PulsePoint – 22nd August 2024

Intro: Welcome to PulsePoint – the LATEST media stories AND research related to family and society that YOU need to know. It’s time to cut through the spin and uncover the REAL issues.

1. According to statistics just released, the total fertility rate for year ended June 2024 was 1.53 births per woman, down from 1.60 at the same time last year – the lowest on record. New Zealand’s fertility rate continues to be at an all-time low, well below the population replacement level of 2.1 required.

Interestingly, the fertility rate for Maori is holding stronger at 1.95 – but it is the first time it has dipped under the 2.0-mark.

Lindsay Mitchell, author of Family First’s report “Families: Ever Fewer or No Children, How Worried Should We Be?“ says “Without population replacement or growth, economies decline. A nation’s strength lies in its young: their energy, innovation, risk-taking and entrepreneurship.”

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, published in the Lancet in 2020, predict that the worldwide fertility rate will fall below 1.7 by 2100. 183 out of 195 countries are predicted to have a fertility rate below the replacement level.

With a declining fertility rate comes a (Video of migration) reliance on migration to provide for an aging population – but all countries around the world will be competing for that migration, because most countries are facing the same dilemma.

We need a younger population to provide a workforce for economic growth. An aging population will also place a burden on the economy through increasing health care, aged care, and other fiscal costs such as the government pension.

Whether the solution is pro-family pro-children’s policies in the form of financial incentives for families including tax breaks & home ownership support, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, employment rights, or simply migration through open borders, New Zealand needs to be having this discussion – urgently.

It’s time to make babies great again.

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2. Fabrizio “Valentina” Petrillo, a 50 year-old-man who “transitioned” to appear as a woman beginningin 2019, is competing at the Paralympics as a sprinter against women in the T12 category for athletes with visual impairment.

Petrillo, who won 11 national titles as a male between 2015 and 2018, he said that he ‘deserves this selection’.

His achievement drew widespread criticism with Canada’s former Olympic head coach, Peter Eriksen, branding it ‘shocking’.

However, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) president, Andrew Parsons, said that he’s ‘prepared for the criticism’ he’s likely to face for clearing Petrillo to compete.

Attorney Fausta Quilleri, who also runs in the over-35s “Master” category of the Italian Paralympics, said “[His] physical superiority is so evident as to make competition unfair,” She noted that the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) sole focus on testosterone “makes no sense” when physique also affects athletic performance.

3. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) has become the first major medical association to challenge the consensus of US medical groups over “gender-affirming care” for minors.

The major medical association (Tweet Photo) represents over 11,000 members and over 90% of the field in Canada and the US has not endorsed any organisation’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.

The organisation acknowledges there is considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy of the use of chest and genital surgical interventions, with existing evidence viewed as low certainty.

The Cass Review in the U.K. and other international evaluations have highlighted concerns about the quality of evidence underpinning gender-affirming care, leading (headlines)several European countries to (headlines)impose restrictions or prioritise psychotherapy over (headlines)medical interventions for minors.

This pushback from ASPS will hopefully encourage other medical professionals to take a more critical role in evaluating the evidence and implications of performing such surgeries.

4. Free abortions are being offered to women who attend the (Video) Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago. Planned Parenthood is deploying an abortion bus to the Democratic presidential campaign event.

(Twitter) A local branch of the abortion giant is offering drug-induced abortions aboard its bus. It’s also handing out so-called emergency contraception.

(Video) Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris has been making abortion one of her major selling points and her insidious relationship with Planned Parenthood is also well documented.

Not only is Harris aggressively pro-abortion, but when asked to provide a cut off week to abort a baby in a previous interview, she refused to give a direct answer.

It is safe to say that the unborn child will not be voting for Kamala Harris.

5. The Church of Englandis apparently dropping the word “church” in favour of “relevant and modern-sounding” descriptions such as “community”

The Centre for Church Planting Theology and Research looked at the language used by 11 dioceses to describe new churches. The report found that while 900 new churches had been started by the dioceses in the past decade, none had used the phrase “church plant” as the primary way to describe the project.

The report’s author found that six of the 11 dioceses used the language of “worship” in their main descriptor of new church projects, two used “congregation”, and seven used “community”.

A spokesman for the Church of England told The Telegraph newspaper that one reason why the word “church” appears less often in description of “new worshipping communities” is that these forms of worship can exist outside of traditional bricks-and- mortar churches.

The irony of this approach is that the more relevant and inoffensive to the world the church seeks to be, the more irrelevant they will become, as they become more and more indistinguishable from the world they are trying to reach.

6. An Australian midwife has spoken publicly for the first time about her experiences of babies being born alive following abortions and, in some cases, 𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐝𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐠𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞.

 Louise Adsett, a clinical midwife who has worked in maternity and birthing units for about 14 years, told a parliamentary hearing in Queensland that some babies born alive after an abortion were never held by their parents but instead placed in witches’ hats, taken out of the room and left to die….

 In an emotional statement to the hearing, Ms Adsett said some midwives were distressed because they were “unable to provide any medical care for the baby” but were “limited to providing comfort care only, which is merely wrapping and holding the baby”.

𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 – 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐚. 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐍𝐙. 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠. Documentation from the Canterbury District Health board in 2020 gives the same exact advice to medical staff.

 During the passing of the extreme abortion law in NZ in 2020, an amendment of then-National MP Simon O’Connor (now working for an unapologetically pro-life organisation Family first) clarified that a qualified health practitioner who performed an abortion that results in the birth of a child after an attempted abortion has a duty to provide the child with appropriate medical care and treatment, no different than the duty owed to provide medical care and treatment to any other child born.

While 36 𝑵𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑴𝑷𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 1 𝑳𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝑴𝑷 𝒗𝒐𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝑭𝑶𝑹 𝒊𝒕, 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑮𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒏 MPs, 𝑵𝒁 𝑭𝒊𝒓𝒔𝒕, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝑴𝑷 𝒗𝒐𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝑨𝑮𝑨𝑰𝑵𝑺𝑻 𝒊𝒕.

It was a shameful chapter in NZ’s history – but to anyone who thinks that born alive abortions do not occur, that myth has been destroyed.

And THAT’S the latest episode of PulsePoint. You can check out ALL these stories AND MORE on our website familyfirst.nz. We’ll keep watching the news… so that you don’t have to.

See you next time.