ProWomanProLife

Pregnant in Heels: It’s a new TV show. I probably won’t see it, given my cableless life. I do wonder how it is that these Sex and the City types manage to wear high heels over the miles of Manhattan sidewalks, pregnant or otherwise. But especially when pregnant. Must involve lots of cabs.

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Deborah adds: Oh, but you have to look at the one practical side! Most high heels are slip-ons! Way easier than bending over (or trying to bed over) to tie my converse shoes! And you don’t have to put on socks to wear heels, so even less trying to reach your feet! (Admittedly, I was determined to be able to wear heels while pregnant, especially after one of our priests exclaimed early on (not too seriously) “Heels! Why are you wearing heels? You shouldn’t be wearing heels, you’re pregnant!” But then the hormones made my ligaments too lax and now I don’t even do any walking without a cane. I guess the joke was on me!)

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Véronique adds: It’s just like at my house!!

Let me just say, I am not a fan of linking motherhood to patriotic duty. Women shouldn’t be having babies simply because the birth rate is down, but the situation in Russia does show, on a national scale, why abortion is not a solution.

Like a scene out of an old Charles Dickens novel, Russian women who are considering abortion might soon be able to leave their newborn children anonymously at the doorstep of special government funded wellness centers if a new bill passes the Russian parliament.

The bill was sponsored by the State Duma Committee for Family Affairs and the Russian Orthodox Church. Under the proposed law, a woman who decides to leave her child at a wellness and adoption home will be exempt from parenting and financial responsibilities. The centers will only be available for children under six months old.

According to data compiled by Ria Novosti newswire in Moscow, Russians have more abortions than their European counterparts. In 2008, 87 out of 10,000 women had abortions, surpassing Romania in second place with 59 out of 10,000 women and Britian, with 35 out of 10,000 women aborting pregnancies.

Russian law permits abortions up to the 12th week of pregnancy.

Russia’s abortion totals have come down between 2004 and 2008, at least, going from 1.7 million in 2004 to 1.2 million abortions in 2008. The number of abortions in Russia was almost equal to the number of babies born in 2008. According to the Russian Health Ministry, there were 1.7 million births in Russia in 2008 comparaed with 1.2 million abortions.

Experts say the low birth rate in Russia is reaching a critical point. It began to decline in 1992 as a result of poor medical services, social problems and high alcoholism, Ria Novosti reported. The government is working to reverse the trend.

An ectopic pregnancy makes it to 32 weeks, Mom and baby are doing fine:

When doctors told Nicky Soto that her baby was growing outside her womb, the Arizona mom was stunned and scared. Soto was told that her life would be at risk if she opted to continue with the ectopic pregnancy — and no one held out much hope that the baby would survive.But Soto, 27, had struggled for five years to become pregnant. After some soul searching, she decided to take the risk, fearing that this might be her last chance.

The abortion rate for UK women over 40 is up by one third.

Josephine Quintavalle, of the Pro-Life Alliance, said: “These figures are extraordinarily depressing -when we see high rates of teen pregnancy we often end up debating whether ignorance is to blame, but you would think that by the age of 40 women would have some idea how things work.”

I too would have hoped that by 40 women would have some idea of how things work and wouldn’t use abortion as birth control.

People! Sex remains connected to pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood is suing another state.

PIERRE, S.D. — Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit in federal court yesterday seeking to block a South Dakota law that would require women seeking abortions to face the nation’s longest waiting period — three days — and undergo counseling at pregnancy help centers that discourage abortion.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to suspend the law until a final ruling on whether it violates a woman’s constitutional right to abortion established under the US Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. The law is set to take effect July1.

The legal challenge was filed in Sioux Falls, where Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota operates South Dakota’s only abortion clinic.

State Representative Roger Hunt, Republican of Brandon, the chief sponsor of the bill, said the lawsuit was expected.

“I don’t understand why, because it just seeks to give women more information, and it seeks to remove coercion, seeks to deal with a number of coercion elements where you have possible rapes and problems within families and whatnot, and we’re trying to help those women deal with that coercion,’’ said Hunt.

Here we go with another “Tyranny of mother’s milk” article. Listen here, I am not opposed in principle to formula. I have even fed it to my children. But I have several issues with rants such as this one, the first one being that hard cases make bad law. A mother felt that her breast milk was not sufficient to nourish her infant and some healthcare providers with inadequate or incomplete  formation on breastfeeding made it worse. Can we really draw a public health conclusion about this? As someone who struggled through a similar challenge, I will tell you exactly what the problem was: inadequate follow-up by a nurse with inadequate formation. What we need is more research and information about the root causes of the inability to breastfeed (no, everything is not linked to a poor latch). As long as we have health care providers (whether they are doctors, nurses of nursing consultants) blaming everything on a poor latch, we’ll have situations like the one described in Wente’s article.

But that wouldn’t make a rant, would it? Much better to blame it on an evil patriarchal scheme to oppress women using their own children! Let me try to make something perfectly clear to those who hope that formula-feeding will liberate them from the tyranny of baby: human infants are needy and helpless. The well-meaning nurse who told you that formula-fed infants slept longer, she lied. If that makes infants oppressive, then so be it: human infants are oppressive. It’s not an evil scheme to oppress women, it’s just The Way Things Are. Unlike horses, our infants are not expected to stand-up and flee danger within their first hour of life.  Why does liberation have to mean liberating ourselves from our own children? Why do we have to deny motherhood and the fact that we are able to respond to our infants’ needs to be liberated women?   But mark my words – I have 6 children and I am expecting 2 more – if you think that formula-feeding will liberate you from your children, you are in for a big shock.

The other thing I would like to mention – and I choose my words carefully – is that healthcare providers, especially doctors, are in the business of making us feel guilty for our unhealthy choices. Read that again and think about it. Do you think that any OB/GYN worth his salt has a fleeting remorse about making a pregnant smoker feel guilty? And let’s not even approach the topic of overweight people, especially pregnant ones. Human milk is the best nutrition for human babies. You may choose not to breastfeed for a long list of reasons but it does not remove the fact that human milk is best for human babies. Once again, this is not an evil scheme to oppress women, it’s just The Way Things Are.  Any doctor or nurse who pretends otherwise or avoids mentioning it for fear of triggering guilty feelings is not doing his job. I had to be transferred to hospital for complications following a home birth (baby was fine, I was not). Do you think the duty OB/GYN held back from lecturing me about the dangers of homebirths? Not for a second. Did I feel guilty? Yes. That was the whole point.  We start our pregnancies avoiding everything from soft cheese to caffeine and once the baby is out, we’re supposed to avoid finding out that breast milk is better for them? Fight the tyranny, demand proper information!

…would you rather have abortion access or a family doctor?

I spent last week in Prince Edward Island. Never having been there before, I was eager to see what it was like and why it was such a tourist hot spot. Crossing the long and scenic Confederation Bridge, I found myself remembering all the cries for abortion access for these tiny rural communities. And as the island came into view, I tried to imagine seeing a clinic somewhere in this landscape.

Where would you put it? On that farm? On this waterfront park? How about across from the Green Gable house? Or maybe just down from this amusement park? I couldn’t see it. In fact, when you get into PEI, you don’t see much of what you see in a bigger city, and that’s exactly why tourists go there. Many of the people, just opening up their businesses for the season over the long weekend, told us they did so much business with tourists in July and August, that they didn’t need to operate the rest of the year. One woman, who ran an in-home restaurant and gift shop, told me her daughter was in Halifax for over two months when she gave birth to her premature granddaughter as the island didn’t have the facilities to care for them.

So then there are the priorities, what services does PEI really need? The Atlantic regions, with their higher median age, will inevitably have different concerns. So it’s a shame to hear abortion advocates crying for access, while clinics who offer the services Islanders really need, like this one, have to close their doors.

Dr. Robbie Coull’s decision to leave the province and close the Phoenix Medical Practice will leave 4,500 people without a doctor. The practice employed 14 people.

“This is a disaster for health care in P.E.I.,” Coull said in a news release Friday. [...]

“We lost $10,000 over the last month, and that was without me taking any salary,” he said in a release.

“Unfortunately, they’ve confirmed for us this week that that money will not be forth coming and we will not be getting negotiations for a pilot. We therefore have no option but to let go of all of our staff and to close the practice,” Coull said to CBC News.

The Phoenix Medical Practice had proposed an expansion of its current model. The three-year pilot project would have provided funding for three doctors and cared for 7,500 patients. Coull said part of the project would have been to demonstrate cheaper per-patient per-year cost than what the province is currently paying out to salaried doctors.

“We made it very clear to them that without this funding we would be forced to close our doors,” he said.

Coull said he was very concerned about what will happen to his patients. In looking at the diabetics on his patient roster, he suggested that five of them could die over the next five years if they can’t find another doctor to provide adequate care.

Dr.Richard Wedge, with Health PEI, said the affected patients will automatically be added to the patient registry of people waiting for a family doctor.

4,500 is roughly 3% of the total population of Charlottetown now without a family physician.

Please raise your thoughts to the very many mothers who are in distress today.

I write this post because one specific mother is scheduled to have an abortion tomorrow, but it doesn’t seem clear she really wants to go through with it. We all know abortions happen every single day. But when someone steps into your field of vision even peripherally, through someone you know, it becomes all the more pressing, upsetting and personal.

I don’t know the young mother in question. I merely forwarded on what I hope are helpful suggestions to the person who does know her. If you are a praying person, you might spend some time in prayer today for her and her unborn child.

Here we have a pro-choice woman arguing that pro-life voices should be included around the table at a government-advisory sexual health forum in the UK:

I’m struggling to understand quite why it is so terrible that the anti-abortion charity, Life, has been invited to join a government- advisory sexual health forum. Former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris reckons that the presence of the group, which promotes sexual abstinence, could prevent the advisory panel from having “frank and open discussions”. I’d say that open discussions are the last thing being sought when groups of people are convened because they all share similar views. It’s not hard to be “frank” either, when addressing a circle of nodding heads.

Hats off to her for expressing this view. But she goes on to say that the pro-choice position will always win out because it is the more logical and rational one. Naturally, I disagree, and I think those who try to ban the pro-life groups from being around such tables do as well. It’s precisely because the pro-life position is very rationally compelling that some believe it shouldn’t be heard. Indeed, the ardent pro-choicers best bet in winning on this question is to make sure pro-lifers remain silent.

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Jennifer adds: The group, Life, has done amazing work. Founded in a spa house in 1970, the group now runs charity shops, residential centers, offers counseling and support for new mothers and their babies. It’s a £4 million operation and provides a great template for other groups to follow.

I’ll be on Byline with Brian Lilley (Sun TV) today to discuss this:

While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl.The only people who know are Storm’s brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, a close family friend and the two midwives who helped deliver the baby in a birthing pool at their Toronto home on New Year’s Day.“When the baby comes out, even the people who love you the most and know you so intimately, the first question they ask is, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’” says Witterick, bouncing Storm, dressed in a red-fleece jumper, on her lap at the kitchen table.“If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says Stocker.

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Véronique adds: Believe it or not, I don’t have a strong opinion on that one. I don’t know much about the philosophy , politics or ethics of gender identity. There are a few things I know for sure and others that I suspect. Of the few things I know for sure is that social expectations of gender – girls in pink, boys in blue, dolls and trucks etc. – are at best nice tries. I have a son who likes ballet and nail polish, along with Nerf guns and fire trucks. I have a daughter who is mesmerized by big trucks and sparkly high heels. They were raised in a house with equal numbers of Thomas the Tank Engine and Polly Pockets. I hate shopping. My husband likes a clean house. People can try raising a gender-free baby and at best, they’ll get a boy who likes long hair or a girl who likes motorbikes. They’ll still have a boy or a girl. Unless their child develops/ was born with a gender identity issue in which case no amount of dressing in blue or watching High School Musical was going to make a difference anyway. I say this as someone with a transgendered relative: these things run deeper than your childhood toys.

One of the things I suspect is that people with gender issues – real ones that require treatment, surgery and therapy – see studies explaining why they are all mixed-up with the same disdain I feel when I listen to world population experts quote studies proving that mothers of big families all secretly wish they had 2 kids: with eyes rolling way, way back. My point is, we’re all wierd to someone else. Storm’s parents are wierd. I’m wierd to  most of my kids’ classmates’ parents. I had three babies at home. Some people consider this tantamount to child endangerment. I never had an epidural. Some people consider this downward crazy.

Another thing I suspect is that Storm’s parents love him (or her) very much as they love their older sons and it seems that they are well cared for. There’s a lot more to worry about and get scandalized over in child welfare than parents who appear a bit nutty. I mean, seriously. Some people manage to starve their kids to death. In Canada. Under the watch of child welfare authorities.

In the end, isn’t it ironic that parents who want to deny the importance of gender will give more importance to their child’s genitals than any of my colour-coded babies will ever get? Ironic but sad for the kid who never asked for the scrutiny. But he or she won’t be the first child to pay for his parents 15 minutes of fame.