State Department names 10 countries as worst religious freedom offenders

Washington D.C., Jan 29, 2020 / 12:01 pm (CNA).- In the wake of basketball star and father-of-four-daughters Kobe Bryant’s death, #GirlDad has gone viral on social media with fathers sharing the unique joy of raising daughters. However, in many parts of the world, fewer girls are born than boys today because of sex-selective abortion.

Demographics experts say that “large-scale female feticide” has also occurred in the U.S. in the last decade, in a new analysis published Jan. 27.

“These new data are worrisome, if not alarming—for they demonstrate that large-scale female feticide has been taking place among certain U.S. sub-populations over the past decade,” researchers Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky found when they looked at U.S. birth statistics.

“The ‘global war against baby girls’ has opened a front in the United States of America,” they said.

The phenomenon of mass female feticide in Asia over the last 40 years has been driven by easily available or unconditional abortion access, cultural preferences for boys, and inexpensive prenatal gender determination technology, Eberstadt explains.

While the natural biological sex ratio at birth hovers around 103-105 boys born for every 100 baby girls, in China and India the ratios hit 115 and 111 respectively in 2017.

With the sex ratio skewed in the two most populous countries in the world, sex-selective abortion accounts for millions of “missing baby girls” each year.

Eberstadt and Abramsky’s 2020 analysis also found unnatural imbalances in sex ratios at birth in the U.S. among foreign-born mothers from China and India.

Among foreign-born Chinese mothers, more than 110 boys were born for every 100 girls in the U.S. between 2014-2018. For the third child born, this figure jumps to 122.8 for Chinese foreign-born mothers and 115.3 for Indian foreign-born mothers.

The researchers conclude this can be understood as approximately 8,400 “missing” births of newborn girls in the U.S. from Chinese and Indian mothers between 2014-2018, while the exact number of sex-selective abortions that occurred among those sub-population groups is unclear.

Eberstadt and Abramsky said that they found “some measure of reassurance” in that there was  no conclusive evidence that the same sex ratio at birth (SRB) exists among Asian-Americans born in the U.S.

The abnormal trend only applies to foreign-born mothers from China and India, countries with “mass female feticide.”

This week over 100,000 people have posted photos of fathers and daughters on Instagram with #girldad in tribute to Kobe Bryant, who was the father of four girls. Bryant and his eldest daughter, Gianna, died in a helicopter accident Jan. 26, along with seven others.

The trend was sparked by ESPN analyst Elle Duncan, who shared a memory of a conversation with Bryant.

She said that she had asked Kobe Bryant if he wanted more children, even if there was a chance of having another girl, and said Bryant replied, without hesitation, “I would have 5 more girls if I could. I’m a girl dad.”

“I would have 5 more girls if I could. I’m a girl dad.”@elleduncanESPN‘s story about how much Kobe loved his daughters is something special. pic.twitter.com/1KJx17QRjY

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) January 28, 2020

Following the episode of Sports Center, professional athletes posted photos of themselves and their daughters online with #GirlDad, fathers across the globe followed suit.

“This is trending nationwide because there’s no greater or more significant relationship than that of a dad and his daughter(s),” Duncan wrote on Twitter Jan. 28 with a post that linked to the thousands of family photos shared with her in the past few days.

Please if you’re feeling any kind of way, scroll through this feed and look at all these PROUD #girldad ‘s .. this is trending nationwide because there’s no greater or more significant relationship than that of a dad and his daughter(s) .. i hope it eases your blues. ?? pic.twitter.com/DbUQVbVO22

— Elle Duncan (@elleduncanESPN) January 28, 2020

[…]

Washington D.C., Nov 15, 2018 / 02:44 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The U.S. bishops’ conference and the Holy See face a class action lawsuit filed by six men who claim they were sexually abused by Catholic clergy during their childhoods. They are seeking financial damages as well as public contrition and reparation from the Church.

The 80-page suit filed Nov. 13 claims that the Vatican and the bishops knew about – and covered up for – the “endemic, systemic, rampant, and pervasive rape and sexual abuse” of the plaintiffs and others at the hands of active members of the clergy, religious orders, and other Church representatives.

The suit opens by invoking two passages of Scripture: “(B)ut people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed,” and: “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather, expose them.”

Rather than protect the plaintiffs, the lawsuit says Church leaders protected and – “incredibly” – promoted the offenders.

These kinds of “wrongful actions, inaction, omissions, cover-up, deception, and concealment” create a “conspiracy of silence to their financial and reputational benefit and to Plaintiffs’ and Class Members’ personal, mental, psychological, and financial detriment.” These actions are “ongoing and continuous” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. by four attorneys representing six individuals who lived in six different states at the time the abuse occurred – Iowa, California, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. It does not specifically detail the cases of abuse reportedly suffered by the individuals.

The attorneys who filed the suit are Mitchell Toups, Richard Coffman, Joe Whatley Jr., and Henry Quillen, who have previous experience with similar lawsuits on behalf of victims of clerical sex abuse.

Coffman, one of two attorneys on the case from Beaumont, Texas, told the Beaumont Enterprise that he has been watching the unfolding of the recent sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and felt the “time was right” to file this lawsuit.

“(S)omething needs to be done about this problem,” he told the Enterprise.

“There’s just a louder and louder outcry going on across the United States for the Catholic church to do something about this situation,” Coffman added.

The lawsuit was filed during the autumn plenary assembly of the USCCB in Baltimore, during which the bishops voted down a proposal that would have “encouraged” the Vatican to “release soon” all documents related to the allegations of misconduct against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whose case has been at the center of the abuse scandals in the Church in the U.S. that have unfolded over the past five months.

At the beginning of the meeting, president of the conference Cardinal Daniel DiNardo also announced a Vatican order that the bishops not vote on any proposed solutions to the abuse crisis until a meeting in Rome in February with other bishops’ conferences, a move that the lawsuit said was merely “kicking the can down the road again.”

Several U.S. bishops expressed their disappointment with the order, and the sex abuse crisis still featured as a prominent point of discussion at the meeting, though no action was taken.

The suit also claims that the bishops and the Vatican violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, aimed at organized crime, because the bishops engaged in federal mail fraud and wire fraud in the cover-up of abuse. The Catholic Church in the U.S. is an “unincorporated association” and therefore qualifies as an organization that can be held to RICO standards, it states.

The plaintiffs are seek “compensatory damages, economic damages, punitive damages, RICO treble damages, medical monitoring, pre- and post-judgment interest, and attorneys’ fees, litigation expenses, and court costs.”

They also seek relief that would compel the Vatican and the bishops to “comply with various state statutes requiring them to report the abusive Clergy to law enforcement or other responsible authorities, terminate the abusive Clergy, identify the abusive Clergy to the general public so that parents may protect their children going forward, release documents evidencing such Clergy abuse to achieve transparency, and such other relief the Court deems just and proper.”

Spokespersons for the USCCB have told several media outlets that the conference will not comment on the lawsuit because it is pending litigation.

[…]

The state capitol building of New Hampshire in Concord, New Hampshire. / Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

CNA Newsroom, Mar 28, 2024 / 11:30 am (CNA).
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