Archives for May 2010

…leads to hiding babies and distributing them amongst relatives so as to avoid the authorities. A Chinese demographer therefore suggests the official statistics are wrong:

Liang has discovered discrepancies in China’s census. “In 1990, the national census recorded 23 million births. But by the 2000 census, there were 26 million 10 year-old children, an increase of three million,” he said. His findings suggest that the one-child policy may not have the grim consequences that have been widely predicted.

While I’d be glad to hear that’s true, it doesn’t change the grim nature of the one-child policy. Neither does it change past reports of seeing classrooms filled with boys, for example.

…goes big box store.

Marie Stopes International (MSI) has opened five outlets in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu. Here the selective abortion of girls has led to a gender imbalance of up to 131 boys for every 100 girls.

The closeness of MSI’s relationship with the Chinese government was shown earlier this month when Li Bin, its population minister, visited the MSI offices in London and an abortion clinic in Bristol.

Plans are under way to set up three more MSI abortion clinics in China. Marie Stopes argues that its influence will help to change Chinese attitudes and promote the notion of women’s choice.

This is released just days after the first abortion ad from Marie Stopes aired in the UK. It seems that MSI is behaving exactly like any business would and expanding its efforts, in the name of “promoting women’s choice”… in China.

Marie Stopes carries out 65,000 abortions a year in Britain, most of them through NHS contracts for which it receives £30m a year. Surplus funds from the NHS work are channelled into the work of the international division.

Here is a link to their Chinese site. I don’t read mandarin, but the images are enough for me. I took special note of the smiling cartoon airplane flying overhead with its banner reading: “HAPPY!” That part, I could read.

Same day as the March for Life, I went to the National Campus Life Network dinner at a fun, festive, latin restaurant in Ottawa’s Byward Market. I will be back for some more mojitos and salsa lessons. But I digress.

As we all know, the pro-life movement is populated by largely, old, white men who want to tell women what to do. Evidence in the photo below. These photos keep appearing in my Facebook profile, so I thought it was time to post one. At the dinner, I spoke with eloquent women with degrees from fancy Ivy League universities. Very troubling. As we all further know, pro-life women are home, barefoot and pregnant, wondering how that happened to them. Finally, while waiting for the bus I had a conversation with one young woman whose job was working with the elderly in a home. And I just thought to myself, what nerve! She’s supposed to only care for people while they are in the womb.

People of the pro-life persuasion: Here’s to working ourselves out of the activism niche because of our success. I’ll buy a round of mojitos to that!

Thanks to Julie for sending this:

International human rights organization Equality Now welcomes the AAP’s decision to withdraw its ill-conceived revised policy statement on female genital mutilation issued on April 26, 2010….

The new policy statement essentially promoted Type IV FGM, as categorized by the World Health Organization, and suggested that federal and state laws might be more effective if they “enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ‘ritual nick.'” In a release issued today, the AAP stated that it has “retired” its 2010 revised statement on FGM, is opposed to “all forms of female genital cutting” and “does not endorse the practice of offering a ‘clitoral nick.'”

More on this business with teen pregnancy rates going down. And the explanations from the self-satisfied “experts” that of course their kind of sex-ed in school caused teens suddenly to become more careful about not getting pregnant.

Sexual literacy (the result of sex education in schools) and access to contraceptives are cited as two key reasons Canada’s teen pregnancy rate fell dramatically between 1996 and 2006, according to a study by the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty backed away from plans to introduce an expanded sex ed curriculum this fall, after a public outcry fueled by religious groups. Yet the research from the Sex Information and Education Council does seem to imply that arming young Canadians with information about sex has positive impact. Between 1996 and 2006, teen pregnancy rates in Canada dropped by 37 per cent — more steeply than in the United States, Sweden or the United Kingdom.

Bosh. This implies that 1) the only way to become “sexually literate” is by going through school-based sex ed; that 2) religious parents are against “arming” their own personal young Canadians with information about sex; and that 3) there is significantly less sex-ed in the US than there is in Canada, which I find surprising at best. I’m no expert on religion, but there is not one normal parent I know (religious or not) who’s in favour of keeping their pre-teens and teens in the dark about sex and sexuality (not that they could if they tried). It’s just that not everybody likes the way public sex-ed teachers go about teaching the kids, and I’m guessing a lot of the objections parents have to school-based sex-ed is that it doesn’t talk about morality, the importance of commitment, or anything much outside of pure sex mechanics. Being an expert at unrolling a condom but having no idea why committed, stable relationships are also the ones in which the sex is better doesn’t strike me as fitting the definition of being “armed with information about sex”.

But then, I’m not an expert.

Rightly or wrongly, Catholic clerics are rarely far from the firing line.

Two weeks ago, Cardinal Ouellet said that abortion in the case of rape was wrong. That triggered predictable stories that talked about the ensuing “firestorm of virulent reaction” against the Church, even though Cardinal Ouellet was simply repeating Catholic moral teaching and not proposing an amendment to the Criminal Code of Canada.

Charles Lewis’ article here is an insight beyond the surface story to a look at what the Catholic Church is proposing in terms of proactive solutions to Canada’s abortion rates.

I am launching an appeal with my Ottawa colleague [Archbishop Prendergast] for an awareness campaign and [for] more programs providing assistance for women in distress in Canada,” Cardinal Ouellet said. “There is a great scarcity of information, support and financial assistance to enable pregnant women to make an informed choice.”

So what can we expect? More of these types of programs. The Gabriel Project outreach is in its earliest stages in Nova Scotia though it’s already running throughout the US, and we can expect to see more of these laypeople-run/church-supported programs pop up across this country in the near future. They’re an opportunity for the church to be proactive and to get laypeople, even non-Catholics, involved in the process.

This article really juxtaposes the life of the fetus against the life of the mother. I don’t see things that way. I just don’t think it’s quite that black and white. (EITHER the fetus lives OR the mother thrives…)