Tag: children

Ukraine’s baby factories rake in record profits amid chaos of war

Ihor Pechonoha of the Swiss-based BioTexCom says the business model that has helped him build one of the most profitable surrogacy companies in the world is simple exploitation: “We are looking for women in the former Soviet republics because, logically, [the women] have to be from poorer places than our clients.”

It is no surprise then that BioTexCom has turned to Ukraine for an almost endless pool of young women willing to sell their wombs to ease their financial distress. Eight years of civil war followed by a proxy war between NATO nations and Russia has plunged Ukraine into economic disaster. As its citizens sank into poverty, the country swiftly emerged as the international epicenter for surrogacy, and now controls at least a quarter of the global market. With the rise of the burgeoning industry, a seedy medical underworld filled with patient abuse and corruption has taken root as well.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team have actively encouraged the Western plunder of their war-torn country, inking an investment partnership with the global asset management firm Blackrock, stripping workers of labor protections, and handing state owned companies over to private firms.

But less attention has been paid to Ukraine’s surrogacy industry, which brought over $1.5 billion into the country’s economy in 2018 alone. Since then, the global market for surrogate babies has more than doubled. The industry was valued at over $14 billion last year, and it’s projected to grow by around 25% every year going forward, according to an analysis by Global Market Insights.

As more countries slam the door on the surrogacy industry, Western officials appear to be turning a blind eye to the abuse-ridden business flourishing in a deregulated, politically unstable Ukraine.

Emma Lamberton is a Master of International Development candidate at the University of Pittsburgh who published a paper in Princeton’s Journal of Public and International Affairs on the risks posed to Ukrainian women by the country’s surrogacy industry. 

“The main concern of advocates on the ground in Ukraine is that legislators and even news organizations aren’t looking at this as a human rights violation,” Lamberton told The Grayzone.

“A government would never see human rights violations like child abuse as something to simply be regulated,” she explained. “They’d never say ‘you should only be able to beat your children on Wednesdays’ — that would be incredibly ridiculous. And so from the perspective of advocates on the ground in Ukraine, this is an abuse issue and therefore, it should not be regulated and instead it should be outlawed.”

Long before the escalation of hostilities in Ukraine in early 2022, the country was known as a fertile hunting ground for shady characters and agencies seeking to prey on desperate Ukrainian women.

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Barack Obama Falsely Claims Guns Are Number One Killer of Children

On Monday evening, former President Barack Obama tweeted his response to the Nashville Christian school shooting by repeating the left’s false claim that guns are the number one killer of children.

On March 23, 2023, Breitbart News reported that actor Billy Porter made the same false claim, screaming that “the leading cause of death in children are guns” during an appearance on ABC’s The View.

Porter’s claim, which is now Obama’s claim as well, became a common one among leftists and non-fact-checking moderates in the summer of 2022 after a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was widely reported in late May that year.

FOX News ran a story titled “Guns now the leading cause of death for US children, per CDC.” The story noted that CDC figures show firearm-related deaths of people ages 0-19 totaled 4,368 in 2020, while motor vehicle deaths for the same age range totaled 4,036. And during a June 2, 2022, speech, President Joe Biden reacted to the CDC figures by claiming, “Guns are the number one killer of children.”

But Breitbart News dug into the CDC figures and ascertained that the only way to make the claim work is to count 18 and 19-year-olds as children. But if one does a custom search on the CDC website to adjust the category of children to include only those aged 0-17, only those below voting and military age, then the outcome completely flips.

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Child Homicide Rates Soar In The US

Black children in the U.S. as well as those between the ages of 16 and 17 were about 50 percent more likely to become the victim of a homicide in 2020 than just two years earlier.

In a study published yesterday in the scientific journal Jama Pediatrics, researchers affiliated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Defense and Georgia State University analyzed data both from the CDC as well as the National Violent Death Reporting System.

Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that other groups of children for whom the chance of becoming a homicide victim rose were boys and 11- to 15-year-olds. The rates of homicides in Hispanic children and those between the ages of 6 and 10 also increased, albeit somewhat slower. Generally, black and brown children as well as older children were most at risk of homicide according to the findings. Rates were also up among children in the Southern United States and those living in rural and urban areas.

According to the New York Times, the prevalence of child homicide was much higher in the U.S. than in other developed countries.

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CATASTROPHIC CONTAGION: Bill Gates, Johns Hopkins & WHO Conduct Another Pandemic Simulation With Deadlier Virus That Targets Children

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted another pandemic tabletop exercise in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.

The same people behind Event 201, which took place almost three years ago to the day, just completed a desktop simulation for a new Enterovirus originating in Brazil.

The exercise, dubbed Catastrophic Contagion, simulated WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic that spreads from Brazil to the rest of the world.

In addition to Bill Gates, 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany participated in the simulation, which involved pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions.

The virus in this simulation, called the Enterovirus, has a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affects children and young people.

The phenomenon is dubbed SEERS (Severe Epidemic Enterovirus Respiratory Syndrome 2025).

Enteroviruses are any of a group of RNA viruses (including those causing polio and hepatitis A) which typically occur in the gastrointestinal tract, sometimes spreading to the central nervous system or other parts of the body.

Event 201 was a simulation involving a coordinated global response to a coronavirus that was conducted just months before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in early 2020.

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FDA approves unpopular bivalent Covid shot for BABIES and ‘encourages parents to get their child vaccinated before the holidays’

US health officials today approved Pfizer and Moderna‘s bivalent Covid vaccines for babies, in a move bound to draw criticism.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has green-lit plans for the updated shots to be given as part of a three-dose course for children aged six months to four years.

Agency officials said they ‘encourage parents and caregivers’ to get their child vaccinated ‘especially as we head into the holidays and winter months’.

It comes after a study found the bivalent vaccines are significantly weaker against a rising Covid variant expected to become dominant in the US in months.

Pre-school-aged children were already allowed to receive three extra-small doses of Pfizer’s original Covid vaccine, instead of the standard two-dose regimen for adults.

The move will see them given the Omicron-specific booster – made by either Pfizer of Moderna – as their third and final shot.

Officials recommend the children to receive the bivalent shot from the same brand they received their first two vaccine shots from.

So a child who receive the Pfizer vaccine for their first two doses should get the Pfizer bivalent shot as well. 

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If The Left Ends Parent Rights, You Might Need A License To Raise Your Own Child

Parents are now more aware than ever that their right to raise their own children is in danger. Recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere testify to that awakening. A lot of the news focused on the public school curriculum of critical race theory, which pits children against one another based on their race. Parents never signed on to that.

But they’re also waking up to a host of other disturbing trends in public education. An extremist sex education curriculum includes pornography and pushes transgenderism. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) instruction tells kids exactly how they should feel and relate to others while using invasive data-mining to collect psycho-social information on them.

COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates are another point of contention. All of these directives hijack the role of parents as the emotional and moral guides of their children.

Parents ought to be asking: What next? If those trends are left unchecked, I think the answer could be the state licensing of parents.

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CDC Data Shows Suicide, Overdose, Flu All Kill More Children Than COVID-19

A recently-released CDC dataset detailing provisional COVID deaths by age from January 1st, 2020 to September 15th, 2021 appear to show that less child deaths were linked to COVID in that time-frame than would have died from the flu in a typical year.

Comparing this dataset to CDC’s WONDER database, it is clear that COVID-19 accounts for a lower percentage of total child deaths than any of 2019’s 10 leading causes of child death; that even leaves COVID well behind 2019’s 9th-leading cause of death: Influenza and Pneumonia.

Assuming similar cause-of-death trends in 2020 and 2021 as existed in 2019:

The cause of a child’s death would be 9.49 times more likely to be suicide; 8.46 times more likely to be homicide; 2.02 times more likely to be a drug overdose or alcohol poisoning; and 1.29 times more likely to be influenza.

The infographic below demonstrates the 10 most common causes of death for children aged 1-18 for 2019. Note that this leaves out newborn deaths (as they account for roughly half the total number of child deaths and unacceptably skew the data) and it doesn’t account for seasonality (comparing Jan-Dec 2019 to Jan-2020-Sep-2021).

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More children in Chicago have been shot than died from COVID

More children have been the victims of gun violence in Chicago this year than have died from COVID-19 across the entire country, according to police and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection.

The CDC reported that 214 children 17-years old or younger have died of COVID-19 nationwide so far this year — compared to 261 Chicago kids who have been victims of gunfire in Chicago, according to police statistics reported by Fox News.

More children have been fatally shot on the streets of Chicago than have died of COVID-19 in the state of Illinois.

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Forbes deletes article alleging psychological trauma in mask-wearing for kids

Forbes removed an article that alleges psychological damage of mask-wearing in kids after it was shared on Twitter and started to get traction. The ideas shared in the article contradict the public health bodies and government advisories on the importance of mask-wearing.

The article discouraging mask-wearing in kids went viral after it was shared by Twitter user NYC Angry Mom. They encouraged people to read the article, adding: “I’m just speechless that someone finally understands that masks on children are not benign.”

The tweet had been shared at least 400 times.

The deleted article (archive) was written by Zak Ringelstein, a PhD holder in Education at Columbia university and founder of Zigadoo, an educational and developmental app for kids.

Ringelstein begins the article by describing how he has spent his career advocating for the removal of standardized testing because of “the havoc it has wreaked on the mental health and well-being of American schoolchildren, especially kids from low-income families.”

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