A post a couple of months ago showed just how the falling birthrate and the population decline in general are influencing President Vladimir Putin's priorities in formulating programs for his country. Russian women, however, are not exactly brimming with excitement over prospects of motherhood despite the proposed childcare benefits.
Now initiatives have produced a project that is gaining ground in the city of Balashikha, a city near Moscow, and is renewing Russia's maternity-care system through its test-pilot maternity hospital. The project's success has encouraged Russian authorities "to establish a new health-care district, extending the project to serve the 700,000 people in the area surrounding Balashikha. The pro-life model developed at the Balashikha hospital will be implemented in three other health district hospitals," states a LifeSite news article.
It sure looks like life is slowly coming back to Mother Russia.
Read Russia's first pro-life maternity ward a stunning success: Three more in the works
By Peter J. Smith
* * * * * * * * * *
As life is being nurtured in some parts of the world, death seems to be the favored option even of those whose vocation is supposedly to save and protect life. Pamela Winnick is a writer at the Wall Street Journal and the following is an excerpt from her experience with "fending off a series of doctors and nurses who all insisted that it was the family's duty to let her father die."
"Your husband wants to die," an internist told Pamela Winnick's mother soon after he was taken into the hospital. After she responded that he was incapable of talking, the internist who the family dubbed "Dr. Death" said, "He motioned with his hands when we tried to put in the feeding tube." "Not exactly informed consent," Winnick retorted.
˜'Dr. Death' was just one of several," explains Winnick. "A new resident appeared the next day, this one a bit more diplomatic but again urging us to allow my father to 'die with dignity.' And the next day came yet another, who opened with the words, "'We're getting mixed messages from your family,' before I shut him up."
Her father, says Winnick, was by no means in a state that merited or necessitated pulling the plug. He was "heading ineluctably toward death. Though unconscious, his brain, as far as anyone could tell, had not been touched by either the cancer or the blood clot. He was not in a "persistent vegetative state" (itself a phrase subject to broad interpretation), that magic point at which family members are required to pull the plug--or risk the accusation that they are right-wing Christians."
Then there were "a series of miracles." Within a week of being brought into the ICU, her father had regained enough strength to be removed from the Unit. Soon therafter he was off the respirator, and before long they found him "sitting upright in a chair, reading the New York Times."
"On Father's Day, we packed my father's hospital room: his wife, daughters, grandchildren, each of us regaling him with our successes large and small," she wrote. "'Life's not so bad, after all,' the atheist said. I wanted to go back to ICU, find Dr. Death, drag her to my father's room and say: 'This is the life you wanted to end.'"
Read Doctors kept asking to 'let' my father die: Wall Street journalist
By Terry Vanderheyden
British mothers are being offered tax credits and daycare places to help them hold down paid jobs but the majority do not like the policy, a survey among 1,736 mothers by First magazine shows. Six out of 10 thought the government "doesn't like traditional families" but favours single mothers and working parents. More than half also said they would send their child to a private school if they could afford it, and two-thirds thought grammar schools -- abolished in the 1970s -- were a good idea.
