This Is News?

The pope is opposed to abortion. Certainly the Holy Father's speech was newsworthy, but the headline gives the indication that the content of his proclamation of what has been Church teaching from the beginning was somehow unexpected. What's next? Shock that the pope believes the bread and wine offered in the Mass are transsubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ?

Still, it was good to read this quote:

"It was in Europe that the notion of human rights was first formulated. The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself," he said in an address at the former imperial Hofburg Palace.

"This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right -- it is the very opposite. It is a deep wound in society."

It's also kind of funny to see Reuters' biases in plain view in the following quote:

The average birth rate in the European Union is down to about 1.5 children per woman, raising fears that an ageing population will not be able to finance pensions systems.(emphasis mine)

Some European countries have adopted, or plan to, incentives to encourage couples to have children, to try to reverse trends where couples have fewer children and begin families later. Experts say high housing prices are partly to blame.

Here in the States, politicians talk about how children are our future (true, even if it sounds tacky), but in Europe, it's become "Children fund our pensions." And of course, high housing prices are more of a disincentive to having children than, say, the astronomically high taxes in most of Europe.