Japan on Friday welcomed the news it had topped the world longevity ratings, but with its citizens living increasingly longer lives it may soon become hard for the government to find enough young taxpayers to support them.

The statistics for 2007 published on Thursday by the World Health Organization put Japan on top of the longevity list, reporting that the average life expectancy was almost 83 years—86 years for women and 79 years for men—up from 81 years in 2000.

“A steady increase of Japan’s longevity reflects good medical care, nutrition and successful economic development, and that alone is a good thing,” Norie Handa, a Cabinet Office official in charge of aging issues, said Friday. “What we really have to look at is whether we can live long in good health, and peacefully.”

However, in a country where the birth rate has been declining for decades—the population fell by 51,000 last year, the sharpest decline ever—a longer life expectancy means a disproportionately large elderly population.

The number of people over the age of 65 has reached 22.5% of the population and in a dozen years will likely to surge to nearly 30%, according to government estimates.

By contrast, the percentage of children in Japan is expected to fall to below 11% in the next decade or so from the current 13%. The country already has the smallest percentage of children among 31 countries, trailing Germany and Italy, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications report.

According to the last statistics I read, however, 3 out of every 4 babies in Japan are aborted. That means Japan is aborting itself into extinction. The solution to their aging population is quite simple, actually: start encouraging women to carry their babies to term. It’s certainly a politically incorrect thing to suggest (I noticed that a comment suggesting just that has mysteriously disappeared from the above site), but it’s fairly obvious all the same.

Apparently this is not so obvious to people like Rebecca Hodes, head of policy, communications and research for the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa. WND reports that she “blasted the pope for not advocating wide access to condoms as a means of combating AIDS.” Commenting to the AP, she said, “His opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans.”

WND reports, however, that “a senior Harvard research scientist confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI, who endured heavy criticism for declaring that condom distribution programs worsen the AIDS epidemic in Africa, was actually correct.”

“There is,” Green added, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”

…In Uganda, according to a report in Science magazine, teaching about AIDS and promoting monogamy has led to a dramatic turnaround in the country’s AIDS epidemic.

“Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is preventable if populations are mobilized to avoid risk,” states the report’s summary. “Despite limited resources, Uganda has shown a 70 percent decline in HIV prevalence since the early 1990s, linked to a 60 percent reduction in casual sex. The response in Uganda appears to be distinctively associated with communication about [AIDS] through social networks. Despite substantial condom use and promotion of biomedical approaches, other African countries have shown neither similar behavioral responses nor HIV prevalence declines of the same scale. The Ugandan success is equivalent to a vaccine of 80 percent effectiveness.”

It would appear, then, that it is Ms. Hodes, not the Pope, who is more interested in dogma (in her case that of free sex) than in saving lives. Yet another case of a liberal projecting her own ulterior motives/character flaws onto others.

Steve Chapman points out why this research should horrify even those who are not part of the pro-life movement:

What this mandate means is simple: It may be permissible for scientists to create cloned embryos and kill them. It’s not permissible to create cloned embryos and let them live. Their cells may be used for our benefit, but not for their own.

There lies the reality of embryonic stem cell research: It turns incipient human beings into commodities to be exploited for the sake of people who are safely past that defenseless stage of their lives.

It’s a change that poses risks not just to days-old human embryos. The rest of us may one day reap important medical benefits from this research. But we may lose something even more vital.

The President also says, “And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.” Obviously, he has left the door open for “therapeutic cloning” where the cloned embryo is simply destroyed before he or she has a chance to mature. Why ban cloning for human reproduction, though? Isn’t this a moral pronouncement? Isn’t the President forcing his moral values on us? Couldn’t proponents of reproductive cloning say exactly what Obama said about embryonic stem cell research, i.e. that “our government has forced…a false choice between sound science and moral values”?

The dirty little secret? There was no ban on embryonic stem cell research, only on federal funding of it. The reason researchers could not get funding for their research was because no private investors were willing to invest in ethically questionable research that has proven to be unfruitful despite all the hype about its potential.

Elderly Hardest Hit

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

Hidden Provisions

If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

More Scrutiny Needed

On Friday, President Obama called it “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passing the stimulus bill. In truth, this bill needs more scrutiny.

The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy.

Bruce Hardy probably doesn’t have long to live. But he could live longer, if it weren’t for the attitude and policies of the British government.

As recounted in a New York Times article, Mr. Hardy has kidney cancer that has spread to his lung. His doctor wanted him to take an expensive but effective new drug that has been shown to delay cancer progression for six months.

But Her Majesty’s government refused the request. The Times reports: “If the Hardys lived in the United States or just about any European country . . . Mr. Hardy would most likely get the drug, although he might have to pay part of the cost. . . . But at that price, Mr. Hardy’s life is not worth prolonging according to a British government agency, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.”

(In a supreme irony, the institute’s acronym, NICE, is the same acronym C. S. Lewis used for the evil institute in his classic novel, That Hideous Strength.)

The Hardy case highlights many of the problems with socialized medicine: government rationing of health care, a lack of options, and an ultimate devaluation of human life. Remember, in most other countries, Mr. Hardy could have his treatment if he paid for part of it—but Britain isn’t even giving him that choice. The government makes the health-care decisions. It’s all out of his hands.

And the really scary thing is that other countries are starting to look to Britain as an example of how to manage health care!

Read the rest at Breakpoint.

Update: Based on information provided by my friend John, who actually lives in Britain, the NYT article on which the commentary was based was inaccurate. See John’s comment below.

Is Barack Obama pro-infanticide? Jill Stanek says yes, explaining, “An audio clip of Obama’s 2002 state senate floor speech was recently released. In it he admits babies may be aborted alive but a second physician shouldn’t be called to assess and treat abortion survivors because it would be a “burden” to the mother’s “original decision.” In other words, he thought babies marked for abortion but surviving should be allowed to die. What do you call that?”

It is fascinating to read over texts circulated in the middle of the 19th century in defense of the practice of slavery. When we look back at how revered politicians, intellectuals, and churchmen could seriously defend a practice that now seems so patently barbaric, we cannot help feeling a twinge of moral superiority. Yet their arguments bear an uncanny resemblance to those now used to defend abortion, almost as if pro-choicers had been using these tracts as fodder for their own rhetoric. From Nancy Pelosi’s “historical argument” (“Slavery was practiced in the greatest civilizations”) to Joe Biden’s “personally opposed” argument (“No one is forcing you to own slaves, just to respect those who do”), all the way to the feminists’ “woman has a right to her own body” argument (“Slaves have been bought and paid for and no one has the right to touch another’s property”) to Obama’s “We don’t know when life begins” argument (“We’re not sure whether black people have souls”), it is truly déjà vu all over again.

His position is quite similar (surprise, surprise) to that of his running mate, Joe Biden:

I’d say, “Look, I know when it begins for me.” It’s a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I’m prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths – Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others – who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They’re intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life – I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society. And I know you get the push back, “Well, what about fascism?” Everybody, you know, you going to say fascism’s all right? Fascism isn’t a matter of faith. No decent religious person thinks fascism is a good idea. [Italics mine]

Both of these guys are trying to say that the question of when a human life begins is a theological one and that they can’t force their opinion on others. The abortion debate has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with biology. You might be able to argue about when a human gets a soul, but you can’t argue about when life begins. It is a scientific fact that life begins at conception. It’s indisputable. Upon conception, a new biological organism exists that did not exist before. That precise point in time is when the life of that human being starts.

These guys do not want to “force their opinion” on others, so they prefer to let millions of unborn children be killed in the womb. Does no one else see a problem with that? Could they be any more lacking in moral conviction? Biden says that he accepts his church’s teaching on abortion, namely that abortion is morally equivalent to murder…and yet he thinks it is okay to sit back and do nothing about it? Nay, to actually remove all legal and economic obstacles that stand in the way? In our “pluralistic society” several decades ago, there were differing opinions as to whether black people were to be considered “persons.” If Obama had been alive at that time, would he have preferred that people not force their opinion on slave owners? Would Biden have insisted that personhood was a theological issue back then? Considering that it was the Republicans that moved to end slavery, maybe so.