ProWomanProLife

Here’s hoping this is a big giant misunderstanding:

OTTAWA — Canadian officials contacted the Afghan government Tuesday to express concern about controversial new legislation that would reportedly allow men to rape their wives.

The Canadian government reacted with outrage following reports that the Karzai administration has approved a wide-ranging family law for the country’s Shia minority.

Various reports say the legislation would make it illegal for Shia women to refuse their husbands sex, leave the house without their permission, or have custody of children.

Received today this email from SBA List:

Washington, D.C. – Today the president of the Susan B. Anthony List commented on radical pro-abortion activist Dawn Johnsen, whose nomination was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and currently awaits a floor vote.

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While Johnsen served as the legal counsel for National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League (now NARAL Pro-Choice America), she authored numerous legal opinions rejecting any and all restrictions on abortion. Some notable quotes from Johnsen’s amicus curiae brief in the case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services include

“Abortion restrictions ‘reduce pregnant women to no more than fetal containers.’”

“The argument that women who become pregnant have in some sense consented to the pregnancy belies reality…and others who are the inevitable losers in the contraceptive lottery no more ‘consent’ to pregnancy than pedestrians ‘consent’ to being struck by drunk drivers.”

“The experience [of abortion] is no longer traumatic; the response of most women to the experience is relief.”

Johnsen awaits a floor vote by the full U.S. Senate to gain confirmation to head the Office of Legal Counsel.

A letter in today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Re: The abortion trap, March 28.

Yes, columnist Leonard Stern, abortion is a trap for women and for unborn children, too. I was trapped into believing the lies that abortion was a quick fix and just a “clump of tissue.” I was trapped by my parents and boyfriend to abort.

There is a new and growing voice on this issue and it is women like me who deeply regret their abortions, have great sorrow and have been damaged physically, emotionally and spiritually.

We are pro-woman and pro-life and know that aborting your baby should be unthinkable! We urge politicians and doctors to stop abortion as a form of birth control. It is really child sacrifice; and not a medical necessity.

Many studies confirm that abortion causes depression, substance abuse, suicides, pre-term births in subsequent pregnancies, miscarriages, infertility and breast and cervical cancers.

We were not informed about fetal development and did not know our babies had a beating heart by three weeks and arms, legs, fingers and toes by eight weeks. Abortion is a wrong, and not a right.

The choice must be made on who, when, where and why to have sex with someone — pregnancy is a natural outcome of that intimacy. Childbirth is the healthy and natural choice.

Denise Mountenay,

Morinville, Alberta

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Andrea compares and contrasts with this: This blog post “Simple answers to simple questions” (from simple minds?) says:

Insofar as “pro-life” is generally just a euphemism for someone who supports forced childbirth, the answer is no.  There is no such thing as a “pro-life” feminist, anymore than there’s such thing as a pro-genocide pacifist.

“My body, my choice.” Very much entrenched. And if you say “but it’s not your body,” they’ll still refer you to point A–”My body, my choice.” It’s like talking to programmed drones.

Hey, Véronique and Patricia, have you tried this?

In the consensual living model, father doesn’t know best. Neither does mom. Instead, parents and children are equal partners in family life, according to the principles laid out at consensual-living.com.

[...]

Consensual living 101

Core principles

Everyone’s wants and needs are equally valid, regardless of age.

Children can be trusted to know their own minds and bodies.

Punishments and rewards are tools of manipulation, unneeded when family members work as a team.

There is a creative solution that works for everyone.

Each family member has a positive intent and desires harmony.

When all are secure that their needs will be met, they will branch out and help others meet their needs.

I’m no fan of draconian and inflexible discipline. But come on. If families had to live with the ‘equally valid’ wants and needs of every two-year-old, methinks they wouldn’t get anything done at all. Thoughts?

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Andrea adds: My completely adorable little niece sometimes responds with a very strong ”I know” as if to put you in your place. My sister and I were laughing over this one day–and concluded that actually, there are some things she doesn’t know–like the other 23 letters of the alphabet, for starters…

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Rebecca says: I hope I’m never trapped on a trans-Atlantic flight beside this kind of family.

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Patricia adds: I was going to blog on this yesterday, but I was too busy validating the needs and wants of my five children simultaneously. Sadly, the end result was my being sedated by the local SWAT team.

Would say more but have to go explain to my youngest why she can’t spend all day, every day watching an endless loop of “The Lonely Goatherd” from our Sound of Music DVD. Or maybe she can, as that particular desire of hers is apparently as valid as my desire, some might even say, need, to go out and get some groceries.

And I think that’s enough said about that particular style of parenting.

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Andrea doesn’t mean to question Patricia’s parenting but what is so wrong with watching part–or all–of the Sound of Music on repeat? What could be wrong with wanting to be a nun, so that you can get kicked out of the abbey, and end up governess for a very handsome sea captain’s children? After a critical moment of harrowing indecision, you leave the captain to go into seclusion, back at the abbey, to ponder your options. Meanwhile, the captain’s girlfriend decides to pack her little bags and go back to Vienna, where she belongs, thereby allowing you to return and face the problem of your illicit relationship with said very handsome captain. No, I’d say there’s nothing wrong with watching too much Sound of Music. Didn’t do me any harm, anyways, says the 32-year-old single gal in the crowd.

Put it this way: I wouldn’t find it cute.

Ashton Kutcher keeps playing tricks on wife Demi Moore by secretly changing the TV channel to porn.

The star – famed for his practical jokes on TV show Punk’d – can access his home television from his computer and has been swapping Demi’s favourite programmes to X-rated movies.

He wrote on social networking website Twitter: “u can change your home tv from your computer. it’s a fun prank 2 play on someone if u know they r watching. keep switching the tv 2 porn (sic).”

Call me a crusty old goat all you like, but I do not find this romantic at all.

For people who care about these things, there’s been a bit of a dialogue in the blogosphere over the comparison between slavery and abortion of late. It all started with this initial comparison piece here, and resulted in a rebuttal here, which caught my eye for this statement:

First of all, to be brutally candid, it [the comparison between slavery and abortion] trivializes abortion. Evil as slavery was in practice (especially in its American variety, which broke up marriages, sold off children, and discouraged religious preaching to blacks), it was never remotely as evil as abortion. It amounts, in essence, to the theft of labor—and theft isn’t quite as evil as killing. Of course, one could rightly see it as “defrauding the laborer of his just wages,” and thus a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance, which would put it in the same category as voluntary murder.

Finally, I choose today to comment on the rebuttal to the rebuttal–which caught my eye for this sentiment which remains encouraging to me, as it should to all who strive for each life to be recognized as worthy:

But the pro-lifer/abolitionist analogy is just that: an analogy that is imperfect and inevitably breaks down somewhere. To my mind, it works best as a cause for encouragement among pro-lifers: If abolitionists could succeed against a moral evil with such deep roots in law, custom, and culture as slavery, they should have some hope of overturning the abortion regime of the past 36 years.

Off to rent Amazing Grace, again.

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Brigitte says: Forgive me for barging into a delicate debate with clumsy clodhoppers, but it seems to me the important connection between slavery and abortion is that both deny the full humanity of human beings. It’s the same connection I see with the Holocaust and any genocide you care to mention. When a society accepts that some of its members aren’t fully human, all sorts of evil things happen – including that it makes it possible for otherwise normal and decent people to do bad things and get away with them, at least in the strict legal sense.

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Tanya has to agree with Brigitte: It is a denial of the human rights of a human being. That is the parallel. Watching the Prince of Egypt with my daughter yesterday, I couldn’t help but again be reminded that the root cause of atrocities against humanity is always someone, somewhere, believing his rights supersede anyone else’s.

So in this article we read about a man who was looking for a one night stand, presumably one he didn’t have to pay for, and found it, only to be dragged through the courts on a rape charge for 13 months at a cost of 90,000 pounds when the binge-drinking, drunken female he spent the night with felt violated.

Right. So I don’t feel bad for the man–you get what you pay for–and since it was sex with no strings attached that he wanted, he probably should have gone to an official prostitute, where this is understood. Or is “caveat emptor” the real premise here–don’t have sex with drunken lawyers…

Certainly no sympathy for the woman either, though. Wrongly accusing someone is always wrong, and certainly a little personal responsibility in the equation never hurts. I’m hard pressed to give advice–four bottles instead of five next time, young miss?

We (royal) note that apparently you can go through years of higher education and still be…not smart.

Research proves pregnant woman are forgetful. Why, anything on their minds?

A group of researchers from Australia and New Zealand have proven the long-held stereotype that pregnant women are forgetful is true. The memory tests involved 30 women in their first trimester, another 30 in their third trimester and 30 women who were not pregnant. While no change was found in measurements of the pregnant women’s visuospatial memory—they performed worse when measuring their auditory memory. Pregnant women scored an average of 10 points lower than those who weren’t pregnant for a combined memory score. Researchers say the findings are important because clinicians need to be aware that information given to pregnant women orally may not be retained as well as written information.

My new baby turned five weeks last weekend and boy, does time fly or what? I am still getting the hang of surviving a six-kid family which may or may not explain the light blogging. Writing anything coherent is challenging on two three-hour stretches of sleep and the challenge is compounded by single handed typing: by the time the first half of the sentence is written, I cannot remember where the heck I was going with it. My days as a graduate student seem so far away and I can hardly believe I finished writing a whole thesis last summer. Today, I can barely keep on top of emails, to say nothing about birth announcements and thank you cards.

Many people think I’m brave to have such a large family. I think that “brave” is what people say when they don’t want to say “insane” in front of the children. I have been considered “brave” since my fourth child and I would be lying if I didn’t admit to questioning my sanity on a regular basis.

Recently, on a particularly hairy evening when my husband was away, the baby was fussy and the toddler was screaming his head off, I issued a teary “I quit this job!” to the world. The world didn’t accept my resignation and so here I am, as “brave” as ever, trying to juggle a modern life with three times the national average of children.

Over the last five weeks, I have developed a system of priorities deployed whenever the baby gives me a break. As soon as the baby settles down, I go through the list until she wakes up. The list goes a little like this: personal hygiene, prepare supper, tidy kitchen, fitness training and housework. I sometimes switch fitness and housework according to need: yesterday for instance, the bathrooms were so gross that Public Health would have closed the whole place down. As for fitness training, my rebel streak believes that a mother of six shouldn’t have to train to be fit… and so I sit on my extra 30 pounds trying to will it off my midsection. Last week, we were eating in a fancy restaurant and the waiter said: “Six children! And a seventh on the way…” To which my husband replied cheerfully “Oh, this is just leftover from the sixth” and I thought “Guys, a slow and painful death will be too good for you” and ordered the goat cheese crème brûlée to drown my sorrow. The baby sleeps so well in the jogging stroller that colic-avoidance and self-preservation should whip me back into the shape of my life by the summer. In the meantime, a brownie a day keeps the baby blues away.

That’s what I like to believe anyway.

In spite of being in a conference this weekend, I heard about this march against greed and capitalism. I did not hear about the tens of thousands marching in Spain against the liberalisation of abortion laws.