As you are already aware, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is reviewing their current policy on conscience rights for doctors. They have favoured conscience rights for non-emergency procedures to date. This reasonable position is at risk of changing.
What you can do:
Go to this web site, and choose how you want to give feedback. I found it easiest to send a quick email, which said this:
Every physician must be free to practice medicine using their hearts and minds. Restrictions on conscience removes the ability to do so. There will always be disagreements on what constitutes good treatment and this is healthy dialogue to have in a democratic society. Physicians must be free to respond to patients, using their own medical expertise and their conscience, not the enforcement of an outside regulatory body. There is a responsibility on the patient to discern, again, using his or her own conscience, whether they want a different doctor. If conscience rights are restricted, Ontario will lose good doctors.
You can use my letter, or part of it, or just write “I support freedom of conscience for doctors.” Really, it’s that easy. So do it today. They are accepting opinions until August 5.
This is important–and if freedom of thought is curtailed for doctors, we all lose.
It isn’t news that we live in a time where relationships with our pets have transformed from greatly loved companions to equals. I remember several years ago when ethicist Margaret Somerville warned us at a pro-life gathering that this cultural shift was occurring in the ”intelligentsia.” I didn’t doubt her. Nor did I doubt our rudderless North American culture to be able to reason against the notion that pets are people too.
Are we at the point where pro-lifers must start from scratch and use animal images to stir hearts? To identify when life begins? So be careful who you share this with. These graphic images come with their own warning and may disturb you. Disturb you because the fuss is reserved for the animal kingdom today, not the pre-born of the human species.
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Andrea adds: I am very unhappy to see these animals killed for no reason. People who protest abortion are very often sensitive to a lack of care for the natural world too, myself included. That we should limit our empathy to animals, though, is beyond all reason.
Speech isn’t the only thing that babies absorb while in the womb. Studies have shown that around the 20th week of pregnancy the sensory systems for taste and smell have developed. And that allows the baby to experience some of mom’s favorite foods as nutrients pass into the womb.
I decided after the Miley Cyrus debacle that I was disgusted with Robin Thicke. And absolutely couldn’t dance to his song, Blurred Lines, in spite of how fun the beat was. I recall the cultural-disaster-sliding-into-the-sea-as-a-society-morals-are-dead-I-wish-I-was-too moment at the MTV awards–which I didn’t watch. Of course, we were all “treated” to hearing about it afterwards.
Now, people of goodwill no longer have to choose. Weird Al provides a positive messaging version of the same song. Everyone can dance to this one. (I hope this post is grammatically correct.)
Watch this. Sweet. A mom, and I gather a Gold-medal winning gymnast, watches her daughter perform as she comments. (With enthusiasm, shall we say. She’s really living it with her daughter. Which does remind me of my mom, albeit at an entirely different level of sport. If you can call what my sister and I did a “level of sport” at all. Nonetheless, my mom was there, living it, excited. I’d call it a small blessing, except it’s not. It’s a big one, to have supportive parents, these days.)
How times have changed. The essence of what a child needs hasn’t changed, but the expectations surrounding parenting sure have.
I am struck by the sheer beauty found in these black and white shots taken 50 years ago, and re-discovered just recently.
I love the close physical contact between the mothers and their children. I love the nakedness of the children. I love the warm hugs, that eternally nurturing posture. I love the ordinariness of their affection.
But most of all, I LOVE that these photos were taken in a time before the concept of the Yummy Mommy or the Hot Mama, in a time before the perpetually sexualized woman. These images have a carefreeness about them that betrays today’s misunderstanding of love, of womanhood and of motherhood.
If you want to give a gift card for a restaurant so they can order in or for diapers or anything else, I can bring them when I drop off food on the 26th. Just get in touch with me.
You can also do e-gift cards with a number of stores, like Baby R Us. (It’s what I do for baby showers that I cannot attend.)
Our democracy has a rich tradition of allowing conscientious objection, be it for pacifists or pro-lifers. Not so, argues Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition. Blogger Pat Maloney explains the issue.
I think I feel an op-ed coming on, about why this issue is not about the Pill or abortion at all, but rather a basic issue of the right to free speech, which stems from free thought, which is at risk of being curtailed here. Achtung: No thinking allowed in dogmatic pro-abortion ranks.
It is called “We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story.” In it, she calls abortion a “sweet brutality,” and attempts to justify what she sees as a necessary evil:
But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside. The girl asks to see it, sitting up. “It’s not allowed,” I told her sternly.
I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. ‘Let’s do an abortion,’ they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden.
A website is being launched this week to allow individuals who have had their babies aborted a chance to acknowledge and grieve their loss, as well as memorialize the unborn child, without guilt or politics.
Located at www.abortionmemorial.com, the website provides a wall where individuals can post thoughts, poems, images or video – whatever they consider a fitting tribute – to honor the life of the child that could have been. Not only for parents who’ve experienced abortion, but grandparents, siblings and extended family and friends are also invited to post in the baby’s honor, acknowledging the loss that they, too, may feel because of the relationship they would have had with the child.
Abortion isn’t just some other medical procedure. It’s the taking of a life.
