Ban Bullfighting but Kill Babies?: Spain’s New Moral Values Criticized by Pro-Life Leader

By Hilary White

ROME, July 30, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Spain’s newly liberalized abortion law comes into effect the Spanish regional government of Catalonia has banned the ancient blood sport of bullfighting, and the irony has not been lost on pro-life observers.

Catalonia’s regional parliament voted Wednesday to ban bullfighting from January 1, 2012, making it the first region in mainland Spain to outlaw the centuries-old tradition, which has inspired artists from Goya to Picasso to Hemmingway. Bullfighting promoters have called the measure “outrageous” and have vowed to “launch a huge battle” in conjunction with the conservative opposition Popular Party (PP), which sees itself as the defender of Spanish cultural traditions.

Monsignore Ignacio Barreiro Carambula, the director of the Rome office of Human Life International and an Uruguayan of Spanish descent, said that the banning of bullfighting in Spain, like the banning of fox hunting in Britain, even as those governments promote abortion, represents a triumph of newly invented moral values based on arbitrary “progressive” whims and social fads.

He told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) that the banning of bullfighting and the promotion of abortion is part of the same liberalizing social re-engineering project being undertaken by the far left in Spain.

Barreiro said that “a large percentage of the persons in favor of animal rights are not concerned at all about the rights of the unborn.” Those who voted for the bullfighting ban, he said, are on the progressive left, the same people who have pushed to expand abortion and homosexuality.

“This is based in a wrong ideology,” he said. “Animals should not be treated with cruelty, but animals do not have rights. Rights are inherent to the human person, so from the moment of conception, you have a human being who has rights. Animals need to be treated with respect, but is not a bearer of rights.”

“It’s an irony that these people are protecting non-existent rights and they conveniently forget about real rights of human beings. And they forget about the most basic of all rights, which is life,” Barreiro said.

Barreiro added that the efforts to ban longstanding cultural traditions like bullfighting and fox hunting is a favorite work of “progressive” liberals and socialists. “Bullfighting is part of Spanish tradition,” he said. “It’s a very ancient Spanish tradition that has to be respected. It’s a manly sport and obviously in manly sports you have risks.”

He compared it to the determination of the Tony Blair Labour party in Britain to ban fox hunting based on “animal rights,” while working to liberalize abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Barreiro put it down to the creation of “new moral values” that are based on arbitrary social fads instead of perennial philosophical norms.

“New moral values are coined that are not part of the Natural Law, and real values are destroyed or not recognized.”

“Socialists and liberals are bent on destroying the traditional customs and institutions of society.”

“The main issue,” he said, “is the protection of animals against the lack of protection of babies. But it must be mentioned, this conscious policy of different socialist and liberal governments to destroy legitimate cultural traditions of different nations. It’s a conscious decision.”

Spain’s “Disastrous” Contraceptive Policies have Resulted in the Oldest European Population

By Hilary White

May 22, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A report by Spain’s Institute for Family Policy says that Spain, with one of the western world’s lowest birth rates and a high average life expectancy, is now the most rapidly aging country in the European Union.

The Institute’s head, Eduardo Hertfelder, told media that the government’s “dreadful” contraceptive policies are having a “catastrophic effect.”

The report says that the Spanish youth population has dropped from 10 million in 1981 to 6.6 million in 2008. The process of population aging follows Spain’s precipitous drop in birth rates. In 2000, a UN report found that the Spanish birth rate was the lowest in the world with 1.07 children per woman. Hertfelder stressed that the Spanish population is being bolstered now only by increases in immigration.

In Spain, the median age of women is 42.5 years; most physicians say that conception becomes increasingly less likely after age 35.

While the country’s fertility rate remains one of the lowest in the world at 1.31 children per woman, the socialist Spanish government announced earlier this year its plans to loosen the law to allow abortion on demand during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.

The loss of young people, aging of the population and impending impact of this demographic implosion on the economy, is not limited to Spain. A report published in April by the European Commission said that the working-age population of Europe will peak next year and begin to decline.
The EC report said that by 2060 Europe will have 2 people of working age for every person aged over 65, compared to 4 people of working age currently. Europe now has some of the world’s most generous government-sponsored pension and welfare plans that will be directly affected by the anticipated drop in population.

Referring to it as the “inverted pyramid” effect, demographers believe that a 1.3 fertility rate is all but impossible to correct and inevitably leads to a drop in population. With below-replacement fertility – that is, with two sets of parents producing only one child each generation – the number of children born is halved in each successive generation, resulting in dramatic decreases in the working-age population in twenty five years.

It has been widely noted that many of Europe’s predominantly Catholic nations seem to be particularly hard-hit by the demographic plunge. According to statistics available from the CIA World Fact Book, Portugal, with a Catholic population of 84.5 percent, has a birth rate of 1.49 children born per woman and a median female age of 41.6 years. Italy’s birth rate is 1.31 children per woman with a median female age of 44.8 years and the population is 90 percent Catholic. Poland’s birth rate stands at 1.28 children per woman and the median female age is 39.7 years.

Around the world, the industrialised nations are all conforming to this pattern to varying degrees, with only the US currently maintaining close to a replacement-level birth rate of 2.05 children born per woman. Outside Europe, at 1.8 children per woman Australia has one of the highest birth rates, with China (1.79), Canada (1.58), Japan (1.21), South Korea (1.21) lagging far behind.

In many cases, the trend of falling birth rates and aging populations is not a new phenomenon. In Japan, now with one of the world’s lowest birth rates, following its post-war baby boom the birth rate had fallen 50 percent by 1960.

In 2008, the UN Development Programme called the continued depopulation of Russia one of the country’s “most severe challenges” that had been ongoing for forty years. The report said, “Beginning from 1992, mortality in Russia has consistently exceeded fertility.”

With the median ages of women in these countries rising, continued promotion by many national governments of population control measures such as free abortion and contraceptives, demographers are increasingly warning that the prospect of population recovery is remote.