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Summer blogging

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Some of you have asked if everything is OK since blogging is light. Thank you for the concern! Indeed, all is well. It’s summer and I’m trying at every possible opportunity to be outside, aka away from the computer. For example, I swam across Lake Okanagan on July 16. And I have the new bathing cap to prove it!

My ardour for the cause has not waned, as we (pretty much constantly) discuss how to move the ball forward on this file with like-minded friends. Culture change is not achieved overnight. It’s long term. If you have ideas you want to toss around for making abortion unthinkable, and, specifically, to ensure that all of North America knows abortion does not enhance women’s rights (and never has)–then please drop me a line! And I will respond–after I towel off.

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It’s only confident types who post photos of themselves in bathing caps. 

ProWoman and ProLife: Not a ruse or a PR strategy

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Articles like these do not reflect my sentiment as a pro-life woman. Being pro-life/anti-abortion/whatever-you-want-to-call-it reflects a genuinely pro-woman sentiment, not some rebranding so that my message can be more tenable. Ours is the novel idea that women ought to be accepted in all their reproductive capacities. Certainly my view also partners with the humanity of the preborn–we are not aborting cucumbers, after all–to suggest that there is something of value, a fetus, which is the result (in many instances) of a natural thing called sex. These are facts on the ground that we need to recognize.

The author also adds that pro-life folks lost the battle long ago. I’d argue the presence of his column is evidence that the pro-choice victory has not been complete. In order for a complete pro-choice victory to occur, we would have to wipe out all joy at the prospect of a wanted child being born. When that happens, women might feel entirely unconflicted about the act of abortion.

However, since that won’t happen, we will muddle through with pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike muttering about the matter. It’s just not going to go away quietly into the realm of non-controversial.

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Canada Is A Complicit Partner In Sex-Selection Abortion

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My latest, up at Huff Post:

In the middle of writing this piece, I got an urgent email. A woman with an in-utero diagnosis of trisomy aborted her second trimester child. She is now suicidal. Did I know of anyone who could help?

This is the modern face of abortion that few publicize, though suicide and suicidal ideation are known risks when abortion is chosen for wanted pregnancies. (There’s a new documentary coming out called Hush that explains this. It is being pre-screened April 16, 2016.)

Canada loses roughly 280 human beings to abortion every day. Annually, that’s like losing the number of people in Waterloo, Ontario.

What bothers us about this number, what bothers us about the post-abortive suicidal woman is basically… nothing at all. We care only that when abortion happens, females and males die in equal numbers.

It’s not Indo-Canadians alone who have a problem. Cultural change is needed in many more communities and homes across Canada. We can start by re-evaluating our own openness to abortion at any time, for any reason.

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Hillary Clinton’s abortion gaffe

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This is apparently a gaffe. From Hillary Clinton, this time. I have a hard time registering it as such. It just goes to show you that this issue of abortion is not settled. It is impossible to make every living soul use the term “fetus” in every instance, instead of person or child.

“The unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights,” Mrs. Clinton said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t do everything we possibly can in the vast majority of instances to, you know, help a mother who is carrying a child and wants to make sure that child will be healthy, to have appropriate medical support.”

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As it happens: From fetus to baby in one interview

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CBC’s Carol Off interviewed a Brazilian abortion activist who is using the onset of the Zika virus to promote abortion in Brazil. You can listen to the interview here.

Some thoughts:

These are wanted children, presumably. In the contested science of psychological effects for women after abortion, there is an area of agreement and it’s this: aborting a wanted baby leaves women at greater risk for later problems.

Secondly, many women might be right to wonder why there isn’t an all out attack on fixing the virus, finding a cure, finding a vaccine and controlling the spread by controlling mosquitoes. Even the abortion activist alludes to this as a problem in the interview.

Finally, it’s only where you are not thinking of babies that abortion can be a solution. You’ll notice the interview starts with reference to the “fetus” and ends with reference to the “baby.”

Carol Off’s last question is about whether abortion is even an effective solution since microcephaly is only diagnosed later in pregnancy.

According to the CDC “Microcephaly is most easily diagnosed by ultrasound late in the 2nd trimester or early in the third trimester of pregnancy.”

I’m against abortion, so it’s pretty clear where I stand on abortion as a solution to anything. But even if you are not against abortion in principle, second or early third trimester means women have been pregnant for many weeks, are bonded with their babies–furthermore, their babies look like babies, very clearly.

So I believe that advocating for legal abortion in response to the Zika virus gets an epic fail on the feminist front regardless of whether you are against abortion or not.

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Jane Roe’s baby is alive…

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…and likely doesn’t know how the question of her life was a legal battle:

Norma McCorvey is “Jane Roe.” She claimed then that her pregnancy was the result of a rape, although for over a decade now she has been outspokenly pro-life and publicly admitted that this, and virtually every fact on which her case was built, was a lie. Both McCorvey and Sandra Cano, the Doe of Doe v. Bolton—Roe’s companion case from Georgia decided the same day—[became] outspoken pro-life advocates who have sworn that their cases are built on lies (Cano unfortunately passed away in October 2014). […]

It is unknown to me whether the adoptive family ever even knew that their daughter was the supposedly unwanted child who was the subject of Roe. As far as we know, they raised her not knowing who she was and certainly never telling her.

I can’t imagine carrying the knowledge that the value of my life was a national (and international) debate, and where, in the end, it was justified that I should die. I wonder if Daughter Roe knows, and if she’s pro-life herself. At least, if she has, she has managed to maintain a private life all these years.

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Hurray for the Toronto Star!

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They start this article with pro-life talking points:

When a man and a woman of a certain age have unprotected sex, there is always the possibility a baby will be made. Such are the facts of life with which, one would assume, a doctor is familiar.

Yes indeed.

But read the article. I was bemused reading it, that a grown adult, a physician, would launch a lawsuit for this:

And yet a 42-year-old Toronto physician recently tried to sue a woman with whom he’d had a casual sexual relationship for more than $4 million in damages, claiming “non-pathological emotional harm of an unplanned parenthood.”

Here’s what the physician was unhappy about, at age 42:

To use the language of the statement of claim, PP was emotionally harmed because he was deprived of the choice of falling in love, marrying, enjoying married life and, when he and his wife thought ‘the time was right,’ having a baby,” the judge wrote in his 18-page ruling.

The man is a cad and an idiot, who passed med school. Scary.

However, he is only buying into what he’s been told his whole life… that sex need not result in babies, that sex is an itch to be scratched, something nice that comes no strings attached and that ultimately, we can all plan parenthood. (Where have I heard that phrase before?)

It is only in a world where women get the ultimate and arbitrary right to do away with or keep babies based on how they feel that a lawsuit such as this can get off the ground. They obviously felt they had a chance, and quite frankly, I would have thought they did too.

I’m sad for the child, though. A friend’s son, who is growing up without his dad, has taken to asking whether his dad was a good guy. And the obvious answer here will be, sadly, no.

A feminist writes about miscarriage…

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…Her own miscarriage. She acknowledges a major point here:

The more I considered it, the more I became convinced that the silence around miscarriage was connected to feminism’s work around abortion. How could I grieve a thing that didn’t exist? If a fetus is not meaningfully alive, if it is just a collection of cells – the cornerstone claim of the pro-choice movement – what does it mean to miscarry one?

…but this appears to never sink into her consciousness. It’s as if that idea is the swimming pool, but she just sits on the edge, never taking a dive in to embrace the reality that if we abort a collection of cells in utero, we cannot mourn the loss of a son or daughter, also in utero.

Oddly, I also think that the abortion culture creates an expectation that we don’t have children when we don’t want to, and we do have children at the precise moment we decide we are ready. Perhaps the result is the kind devastation she experiences at her own miscarriage. It’s as if she blames herself for not being able to sustain the pregnancy, not realizing this was never within her personal sphere of power.

She also only mourns the child she wanted, not the one she aborted. Another inconsistency that the article never grapples with.

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