Working mums have the unhealthiest children, research finds

The analysis showed that mothers who worked full-time had the unhealthiest children, followed by those who worked part-time.

London Times | Sep 29, 2009

by Sam Lister

Children brought up by mothers who work are less healthy and more likely to have poor dietary habits and a more sedentary lifestyle, research suggests.

Mothers in full-time work, including those who work flexible hours, were found to have children who eat too few portions of fruit and vegetables, watch more television and consume more fizzy drinks than the children of mothers who stay at home.

The research, published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, involved more than 12,000 British schoolchildren born between 2000 and 2002 who are part of the Millennium Cohort Study. Trends being explored include the rise in childhood obesity and policies that have encouraged women to return to work.

Researchers questioned mothers about the hours they worked and their children’s diet, exercise and activity levels when the youngsters were aged 5. They also asked how long their childdren spent in front of a TV or computer. About 30 per cent (4,030) of the mothers had not worked since giving birth but the rest (8,546) were employed. On average they worked 21 hours per week and for 45 months.

Catherine Law, of the Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Institute of Child Health, University College London, told The Times the analysis showed that mothers who worked full-time had the unhealthiest children, followed by those who worked part-time.

Making use of flexible working arrangements while in full-time employment did not appear to improve a child’s habits, she added. “We have seen the rising rates of childhood obesity and the rise in initiatives to get women back to work, and that is what this research explores,” Professor Law said.

The latest research backs findings from 2007 in the Millennium Cohort Study suggesting a possible link between parental working habits and child health — suggesting that children at the age of 3 were more likely to be overweight if their mothers worked. Both studies took into account factors that might influence the results, such as socioeconomic background, single-parent families and household income.

Researchers on the latest paper concluded that with approximately 60 per cent of British women with a child aged 5 or younger in employment, more support was needed. “For many families the only parent or both parents are working. This may limit parents’ capacity to provide their children with healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity,” they said. “Policies and programmes are needed to help support parents.” and create a health-promoting environment.”

Professor Law said that while the work did not prove a causative link between maternal work and child health, it showed a definitive association which needed to be considered by policymakers.

She said that factors requiring further investigation included the quality of childcare, such as agency standards and care provided by grandparents or other relatives.

Other areas for investigation included whether the link was associated with children’s habits while the mother was at work, or whether it might be a consequence of the time pressures on parents’ when back in the home, she added.

She said: “Many working mums will recognise the challenges [identified in the study]. Every mother wants to ensure the best for their children and going to work may help that.

“This is not a single factor, but it does appear to contribute. What policymakers need to understand is that what might be a solution to some issues may create others. There are upsides and downsides.”

Lucy Lloyd, of the Family and Parenting Institute, said the findings should not be used to undermine working mothers, but as a basis for more work on helping them. She said that a better system of health visitors, who could set advice on dietary and lifestyle habits, was in need of funding: “What they [children] are given outside the home will set the standard for what they will expect at other times.”

Abortion Addict Confesses 15 Procedures in 16 Years

Repeat Abortions Baffle Experts, as Author Irene Vilar Explores Her ‘Impossible Motherhood’

ABC | Sep 21, 2009

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

Irene Vilar worries that her self-described “abortion addiction” will be misunderstood, twisted by the pro-life movement to deny women the right to choose.

Her book, “Impossible Motherhood,” which will be released by Other Press on Oct. 6, chronicles her own dark choices: 15 abortions in 16 years, much of it as a married woman.

As press on the book has begun to leak out, Vilar — a literary agent and editor — says she has already sensed “an inkling of hatred.”

Vilar has scheduled only closed-door interviews and will not do a book tour. At the urging of her husband, they have made sure all public property records do not reflect her name, so she cannot be targeted at their home.

“I am worried about my safety and the hate mail,” she told ABCNews.com in a telephone interview as her home-schooled children were at work on a painting project.

“No book like this has ever been written,” she told ABCNews.com. “I just imagine the ‘baby killer’ and I could be a poster child for that kind of fundamentalism. And there are my little kids in all of that.”

Today, at 40, the Latina author has two young children, but her troubled past continues to haunt her well into motherhood.

She grew up in the shadow of her notorious grandmother Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron, who stormed the Capitol steps with a gun in 1954. Lebron served 25 years in jail for the crime until receiving a pardon from President Carter in 1979.

Her mother committed suicide by throwing herself from a moving car when Vilar was 8 and two of her brothers were heroin addicts.

Mass Sterilization in Puerto Rico

Vilar’s story is set against the backdrop of the American-led mass sterilization program in her native Puerto Rico from 1955 to 1969, a fitting symbol for her struggle with her own reproduction.

By 1974, 37 percent of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been permanently sterilized in that experiment.

“Women tend to repeat behaviors,” Vilar said of herself. Her mother’s forced hysterectomy without hormone treatment at the age of 33, led to depression and a Valium addition.

Vilar attended boarding school in New Hampshire and was just 15 when she left for Syracuse University, where she fell in love and later married her first husband, a tyrannical 50-year-old professor.

With a predilection for young women, he bragged that his relationships had never lasted more than five years and that having children killed sexual desire.

She says their emotionally dependent relationship was riddled with shame, self-mutilation and several suicide attempts.

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Margaret Sanger: Birth Control Pioneer and Feminist-Fascist

mensnewsdaily.com | Aug 31, 2009

By Carey Roberts

Shell-shocked liberals have taken to dubbing conservatives as “Ku Klux Klan folks” and “neo-fascists” toting swastikas to town hall meetings. But ironically, turns out it’s liberals who have engaged in a century-long pas de deux with fascistic ideology.

Take Margaret Sanger – public health nurse, rabid feminist, and avowed socialist. Doing her rounds in New York City’s immigrant ghettos, she became enamored of the biological and political possibilities of birth control. A prolific writer, she churned out numerous books and articles. In Women and the New Race, Sanger ominously expounded: “no Socialist republic can operate successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree.”

Margaret Sanger regarded members of both sexes with a decidedly misanthropic disdain. Of men she wrote, “In all of the animal species below the human, motherhood has a clearly discernible superiority over fatherhood….natural law makes the female the expression and the conveyor of racial efficiency.”

Members of the female sex were equally worthy of contempt: “woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.”

In 1921 Sanger established the American Birth Control League, which later assumed the sanitized moniker Planned Parenthood. The League’s co-founder was the anti-Semite Lothrop Stoddard, who would later aver the “Jew problem [is] already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich.”

Two years later Sanger launched her notorious Birth Control Review. The journal would publish propaganda pieces like “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” by Ernst Rudin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. The American counterpart to the Nazi group was the American Eugenics Society, of which Sanger was a prominent member.

In 1939 Sanger created the Negro Project with the avowed purpose of reining in the unchecked growth of the Black population. But her true intentions went beyond mere population control: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she cautioned a friend.

At that time Blacks numbered 12 million persons, representing about one-tenth of the U.S. total.

The acme of Sanger’s career came in 1932 when she unveiled her Plan for Peace. The fascistic manifesto urged the U.S. Congress to “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of populations whose progeny is tainted” and to “give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.” Sanger’s wide-ranging hit-list included “morons, mental defectives, epileptics,…illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, [and] dope-fiends.”

Sanger admitted these persons constituted an “enormous part of our population,” upwards of 20 million persons. That represented about 15% of the American population.

A mere year after Sanger expounded on her peace plan, Adolf Hitler signed the infamous Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. During the ensuing years, the Nazi regime sterilized an estimated 400,000 persons deemed to be racially, physically, or mentally unfit.

At the Nuremberg Trials, Allied prosecutors recited the horrifying litany of Nazi crimes, including the practice of compulsory sterilization. Without mentioning Sanger by name, the German Socialists defended their harsh population control measures by explaining it was the United States from whom they had taken inspiration.

Over the years, Margaret Sanger used her bully pulpit to call for the segregation or sterilization of 15% of the U.S. population, and the extermination of another tenth of the citizenry. Despite those fascistic designs, Margaret Sanger still occupies a revered position in the pantheon of American liberalism.

Every year Planned Parenthood bequeaths its Margaret Sanger Award to recognize “outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.” Past recipients include such liberal luminaries as Bella Abzug, Phil Donahue, and Jane Fonda.

Any guesses who carried home the award in 2009? Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

ADHD treatment causes young boys to develop female breasts

3news.co.nz | May 26, 2009

In Janssen's own clinical trials, 43 children developed the abnormal breasts

A drug used to treat ADHD children is causing concern in the United States.

It is called Risperdal and it is supposed to be used primarily for adults with sever psychological problems.

But last year it was prescribed more than 6.5 million times.

The side effects include young males developing female sex organs.

Nineteen-year-old John was just seven when he began taking Risperdal for ADD.

Even though the FDA approved the drug only for adult patients who were psychotic, John’s doctor and others widely prescribed it to kids for less severe behaviour problems.

Once taking Risperdal, John’s mum says he became aggressive, sleepy, and developed bowel problems. But the biggest shock came when he was 14 and started developing women’s breasts.

“He asked me if he was a girl,” she says.

It turns out Risperdal can increase production of a hormone called prolactin, which stimulates breast growth. It is called gynecomastia – and it is irreversible.

Risperdal and other so-called “atypical anti-psychotics” have exploded in use.

Hundreds of thousands of kids have been prescribed Risperdal in the 14 years it has been on sale – long before the FDA approved it for very limited pediatric use in 2006.

John and most of the other children were not psychotic at all, but were given Risperdal for behaviour disorders including autism and ADD.

Attorney Stephen Sheller is suing Janssen, which makes Risperdal. He claims Janssen marketed Risperdal for unapproved uses in children, downplayed serious risks like diabetes and seizures.

Janssen would not agree to an interview but told us the breast growth risk is “clearly stated in the FDA-approved” labelling, and “we only promote our products for their FDA-approved indications.”

Nobody knows how often it happens. But in Janssen’s own clinical trials with fewer than 2,000 children (1,885), 43 developed the abnormal breasts.

Mr Sheller represents John and nine other boys – one of whom was only four when he developed a breast on one side and began producing milk.

The treatment for the unbridled breast growth is as unthinkable as the disorder: painful removal of the breasts.
Eventually, the boys can appear normal again.

The family’s lawsuit is still in court.

But John’s mother says surgery did not fix all of the problems from the medicine.

When asked if John still thinks he’s a girl his mother wells up and cries before answering, “yes.”

As for Risperdal – it’s still on the market.  And families say putting even more children at risk.

Women to delay motherhood into their 40s and beyond through ovary storage

Women will soon be able to delay motherhood into their 40s and beyond by having one of their ovaries removed and stored, the doctor behind the world’s first whole ovary transplant has said.

“They do not want to commit to a relationship until they are sure it is the right one, they want to get the degree, save a little money and buy the nice flat. It is the modern way.”

Telegraph | Nov 11, 2008

By Rebecca Smith

Dr Sherman Silber, performed the transplant between two twins last year and the recipient, who cannot be named, is due to give birth in London today.

The operation is the first where the whole organ has been transplanted from one person to another.

Previously slivers of ovarian tissue have been removed and re-implanted and have successfully begun to produce eggs resulting in pregnancies and births.

The technique will offer hope to women undergoing treatment for cancer which can leave them infertile by allowing them to store an ovary before having cancer treatment and then re-implanting it once they have the all clear.

But the ‘overwhelming usage’ will be women who want to preserve their fertility for the future and it delay the menopause, Dr Silber said.

“We are in the midst of an infertility epidemic which has become an enormous public problem.

“The reason is that women have opportunities they didn’t have before, they do not want to commit to a relationship until they are sure it is the right one, they want to get the degree, save a little money and buy the nice flat.

“It is the modern way, not just in England or the USA, everywhere women are putting off child-bearing.”

He said women could have one ovary removed and frozen in their 20s for use in the future.

Dr Silber said: “They then have a young ovary that can be transplanted back at any time and extend fertility.”

Dr Silber carried out the ovarian transplant in St Louis, Missouri, last year. Previous attempts in India and China have failed.

The donor twin, who lives in Vancouver in Canada, donated her ovary to her sister, who lives in London with her husband, who had gone through an early menopause which had left her with severe osteoporosis, due to the lack of hormones made by the ovaries.

She wanted a long-term solution rather than use hormone replacement therapy and insisted on the ‘daring procedure’, Dr Silber said.

Just a few months after the surgery, she fell pregnant.

She will have to take immuno-surpressant drugs for the rest of her life although this is not thought to harm the developing baby as experience with 2,000 births from women who have had kidney transplants has demonstrated.

The twins are identical so the suppression drugs can be kept to a minimum and also the ovary is not rejected as readily as some other organs.

The case has proven the delicate technique works and in four non-identical twins will go through the surgery next year, Dr Silber said.

But the ‘critical pay-off’, he said, was the fact that women would now be able to preserve their fertility using this method. He said it was ’so much nicer and more convenient’ than using an egg donor in order to conceive and ethically there is no problem.

Magazine Promotes Sterilization For Women In Their 20’s

‘Young, Single and Sterilized’ article advertises for birth control clinic founded by Nazi eugenicist Marie Stopes

Prison Planet | Sep 23, 2008

by Paul Joseph Watson

A popular women’s magazine in the UK recently featured an article entitled, Young, Single and Sterilized, in which women in their 20’s discussed why they had undergone an operation to prevent them from ever having children. The article is little more than PR for a “women’s charity” called Marie Stopes International, an organization that carries out abortions and sterilizations and was founded by a Nazi eugenicist who advocated compulsory sterilization of non-whites and “those of bad character”.

The story appears in a weekly magazine called Love It (click for PDF enlargement). One of the women featured in the article, Chloe, explains why she decided to have herself sterilized at the age of just 20.

“By the time I was 18, I knew I was never going to change. I couldn’t imagine letting something take over my body and then my whole life.”

“I couldn’t even look at a baby without feeling uncomfortable.”

Following the sterilization procedure, Chloe celebrates the fact that “I’ve got a lifetime of going out ahead of me now,” presumably meaning going out, getting mindlessly drunk and having sex with random strangers, as is British culture, while not having to worry about the risk of pregnancy or the responsibility of looking after a child.

Despite admitting that she has not told any of her family and not even her own mother about the sterilization, the article ends with Chloe boldly stating that it was, “the most sensible adult decision I’ll ever make.”

Another ’success story’ as the article skews it is Charlie McCann, who was sterilized on her 30th birthday and, we read, “is happy with her choice, insisting the men in her life have to adjust.” Her then boyfriend decided to adjust by ending the relationship because he couldn’t bear never having children.

Ironically, another woman speaks about how she first became interested in the idea of being sterilized after reading about the subject in a women’s magazine.

Jacquelyn Arnold tells of how she felt “irritation” at the sight of children playing in a garden and decided to go ahead with the operation, which is described in routine and straightforward terms. Arnold says she has no regrets and has ‘taken control of her life’.

Sterilization is lauded as an “excellent method of birth control” by Dr. Patricia Lohr of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

The article includes an advertisement that encourages women to seek “more information about sterilization” by contacting Marie Stopes International. We read that, “Over the past year, a quarter of the women who booked a sterilisation consultation with women’s charity Marie Stopes were aged 30 or under.”

Marie Stopes was a feminist who opened the first birth control clinic in Britain in 1921 as well as being Nazi sympathizer and a eugenicist who advocated that non-whites and the poor be sterilized.

Stopes, a racist and an anti-Semite, campaigned for selective breeding to achieve racial purity, a passion she shared with Adolf Hitler in adoring letters and poems that she sent the leader of the Third Reich.

Stopes also attended the Nazi congress on population science in Berlin in 1935, while calling for the “compulsory sterilization of the diseased, drunkards, or simply those of bad character.” Stopes acted on her appalling theories by concentrating her abortion clinics in poor areas so as to reduce the birth rate of the lower classes.

Stopes left most of her estate to the Eugenics Society, an organization that shared her passion for racial purity and still exists today under the new name The Galton Institute. The society has included members such as Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the evolutionist), Julian Huxley and Margaret Sanger.

Ominously, The Galton Institute website promotes its support and funding initiative for “the practical delivery of family planning facilities, especially in developing countries.” In other words, the same organization that once advocated sterilizing black people to achieve racial purity in the same vein as the Nazis is now bankrolling abortions of black babies in the third world.

While the issue of abortion is an entirely different argument, most would agree that no matter how extreme it sounds, a woman has the right to sterilize herself if she so chooses, just as a man has the right to a vasectomy.

But when a magazine aimed primarily at young women all but encourages girls as young as 20 to have their fallopian tubes tied in order to prevent the “irritation” of children entering their lives and then advertises an organization founded by a Nazi eugenicist that can perform the operation, something has to be amiss.

Even more shocking than this is the fact that the majority of people in the UK routinely express their support for society’s “undesirables” to be forcibly sterilized by the state, harking back to a time when such a thing was commonplace right up to the 1970’s in some areas of America and Europe.

As we highlighted earlier this month, respondents to a Daily Mail article about Royal Mail honoring Marie Stopes by using her image on a commemorative stamp were not disgusted at Royal Mail for paying homage to a racist Nazi eugenicist, but were merely keen to express their full agreement that those deemed not to be of pure genetic stock or of the approved character should be forcibly sterilized and prevented from having children.

“A lot of people should be sterilized, IMO. It’s still true today,” wrote one.

“Just imagine what a stable, well-ordered society we’d have if compulsory sterilisation had been adopted years ago for the socially undesirable,” states another respondent, calling for a “satellite-carried sterilisation ray” to be installed in space to zap the undesirables.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer slaying church attendance among women

The old-fashioned attitudes and hierarchies of the Church of England are causing a steep decline in the number of female worshippers, according to an academic study.

Young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.

Telegraph | Aug 22, 2008

By Martin Beckford

The report claims more than 50,000 women a year have deserted their congregations over the past two decades because they feel the church is not relevant to their lives.

It says that instead young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.

The study comes amid ongoing controversy over the role of women in the Church of England. Last month its governing body voted to allow women to become bishops for the first time, having admitted them to the priesthood in 1994, but traditionalist bishops have warned that hundreds of clergy and parishes will leave if the move goes ahead as planned.

The report’s author, Dr Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby, said: “In short, women are abandoning the church.

“Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularised by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church.

“Women’s ordination, as priests and now bishops, has dominated debate and headlines – but while looking at women in the pulpit we have taken our eyes off the pews, where a shift with more consequences for the church’s survival is underway.”

Her research, published in a new book called Women and Religion in the West, cites an English Church Census which found more than a million women worshippers have left the Church of England since 1989.

Over the past decade, it claims, women have been leaving churches at twice the rate of men.

In addition, the census is said to show that teenage boys now outnumber girls in the pews for the first time.

Dr Aune says the church must adapt to the needs of modern women if it is to stop them leaving in their droves.

She believes many women have been put off going to church in recent years because of the influence of feminism, which challenged the traditional Christian view of women’s roles and raised their aspirations.

Her report claims they feel forced out of the church because of its “silence” about sexual desire and activity, and because of its hostility to single-parent families and unmarried couples which are now a reality for many women.

But it also says changes in women’s working lives, with many more now pursuing careers as well as raising children, mean they have less time to attend church.

Dr Aune believes churches must now introduce services and activities that fit in better with modern’s women’s schedules, such as Saturday morning breakfast clubs.

She said: “Gone are the days when the mother was at home during the day and had time to visit the church’s coffee mornings and mother and toddler groups.

“With the pressures women face, churches must adapt to make themselves more accessible.”

Christina Rees, chairman of the pro-women bishop campaign group Watch, said the report highlighted the damaging effect that traditionalist attitudes within the Church of England are having on women.

She added that the introduction of female bishops will lead to a renewed interest in the church among young people and women in particular, despite the opposition to the historic step from Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals who believe scripture and tradition teach that bishops must be male.

Ms Rees told The Daily Telegraph: “What this research reveals is that a lot of people are put off by traditional stances and attitudes. We still have a long way to go before women, particularly young women, feel as included in the church as men do.

“I’m absolutely convinced that when we have women as bishops that it will send out a very clear message that women are as valued as much as men.”

The Church of England declined to comment.

Men aged 18 to 30 on Viagra to keep up with Sex And The City generation

Health experts believe young men are turning to Viagra to keep up with modern women inspired by Sex And The City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker

Daily Mail | Jun 14, 2008

By  Jo Macfarlane

It used to be that men had the upper hand when it came to confidence in the bedroom.

But health experts say ever-younger men are increasingly turning to Viagra in a bid to keep up with modern women inspired by the strong female characters in films such as Sex And The City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

Relationship therapists are also seeing a rise in the number of men in their 30s asking about the impotence drug, traditionally prescribed to those more than two decades older.

Experts believe the men feel increasingly emasculated by today’s women.

They claim that women, following the example of television and film characters, are more vocal about their desires and demand a higher level of stamina and imagination in the bedroom.

The pressure is causing an increasing number of men to experience ‘performance anxiety’ and, in extreme cases, is leading to diagnoses of erectile dysfunction, requiring specialist treatment. Dr John Tomlinson, a former GP and trustee of the Sexual Dysfunction Association, said he was hearing from an ‘ enormous’ number of 18- to 40-year-olds worried about sexual problems.

He suggested advertising – such as David Beckham’s Armani underwear campaign – glamorises the well-toned male body, which men find daunting because they assume it is what women expect.

He said: ‘Men may feel emasculated by modern women and feminism has taken its toll. But most of the problems are psychological. I’m sure many of these men are fuelling the counterfeit drugs industry by buying their Viagra online, so the real picture is likely to be bigger than GPs are reporting.’

There are no official figures for the number of young men taking Viagra because it is not routinely recorded by doctors. Many also opt to seek treatment privately. BUPA said it could not provide data on consultations. However, health experts agreed the average age for men seeking the drug is falling.

Dr John Dean, a specialist in sexual medicine, said when Viagra was introduced ten years ago, it would have been unusual to treat men in their 30s. Now, however, it is common, he said.

Peter Baker, of the Men’s Health Forum website, said it is ‘well-known’ among health professionals that younger men are turning to Viagra.

Relationship experts said the prevalence of pornography in society also left men with unrealistic expectations.

Sex therapist Denise Knowles, of counselling service Relate, said: ‘Pornography affects how men see themselves and how they think women will see them. Further pressure comes from the myth that men should know what to do in the bedroom and that women are difficult to satisfy.’

Nearly 6.5 million tablets of Viagra – launched by drugs firm Pfizer in 1998 – were issued in England in 2007, costing the NHS £35million. Research in 2004 found that taking the drug recreationally could affect fertility.

Women given right to have children without fathers

Single women and lesbian couples won landmark parental rights last night as MPs voted to remove the requirement that fertility clinics consider a child’s need for a father.

Times Online | May 20, 2008

By Mark Henderson, Francis Elliott, Ruth Gledhill and Sam Coates

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will replace the rule with a “need for supportive parenting” after opponents were defeated in two votes by unexpectedly wide margins.

The Government had been prepared for defeat but won the free votes by majorities of 75 and 68. The decisions mean that the legislation will grant the most significant extension to homosexual family rights since gay adoption was sanctioned.

It will stop fertility clinics turning away lesbians and single women because their children will not have a father or male role model. While the current law does not block such therapy, it is sometimes used to justify refusals.

In another landmark decision last night, MPs rejected moves to prevent women having abortions up to 24 weeks into pregnancy. In the first vote on the issue in 18 years, an attempt to reduce the limit to 22 weeks was rejected by 71 votes. An attempt to reduce the limit to 20 weeks was defeated by a majority of 142.

The defeat came despite a high-profile cross-party campaign and the decision by David Cameron, the Conservative leader, to back a reduction in the limit to 20 weeks. The Prime Minister voted to retain the existing limit.

The Government has now won all four of the measures on which it agreed to grant Labour MPs a free vote. Moves to allow the creation of hybrid embryos for medical research, and “saviour siblings” screened as suitable tissue donors for sick children, were passed by large majorities on Monday.

MPs who backed the fatherhood amendments said the traditional family would be undermined. Iain Duncan Smith, who proposed enshrining the importance of a father and mother, said that the new law would amount to telling couples that “fathers are not important, or are less important than mothers”.

The former Tory leader said there was overwhelming evidence that children without fathers were more likely to have problems at school and with drink and drugs. He also questioned whether the existing law led to genuine discrimination, as many IVF clinics already treated lesbians and single women.

His criticisms were backed by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’ Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, in an interview with The Times. “I think it strange that the Government should want to take away not just the need for a father but the right for a father,” he said.

The law will now be brought into line with the Human Rights Act. The Bill will also allow both partners to be recognised as parents when lesbian couples conceive with donated sperm, or gay men use surrogacy. At present, only the natural mother or father is automatically considered to be a parent when gay couples have fertility treatment.

A Times/Populus poll last month found that 40 per cent of people were against the Government’s proposals and 32 per cent in favour. It also revealed a generational divide: while over-55s were strongly opposed, 18 to 34-year-olds were strongly in favour of reform.

6-Year Old Boy Accused of Sexual Harassment

Kindergarten student’s father fears his son will be stereotyped as a “pervert”

WSPA | Apr 4, 2008

A six-year old boy is accused of sexually harassing a teacher in Greer. The kindergarten student is now facing possible discipline.

Malory Pinkney, Sr. says his son came home Tuesday in tears from Skyland Elementary. His father is a minister and says his child has been accused of sexual harassment by one of the teachers there.

Pinkney says the boy brought home a discipline referral that says the child told his teacher that one of his classmates liked looking at her behind.

Pinkney doesn’t deny the allegation, but says his son is going to be labeled as a result of this situation.

“Here is my son is six years old,” says Malory Pinkney, Sr. “Now he’s getting ready to have something put on his record that’s going to follow him for the rest of his life. So whoever looks at his record, they have already stereotyped him as being some kind of little pervert or something like that. And I have to refuse that.”

The Greenville County School District responded with a written statement saying, “anytime you have a media account, you’re only going to have one side, one viewpoint. Since we can’t give the details, we can assure you the matter was handled appropriately at the school level.”

We did give the district a chance to tell their side in detail, but they declined. The district said that since it was a student discipline matter, they could not make any further comment.