Is ignorance really bliss? On June 17 The Guardian ran this article,
In 1979 China signed a $50m four-year deal with a UN body designed to help it control its spiralling population through family planning. It was the largest foreign aid package Beijing had accepted in almost 20 years.
But the funds became entwined in China’s one-child policy that was just taking hold, and instead of sponsoring an education drive for small families, the money was used to pay for posters in Chinese villages proclaiming “You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it.”
The story of the complicity of the UNFPA, the UN’s main population agency, in the tyranny of China’s forced abortion policy is just one of the examples given in a book that explores western involvement in what has become a modern scourge: sex selection.
Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.
While the article highlights some excellent points, Mara Hvistendahl was unhappy with her books misrepresentation. This is perhaps due to the fact that the UNFPA responded with their own letter refuting the claims of the original article. On July 20, Hvistendahl wrote the following:
I did not argue, furthermore, that the United Nations Population Fund was complicit in these abortions – rather that the agency provided $50m in funding ahead of the one-child policy’s unveiling, and then looked the other way when foreign press reports made clear that forced abortions were occurring. There is a difference between outright funding an injustice and ignoring injustice once it occurs.
UNFPA responded to the article with a letter contesting my supposed claims (Sex selection, China, and human rights, 25 June). The letter may not have been necessary had the article veered more closely to the message of my book.
Sex selection is an important issue, perhaps the most impacting issue on the female population to date, and I just hope that authors and reporters aren’t feeling intimidated because the agencies they’re reporting on are so well financed and multinational. It’s always frustrating to be misquoted, but especially when you just might get a letter from one of the largest agencies in the world.
I’ve had a week chockablock with illness, summer camps and puppy ownership. Inevitably during my downtime, I was watching mind numbing telly to escape the circus. Enter Rosie Pope of Pregnant in Heels, who proclaimed… “I’m happy you’re not for time-outs. A lot of people think time-outs humiliate a child.”
Now, I use time-outs, and I naively thought this was the social norm for discipline. Our western world doesn’t fully accept spanking anymore,
Those who oppose spanking as a form of discipline say that, in modern democratic societies, hitting a child — in any circumstance — is unacceptable. Not only does it encourage violence, they argue, it is an affront to human dignity.
Was I spanked? Of course, but did some parents abuse the power they had? Yes. It seems that now the same thing is happening with time-outs.
Parents are posting their child’s time out videos on the Internet. All of these children are all under 24 months of age- still in diapers. [...]
This is a clear example of where American parents are failing their children and our society. It’s humiliating enough for a child to be disciplined in private, but then to post it on the Internet? What purpose does this serve?
The point is, any form of discipline can be misused, but older children and grown-ups should feel bad when they do something wrong. Discipline achieves that, and we shouldn’t let a handful of parents who use more than reasonable force set the bar for the rest of us. I’m assuming Rosie Pope has a lot of followers who may take her advice without any salt, but I’m keeping my time-out step.
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Andrea adds: Thanks, Jennifer for this post. This is one I must add to before it imports to Facebook where people will think I’ve been sick, at summercamp and that I got a puppy. So. My two cents: any child discipline can be abused, be it spanking or time-outs. I’m not opposed to parents using either of those things, done appropriately.
The tragic shootings in Norway have the country mourning not only the lost lives of so many young people but also the loss of the people they could’ve become. More from The Guardian,
Lejla got involved in politics, convinced that words and not weapons were a way to make the world a better place.
That’s how the 17-year-old came to be on the island of Utøya last Friday when Anders Behring Breivik arrived dressed as a policeman with a pistol in his belt and a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, telling the campers he was there to protect them following the bomb in Oslo – only to open fire over the course of 90 minutes, killing 68 people.
Lejla was attending the youth convention on Utøya as head of the Fredrikstad branch of Norway’s youth labour movement, Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF. On Thursday night she sat with friends around the campfire as they practised a pop song they hoped to perform for the rest of the group the following night. The performance never happened.
Now Lejla is missing, presumed dead at the bottom of the Tyrifjorden, just one of dozens of young activists tipped for the top of Norwegian politics who will never reach adulthood, let alone the Stortinget, Norway’s parliament.
Obama said it as best anyone can in response to such a devastating loss, “To the people of Norway- we are heartbroken by the tragic loss of so many people, particularly youth with the fullness of life ahead of them. No words can ease the sorrow but please know that the thoughts and prayers of all Americans are with the people of Norway, and that we will stand beside you every step of the way.”
I get shivers watching this. Holy powerful communications through a well done video. Jarring. And I’m not even sure that I agree with it. (Planned Parenthood is evil, don’t get me wrong, but I think they want anyone and everyone to have ”access to abortion,” not just black people. That said, the numbers don’t lie, and more black women are having abortions. And so that is worth addressing and doing some PR on, especially within the black community. I’m just not sure this is a race issue.)
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Andrea adds: Here’s another clip from the same group. Note the different tone. Note also that it has about 300 views compared with 20,000 plus for the other one.
It is no surprise, then, that the rates of every outcome harmful to women–uncommitted sexual encounters, sexually transmitted infections, nonmarital births, and abortion–have climbed precipitously during the decades that the federal government has escalated both public and private support for contraception. Yet the IOM report–a report on women’s health–makes no reference to this substantial body of literature. Americans are likely to support its conclusions generally. They assume, understandably, that widespread distribution of contraception successfully reduces pregnancy rates. Four decades of history and empirical data, however, demonstrate otherwise. Women’s reproductive lives are more, not less, outside their control in a sex and mating market dominated by the notion that it is not sex but “unprotected sex” that makes babies.
Well, I’m not a rock star. Not in the musical way, anyway. Although if you blast the right music in my kitchen loud enough, on occassion, you might be confused.
Anyway, yes, this blog post does have a point and I’ll get there in a second. This morning on the radio I heard that the rockstar Pink has taken up knitting. Please feel free to listen to her hit “So What” while you read this, this fine Saturday afternoon:
Where was I? Oh yes, knitting. Apparently upon the birth of her daughter, she can’t get enough of it. The actual quote on the radio I heard was that she said couldn’t believe that she is doing this, but as a new mom, it just brought the knitting out in her.
And it made me think of the very many cool ways in which motherhood has changed some of my friends. My friends were cool before they were moms, but some of them became even cooler. None of them, incidentally, picked up knitting, but my point is that motherhood can change you in ways that are entirely unforeseen. When you are pregnant, you couldn’t possibly know that you’d be knitting away in nine months, could you?
So one of the great things in life is to expect the unexpected and hold on for the ride. Forget all the moralizing for a minute–it’s a life! it’s a person! from conception! (all of which I believe, don’t get me wrong), expecting the unexpected while maintaining your rock star status is just one more reason to be against abortion.
Apparently Sarah Palin is going to have another grandchild. Her eldest son got married two months ago and he and his wife are expecting. There are already snarky speculations that the baby is older than two months. Check out the tone of the article linked above, which concludes with the words “The Palins did not respond to our request for comment.” Ya think? Who would?
Anyway, it’s not Sarah Palin who isn’t practicing what she preaches. This isn’t the first time a parent’s child has gone off the rails, nor will it be the last. What she’s preaching–no sex before marriage–is worth preaching even if not followed. My feeling is that this author is from the “get a quickie abortion to cover up” crew. Hypocrisy comes in many different flavours.
Well gosh darn it! If you can get rid of tellers in banks, and just do your transactions online, why can’t you do that with abortions? So much easier. And just as safe! Of course, later we read the real story:
Clearly we don’t have enough primary care providers. One way to solve this is through telemedicine. We don’t want to be attacking that, we probably want to be celebrating it.”
This time I’m looking for academic/intellectual assessments of what repercussions a high abortion rate has on a community, province/state or country. I’m looking for social repercussions, the big picture, not mental or physical health effects. Research from anywhere in the globe would suit me just fine.
A very reasonable column about Tim Hudak’s prior statements on abortion that is, quite frankly, neither pro-life nor pro-choice. Just reasonable. I like this part, especially:
And there is a subset of Canadians that unleashes online hellfire against anyone who sees anything worth discussing about this country’s unique legal vacuum on abortion.
Elizabeth May found this out in 2006 by daring to suggest abortion isn’t an ideal outcome in the abstract, even as she opposed any infringement upon a specific woman’s right to choose. Fair enough. That’s democracy. What’s annoying is the terror that small subset instills in the political class.
And that’s what I mean about having a little chutzpah, Mr. Hudak. Really, it is a very small subset that unleashes the online hellfire. A shrug and standing by your principles is the way to go. There’s no reason to struggle for talking points on this one. And the more any politician does, the more that small subset smells blood and goes in for the kill.
