video games and social media.

Such habits are increasingly rare among children. A 2024 study conducted by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) in the U.K. found that only 35% of children ages 8-18 read for pleasure – a number 8.8 percentage points lower than in 2023. Since 2016, the NLT has seen a downward trend in children reading for pleasure.

A 2020 study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress on 9- and 13-year-olds found that those who regularly read for fun in the U.S. has also dropped substantially over the past decade. Data from 2022 and 2023 show the continuation of this declining trend.

Meanwhile, screen time for children in our country continues mounting since the pandemic.

This isn’t news to most of us; we witness such decline every day in anecdotal forms. I used to see children (and adults) reading on trains and planes; now I primarily see screens. I’ve also seen the decline in the emptiness of my neighborhood library and in the complaints of schoolchildren when they encounter books I once enjoyed.

Efforts are underway to counteract this decline, however. Second Lady Usha Vance recently announced a “Summer Reading Challenge” for children in grades K-8, inviting children to read 12 books between June 1 and Sept. 5, completing a log of what they read. Each child who completes the challenge will receive a certificate, a small prize, and an entry into a raffle to visit Washington, D.C.

Schools often institute similar summer reading challenges or requirements. A classical Christian school in my area created a “Screen Free Summer Challenge,” encouraging children to spend as many days as possible without screen-based entertainment.

Such challenges can help direct children to spend their time taking in the written word rather than delighting in the easy pleasures of the online world. But reversing our culture’s trend toward practical illiteracy will require more than the enticement of a prize or grade.

In my years as a student, tutor and teacher, I have found that those who read much do so not primarily because they are required or enticed, but because of a deep love for reading, a love inculcated and emboldened by their peers and family.

In order to achieve a culture that encourages reading, we need to build sub-cultures that do not normalize ease – the ease of flipping through TV channels or scrolling through social media – but instead recognize the value of difficult delights. Such work begins in the home, with the culture of the immediate family, and moves outward to the neighborhood and then to the church or school community.

By difficult delights I do not mean only those found within the pages of a book, but also the delights of work in the garden or garage, or the delights of time spent at the piano bench in front of sheet music or on a ladder with a paintbrush in hand.

For the enchantment of literature to become once again a force in our culture, we must become disenchanted with the latest offers of a passive and difficulty-free life mediated by screens and feeds. We must become disconnected from the consumerist mindset that dominates our society. When a sub-culture, however small, connects instead with gladhearted gratitude around pursuit of the good, true and beautiful – not the easy, crass and self-gratifying – children will be blessed in all variety of ways, including a fondness for good stories.

In other words, for children to love reading again, they must be shown and learn how to love life – real, embodied life, as God has given it, with all its difficult delights.

By Sarah Reardon.

The above article first appeared in Intellectual Takeout (Bloomington, Minnesota), and is reproduced by permission.

The Arrogance of Transhumanism

The arrogance of transhumanism

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Technology has many benefits, but some high-tech fads like transhumanism, seem to treat human life as just another physical process to be manipulated.

Christian faith teaches us humility in light of the mystery of God’s creation of life. Today, as we enter a brave new world of elite technocrats calling for “transhumanism,” this faith is being tested.

We have been warned about the fate of those who seek to become gods on earth. Warnings found in Greek mythology (Prometheus and Icarus), Jewish tales (golems) and Western literature (Frankenstein) are being ignored in today’s secular world of rapid technological advancement. This advancement is evident in artificial intelligence (AI), which places “knowledge” at the fingertips of every person with a phone or a computer; experimentation on human embryos; and technological tools such as CRISPR that can select for human genetic traits. Hubris is a natural consequence. For many, we have become gods.

Technology can be a great boon for human progress, but caution is warranted for some of the latest high-tech fads, which seem to treat human life as just another physical process to be manipulated.

What is Transhumanism?

Transhumanism is the call for three supers—super intelligence, super longevity and super happiness—all gained through technology. Tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are the biggest promoters of transhumanist thinking. While they debate whether transhuman beings will be organic beings with increased lifespans and mental capabilities enhanced through drugs, or inorganic machines uploaded with individual personalities and enhanced thinking ability, they hope that technology will enable humans to design our evolutionary futures.1 Some transhumanists predict that the human mind will be uploaded into digital form; others believe that the future rests in designer babies, artificial wombs and anti-aging therapies.

Transhumanists could be dismissed as computer geeks who have read too much science fiction. But designing babies has become a reality and will become more refined with technological advances. American companies already screen the genetic traits of embryos, discarding the ones with high risk of disease or unwanted traits (such as being male or female), then implant the chosen embryo into a womb. Other researchers are pursuing the development of artificial wombs.2

Technocratic transhumanists believe in using drugs to enhance human cognition. This includes the use of psychedelics, long promoted in Silicon Valley. In the 1980s, the psychedelic drug MDMA, known popularly as Ecstasy, was touted as enhancing feelings of love and social connection that would heal “global trauma” and usher in world peace. This faith in MDMA as a wonder therapeutic drug has continued into the 21st century. In 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration turned down an application by Lykos Therapeutics for MDMA therapy, arguing that more data was needed. Lykos remains, however, a favorite of Big Tech investors who see psychedelics as the future.

The tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel is a major investor in Atai Life Sciences, which is testing ketamine-related drugs. Elon Musk has publicly mentioned his use of small amounts of prescription ketamine, an anesthetic. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has talked about how his son overcame grief following the death of his mother by using ayahuasca, an Amazonian plant psychedelic.3 In a Cabinet meeting on April 30, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins told President Trump that his team was looking at psychedelics as an option to combat veteran suicide.4

Big Tech gurus such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, however, understand some of the dangers of the new age of transhumanism. For example, Musk has warned that AI poses the greatest threat to humanity. It does not take a tech billionaire to see that the promise of bringing people closer together through social media technology has failed. People seem more divided and lonely than ever even though they regularly use TikTok, Instagram, SnapChat or Facebook. And who is not worried about government control of information and enhanced surveillance through technology? Many of our youth are living in an augmented reality through phones, screens and earbuds. We live in an age of in vitro fertilization, genetic manipulation and transgender surgeries.

The pernicious fad of transgender treatment through hormones and mutilating surgery, even on children, could be seen as an offshoot of transhumanist ideology. Probably no worse example of playing God with the natural order may be imagined. However, we should not blame it on Silicon Valley tech titans. Musk is vehemently opposed to transgender treatments of children, having seen one of his own sons “transition” by means of this Frankensteinian perversion of modern medical practice.

Equally Frankensteinian is gain-of-function manipulation of dangerous pathogens, which likely caused the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic with the involvement of U.S. tax dollars in a Chinese lab. President Trump acted to restrict such research in May. He previously signed several orders to counteract transgender ideology.

Longevity and Immortality

Medical clinics are popping up promising to help clients live longer and better—for a hefty price.5 The goal of these longevity clinics is to extend and optimize a patient’s health for years through early cancer screenings, stem-cell therapies and socalled biological-age testing. Their efficacy is unclear. Venture capital is investing in longevity research, more than doubling the investment between 2021 and 2022 from $27 million to $57 million globally.

While aiming for longevity, scientists have explored the physiological dimensions of death itself. For transhumanists following this work on death, hopes of human immortality have arisen from attempts to keep the brain alive after the human body has failed.6 In 2018 the Silicon Valley AI billionaire entrepreneur Sam Altman reportedly paid $10,000 to join a waiting list to upload the contents of his brain to a cloud computer, on the chance that his consciousness could live on after he dies.

Transhumanists believe that true human immortality is only a speck on the horizon, but some are convinced that the future lies in detaching oneself from one’s physical body. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, seeks to capitalize on this vision of brain life after death through cryonics, the freezing of human bodies and brains in liquid nitrogen after legal death, to be revived (resurrected) once new technology becomes available.

Within the scientific community, cryonics is regarded as quackery and a pseudo-science, but this has not prevented the nonprofit from enlisting close to 2,000 members. More than 200 have already died and had their bodies frozen. Another 116 members have had only their heads preserved. Pet bodies have also been preserved. Immortality does not come cheap, though. Alcor charges $200,000 for freezing a human body or $80,000 for just the head.7

Stéphane Charpier, a professor of neuroscience at Sorbonne University who is a leading scientist in studying brain death, dismisses cryogenics as a “pipe dream.” He acknowledges that humans are capable of “tinkering with brains,” but considers it unimaginable that a machine could replicate complex neural processes.8

New Frontiers in IVF

In vitro fertilization (IVF) offers a devil’s bargain to humanity. It is popular for helping infertile couples to have children, but is also used in ways that lack an appealing justification, including reproduction without both a legal father and mother, eugenic selection of embryos, or careerist postponement of childbearing.

IVF works by extracting eggs from a woman who has been primed with injections of powerful drugs, then fertilizing the eggs with a man’s sperm in a laboratory. After a fertilized egg (zygote) undergoes embryo culture over two to six days, the embryo can be implanted in the would-be mother. Women can freeze dozens of their eggs—a practice sometimes encouraged and paid for by large corporate employers in the U.S.—while they wait to make the decision to get pregnant. After eggs are combined with sperm to form embryos, surplus embryos may be frozen or discarded. How many frozen embryos exist in America is not known.

Embryos may be subjected to experimentation. Research on fetal tissue is permitted on a state-by-state basis. New York state has no limit on how long embryos may be grown for experimentation, while California has a guideline of 12 days.

Embryology has made huge advances in the last three decades, but we are still at the beginning of a wave of unforeseen consequences.9 In the 1990s researchers pioneered preimplantation genetic testing (PGT). An embryologist took single cells biopsied from embryos and identified their sex, as well as certain chromosomal abnormalities. PGT subsequently became increasingly refined, and today nearly half of IVF cycles are tested, at a cost of $3,000-$5,000 per batch.

Eugenics Based on ‘Risk Scores’

There are questions about PGT’s accuracy, but in any case this testing goes beyond the promise of improved health. Newer polygenic embryo studies have identified genes linked to traits ranging from height to likely educational attainment to propensity for mental health disabilities such as depression and schizophrenia. Unlike earlier PGT, which focused on single-gene disorders, polygenic embryo screening (PES) examines the likelihood of developing more complex traits that depend on many genes.

PES provides “risk scores” that rely on identification of hundreds or thousands of genetic variants that can be linked with certain human attributes. PES lends itself to eugenics, the selective breeding of children. Companies have been created to screen embryos for hundreds of conditions. One such company is Orchid, headed by Noor Siddiqui, in Silicon Valley. Orchid provides polygenic screening that produces a risk profile of each embryo’s propensity for certain health conditions. This risk profile aids the selection of which embryo(s) to implant.10

PES has not yet gained wide acceptance, but some surveys show that nearly 4 in 10 people said they were “more likely than not” to use it if it could increase their child’s chance of getting into a top college.11 Several European countries have banned this procedure or limited its use. Britain, for example, does not permit PES, but does allow screening for an approved list of roughly 17,000 single-gene disorders. In the U.S., such screening is not subject to any regulatory oversight. Genomic Prediction, based in New Jersey, has provided risk scores for at least 420 clients involving more than 1,600 embryos.

Legal and Ethical Conundrums

The advances in embryo research have given rise to ethical and legal problems. In one among many similar disputes, a Tennessee divorce court in 1992 concluded that embryos “are not, strictly speaking, either ‘persons’ or ‘property,’ but occupy an interim category that entitles them to special respect because of their potential for human life.” Nonetheless, the court ruled in favor of the father who wanted to destroy seven frozen embryos, while his wife wanted to donate them to others. The court upheld the father’s claim, based on a contractual provision, that he should not have to father children against his will.12

State legislatures have only begun to address the status of embryos. In 2018, the Arizona legislature passed a law requiring judges to award disputed embryos to bring in vitro human embryos to birth and not keep them frozen in storage, regardless of preexisting legal contracts.13

Spurred on by a controversy that arose from an Alabama court decision during his 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump signed an executive order this year that calls for policy recommendations to protect IVF and lower its costs. Many around his administration support his pro-natal perspective and are strong supporters of IVF. Despite having experienced no known infertility issues, Elon Musk has used IVF to produce most of his many known children (some with the assistance of paid surrogate mothers). Peter Thiel has invested in multiple fertility-related companies.14

There is widespread concern in the developed world about declining birth rates, as described in the May 2025 Mindszenty Report. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see IVF as a policy solution to this problem or to push governmental support of the $25 billion global IVF industry. IVF is very expensive and unpleasant, has a low success rate, and poses significant health risks for both the mother and the offspring.15 There are obvious ethical problems with destroying embryos, practicing eugenic selection of embryos, experimenting on embryos, and engineering children who may never know both of their biological parents. IVF is contrary to Catholic teaching.

Enter the Brave New World

Couples can be infertile for various reasons, but both eggs and sperm decline in quality with age. Therefore, IVF is less effective for older would-be parents. Changing the culture to encourage more marriage and childbearing for women in their 20s would be a preferable way to boost birth rates. And we certainly do not want the government to promote IVF, or related assisted reproductive technologies such as purchased eggs and surrogate motherhood, for gay couples or single parents.16

We are at a point in embryo science that allows for the culling of the population. Whether it is called positive or negative eugenics, it is all eugenics in the end. Although it is possible to do IVF without destroying embryos, IVF in the U.S. commonly entails the rejection and elimination of at least several embryonic human beings.17 Designer babies culled from a herd of subsequently discarded sibling embryos may not appreciate their commoditized origins.

Essential to any discussion of transhumanism or IVF is the importance of understanding God and the mystery of our creation and His design for the world. Removal of God from the human equation tends to breed nihilism and hopelessness.18 Transhumanism and Christianity present divergent value systems. For the transhumanist, the highest virtue is intelligence and the highest goal is to defeat death. Christians believe that the greatest ideal is love—love of others, including one’s own children, in their flawed humanity, and love of God. Transhumanism is a new religion, which should not replace God.

This article is published by the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation in St Louis, Missouri, USA. The original article is available from the foundation’s website:  www.mindszenty.org. The Mindszenty Report is not copyrighted, and readers are invited to forward copies to their local bishops, priests and pastors.

  1. Alexander Thomas, “Transhumanism: Billionaires Want to Use Tech to Tech to
    Enhance Our Abilities,” The Conversation, January 16, 2024. ↩︎
  2. Mark Legg, “What Does the Bible Say About Transhumanism?” Denison Forum, June
    20, 2023. ↩︎
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/opinion/tech-billionaires-psychedelics.html. ↩︎
  4. https://www.marijuanamoment.net/va-secretary-tells-trump-about-psychedelicspotential-to-combat-military-veteran-suicide-crisis-at-cabinet-meeting/;
    https://www.11alive.com/article/news/politics/va-sec-doug-collins-says-agency-willlook-at-psychedelic-other-alternative-treatments/85-d90e6b9d-a705-4f09-aeda5b839879bd03 ↩︎
  5. Alex Janin, “The Longevity Clinic Will See You Now—for $100,000,” Wall Street
    Journal, July 10, 2023; Alex Janin, “Want Better Health and Status? For
    $250,000, Longevity Clinics Promise Both,” Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2025. ↩︎
  6. https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/health-andbiotech/immortality-an-ancient-fantasy-revived-by-transhumanism/. ↩︎
  7. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-12-19/see-inside-alcor-lifeextension-s-cryogenics-facility-in-arizona. ↩︎
  8. Ibid. ↩︎
  9. This discussion of IVF and the current state of embryo research draws heavily from
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/opinion/human-embryoexperiments-timeline.html; and https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-oflife/2025/04/24/new-york-times-we-owe-clustercells/?srsltid=AfmBOoqAkPMgoM175_FK6K6D6kVjrK7t7T9ulxqgShugqUGsZsPK07gt. ↩︎
  10. Anna Louie Sussman, “Should Human Life be Optimized?”
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/01/opinion/ivf-gene-selectionfertility.html. ↩︎
  11. https://answersingenesis.org/sanctity-of-life/2025/04/24/new-york-times-we-oweclustercells/?srsltid=AfmBOoqAkPMgoM175_FK6K6D6kVjrK7t7T9ulxqgShugqUGsZsPK07gtd. ↩︎
  12. Ibid. ↩︎
  13. Ibid. ↩︎
  14. https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/FS268.pdf. See also n. 17. ↩︎
  15. See “A Comprehensive Report on the Risks of Assisted Reproductive Technology” by
    Katie Fell for the Center of Bioethics and Culture Network, https://cbcnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Comprehensive-Paper-on-ART-Final.pdf. ↩︎
  16. For an in-depth discussion of surrogate motherhood and purchased eggs, see
    Mindszenty Report, December 2019. ↩︎
  17. Kayla Bartsch, “Eugenics Gets a Modern Facelift, with Investment from Peter Thiel,”
    National Review, April 4, 2025. See also
    https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/12/96647/. ↩︎
  18. https://firstthings.com/the-impossibility-of-christian-transhumanism/. ↩︎