Chapter 20

 

A major charitable activity suggestion concerning reducing abortions

 

This would be like conditions in Rome where saving discarded babies

was a signature Christian activity

 

 

"Charity never faileth"

Except, in our case, it has already failed, or we have failed it.

 

 

The first principle of the practical Christian gospel is active charity.  Unfortunately, today the first operating principle of the LDS Church is to require all members to pay all religious contributions to the central church where it is spent on everything BUT charity. The limited available reports indicate that less than 1% of the tithing money received centrally goes to charity. The central offices contain nearly ALL our welfare cases, so to speak. That kind of behavior will never convince anyone that we actually believe in and practice serious charity, raising the question as to whether we actually believe in the tenets of Christianity.

 

The text at 1 Corinthians 13 is probably the most forceful argument for the importance of charity, and it appears that this kind of charity was indeed practiced by the Saints who lived during the life of Christ and for at least 300 years afterwards.

 

1 Corinthians 13

Paul discusses the high status of charity—Charity, a pure love, excels and exceeds almost all else.

1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

 

So, with this theoretical understanding of the importance of charity, what would an appropriate latter-day charitable works program look like? Perhaps it could begin with a basic, efficient, charity-based social insurance system that would gradually replace all the others in the world, at least for members of the church. It might then set the goal of going on to administer an annual budget of about $200 billion for active charity projects designed to improve many aspects of earth life.

 

Hopefully, we would be at least 10 times more efficient and effective than anyone else in administering charity.  We could replace Catholic Relief Services and become many times larger and more influential than they ever were. It is not clear today why the LDS Church has any association with the Catholic Relief Services, since we should be perfectly able to do our own charitable works, if we so chose.

 

Project scale

To get some rough idea of how big an effective Christian charity-based project might need to be to completely change the direction of our nation, we might start with the observation that a US presidential campaign costs about $1 billion these days, or maybe up to $2 billion. That is one rough measure of how much influence on the world $1 billion of focused effort can accomplish. By various estimates, the LDS church receives between $15 billion and $50 billion a year and has about $100 billion in reserves, indicating that the church could execute the equivalent of up to 150 presidential campaigns if it chose to.

 

If we said that the colleges and universities of the United States absorbed about $500 billion each year, and the K-12 education systems absorbed another $500 billion, that would give us an idea of what it would take to counteract or replace the corrupt and pagan-philosophy-dominated school systems of our country. The mainstream media probably absorbs about $50 billion a year, and Hollywood might absorb something like $10 billion a year. The Social Security system absorbs about $500 billion a year and the Medicare systems absorbs about $300 billion a year. Directly counteracting or replacing all of these currently powerful and even controlling secular influences on the people of the nation could require as much as $1.8 trillion every year. It is quite possible that it would not take anywhere near that amount to completely overturn all these negative influences, if we were clever in our strategy, but we may not know the answer to that question until we are well into some kind of a countercultural project.

 

The main point here is to think big and not settle for just a small amount of local influence, although that is a good place to start. The state of Utah ought to be a model society on every level, but it is currently far from that. For example, corruption of the court system seems both very deep and very blatant. Getting Utah straightened out would give us some good experience and show other people that it can be done.

 

It seems highly likely that we could assemble many allies in this process of fixing the degenerate culture of the United States, but someone needs to do the research and experimenting and lead out to help people move along new paths with confidence. That should be our first focus.

 

People today are generally so misinformed and confused on so many topics, that perhaps the first priority ought to be to improve the education process on every level. Education should be paramount. Everyone knows that it is better to teach a man to fish so that he can take care of himself for life, rather than just to hand him a fish that will feed him for one day. But the same education philosophy probably goes for many other aspects of life such as teaching a person how to understand politics well and how to vote wisely so that he can help repair a broken society, as opposed to trying to perform some vague "nation-building" projects without the full ideological support of the populace.

 

Administration costs

One way to improve the effectiveness of charities is to lower their administration costs so that more money gets to the desired goal instead of being eaten up by the process. It would be ideal if those who administer charity programs were not themselves receiving a salary, although they might indeed have their travel and communications expenses paid for. Keeping it all volunteer has a way of ensuring that only those who are doing the tasks for the right reasons will stay involved.

 

The participants would be doing their personal charity and "paying their tithing" by doing this work. We should end up with good, high-powered people working for free, or at least without salary.  The church could pay all administrative costs so that 100% of contributions, even from outsiders, go to the intended purposes. For example, the church might expend $200 million, mostly on travel and communications costs, to administer $200 billion. That would give us the remarkable result of having only 0.1% in administrative costs. That nearly perfect administration system should encourage everyone with good intentions to contribute to these projects.

 

Ideally, we would develop plans and projects and test them, and then request large sums of money from like-minded people in and out of the church, based on the results of our pilot programs. This method of administration should bring in enormous amounts of outside money.

 

Macroeconomic effects

Another long-term goal of this project is to change the basic economics of an entire nation. Instead of continuing to support [allowing] the wasteful and constraining tax-and-spend government programs for retirement and medical care, which alone typically capture 15.2% of a person's income, all of those programs should be gradually replaced with a charity-based program which is easily 2 1/2 times more efficient and will probably be five times more efficient when operating correctly. That should have the effect of lowering taxes, since the biggest portion of government spending, perhaps 80%, is related to so-called "entitlement" spending for "charitable" purposes which has non-gospel effects on citizens, encouraging greed, fraud, waste, and abuse, which, together, double or triple the cost to deliver the desired services. This all has a "virtuous spiral" effect so that increasing charity decreases destructive taxes which then allows for more charity, or free will-based services. Getting rid of the vast inefficiencies of an atheist culture allows a gospel-based culture to shine and become "the city on the hill" which every instinctively good person wants to be part of.

 

When the Social Security program was first begun, there was an option to start an alternative system for pensions which could use free-market principles along with a few government contribution parameters. Numerous groups took advantage of that alternative system. The might most widely known cases are the three counties in Texas which is which adopted this alternate system. The participants in that program receive somewhere between 2.4 and five times greater pension benefits from that system. The participants actually own the money and can spend it themselves or give to the children, as opposed to the Social Security system where you only receive the money as long as you're alive. If you live until your 85, you do well. If you die at age 65, you get nothing. This problem disappears with the alternate systems used by these three Texas counties.

 

I think it is interesting that if the church had encouraged such systems in the 1930s, the people who have reaped church members who have retired since then, calculating as 5 million retirees over a 50 year period, would have received $10 trillion more than they did receive through the government pension program. One can do rather large amount of missionary work, or education work, or other good in the world with $10 trillion in extra money, with no extra fees involved. If the church had sponsored such a system when it was possible, the church members as a group would be receiving about $200 billion a year more than they are receiving now from government systems. That extra free money could easily fund most of the projects suggested here. With an administrative system which applies almost 100% of funds to the intended target audience, I believe many other people in the world will want to offer to support our programs.

 

 

The abortion avoidance/rescue/orphanage project

What follows are the segments of a brochure I put together to try to inform people about a much-needed charitable project and to seek their support.

 

Introduction

The basic problem we start out with is that there are about one million abortions each year in the United States, and nearly 60 million worldwide. These are staggering numbers which mean that a population the size of the United States is prevented from coming to earth every five years.

 

We should notice that the number of abortions worldwide is about three times as high per capita as we see today in the United States:

 

Calculation:

For the world:              60 million abortions/6 billion people = 1%.

For the United States: 1 million abortions/300 million people = 0.3%.

 

Presumably that is because the United States is still the most Christian country in the world and still values life more than anyone else. Unfortunately, if the rapidly growing number of pathologically self-centered pagans in United States have their way, the number of abortions each year in the United States will gradually rise to about 3 million. That would put us on a par with the rest of the world. We should at least try to keep this one million number from rising any more in the United States, up to the 3 million level, even if we cannot set up a system to do something about the nearly 60 million potential beneficiaries of our program worldwide. In general, as we reach for a worldwide Zion, we should want to make the earth a more welcoming place for everyone, especially for new babies.

 

State-level antiabortion efforts

It is wonderful to see at least 17 of the 50 states working hard to minimize or end abortions in their states. But, unfortunately, it seems likely that, as a practical matter, most people seeking abortions do so because they do not want to raise that child for some reason, so if states are successful in limiting abortions, the number of unwanted children, potential foster children, could go up substantially. 

 

Also, unfortunately, these same antiabortion states don't seem to be doing much to adapt for or prepare for the likely effects of having success with their antiabortion policies. Perhaps we can say that their Christianity goes far enough to want to avoid abortions, which is a good thing, but not far enough to try to solve all the problems that cause people to want to limit their offspring through abortions.

 

So, it appears that someone needs to provide a large and practical system that will do something about those impending consequences.  If limiting abortions means we simply have more child neglect or abuse or even infanticide, those states will not have actually made much of a positive difference but may make worse the whole process of the birth and rearing of children.  Hopefully, one element of a successful program will be to help mothers and fathers understand the value of life and be willing and able to raise these children themselves.  If we cannot empower those parents, perhaps we can help in another way. We might start with providing a comfortable place where women can go to be cared for themselves until they give birth. If all else fails to get every child into a loving home, the child can be temporarily placed in our orphanage.

 

Some program limitations

One great difficulty is that, at the beginning, we will certainly not be able to care for all the nation's one million rejected babies, so we will have to engage in some kind of selection or triage process to choose the limited number of children we can assist and offer a nice life. Those outcomes may be determined for us in most cases, but there will surely come times when we have to choose.

 

Unfortunately, to create a viable and successful system we will probably have to focus on trying to save those children who are best equipped to live a successful and productive life.  If we only choose the sick and disabled children at first, those very ones who might seem the most pitiful and needful at the beginning, we may not be able to give them the much higher and longer term help they need.  We might find that those extreme resources, needed for one such child, could possibly be used to successfully raise 10 healthy children to maturity.

 

A large and successful general population can absorb and support a small percentage of seriously disabled children, but we would not start out with anything like a large "general population." But, hopefully, the long-term success of the program contemplated here, will include grown children giving back to the process, like alumni of any school, possibly including adopting some of these children themselves. That bootstrapping process should finally allow a large number of "institutionalized" or severely disabled children to be cared for within the system we create. Otherwise there is the risk that we might swamp and overwhelm the system with unbearable failure and sadness that never goes away.

 

We are not quite the same as Sparta, Athens, or the Eskimos. We don't have to decide to discard a child or keep it. We simply have to decide that since we cannot keep all the children, we simply keep the ones who are most likely to be successful, and we continue that way until we can find a way to accept all unwanted children.

 

Long-term considerations -- exponential growth?

There is another interesting issue here. The healthy and strong ones can grow up to have children of their own which they will probably value more than their parents valued them. This means that the number of "lives" that we are helping will grow exponentially, which seems like a good idea. If only the weak and sickly are saved, they are not likely to have any progeny of their own, or be able to take care of them if they did. So, if we are trying to optimize and maximize the number of spirits who can come to the earth and have a good experience, then we would want to start out focusing on those who can be successful.

 

Very long-term considerations -- genetic entropy

For purposes of the proposed project (and for the church more generally), we also have the very long-term problem that the human genome is continuing to deteriorate rapidly over time. After 300+ generations of humans on this earth, the mutation load is becoming critical. The number of chronic, genetics-related diseases goes up at a relatively fixed rate of about 0.7% a year, inexorably. This means that, by now, about 50% of all living people have at least one significant genetic disease. Diabetes and heart disease seem to be widespread current genetic diseases, but the rate of cancer is also going up, especially cancer among children. The occurrence of autism, which is apparently genetically related to childhood cancer, seems to be going up at a frightening rate.

 

At some point in the near future, perhaps in as little as 100 years or about five generations away, children may be born with such an overwhelming set of genetic problems, that they will not be able to survive after birth. This indicates that one of the very long-term goals of this project ought to be to do the medical research necessary to understand and deal with this long-term genetic entropy problem, to the extent that that is even possible. Our society is probably already devoting enough resources to medical research in general that they should be able to take on this research problem and devise the best available solutions. However, in general, the researchers appear to be so blinded by the false theories and speculations of atheistic organic evolution that they will never focus these available resources in the most fruitful places. Changing that pagan philosophy and refocusing those resources ought to be one eventual goal of this project.

 

Christ quickly drew many tens of thousands of people to his new religion, partly because he demonstrated the power to heal people of every imaginable disease, and even to raise them from the dead. At the present moment, it seems quite unrealistic for a modern-day church to offer anything like those levels of healing powers to people. However, if it turns out there IS any way for the church to offer healing powers on that scale, that would be an extremely powerful indication to the world that the church had the truth, and they would naturally flock to it. It might even provide a way to resolve the unpleasant practical and ethical difficulty of not being able to heal and help every child that comes into the world with an imperfect body.

 

 

 

 

 

The Leland Farms Project

 

A vigorous Christian response to the growing pagan practices of abortion and infanticide in our nation

 

 

 

Thanksgiving Point Curiosity Museum -- a sample of possible facilities to brighten children's lives.

 

Short Version

 

Leland Farms

Orphanage, farm, and schools

 

A 600-acre complex with orphanages, farms, schools, and colleges,

plus appropriate housing for residents and visitors.

 

 

Education

The focus will be on education, and there will be facilities to promote education at every level.

 

Demographics:

For planning purposes, assume an eventual population of 16,000 orphans of all ages, although a much smaller size would still be beneficial and feasible

 

Funding:

There is a $0 funding option, a $1 million funding option, and a $3 billion funding option explored.

LDS families care about people and tend to be generous, so that it should be reasonable to expect a final investment or endowment of $3 billion, if the concept proves to be as valuable as it seems.

 

Volunteer staff:

Thousands of families in the Utah Valley area, especially those who are retired, spend large amounts of volunteer time on religion-related projects. Hopefully, these same groups of people would be willing to act as volunteer grandparents or Big Brothers/Big Sisters for the orphanage children.

 

History and philosophy

The early Christians were known for rescuing rejected children who had been "exposed" to the elements by other Roman citizens.  Some of those children died anyway, and were given a Christian burial. In some cases, pagan people took these rejected children and turned them into slaves, but of course the Christians did not turn them into slaves, but kept them as their own children. This added to the ranks of the Christians in Rome, and presumably in other cities as well, since the exposing of unwanted children was a common practice in that society.  We seem to be repeating all the practices and problems of Rome today. https://earlychurchhistory.org/medicine/infanticide-in-the-ancient-world/

 

Expansion:

If another orphanage were to be created in St. George Utah, that could be something similar to what is planned for Utah Valley, with even better weather. There would likewise probably be tens of thousands of honorary grandparents readily available to help out the project.

 

Instructive examples:

1. A Child’s Hope Foundation. “Our Mission: Lifting Orphans from Surviving to Thriving”

www.achildshopefoundation.org/about/ -- Orem Utah headquarters, assists orphanages in Bulgaria, China, Mongolia, Ukraine, Peru, South Korea, Haiti, and Mexico, with more intense support for one orphanage in Haiti and three in Mexico.

 

2. Southern Virginia University is a private liberal arts college located in Buena Vista, Virginia. The school, though not officially affiliated with a particular faith, embraces the values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. www.svu.edu

 

Longer Version

 

Leland Farms

Orphanage, farm, and schools

 

 

A 600-acre complex with orphanages, farms, schools, and colleges,

plus appropriate housing for residents and visitors.

 

 

I prefer the term "boarding school" to such terms as orphanage or group home, since the term "orphanage" has mostly gone out of style these days. The "boarding school" term tends to emphasize the learning part of this process. I fear that the term "orphanage" brings to mind the idea of rows of cribs which act as cages for children who are kept from exploring the world around them.

 

It would be ideal if we had the money immediately available to take a 600-acre block of land and turn it into a kind of planned "theme park," a "curiosity museum" even larger than the one at Thanksgiving point, with the entire Leland Farms project being designed for the maximum learning opportunities of children from age 0 through age 18. To imagine the broadest possible view, the project might begin on the east side with facilities to assist mothers who wish to give up their babies for adoption, with the "output" at the west end of the project, where young people have completed high school or even college work and are ready to take their place as adults in our society, having learned all the most important things about the world we live in, including the importance of religion..

 

The two major factors

1. I believe that Leland is a truly unique place which has been kept from being overrun by the normal population for a purpose which is quite different than just general economic progress. It is hard to imagine anywhere else in the world where you could easily name six or eight bishops or past bishops in the LDS church who own substantial amounts of property which are essentially contiguous. There are many other good people who are have not been LDS bishops but who subscribe to that same philosophy and might be willing to help this project in some way.

 

On the pure economics of the situation, I'm guessing that, except for the land right around the Benjamin  exit, which will probably bring a major premium in land prices, the rest of the land in Leland is likely to be sold at about the same price whether it is sold to a standard commercial developer who is going to put in homes, or whether it is sold to a charitable organization for an extensive orphanage facility. The charitable organization might actually be able to pay the current land owners more, if they wish, and the payment of that money could take place in ways which might be more creative than might be typical for a standard commercial developer.

 

2. The battle of good and evil is accelerating every day in our nation, and one of the areas of greatest conflict concerns the bringing of new babies into the world. The atheistic political left considers that women should have the availability of abortion on demand, paid for by the government. About 1 million babies are aborted each year in the US, and, if the political left has its way, that number will soon rise to 3 million a year which would put the United States at the same rate as the rest of the world. Presumably the fact that Christianity still exists in the United States is what keeps the abortion rate much lower, but that may not continue for long. (Worldwide, there are about 56 million abortions a year as opposed to the United States' 1 million abortions. The US is about 1/20 of the world population, so, theoretically, there should be about 3 million abortions a year in the US.  ~60/20=~3)

 

There is a very active political battle in progress. The godless left wants the Roe V Wade decision to be an eternal rule, while many of the states are putting all the restraints on abortion which they reasonably can, while undergoing constant scrutiny and litigation by the left. In at least one case, Georgia, the state hopes to be the means of overturning Roe V Wade. There is quite a patchwork of legislative results reached in the various states. There are currently 17 states that ban abortions beginning at 20 weeks. The latest move is for one of those states, Ohio, probably to be soon joined by Georgia, to ban abortions after six weeks when a baby's heartbeat can be detected. Technically, most babies have a heartbeat at five weeks, but apparently the legislatures have chosen six weeks as their target. Advances in medical science have made the Roe V Wade decision vulnerable to challenge, since that decision is based on the fact that there was no consensus then about when a child becomes a person. Georgia is declaring that a baby becomes a "natural person" at six weeks and is granted all the protection of the state, including the right to child support, the right to be claimed as a dependent, and the right to be included in George's population counts.

 

School curricula:

Montessori experiential schools and homeschooling are very popular in the state of Utah, and there are numerous excellent and well-tested curricula available. These methods also take full advantage of extensive online resources, many of them free. They offer a very frugal alternative to expensive public education with its enormous investment in centralized schools and the related busing systems. The assumption is that this entire operation, including the schools, will operate mostly independently of government and church funding and administration systems and the related politics concerning warped values. The hope is that the farming activities could make the whole operation mostly self-sustaining, while also providing educational and productive work to the orphans and volunteers.

 

History and philosophy -- more

The early Christians were known for rescuing rejected children who had been "exposed" to the elements by other Roman citizens.  Some of those children died anyway, and were given a Christian burial. In some cases, pagan people took those rejected children and turned them into slaves, but of course the Christians did not turn them into slaves, but kept them as their own children, in the process rejecting two immoral aspects of Roman society. This added to the ranks of the Christians in Rome, and presumably in other cities as well, since the exposing of unwanted children was a common practice in that society.  We seem to be repeating all the practices and problems of Rome today. https://earlychurchhistory.org/medicine/infanticide-in-the-ancient-world/

 

I'm guessing that besides adding the children to the Christian ranks, other people who were sympathetic with the Christian value system were also drawn to that group of believers, offering a double sociological benefit to saving those children.  We do know that the early Christians eventually grew to be the largest single religious group in the Roman Empire.

 

It would be useful to have more detailed statistics on the whole topic of children who might be well served by an orphanage, but it is instructive to learn that there are about 1 million abortions a year in the United States and a total of about 56 million abortions worldwide each year. Many other children are born alive but are not wanted, leading to abandoned children or infanticide, plus the classical orphans in cases where parents have passed away. I read of one case in Brazil where 200 children out of 1000 were killed or left to die by their parents. These are all staggering numbers, and it would take some heroic efforts to begin to do what the early Christians did in saving unwanted children, but on a worldwide scale. When you realize that every six years the entire population of the United States is lost to abortions worldwide, one might see this as an amazing opportunity to do good or as nothing more than a depressing statistic. One year's loss of life through intentional abortion or infanticide would replace the entire LDS church population three times. The 60 million children who have been aborted since 1973 in the United States would easily replace all those workers who are now being supplied in the form of desperate immigrants from South American and Central American countries.

 

Potential participating landowning families:

Larsen, Larson, Eaton, Christensen, Creer, Swenson, Nielsen, Westwood, Isaac, Baadsgaard, et al.

 

Some possible practical factors

 

1. County assistance to farmers

The county government for Utah County is considering a proposal to assist new farmers in being able to make a living on a farm. The County is proposing to give some kind of assistance to lower the beginning capital costs required to operate a farm profitably. This will be difficult, of course, because there is a constant upward pressure on the cost of land, making it very difficult to get a proper return on investment in land and the equipment required to work it.

 

2. Conservation covenants

In many places, land owners have the option to limit the future use of their land for themselves, their families, and others, by making a long-term commitment to keep the land close to its original form. That might apply in Leland if some of those who own land would wish to make that commitment. Perhaps that commitment would be easier to make if there was some remuneration for those landowners at the beginning. Using land for the charitable purposes suggested here may be far more valuable than using it for ordinary residential purposes. This needs to be explored quickly before the option passes of being able to do such a thing on a grand scale.

 

3. Dual-use construction

There is also the interesting possibility that if Leland were developed for purposes of supporting a large population of orphans and related people and facilities, that development might itself look very much like regular residential development. The main difference might be that the homes would be a little larger, with more bedrooms, so that they could be suitable for operating as group homes. It seems ideal if a new development can be created for the very purpose of orphanage-style operations. At least there would be no backlash later on as might happen if someone first developed the area as a standard residential area and then tried to move it piecemeal to becoming an orphanage-style operation. The typical Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) reaction would never have a reason to exist. If the project were not successful or if the concept or the location changed, those original houses might be repurposed to normal residential living much more easily than going the other way.

 

4. The current planning status

The surrounding cities of Spanish Fork, Salem, and Payson seem to be aggressively pursuing development of this area. It may seem like a sensible thing to do, but I don't know of any requirement for the cities to press for this kind of development. Presumably the cities are only driven by the opportunity to increase taxes on developed land and therefore grow the size of the city administration. However, the cities are theoretically supposed to be the servants of the people who live there, not their masters. If the people in the nearby areas where there is still raw land wish to restrict the growth of the cities and the growth of the city's power over those large parcels of raw land, that seems like something which should be possible. There is nothing inevitable about having to accept this kind of aggressive growth, for no other reason than for growth's sake. It is my opinion that many cities in Utah County have far too grand view of their own purposes and powers, and that attitude ought to be reset. Representative government is supposed to work at the local level, not just in Washington DC.

 

It may be that it would make a great deal more sense to leave Leland intact and to direct the typical developmental growth toward areas which are to the west of Leland, simply skipping over Leland. The commuter bedroom communities for offices along the Wasatch front easily extend down to Santaquin and beyond. There is no obvious reason why this particular tract of 1200 acres ought to be so avidly sought by city managers. Perhaps it would make more sense to start someplace like Benjamin or Lakeshore and upgrade the status of their cities and appoint THEM to be the ones who are annexing land for residential and business purposes. They would almost certainly be more democratic in how they planned for residential expansion.

 

I understand that Spanish Fork has zoned one area for 500 homes, and Salem has zoned another area for 1500 homes, and that Target stores has bought land near the Benjamin exit, and that Salem is planning to build a sewer facility in the area of Benjamin exit. But none of these things seem inevitable or even particularly necessary. It may be slightly cheaper to provide utilities for Leland from the existing cities, but it should only be a minor change in cost to leave Leland intact, jump the freeway going west and then continue development there. The general flow of water is obviously from the mountains to the lake, and there's no particular reason to stop at any particular point along that drainage slope to emphasize one area over another. "Doing what comes naturally" may not seem so natural if there are other important factors to be considered, such as the "boarding school" option.

 

I believe there are areas near Spanish Fork, Salem, and Payson that are rather low quality as far as farming possibilities are concerned. It seems obvious that those areas should be first moved into residential use before the higher-quality farmland is bothered. Perhaps that is what is already happening with the zoning of Spanish Fork and Salem, but I don't know the reasoning behind what they are doing.

 

A few interview results:

1. One local landowner had two reactions to the idea. One was that there are many people who want to adopt, and there are far too few babies for them to adopt.  On the other hand, the real difficulty, as he sees it, is in convincing pregnant mothers to go full term and give birth to their babies when there is abortion on demand where the government pays for the medical costs which make it free to the mother. Many adoptions can be very expensive, rising to as much as $50,000. There are still apparently more people who are willing to pay that amount than there are babies for them to adopt. That should give us a few clues about how the various programs might be set up.

 

He was not certain that it was necessary to build a big physical plant to make a big difference. That is a good point if we would like to get some kind of program going quickly. Obviously, if we delay as long as possible building any structures for an orphanage, we can do a lot of work at minimal cost in exploring who the children and families might be who would benefit from such facilities.

 

In contrast, I would observe that this may be a chicken and egg situation: if we have the facilities, then it's much easier to make it clear that we are prepared to take good care of any children that are entrusted to us. Perhaps beginning with building or renting a single group home, perhaps with 8-10 bedrooms, would be one way to kick off the project, get some office space, and get some experience with the whole process.

 

2. A Spanish Fork-based builder thought the general idea of a high-quality orphanage was a good one. He is very much aware of the state's efforts to build housing for people in need, but there is no state follow-up program to make sure these people get the individual help or encouragement they need.

 

The Basic Church Statistical Picture

Church growth statistics help explain what's happening to the church worldwide

 

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Introduction

The last five years of church statistics show that almost everything is in decline as far as membership growth rates are concerned. There are fewer missionaries, fewer children of record added, fewer converts, fewer members added, fewer missions, and fewer districts. There is a small increase in the number of stakes, wards and branches, and church service missionaries. It is not clear why the numbers of stake organizations and wards or branches are going up, while almost everything else is going down, unless perhaps there was some decision made to increase the levels and concentration of local organizations in hopes of increasing local control and perhaps using that method to stimulate growth through more intensive administration. The increase in the number of church service missionaries, while the number of full-time missionaries keeps dropping, may be related numbers. That could easily happen if fewer people chose the more rigorous full-time mission option which usually involves more travel, and instead chose the more local and less rigorous service mission option.

 

Only an increase of 3,000 in new long-term members from 2017 to 2018? Or was it a net loss?

The statistics which the church supplies publicly are interesting, but they are far from thorough, leaving us to guess about what is happening in many situations. For dramatic effect I want to focus on the apparent gain of only 3,000 long-term active members during the year of 2018. But even a gain of 3,000 might be a stretch. It could easily be a net loss after all the factors are considered. I calculate that 3,000 by noticing that there was only an increase of 30 wards and branches worldwide. It would be much more helpful if we knew exactly how many branches and exactly how many wards were added, instead of seeing only a combined total.  To get around that lack of more exact information, I'm going to assume that the average size of branches and wards is 100. Branches are smaller and wards are bigger, but 100 might be a reasonable average size. So, obviously, 30x100 equals 3,000. But notice that we have 30,536 wards and branches. If the church, on average, lost one person from each of those wards or branches, that would be a loss of 30,536 active members. That could mean that there was actually a net loss of about 27,536. The point is, that we are getting so close to zero growth, that we can't actually be sure which way it went. I will supply some other numbers later which will make it seem more like it was indeed a year in which the church had a net loss in active members.

 

Starting with some of the basics

I think it is useful to distinguish here between the basic maintenance level, baptizing enough people to replace those who have died or left the church, and actually going beyond that maintenance level to include raising the total number of active church members by bringing in new long-term members. I am more interested in seeing the church actually grow, not just avoid shrinking, so I would prefer to start with that growth viewpoint. But it is probably too confusing to start there, so I will start with the more basic maintenance level concerns.

 

Church statistics from 2018 show that there were 234,332 converts, and that the church grew by only

195,566 members. (We might wonder where those lost 38,766 went to? Was it because of an extra-large number of deaths or defections?) And supposedly, that increase of 195,566 includes baptized children of record. New children of record are reported to number 102,102, of which, historically, only about 60% actually get baptized, which would add about 61,261 for 2018.

 

But the church only grew by 30 wards and branches, which I would estimate to be 3000 people that were new long-term members. It is obviously hard to understand what is going on here without more and better data.

 

The church does not report deaths anymore, but an average life expectancy of 75 years implies that 1.33% of the population will die each year. For the current reported church population of 16,313,735 that would mean that the church should have about 216,973 deaths each year. With 234,332 converts reported, that would give us a net gain of only 17,359 of new members over deaths, without counting defections. But notice that last year the church only reported a gain of 195,566, which is 21,407 less than the claimed converts. Extra deaths or defections might be involved, but there is no way to know exactly what happened. Also remember that the church reported 102,102 new children of record, of which perhaps 60%, or 61,261, were probably baptized from prior years' blessings of children. So, the church might claim that converts, plus the baptisms of children of record from prior years, would be a total gain of 295,593, but they only report a gain of 195,566, an unexplained loss of 100,027. It's hard to guess what went on behind these numbers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2018 Church Statistics		Comments
Calculation 1
Reported converts	234,332
Estimated baptisms of children of record (60% of 102,102 reported children of record)	61,261
Total expected growth	295,593
Reported church net growth	195,566
Unexplained loss	100,027	Extra deaths or defections?
Calculation 2
Total expected growth	295,593
Estimated deaths	216,973
Estimated church net growth	78,620
Reported church net growth	195,566
Estimated church net growth	78,620
Unexplained "gain"	116,946	Were many deaths unreported?
Reported missionaries	65,137
Average converts per missionary per year	3.597
Low estimate of church resources centrally assembled annually (could be 3 times that large)	$15 billion
Cost for each of 234,332 converts -- $15 billion/ 234,332 =	$64,011
Calculation 3
For 2018
Growth in number of wards and branches	30
Estimated growth in new long-term active members, assuming 100 average for a ward or branch	3,000
Low estimate of church resources centrally assembled annually (could be 3 times that large)	$15 billion
Cost for each of 3,000 net new long-term converts	$5 million
Cost for a family of five	$25 million
For 2017
Growth in number of wards and branches	202
Estimated growth in new long-term active members, assuming 100 average for a ward or branch	20,200
Low estimate of church resources centrally assembled annually (could be 3 times that large)	$15 billion
Cost for each of 30,000 net new long-term converts	$742,574
Cost for a family of five	$3,712,870
For 2016
Growth in number of wards and branches	288
Estimated growth in new long-term active members, assuming 100 average for a ward or branch	28,800
Low estimate of church resources centrally assembled annually (could be 3 times that large)	$15 billion
Cost for each of 30,000 net new long-term converts	$520,833
Cost for a family of five	$2,609,165

Even if Mormons are extra healthy, we can still be fairly confident that there were somewhere around 200,000 members who died, plus an unknown number of those who left the church. After all that activity and all those changes, it leaves only about 3000 members who can be counted as actual growth. Of course, it is useful for the missionaries to replace the people who die and leave the church, but it is clear that the birthrate within the church is nowhere near enough to keep us from shrinking without the missionaries finding new people. That itself ought to be a cause for alarm, and evidence that the newer generations of church members don't value children very much – not enough to even replace those members who die. Here again, it seems like we ought to focus a great deal more on living people than on dead people who have already had their turn on Earth. They are much more able to take care of themselves than are these little ones.

 

If we said that the income of the central church was a mere $15 billion a year (some have estimated it to be three times that amount), bringing in about 200,000 converts to avoid the church shrinking from deaths would cost about $75,000 each (enough to keep out 25 missionaries for a year for each person baptized.). But, ideally, we would not be spending all of our money just to stay exactly where we are. We would be making some progress. The fact that we are not making any progress should tell us that there's something critically wrong with our current program.

 

In 2018, the Church added only about 3,000 people to the number of long-term active members.  That is getting close enough to zero that the church leaders cannot really argue anymore that they have an effective program.  The number of missionaries is shrinking as well, perhaps as people find out that they can go on their missions for 1.5 or 2 years, and, even though they may baptize on average about 4 people each year per missionary, many of them will not have a single convert that stays with the church long-term.  On average, in recent years it has taken more than two missionary man-years to get one new long-term convert beyond the maintenance level, beyond keeping the church from shrinking, and now, as of last year, we see the church adding hardly any new long-term converts, meaning it takes about 20 missionary man-years for every new long-term convert which actually extends the size of the active members of the church. 

 

The 3000 number represents the new long-term converts who added enough to the church activity rolls to justify adding a ward or branch somewhere in the world. Last year the church added 30 wards and branches. If we guess that there is an average of 100 people for each ward or branch, then 30x100 = 3000.

 

The church attitude towards missionaries seems to be that the people in Utah, their main constituency, their "breadbasket" so to speak, the source of so much of their money income and volunteers, really want their children to get out and go on missions and see the world, and so the church is supplying that experience for young people.  However, at this point that whole system is so strikingly ineffective, almost counterproductive, with so many missionaries becoming depressed, that the time has come to end it or greatly reorganize it. Again, the whole thing was built up as a service to the money-paying people in Utah, and that whole program is falling apart. I could supply some statistics but that may not even be necessary.  I think we are beyond statistics.  People can plainly see that the whole thing is not working.

 

A few years ago, as in 2016, the church members were paying through tithing about $0.5 million for each new long-term member which would mean, overall, that we were paying about $2.5 million for a family of five.  But that was when we were still bringing in about 30,000 new long-term people a year, as indicated by the number of new wards and branches that were formed each year.  Today, the numbers concerning average cost have become astronomical.  We are now spending about $5 million for each new long-term member, and about $25 million for every family of five.

 

Can you imagine how many children could be saved from abortion with that kind of money available to fund the program? Perhaps we should simply charge the church $1 million for each new long-term member we supply through the orphanage system.  That would save them a great deal of money and get us off to a great financial start. This, of course, is another way to say that our whole system has collapsed, as well it should, because we are not following the simple program that Christ set out. 

 

We have made up our own program which focuses on centralizing all the money which is possible, and then essentially intentionally wasting all that money at the central offices so that the members will not actually be able to use those resources to do something good in the world, since doing so would be so disruptive to the church's current business model of quietly enjoying a lavish income for doing almost nothing.  That system is in a state of full collapse and we might as well recognize it and take some action to fix it.  If church leaders are unwilling to face reality and "face the music," so to speak, then a few sturdy members are going to have to take action.

 

The truth is that my deepest reason for wanting to do this abortion/orphanage project is because of how confused the church has become after 200 years of operation – the point at which all previous restorations have collapsed.  This orphanage program would be a serious project that does a lot of good, and is very necessary. It would start the process of people exercising their religious freedom to send their charity money where they think it will do the most good, and I hope that this abortion/orphanage project will seem like exactly the right thing for all these people to do.  They can stop sending their money to the temple building/temple work charitable activity which keeps church members busy and off the streets but doesn't create any effect in the real world, or they can send their money to a project which is aggressively taking on Christian activities.  There will be some members who would like to remain invisible and ineffective, but there are some who are a little more aggressive in their Christianity, and will want to send a message to the world that the Mormons support Christianity everywhere and are not shy about it.

 

This will probably terrify the current church leadership, and I don't know what they will do.  They might even do something completely irrational.  But it is time to find out, since we can officially declare that the old system has completely failed.  It is no longer in doubt which way the right direction to go might be.

 

If the church does choose to help us, I would say Hallelujah, because that will mean that this hundred-year confusion about the mission of the church will finally be cleared up and we can get back on the right path.  I'm not expecting that to happen, but that would be the ultimate measure of success for this project.

 

I believe there is a silver lining to this current bad situation or problem. We do indeed have many church members in other countries already, even though the cost of getting them has already been 100 times what it should have been. If we simply stopped trying to keep people from gathering, and let the gathering happen naturally in any way people wanted to do it, or could do it, we would suddenly have all these church members from all over the world flooding in to be living in the United States. And, using the examples from the 1800s, where 90,000 people came from England and Scandinavia to Utah within just a few years, constituting about 83% of ALL active members in about 1852, for every person who left a foreign land for Zion, there would be one or two people who would be getting ready to do the same thing. That process would never stop. Many arrived in Utah without ever officially joining the Church through baptism, presumably because of their eagerness to leave their bad situation in England.

 

That is the way it worked in England. People wanted freedom, and the church gathering process provided an organized way to escape the near-slavery the lower classes experienced in England. (We might remember that it was English ships who were bringing slaves to America, providing insight into the English viewpoint on slavery at that earlier time.) The opportunity to live in freedom is an enormous and constant electro-magnet (which we have intentionally turned off). If we would just get out of the way, we would only have to help a little here and there to have a constant flood of people joining us in the United States and greatly bulking up the number of pro-freedom people in the United States, hopefully enough to continually overwhelm the anti-freedom influences which keep growing in our nation.

 

When you have Zion all in one place, they will take care of themselves. You don't need a giant expensive bureaucracy to act as headquarters for 200 different scattered tribes or versions of the church living under 200 different versions of Babylon. You only need such a huge bureaucracy if you can insist on keeping everyone from gathering together. So, as a business model, you want to avoid the gathering because it hurts your tithing income going to your paid ministry labor union.

 

Here is a more precisely written version of that historical migration from Europe:

 

In a chapter by Rodney Stark about LDS Church growth, he includes one subtopic entitled “The British to the Rescue.”* The statistics he provides show that the British converts went from 23% of the 16,865 members in 1840 to 83.4% of the 52,640 members in 1852, then gradually down to 49% of the 188,263 members in 1889. This was a huge influx of members at a critical time for the Church. Of the 92,465 total British converts in the 1840 to 1890 period, 89,695 moved to the US, leaving 2,770 behind. The year 2000 membership figure for the United Kingdom is 165,100, so the emigration of that huge portion of early British converts does not appear to have caused any long-term problem for the Church in that country.

 

*Rodney Stark, "The Basis of Mormon Success: A Theoretical Application” in James T. Duke, ed., Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1998), pp. 29-67 (chapter 2).

 

Some further steps?

One of the very long-term goals of this project could be to establish an entire new social insurance system based on charity, which worked so well for the Saints during and after the life of Christ. That would mean replacing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and perhaps 60 other patchwork tax-and-spend entitlement programs with a gospel-based/charity-based system. Such a system is easily twice as efficient as anything a government can do with its wasteful and corrupt methods, and these charity-based support systems can easily be five times as effective.

 

The church could have solved this general social insurance problem for all of us back in the 1930s when it was easy to do, bringing $10 Trillion in extra pension funds to church members up to the present. They didn't do a thing then, going along meekly with the New Deal then, so it is a little harder to do it now. But it is well worth the effort even if it takes several years to work out mechanisms that are suitable so that these tax-and-spend atheistic entitlement monstrosities can be replaced with something Christian and workable, without having to pay two or three times just for insuring that peoples' basic needs are taken care of when necessary.

 

 

The Leland Farms Project

 

A vigorous Christian response to the

growing pagan practices of

abortion and infanticide in our nation

 

 

An Administrative Addendum

 

 

Who should do this project? 

Should it be a new, local, one-of-a-kind charitable organization which starts from scratch and gradually builds itself up, or should LDS Church headquarters have a role in this project?  Or should there be some combination of the two?

 

Some possible topics for discussion:

 

1. If the Church was ever interested in making a statement that could change the course of the nation, this looks like this would be a good time to do it.

 

2. This would represent a new and seemingly unusual way to "gather Israel." Perhaps it could gradually be scaled up to compete on almost equal terms with the regular proselyting processes. The project should also have major ripple effects as it shows other Christian groups one good way to go about counteracting the pro-abortion influences on all levels.

 

3. If the Church wanted to increase its total number of proselyting missionaries and service missionaries, this might be a good way to do it, perhaps adding 20,000 to the young people and senior citizens involved. It seems likely that the senior citizens would be especially interested in this kind of service. Everyone loves children, and the social stresses and anxieties should be much less in assisting children than in cold-contacting unknown adults of the world.

 

4. Teaching children while they are a young, especially those who might feel some gratitude for having been rescued, is usually a better way to introduce the gospel than having to help people first "unlearn" what they have incorrectly learned in their lives.

 

5. The rate of church growth seems to be dropping in recent years. Setting up this Leland Farms project and system could help greatly improve church growth. I think this project could have many ripple effects which could raise the church growth rate far beyond just the number of children who were helped directly by the project. Simply further emphasizing the LDS respect for life and respect for personal freedom would have a positive effect on people's view of the LDS church.

 

6. Although this may seem like a highly political move, in another sense it is not very political, even though it is a direct challenge to rampant paganism. The idea of killing babies simply because they are inconvenient to have around is not really popular anywhere. Almost everyone can agree that is a bad idea. Even the atheistic political left claims that they are really sad about there being so many abortions. They don't actually believe that, of course, but Christian thinking still has so much influence in our country that atheists would never publicly state that it is their goal to kill as many children as possible. The atheistic left would have to find a different argument against the project.

 

7. I have often thought it would be nice if, instead of sending humanitarian relief funds to Catholic organizations to be administered, a large amount of church funds could be sent to more specifically LDS projects such as this one, where the teaching of the gospel is an important part of the project.

 

8. We put a huge amount of effort into saving the dead, but maybe it is time to put some more effort into saving the living through this new channel of assisting children into this world and into gospel families.

 

9. Many states, at least 17, have tried very hard to constrain abortion to the extent they can at the state level, pushing back actively against the 1973 federal takeover a rightful state issue. This project could become a focal point for coordinating the activities of a large number of Christians in our nation who are taking aggressive action to limit the number of abortions, but who may not actually have a plan to follow through on some of the practical effects of the legal changes that are being proposed. The great efforts of these other Christians ought to be recognized and assisted where possible.

 

10. The church has been putting a lot of architectural effort into explicitly religious structures such as chapels and temples. Perhaps some of that architectural enthusiasm could be directed toward solving a social problem such as the new wave of abortions and infanticides. Housing and educating young people would become more important.

 

11. Once a project headquarters staff was assembled and trained, it is quite possible that the activities in Leland, the part that could be seen easily, would only be 1/10th of what was being administered worldwide.

 

12. There are many possible initiation and long-term management methods that could be used. The LDS church might offer a loan or grant to this organization. Or the church might design and build it and then turn it over to someone else to operate, perhaps through some leasing arrangement. If the LDS church did not want to make its efforts too public because of potential public relations problems, there might even be a way for it to remain anonymous. It is conceivable that the original cost could be paid back over time.

 

13. It could be that a local management group would care little about what the world thought of them, since that local group might see themselves as having little to lose, and would not be subject to much social "blowback" from the project, while the centralized church might be more concerned about such matters.

 

14. The Church already has some undeveloped land in Leland. A fully developed project area might need multiple chapels.

 

15. I believe the LDS Church could easily do this project if it chose to.  It could set up even the most ambitious version of the project within two or three years, perhaps by slightly delaying some of its many temple building projects.  Even at the highly ambitious $3 billion level, that would probably not be much of a strain on the Church or change its other plans very much.

 

 

Current church strategy

 

(And why the Church leaders probably will not help us with the orphanage project,

at least not at the beginning.)

 

 

The first three presidents of the church used the same basic program as Christ used himself.  Christ made clear his extreme focus on charity, and imposed no other expenses on the members. We should be able to remember that Christ fulfilled and ended the law of Moses, especially including ending the law of tithing, for which he showed great scorn during his ministry.

 

Every separate group of church members had their own patriarch who held all the sealing powers, so they didn't need any central headquarters or any fancy or expensive buildings to be able to carry out every aspect of the complete Gospel. And with a built-in social safety net based on charity for anyone who joined the church, the church apparently attracted a lot of good people and grew at a rate of at least 10% a year for the next 300 years.

 

But starting with Wilford Woodruff, the church changed its strategy into something else, and it has been gradually going further and further in that new direction. It has finally reached the logical end of that path. It must change direction or face continual near-paralysis or perhaps even extinction. It certainly cannot continue to grow enough to matter to anyone.

 

There are a few simple, basic rules that seem to control nearly everything which the Church does at the strategic level:

 

Rule number one: the church is largely controlled by outsiders

Rule number one is that the nature of the Church today is mostly controlled by the corrupt governments of the world.  This really means that we have about 200 versions of the church, one for each of the world's 200 countries, not just a single version of the church. One might guess that it takes a huge administrative bureaucracy to administer 200 versions of the church instead of just one version of the church, and that partially explains why we have such an enormous government-style overhead staff at the Salt Lake City headquarters which operates this diplomatic regime that directs all the activities of these 200 versions of the church.

 

In order for the church to go into other countries using its current corporate form and current policies, it must receive permission from those various governments which are more or less corrupt.  That means that the church must do absolutely nothing to threaten any of these organizations.  The church must be as bland as possible.  It must make it clear somehow to these corrupt foreign leaders that the church will never promote freedom-seeking activities of any kind or do anything else which might seem even slightly disruptive to these various corrupt leaders or groups of leaders or their societies.

 

The way it affects us here in the United States is this: we are not allowed to do anything in the United States that would seem the least bit threatening to a government somewhere else. (Especially today, with all the many news organizations and the Internet constantly carrying masses of new information around the world, it means that anything new done in the United States by the LDS Church would soon, often almost immediately, be made known everywhere else.) 

 

There are many things which could be helpful to the church which we could do in the United States because of the great freedom we have here that would cause it to grow and be successful and be a great blessing to many people.  But all of those things must be tamped down or remain essentially invisible so that the leaders of these other countries will not feel threatened in the least by the church being present there as a formal organization with a major headquarters in Salt Lake City. The church budget is larger than at least 30 countries, and perhaps as many as 60 countries, so it is likely to be treated as a serious potential political threat, if it chose to be a threat.

 

This means that the nature of the church in the United States has to be the lowest common denominator of every other country in the world.  If there is one country where we can't do something in the rest of the world, then we can't do it here, because otherwise word would get out that we are inconsistent and that we might be a threat to some other governmental organization somewhere in the world.  For example, if we encouraged the gathering of members from around the world, we might be viewed as stealing their people or we might be viewed as being part of a brain-drain operation if we took their best people or allowed or encouraged them to move to the United States.  Apparently, using this logic, the gathering has been officially canceled as of the 1970s, probably because that could be a source of irritation to these other governments.

 

(I should mention that some of the things I say here I am very confident are true, and other things I say are slightly speculative since I can't gather much data on some of these points.  But I do believe that all the things I say are consistent, and if the church selects one policy then it must necessarily select another closely related policy to stay consistent.)

 

Rule number two: The lowest common denominator

So, the church in the United States having to be the lowest common denominator among all countries is the most basic rule of all. That really means that we can't do anything that normal Christians would do in the United States.  We can't be actively promoting freedom as Christians have done for the past 2000 years, which process brought the United States into existence.  The church has officially decided that it cannot continue that history of promoting freedom that brought us to where we are.  That single factor causes me the largest amount of heartburn. 

 

Again, we can't be promoting freedom here because that will, in the minds of the church leaders, lead to a suspicion by all the leaders of these other countries that we will inevitably start promoting freedom there in their countries, and of course those countries don't want that.  A possible example is Venezuela today where there are quite a few church members in that country, and they probably would all like to be free, but the church presumably believes it cannot be involved in even the most bland way in helping them gain their freedom.

 

In other words, the church members abroad are expected to stay in the countries where they joined the church so that their leaving is not a threat.  Many of those countries have such terrible economic and social situations that it makes it almost impossible for someone to live the gospel there because of all the conflicts that they will have with the mainline society and the government. At the same time, they can't take any steps to change that society to make it more bearable because that would be a threat to the ruling powers there. The local people, the old settlers, would say "This is our culture, not yours, and your changes are not welcome here." Remember Jackson County Missouri? Things did not go well for the members who wanted to actually live the gospel there.

 

Those conflicts with local societies argue very strongly for foreign members to leave their particular version of Babylon and come to the United States where the sheer numbers of church members would build up a huge pool of freedom-loving people who could keep the United States on an even keel and keep it from destroying itself through adopting worldly atheistic beliefs and practices.  However, someone at church headquarters has made the choice that it is currently more beneficial to church headquarters to proceed using the current strategy.  That means that individual church members out in these branches of Babylon are hurt very much by this church policy.  They are asked to sacrifice needlessly on behalf of the church headquarters itself. Strangely enough, the very lack of privileges of members in those foreign countries gives excuses for the Salt Lake City bureaucrats to have additional privileges here as they travel to deal with some of the problems there. I see nothing fair or necessary about that at all. The church leaders in Salt Lake City can travel the world at will, and have a great time, but the members abroad are chained to their current locations.

 

Another layer deeper

So now it's time to go another layer deeper.  So why would the church want to keep people living in these often very unpleasant Third World countries when they could come to the United States or perhaps some other First World country and enjoy the blessings of freedom and be able to live the Gospel exactly as they would like?

 

Apparently, through trial and error, the church headquarters has discovered that the people in Utah and in the United States will consistently pay the largest amount of tithing to church headquarters if there are certain conditions in effect. The church needs to keep members in these other countries, not for their own sake or for the sake of the other people there, but because they represent trophies which can be presented as reasons and proof that the church is being successful and why the church members should keep paying in their tithing money.  Also, when the church is able to build chapels and temples in these other countries, that has multiple policy effects.  It tells the tithe-paying people in the United States that the church must be achieving success because it has now been able to plant another symbol, another trophy, in one of these foreign countries, so that the people in Utah can feel like they are being successful even though they have no idea what's actually going on in the world. 

 

Actually, I consider the building of a temple in one these foreign countries to be a major step backwards in many cases, the most egregious case being in East Germany during the Cold War. What that really means is that the church has finally given away enough of the freedom of their own members to make a deal with the usually corrupt powers-that-be there so that those people will allow us to build a temple there.  We have dumbed down or simplified the Gospel to the extent that is required in that area so that we have satisfied the corrupt attitudes of the governing men or bodies of men so that we can build a temple there.  I consider this, as I say, a step backwards.  There might be many things that were possible for church members to do quietly before they became so visible through their temples, and perhaps to a less extent through their chapels, and now they can't do some of those things anymore because they have to behave in a certain prescribed way. They become hostages to that temple which has been built.  That means, in most cases, their freedom and personal ability to live the Gospel in everyday life actually goes lower. 

 

We then have a trade-off.  Yes, those foreign members have the chance to go to a temple and perform some ordinances themselves and for the dead, but their own daily lives are worse than they were before or worse than they could be somewhere else. The temple actually keeps them peaceful -- it gives them an outlet for their energies which otherwise might be devoted to helping others and improving freedom.  That makes the temple a kind of albatross around their necks, although I assume it is not obvious most of the time.

 

The church headquarters probably considers a temple to be a good thing because it will pacify those people and stop them from trying to leave or trying to disrupt the local corrupt society by trying to make it better.  But it actually puts them in chains.  They could easily go to some other country for their temple ordinances, especially if some element of the church helped them, and they would learn some interesting things in the process. Of course, it might also stimulate them to want to be more free to live the gospel, and that is what the church is trying to avoid. The church ends up having to manage member expectations.

 

Also, it should be mentioned here, that temples are not a necessary part of the gospel at all.  The people after the time of Christ had no buildings at all for 300 years and they did very nicely.  We somehow forget that rather important little historical fact. An endowment house served the people of Salt Lake City for 40 years before the temple there was finished.  It seemed to be perfectly adequate.

 

The early Christians were always persecuted, at least in the sense that they could not build any buildings, whether chapels or temples.  But that restriction turned out to be an unexpected blessing in disguise, because they could spend all of their resources on helping each other. We are requiring members in these other countries to live under all sorts of legal restrictions, somewhat the same way as the Saints had to live in Rome.  None of that is necessary or desirable except that is the preferred business model of the Salt Lake City headquarters.  I don't see any good gospel purpose for any of it.

 

I was told by a person who had once been a stake president, that the Church strives to keep a certain balance between those who live in the United States, who are paying for almost everything, and those in foreign countries who are spending a big part of that money in their countries.  The church in these other countries cannot be allowed to get very large because the church cannot "support them in the style to which the church would like them to become accustomed," with buildings of specific kinds, unless they are getting enough money from the United States.  It is nearly always a net loss overseas concerning contribution revenues.  It is always a major expense (and sometimes a major embarrassment to the people receiving it) to support these foreign groups of people, at least if we insist on having lots of nice buildings for them.  So it is good to have the church be large in the United States where the church gets all its money, but the churches in the rest of the world can't be allowed to get too large because we can't spend more money on them than is supplied by the people in Utah and elsewhere.  That is the balancing act on the money scene.

 

Of course, those are all completely artificial barriers to growth in other countries, intentionally imposed by the church headquarters itself to maximize its control and its profits. After Christ, the church quickly spread through areas of Greece and elsewhere with no impediments because the only thing the new members had to do was take care of each other. There were no capital investment or start-up costs or taxes required to do that.

 

Almost inconceivable to today's church members, those early members did not have to send any tithing to anyone, so there was no need for banking operations, big buildings, etc. Those new members did not need to basically pay a franchise tax to some headquarters unit somewhere in the world to be allowed to move forward according to certain legalistic franchise rules enforced by a US religious corporate entity wrongly claiming exclusive copyright ownership of all the gospel texts and concepts.

 

If the church let these other areas of the world just do their own thing, as at the time of Christ, and pay no tithing/salvation franchise tax in order to operate successfully, the US members might suddenly get the idea in their heads that they didn't need to pay any franchise (or temple ordinance) tax themselves, and then the whole system would collapse (which is what needs to happen anyway). Priesthood ordinances are all supposed to be free, especially including temple ordinances.

 

The Salt Lake City people build buildings, but charge perhaps an outrageous overhead charge of perhaps 500% for doing so and allow no competition. They are a monopoly in this area and charge monopoly profits. Perhaps they internally sometimes justify their enormous overhead charges using that kind of government contract negotiation logic, although they would never use that logic on the members.)

 

The church has been engaged in a worldwide branding process which is unnecessary, but apparently makes the Salt Lake City people feel more important. They have greater control at the detail level in all these places, it seems to them. This apparently helps teach and reinforce the claimed need to pay a license or franchise tax for all church activities. And, there is apparently a lot of money to be made in constructing church buildings, which supports a whole construction bureaucracy of well-paid and therefore naturally very supportive members.

 

The temple building/temple work strategy

Again, through trial and error, church headquarters has discovered that, since the church tries to do almost nothing to change the society around it, and engages in hardly any measurable amount of charity, since doing serious charitable works can change societies, and that is to be avoided at all costs, one has to decide what happens to people's money and time in this headquarters-preferred situation.  Building temples and doing temple work is actually a way of distracting church members, intentionally using up their money and their energies without allowing them to do anything that matters in the real world. 

 

It is all very fine for members to do work for the dead.  They can be reminded of how the plan of salvation works and they can feel like they're contributing, but, more importantly, they are being kept off the streets, so to speak.  If people are convinced that the most important thing they can do is work for the dead, as opposed to work for the living, then that's going to keep them very tame.  They send all their money to Salt Lake, they spend all their church time doing things which are invisible to everyone else, and there is no effect on the society, and the church can continue to seem completely bland and completely ineffective as far as any of the typical Christian activities would be.  In other words, the temple building and temple work projects are giant make-work projects for church members to keep them from being active in the lives of living people, and instead encouraging them to spend all their time working on behalf of people who are not here and will not cause any trouble in society no matter what you do for them. They will not change their earthly attitudes or their votes, etc.

 

Spy vs. spy

Our little group needs to operate in a stealthy way, just like the church is operating in a stealthy way around the world.  We think we are living in a Gospel society here in Utah, but we are not. We see the corruption of our local governments, and the church must take a lot of the blame for that. Since they will never support the Constitution anywhere else, why would they support it in Utah? That would be acting inconsistently. We are gradually importing all the wickedness of the world, and doing it intentionally, because the church leaders think we need to blend with the world, not be a peculiar people who stand out and who do important Christian things and who change societies. 

 

So, the church itself is part of the corruption here in Utah because they have imported it because it seemed convenient.  I think we have finally reached the end of that possibility.  It should not be allowed to be stealthy anymore.  The whole thing, the whole gospel project, is collapsing and going up in smoke because they have let it "grow wild" for so long, imagining that avoiding any active interference with the downward slide of society was actually in their business interest.  So now a big charitable project will have to stay under the radar of the church for a while or they will try to squelch us and squeeze us out.  We need to be aware of that, but simply not talk about it or make it much of an issue.  We need to just go on our way and do what we can legally on our own in a free country which is barely just still free.

 

The church will start to feel like we are putting them in a bad light, making it seem like their old business model of total passivity won't work and they can't keep claiming and pretending that they are pushing the full gospel worldwide, when they are only promoting the thinnest shadow of the real gospel.   They are just building up trophies to get money from United States people.  It's quite possible that they have been doing this so long that nobody at church headquarters even knows what the basic strategy is -- they may just be mindlessly continuing the "traditions of the fathers" by rote But I'm sure there are some people who understand the strategy and enforce it, or it would have gone a different way already.  We just need to be alert that we are playing a double game here, but feel confident that we are doing the right thing, nonetheless.

 

Likely church analysis and reaction

So perhaps we can discuss what the church will probably think about this Leland project.  Abortion has become a major political issue, perhaps the biggest political issue of our times.  If we agree with the good Christians who were active in Rome in rescuing and adopting discarded babies, we would want to do something about at least changing the effects of these pagan abortion rituals that are going on, this infanticide.  But to do that, we obviously will have a political effect because we will be backing up the legislative work of the 17 Christian states who have decided to do what they can to minimize abortions that occur in their states.  I am assuming they will not have a plan in effect to deal with the aftermath of the laws they pass.  There will still be just as many unwanted children, even if they are allowed to go to full term and be born, but they will still be just as unwanted or perhaps more of them will be unwanted than the million a year who have been killed through abortions.  So, someone needs to give those states the practical backup for their political crusade.  So, we will obviously then be right in the middle of a highly emotional political issue. 

 

We would be saying that we believe in the sanctity of life which includes the right to life, the right to be born, and that puts us squarely in conflict with the political left.  We will be anything but bland.  We will be sticking out like a sore thumb, as they say.

 

All of this potential political visibility is exactly what the church leaders will want to avoid because that will hamper their "non-political, business franchise 'McDonald's' operation" work, as they see it, in other countries.  It's interesting to note that the abortion rate in the rest of the world, on a per capita basis, is about three times what it is in the United States.  In other words, the Christian heritage of the United States has already kept the abortion rate quite low compared to the rest of the world.  If the rest of the world sees LDS Church members here actively helping to lower the number of abortions, and to find homes for all of the children who are rescued, they are probably going to have numerous bad reactions to that. For example, they might say "Someone is stealing our children and using them against us by teaching them a different value system."  Someone will fairly quickly figure that out and be upset. Just the idea of confronting and resisting the political left (a bland term for Satanism) is going to get us into deep trouble.  The church will immediately want to stop this process because, as they will likely see it, it will be threatening their bureaucratic power and their stable income for all the reasons I mentioned above.  (It may take some intricate reasoning to piece together the actual, possibly quite indirect, church reaction since leaders are not in the habit of speaking candidly about policy matters).

 

So, not only will the church probably decide not to help this project, it will likely engage in some active efforts to stop it. There is a tiny chance that if we war-game this out for them, and show that they have to support this project or become irrelevant themselves, then maybe they will support it.  But that is extremely unlikely to begin with.  The chances go up over time if the project is successful.

 

The central headquarters could decide to jump in and use all their assembled management expertise to give such projects a rocket boost, but that would require an enormous set of policy changes at church headquarters.

 

There is another aspect here which needs to be mentioned.  It is likely that there are many church members who are quietly or even subconsciously a little bit uneasy about what the Church has been doing, in the last 50 years, of remaining completely passive on every important issue that relates to religion and politics. Religion and politics are always intertwined.  There is no cure for that.  Politics is the way we show our morality, and morality comes from religion, and there is no avoiding this conflict.  In the long-term, you have to make a choice to go with Christianity or with Satanism, and unfortunately, the LDS Church has decided that their short-term benefit is to go with the political left on almost every issue, perhaps being just a few years behind them so that they don't seem to be either too eager or too resistant.

 

Church members can choose to continue to do more mostly invisible temple work, and pay for building more temples that do almost nothing to change society, and in this way the members can manage to do essentially no charity at all, or those members can take the gospel bull by the horns, so to speak, and take the scriptures seriously, and make charity our number one activity. If we devote billions of dollars to charitable activities that could be quite noticeable in the sense that we will be changing society for the better.  In most cases that would be highly commended by other Christians in our country and would be condemned by the corrupt leaders and many of the people nationwide and worldwide.  But the conflict would become very clear.  If church members then decide to send their money to support these somewhat aggressive charitable activities like limiting abortion and promoting the gathering -- which are actually two unexpectedly interrelated aspects of the gathering, since they are just different paths to get all the good spirits together -- then that will potentially mean an immediate drop in the tithing income to the central church, assuming they will refuse to use the tithing money for any of these highly commendable charitable projects. 

 

Incidentally, the church members should be eagerly involved in correct education instead of supporting corrupt state systems, that nearly all aggressively promote leftist ideologies, so that would be another project which would be a subproject of the Leland Project, providing the proper education for the children that are saved from the fires of Moloch, as they used to say about ritual infanticide.

 

So, we need to be ready to experience some pushback from the church and we might as well know why it's happening, so we will not get too confused or discouraged.  Unfortunately, church leaders have been very clever in presenting to a politically unsophisticated church membership arguments for what they do which seem semi-convincing.  Unfortunately, the truth is, that the church leadership have been skirting the truth and telling some outright lies in order to keep their control over the income flow of tithing from church members.  It's rather an unpleasant shock to discover that LDS Church members have been manipulated so much for so long, but I think we have finally reached the point where the real story has to be told and people have to wake up.

 

The church should be at 200 million members

If the gospel were being taught and practiced properly, after 200 years of operation I think it would be at the 200 million level already, large enough to keep United States on an even political keel. However, the church today is only teaching and practicing about 25% of the gospel. We might find nearly all correct teachings somewhere buried in the literature, but we are not DOING any of those things -- we don't support freedom, we don't do charity on a grand scale, we don't resist abortion, etc., etc.

 

Last year, the church apparently added only 3000 new long-term people to its active membership. That is close enough to zero to call it zero. And it costs us at least $15 billion in total member costs every year just to keep from shrinking.

 

Our growth rate is so pitifully small, that it is hardly even worth discussing, but some of the numbers the church puts out may seem confusing, so only for that reason it might be worthwhile to present the various numbers and attempt to analyze and compare them.

 

 

 

 

There Must Be More to the Pro-Life Cause

 

May 16th, 2019

by Erick Erickson

 

I support legislation in Alabama, Georgia, and elsewhere to restrict killing children behind the euphemism of abortion.

 

I also think pro-lifers must do other things as well. Should we be successful, there will be women carrying children they do not want and there will be women who bear costs with no fathers around to help them. We must do more to provide social stability for these moms.

 

Pro-lifers must be willing to fight for adoption reform across the states. We should support making it more efficient to adopt by cutting bureaucratic red tape. We must work to end laws that allow mothers who give up their children to change their minds once an adoption has gone through. We must work to encourage more interracial adoptions.

 

We must also work to improve the social safety net to help women. Churches need to step up on this, not just taxpayers. This burden should be on the pro-life community, not just the state. We need to make it easier for mothers to get care they need. We need to make it easier for them to collect from deadbeat dads. Frankly, we also need to make it easier for deadbeat dads to find jobs to help pay for support. Sometimes a catch 22 develops where a father falls behind on payments to help his children and goes to jail, even though he is trying to earn money to help his child.

 

This cannot be a “ban abortion” approach because then the pro-life community will be accepting the abortion community’s critique that we only care about children in the womb.

 

Additionally, we need to understand the new fronts the left will open. Some activists will work to curtail adoption choices through targeting faith-based adoption agencies in the name of tolerance. They’ll shut off the avenues by which adoptions can happen in the name of tolerance, then complain that the adoption process is too burdensome and abortion is the answer.

 

Restricting abortion is a good thing. It is killing a human being. But restricting abortion without helping mothers and children is cruel. A healthy pro-life community will step up and move beyond restrictions on abortion towards greater social and community support for mothers with nowhere to turn.

 

https://theresurgent.com/2019/05/16/there-must-be-more-to-the-pro-life-caus

Ohio Just Became the Fifth State to Ban Abortion at 6 Weeks

Apr. 11, 2019  By Madeleine Aggeler

 

Ohio has become the fifth state to ban abortion at six weeks. A so-called “fetal heartbeat bill,” which outlaws abortion before most women even realize they’re pregnant, passed the state legislature on Wednesday morning; newly elected governor Mike DeWine signed it the next day.

 

Ohio joins four other states that have passed similar six-week abortion bans: Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa, and North Dakota. In addition, Georgia passed a six-week abortion ban back in March, and openly anti-abortion Governor Brian Kemp, who has voiced his support for the bill, has until May 10 to sign it.

 

Heartbeat bills ban all or most abortions once a heartbeat can be detected — which is usually at the embryonic stage, around five or six weeks — severely restricting the usual, legal threshold at which states can ban abortion, which is considered to be when a fetus is viable outside the womb (around 24 weeks). Such bills, in effect, prohibit nearly all abortions, because they leave women with such a small window in which to confirm they are pregnant, and then have the procedure done.

 

While these laws have all been challenged in court, and blocked from taking effect because they run counter to Roe v. Wade, they are part of a larger effort to eventually overturn Roe at level of the Supreme Court, and a growing push against women’s reproductive rights in the United States. Here is a closer look at what has happened with these bans in each state.

 

Ohio

Ohio’s fetal heartbeat bill was shut down twice before, by former governor John Kasich. Ohio’s current governor, however, Mike DeWine, signed it shortly after it passed the legislature. The ACLU has said it will challenge the measure as soon as it is signed.

 

Georgia  (passed; not yet signed by the governor)

Passed in March, Georgia’s HB481, or the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, would ban all abortions after six weeks, including in cases of rape or incest. It also redefines who is considered to be a “natural person,” expanding the term to include “an unborn child.” This new definition would potentially make mothers who receive abortions and doctors who administer them open to criminal prosecution.

https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/which-states-have-passed-six-week-abortion-bans.html

 

 

New York abortion law allows infanticide

Posted: Feb. 6, 2019 10:15 am

To The Herald-Whig:

 

Democrats hold many positions that I disagree with. But the one that has caused me the greatest pain is abortion.

 

I believe in the sanctity of life at any stage of development, but now the Democrats have crossed a line that no civilized person, regardless of their politics, should support.

 

The Democrats are now stepping beyond abortion to infanticide. If you're not familiar with that term, it is the killing of a baby after it is born, its heart pumping blood, its lungs pumping oxygen into that blood. The infant can cry and smile, and it can take in nourishment, either through its mother's breast or from a bottle.

 

New York lawmakers, with the support of Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo, have approved late-term abortions up to and including after birth. The New York law, in addition to approving abortion at any stage of pregnancy, also moves the state's abortion regulations from the criminal code to the health codes, prohibiting criminal prosecution for medical professionals who perform abortions. The Democratic governor of Virginia is pushing for a similar law.

 

Under the new law, in New York a medical professional is now defined as a licensed physician, nurse practitioner, physician assistant and licensed midwives. And under the new law, the decision to abort lies with the mother, regardless of the baby's physical condition.

 

Whether or not we choose to remain a civilized society will be decided in November 2020. If killing newborn babies doesn't bother you, vote Democratic. If you have one shred of respect for human life, you have to vote Republican.

 

If you believe abortion at any stage of development is OK, please go to YouTube and type in the search box "Dr. Levatino destroys abortion in two minutes." His description of a late-term abortion while testifying before a congressional committee sickened me. Today, he no longer performs abortions except to save the life of the mother.

 

William Mussetter, Quincy

https://www.whig.com/20190206/new-york-abortion-law-allows-infanticide#

 

 

March 2018

Fact Sheet

Induced Abortion Worldwide

GLOBAL INCIDENCE AND TRENDS

• During 2010–2014, an estimated 56 million induced abortions occurred each year worldwide. This number represents an increase from 50 million annually during 1990–1994, mainly because of population growth.

• As of 2010–2014, the global annual rate of abortion for all women of reproductive age (15–44) is estimated to be 35 per 1,000, which is a reduction from the 1990–1994 rate of 40 per 1,000.

• The estimated global abortion rate as of 2010–2014 is 35 per 1,000 for married women and 26 per 1,000 for unmarried women.1

• Women in developing regions have a higher likelihood of having an abortion than those in developed regions—36 vs. 27 per 1,000.

• Between 1990–1994 and 2010–2014, the abortion rate declined markedly in developed regions, from 46 to 27 per 1,000, but remained roughly the same in developing regions.

• The annual number of abortions during the period fell in developed regions, from about 12 million to seven million; in contrast, the number increased in developing regions, from 38 million to 49 million, although this change mainly reflects the growth of the reproductive-age population.

• The proportion of abortions worldwide that occur in developing regions rose from 76% to 88% between 1990–1994 and 2010–2014.

• Globally, 25% of all pregnancies ended in abortion in 2010–2014. Between 1990–1994 and 2010–2014, the proportion of pregnancies ending in abortion fell from 39% to 27% in developed countries, while it rose from 21% to 24% in developing countries.1

https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide

 

 

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Was Abortion the ‘Leading Cause of Death’ in 2018?

Leading causes of death worldwide and abortion estimates -- two different measures?

Bethania Palma, Published 3 January 2019 -- Snopes

 

Bottom of Form

On 31 December 2018, the Breitbart.com website reported under the headline “Abortion Leading Cause of Death in 2018 with 41 Million Killed” that “there have been some 41.9 million abortions performed in the course of the year,” making abortion “the number one cause of death worldwide in 2018, with more than 41 million children killed before birth.”

 

That article spawned a ripple of similar reports on various other sites, most of which referred back to the Breitbart piece, which itself rested on a figure gleaned from Worldometers, a real-time tool that “analyzes the available data, performs statistical analysis, and builds our algorithm [to feed our] real time estimates.” Worldometers states that its abortion figures refer to induced abortions (as opposed to miscarriages), and that:

 

The data on abortions displayed on the Worldometers’ counter is based on the latest statistics on worldwide abortions published by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to WHO, every year in the world there are an estimated 40-50 million abortions. This corresponds to approximately 125,000 abortions per day.

 

However, the most recent figure on abortions from WHO we could locate dated from 2014 and was slightly higher than Worldometers’ tally. WHO estimated that between 2010 and 2014, an average of 56 million induced abortions occurred worldwide each year.

 

If WHO’s estimate of 56 million abortions annually held steady through 2016, when they released their survey on the top ten leading causes of death globally, it would be true that the number of abortions worldwide outnumbered overall deaths from heart disease and stroke, the top two causes of death that year. In 2016, ischemic heart disease and stroke killed a total of 15.2 million people worldwide, according to WHO, noting that “These diseases have remained the leading causes of death globally in the last 15 years”:

 

We can infer from WHO statistics that the difference between the number of abortions worldwide versus the number of deaths from heart disease and stroke worldwide is not a new dynamic, although viral stories proclaiming that abortions “now” outnumber deaths from those other causes imply that fact is a recent development.

 

Stating that abortion is the “leading cause of death” worldwide (as opposed to a medical procedure) is a problematic pronouncement, because that stance takes a political position, one which is at odds with the scientific/medical world. The medical community does not confer personhood upon fetuses that are not viable outside the womb, so counting abortion as a “cause of death” does not align with the practices of health organizations such as WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as Heather Boonstra, director of public policy for the reproductive health research organization Guttmacher Institute, told us:

 

Abortion is a legal, constitutionally protected medical procedure in the United States. It’s not considered a cause of death by CDC, WHO and other leading authorities, and statistics on induced abortion are excluded in the CDC’s national fetal-death statistics.

 

The legal, philosophical, religious, and scientific arenas provide no definitive answers as to when personhood begins. Medical advances continue to push the stage at which a fetus can be considered viable outside the womb, as Wired reported in 2015:

 

When life begins is, of course, the central disagreement that fuels the controversy over abortion. Attacks on abortion rights are now more veiled and indirect — like secret videos pointing to Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donations, or state legislation that makes operating abortion clinics so onerous they have to shut down. But make no mistake, the ultimate question is, when does a fetus become a person — at fertilization, at birth, or somewhere in between?

 

Here, modern science offers no clarity. If anything, the past century of scientific advances have only made the answer more complicated. As scientists have peered into wombs with ultrasound and looked directly at sperm entering an egg, they’ve found that all the bright lines they thought existed dissolving.

 

Concluding an entry on the topic, RationalWiki quotes developmental biologist Scott Gilbert in saying that “The entity created by fertilization is indeed a human embryo, and it has the potential to be human adult. Whether these facts are enough to accord it personhood is a question influenced by opinion, philosophy and theology, rather than by science.”

 

Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the landmark 1973 Roe. v. Wade case held that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion was unconstitutional, fetal personhood very much remains a legal issue and not merely an abstract philosophical one. As the New York Times reported, the enactment of fetal personhood statutes in some states has resulted in the prosecution of women over circumstances that ended or endangered their pregnancies:

 

You might be surprised to learn that in the United States a woman coping with the heartbreak of losing her pregnancy might also find herself facing jail time. Say she got in a car accident in New York or gave birth to a stillborn in Indiana: In such cases, women have been charged with manslaughter.

 

In fact, a fetus need not die for the state to charge a pregnant woman with a crime. Women who fell down the stairs, who ate a poppy seed bagel and failed a drug test or who took legal drugs during pregnancy — drugs prescribed by their doctors — all have been accused of endangering their children.

 

So what motivates these prosecutions? The reality is that, in many cases, these women are collateral damage in the fight over abortion. As the legal debate over a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy has intensified, so too has the insistence of anti-abortion groups that fertilized eggs and fetuses be granted full rights and the protection of the law — an extreme legal argument with little precedent in American law before the 1970s.

 

Frustrated by the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, many in the anti-abortion movement hope for a sweeping rollback under a conservative Supreme Court — one that would block access to abortion even in states that protect women’s access to such health services.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/01/03/abortion-leading-cause-of-death/

 

 

 

What the Alabama Abortion Law Means for Women Across the Country

 

By Macaela Mackenzie

November 7, 2018

 

The results of Tuesday’s midterms marked a number of history-making elections for women: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York became the youngest person ever elected to Congress, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan broke barriers as the first Muslim women elected, Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Haaland of New Mexico made major strides for Native American women with their wins, and Jahana Hayes of Connecticut and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts became the first black women to represent their states.

 

But the historic elections aren’t just about who’s repping the country. New abortion laws, which were voted on in three states—Alabama, West Virginia, and Oregon—have implications for women across the country. Two amendments passed last night are putting women's ability to access safe abortions in jeopardy.

 

ALABAMA

Alabama’s abortion measure, which passed by a wide margin, is major. The amendment to the state’s constitution is what's called a “personhood law,” which grants the right to life from the moment of conception. Essentially, it means that in the state of Alabama, a fetus or embryo has the same rights as a full-fledged person.

 

"They’ve granted full rights to the unborn from the moment of conception—that means fertilized eggs—while they strip away all of the rights for pregnant women," says Yashica Robinson, M.D., a gynecologist in Alabama and a board member of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

 

These laws are known as “trigger laws,” which means if Roe v. Wade is overturned, they could trigger an outright ban on abortion, criminalizing the procedure for women in those states.

 

The threat to women's rights is bad enough, but abortion-rights supporters worry that the amendment might also jeopardize infertility treatments like IVF. "In any type of assisted reproductive technology treatment, most commonly in vitro fertilization, embryos are formed," Dr. Robinson explains. "Generally, you’re going to form more embryos than you’re going to use." What happens to those unused embryos is already a hotly debated issue, and Alabama's newly minted amendment could make the issue of disposing of unused embryos even murkier. "The way this amendment was written, it seems like it’s just about abortion, but it clearly says that it protects the rights of the unborn—and that’s from the moment of creation," Dr. Robinson says.

 

The approved amendment states that no provisions in Alabama’s constitution provide a woman with the right to have an abortion—no exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at risk.

 

For Dr. Robinson, that's not only "devastating"; it violates her duty as a physician. "As a physician I’ve taken an oath to do what’s best for my patients. That means advocating for access to health care for them that values their privacy, their autonomy, and their dignity," she says. "My job, even when it's a hard decision to make, is to counsel the patient and help them to make health care decisions that are best for them. [The amendment will] harm patients and bind the hands of physicians."

 

WEST VIRGINIA

West Virginia also passed a ballot measure that will restrict women’s access to abortion. Just as in Alabama, West Virginia's Amendment 1 paves the way to criminalize abortion, stripping women of protections to their federal right to an abortion. The amendment also strips state funding for abortions through insurance programs like Medicaid.

 

"Being able to pay for an abortion is a key part of being able to access an abortion," says Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds. "The reason why abortion funds exist is because abortion is out of reach for so many."

 

State laws that strip funding for abortion care, often disproportionately affect disadvantaged women, she says. "This is something that we consider to be discriminatory, something that targets people of color and people with lower incomes and discriminates against people based on the insurance coverage that people have."

 

“We need legislators across the country to understand that abortion is health care, health care is a right, and a right is not a right if every patient can’t afford to access it.”

 

(Oregon voted on a similar ballot measure, which proposed ending state funding of abortion except when the procedure was medically necessary, but it was voted down by a wide margin.)

 

So what does this mean for women's rights to reproductive care across the U.S.? Alabama and West Virginia’s newly approved abortion amendments are important on a national level. Laws like the newly passed amendments in Alabama and West Virginia are known as “trigger laws,” which means if Roe v. Wade is overturned, they could trigger an outright ban on abortion, criminalizing the procedure for women in those states, The Washington Post reports. (In an NBC poll taken yesterday, two thirds of voters supported keeping the landmark ruling that grants the right to an abortion in place.)

 

This possibility is what worries abortion activists the most. "It makes our work dramatically more urgent and important, because if that starts to happen, it’s going to make travel to get abortions even harder," Hernandez says. "People are already traveling hundreds of miles to get an abortion. This makes the legal right to abortion completely out of reach for too many. "

 

In other areas of the country, voters elected officials with track records of fighting for reproductive health like Jacky Rosen and Tina Smith (who is a former Planned Parenthood employee). “In 2018 voters made their voices heard loud and clear: They want elected officials who champion reproductive health care and will stand up for women," Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement sent to Glamour.

 

Hernandez says those victories are cause to be optimistic about the future—she's not giving up on health care funding that includes abortion care. “We need legislators across the country to understand that abortion is health care," Willie Parker, M.D., board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement sent to Glamour. "Health care is a right, and a right is not a right if every patient can’t afford to access it.”

https://www.glamour.com/story/what-alabama-abortion-law-means-for-women-across-the-country