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20% of Ottawa residents registered on Ashley Madison

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I live in Ottawa. When the Ashley Madison story first broke, I thought to myself, “Wow, four people in Ottawa are going to be really stressed out.”

I know. My brain picked “four” as the likely number of people in my city registered on a website that facilitates infidelity. I thought Ashley Madison was an American company, and Ottawa can sometimes seems like a quiet little town. Sure, we have our occasional scandals on the Hill, but really. Ottawa?

Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, is also it’s most potentially adulterous, Reuters reports. Around 1 in 5 of the population is registered on Ashley Madison, a social network aimed at married people that touts “Life is short. Have an affair” as it’s slogan.

The sleepy city, with a population of around 883,000 boasts 189,810 users, according to Avid Life Media, the Toronto-based company that owns the service.

I find this all really depressing. It’s likely that I know at least a few people who’ve signed up for help to cheat on their partners.

Woman and Laptop

An open letter to the woman demanding a million dollars to avoid abortion

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Many of you have heard of this woman by now. She says she’s a 26-year-old graduate student who lives in a state that requires a 72-hour waiting period between a consultation for an abortion procedure and the procedure itself.

On July 7, this anonymous woman will give pro-lifers 72 hours to donate one million dollars to her website. If they do, she’ll let her child live, place the child for adoption and put the money in a trust for him or her. If not, she’ll abort her child and return the donations.

She anticipates that pro-lifers won’t give her the money, which she will interpret as pro-lifers only caring about babies, and not women. To make her point, she’ll abort her child on July 10.

Her website domain name is ProlifeAntiWoman. We, at ProWomanProLife, felt compelled to respond to her open letter with our own.

Dear Anonymous Pro-Choicer,

Pro-lifers believe that their position is consistent with a worldview that demonstrates care for all humans, whether they are at their earliest stages of development inside their mothers’ wombs, or outside in the world, fighting for their rights. We see that women remain particularly vulnerable in today’s world. For example, millions of women are exploited each year in sex trafficking. In some countries, girls are still fighting for the right to be educated, or simply to drive and generally to provide a better world for their own daughters.

Faye Sonier

Faye Sonier

All girls also face a horrific battle just to survive, at their earliest stage of development. As The Economist reported a few years ago, millions of girls are being aborted due to cultural preferences for male children. The shortage of women in certain countries leads to more sex trafficking, providing a correlated rights abuse between easy access to abortion and human trafficking, something the compassion of pro-choicers is blind toward.

In short, we care about women too, in ways you don’t and we endeavour to walk our talk. We regularly donate to charities that seek to end the sex-trafficking of women, help girls attend schools in cultures that discourage it and also seek to raise awareness about the value and the life of females, even as they grow in the womb. We give to pregnancy care centres that extend care well beyond a couple of diapers, and to pro-adoption charities. There are numerous pro-lifers we are aware of caring for children with disabilities, with fetal alcohol syndrome, even babies who are addicted to drugs their mothers took, perhaps not even knowing they were pregnant before they gave birth. Our care extends regardless of age, level of development or their abilities or political outlook. We even care about you.

While we cannot give funds to your campaign for the reasons set out below, if you’re willing to waive your anonymity, we’d willingly provide our tax receipts to you, and we’d ask you to do the same in all fairness. We’ve all been giving for years. When we had more funds, we’ve given more, and during hard years of financial difficulty, we’ve given less, but we’ve given. We’ve also volunteered, helped women in our lives with childcare and can provide you with information so you can ask them about it.

Andrea Mrozek

Andrea Mrozek

I hope you’re reasonable enough to understand why it’s ridiculous to expect hard-working citizens to donate one million dollars to an anonymous person on the internet, when our funds could go to registered charities doing great work that have financial reporting and accountability measures in place.

Would you donate one million dollars to an anonymous pro-lifer who simply promised to spend your money on one endeavour or another? Of course not.

The argument that underlies your campaign is one that pro-choicers have been making for years. It’s the oft-repeated ‘Pro-lifers don’t care about women, and they don’t care about babies once they are born. They have no right to speak against abortion unless they are willing to care for these children.’

You’ve actually taken the rhetoric an unfathomable step further by being willing to sacrifice your own child in order to make this point. The argument that you’ve adopted basically states that if you’re unwilling to personally provide a solution for a certain problem, then you’ve lost the ability to speak out against that problem or injustice. An example to expose the intellectual poverty of your argument: We assume you care about domestic violence. Yet we also assume you do not provide a shelter in your apartment or home for every woman in your community who suffers abuse. Would it be reasonable on our part to then turn around and void your concern for spousal abuse?

The same could be said for any number of charitable endeavours.

We might add that yes, there are some activist pro-lifers who do little more than aim to draw attention to the plight of people who are killed in their mother’s womb. If we changed the issue—say to those who draw attention to the plight of the prisoner in totalitarian regimes, or those who draw attention to the plight of the hungry by doing nothing more than the odd 24-hour fast, we wouldn’t say that is wrong. We’d say they are doing what they can. The problem is that with the pro-life movement, you reject our premise and fail to see fighting for the human right to life at all ages as a valid cause. If you accepted the cause, you’d accept the effort, however meager. Pro-lifers are not the only ones who can be charged with hypocrisy.

In short, the argument that underlies your campaign is flawed. Your means to achieving it is one most reasonable people would never consider endorsing, much less financially supporting. And you’re making a life or death decision on these poor considerations. And getting the media to buy into your web page, suggesting you are not without resource or at very least, not without great media contacts.

In your state of residence, you are free to make a choice to kill your child. As you noted, you are also free to choose to place your child in a loving home of your choice. In the end, the choice is clearly yours, in every conceivable way. At ProWomanProLife, we have the tagline “Canada without abortion, by choice,” asking women to look outside politics and laws to consider in their hearts what abortion is. May you choose to do so, instead of launching manipulative and exploitative publicity stunts.

Sincerely,

Faye Sonier & Andrea Mrozek

Your summer reading list

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Want to know what Canadian pro-life leaders think you should be reading? The National Campus Life Network just provided you with that list here. It’s a wide ranging list with something for everyone and I’m looking forward to working through the recommendations over the next year.

Books

Enjoy!

 

Pro-life physicians: Your courage emboldens us

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I haven’t blogged much lately. My mat leave ended in March, I started a new job as Executive Director of Canadian Physicians for Life on March 30th, and I’ve been trying to get used to my new life circumstances. I’m working from home, which permits me to be around my son all day long. I feel pretty lucky. These are pretty much my ideal circumstances.

But my PWPL blogging has been light. I hope to remedy that in coming weeks. I’m just struggling to find a new rhythm.

I attended the Christian Medical and Dental Society conference this weekend in Calgary. It was an amazing conference attended by passionate, pro-life physicians. I heard all kinds of inspiring stories. A couple shared how they have been serving in the pro-life movement together for 50 years. One physician shared how she had been attacked for her beliefs. Another shared how he served his patients to the best of his abilities while abiding by his conscience.

I respect these physicians more than they’ll likely ever know. I can’t imagine how tough the schooling and residencies must have been. (In fact, I spent a lot of time asking them how they did it. With my health limitations, I would have never survived either.) Being a physician is a hard calling, I imagine, but it’s a beautiful one. And now, with their professional regulatory bodies stripping them of their conscience rights, these doctors face additional challenges. I’ve prayed for pro-life physicians for years, and I’ll continue to do so.

I had a moment to share my heart with them during the conference, but it wasn’t quite enough to express my deep gratitude. I wanted to tell them that their courage and commitment to the sanctity and beauty of life – of all lives – emboldens myself and others to commit ourselves further to this fight to protect life.

In September, Ann Voskamp wrote the following words, which I’ve copied into my prayer journal. I’d love to share these words with Canada’s pro-life physicians:

You can hear it about this time of September, breathing warm courage into our exhausted places: “Just Call to Me. I guarantee I will answer you. I will make you strong & brave.” (Ps.138:3)

Be Brave. Hold out your Light to hold back the flood of dark. 

Be Brave. Your bravery wins a thousand battles you can’t see because your bravery strengthens a thousand others to win their battles too. 

Be Brave. And do not pray for the hard thing to go away. But pray for a bravery to come that’s bigger than the hard thing.

Be Brave. There are angels closer than you know. 

Darkness

Thank you, pro-life physicians, for abiding by the Hippocratic Oath, for respecting life and being willing to fight in order to protect it. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for being brave.

photo credit: August Moon via photopin (license)

Hearing from our pro-life advocates

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I love this and this.

The editors at Faith Today, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s magazine, interviewed a number of pro-life students and staffers in their most recent issue. It’s a quick but encouraging read. A few samples:

“I stay involved in the pro-life movement because abortion is a human rights violation that takes the lives of so many children. It has no parallel in history. We know this. With that knowledge comes responsibility. ” Alex vande Bruinhorst, Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, Calgary

“The thing I would like Canadians to know about abortion is that abortion is legal throughout all nine months of pregnancy, which puts us in the same category as North Korea and China. I’d like to ask each Canadian a simple question: Do you believe in human rights? Because if the answer is yes, then shouldn’t human rights begin where the human being begins?”  Jonathon Van Maren, Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform

I love the honesty of this statement:

“I stay involved in the pro-life movement in Canada because the pay is below average, levels of stress is high, I work days, evenings, weekends, and I haven’t had a real vacation in 3 years. I question my involvement in the movement every day and after almost 4 years of working for Campaign Life Coalition, I still don’t know why I keep coming back, but I do.” Matthew Wojciechowski, Campaign Life Coalition Communication Director, Toronto

Thank you student and staff advocates for all you do and all your sacrifices.

Students

Getting ready for the March for Life. Say “hello!”

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March4Life

Canada’s National March for Life is this Thursday, May 14th. Provinces around the country will be holding their own individual marches in solidarity with the larger march in Ottawa.

In preparation for this event, I’ve been reflecting on how we present ourselves as pro-life people and how we interact during these gatherings. Let’s use this time and this space as an opportunity to hear things we may have never heard before and to reshape the perspective. We can use this time and space to reintroduce ourselves, because being pro-life is largely a misunderstood position.

Firstly, we are about love, being pro-life is not firstly about legislation, it is about love. The kind of love of your fellow human being that made Canada great in the first place. The kind of love, overflowing into action, that makes Canadians willing to pay higher taxes to provide healthcare for the poorest of its citizens.

Being pro-life is about making Canada safe and welcoming for women and their children, it’s about reaching out to those in the margins and giving them the help they need, it’s about valuing the sick, the poor and the dying. It’s about overcoming isolation and poverty and fear in a violent system, a system that devalues human life, to attain a more perfect society.

There’s not going to be a person holding a sign on Thursday, across the country, that doesn’t feel love for their fellow human being. How do I know? Because you’d have to, because holding that sign doesn’t make you more popular, it doesn’t come with money, and it doesn’t come with accolades.

Holding that sign is a testament of your love overflowing. You love your fellow human beings, and that love has overflowed into action, into community. That sign is your “Hello.”

Holding a pro-life sign comes with suffering and it comes with discrimination and it comes with unjust vilification.

So why do it? Why hold that sign?

Because being pro-life is about love, and it’s also about speaking the truth. Truth that is not diminished or increases by the number of people who believe it, it is the truth, and it is unchanging.

And the truth is that we do not empower women by making them dependent on abortion. We offer hope and truth instead, hope and truth are our “Hello.”

When basic human needs are ignored, rejected, or invalidated by those in roles and positions to appropriately meet them; when the means by which these needs have been previously met are no longer available: and when prior abuse has already left one vulnerable for being exploited further, the stage is set for the possibility these needs will be prostituted, exploited. Abortion arrives as the perceivable “option” for vulnerable women, but in reality it is a violent exploitation of their situation. A situation that places a woman who has unmet needs in an incredible dilemma. She can either do without or seek out the option of abortion that leaves her increasingly divided from herself and ostracized from others.

Abortion is a form of prostitution, that convinces a woman to pay with her body and mind for affection and care which should be freely given. Because abortion is NOT love, abortion is NOT compassion, abortion is the cheap and careless handout we as a society offer to women in need and not a lasting change for the better. Our offerings, our compassion, these are also our “Hello.”

Who turns to abortion? Overwhelming it is the poor, the marginalized, and those already struggling with the demands of parenting. 2 out of every 3 women having an abortion already have children. These women need our help. Helping is our “Hello.”

Hierarchy, inequality, and violence have always been part of human social structures. There were always rulers and ruled, leaders and followers, the fortunate and the needy, the powerful and the weak. Various cultures have treated disparities in status, power, fortune, and ability in different ways. Buddhists emphasize the aspect of karma and destiny, while in the modern West the focus has been on freedom and choice, and the individual’s control of destiny. In this Western worldview, inequalities and differences are often associated with injustice and victimization.

But there is not enough money, not enough staff and volunteers in the world, to support a permanent population of rescuers and victims. We must raise up women and children and parents from this dark corner of victimhood, in all forms, both real and imagined. And we do that by valuing them. Until we restore the proper dignity and perceived social value of parenting, women and their children will continue to be victims of poverty. There will never be “gender equality” until we value mothers. Without mother’s rights, there cannot be women’s rights, only assimilation. Motherhood is the basic biological reality for the majority of women in the world, let’s accept that fact and move on up. Value, dignity and understanding are our “Hello.”

This Thursday, say “Hello” to everyone you meet.

Really, truly, authentic pilgrimages

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Breathtaking-Views-Slide-1600x543

Now for something totally different and shamelessly self-promoting.  I was actually given an invitation to blog about this, so I’m not being totally shameless.

Having lived in Rome, Italy for two years and marrying a man who spent nearly a decade traipsing around the European continent, I have some experience in these matters.  There are pilgrimage companies, and then there are pilgrimage companies.  Likewise, there are tour guides (especially in the Vatican) and there are tour guides.

Orbis Catholicus Travel is one of those tour companies offering small group pilgrimages to Italy, the Holy Land, Mexico, (even Cuba – in January 2016) and France that really knows a thing or two about authentic pilgrimages, and excellent tour guiding.

We keep groups small and intimate, we stay right in the heart of the action, and we make sure that groups get to know an area intimately, with regard to the art, history, culinary traditions and religion.  And we don’t do the marathon tours of spending 14 nights in 14 different cities – watch out!

We know our guides. Tour guides can make or break a tour.  Ours happen to be our good friends with whom we prayed, ate, lived and celebrated Rome.

There is so much more I could say on the subject, but suffice it to say, your time and resources would be well spent. So I encourage you to visit Orbis Catholicus Travel to learn more about our upcoming tours.

 

Student adopts homeless pregnant cousin

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What does love look like?

Australian student Tommy Connolly, 23, worked extra shifts in order to adopt his 17 year old homeless cousin. She was pregnant, and he wanted to help her and her child have a better life.

Tommy Connolly, an aspiring athlete at the University of the Sunshine Coast, said he hadn’t seen his 17-year-old cousin for more than a decade when he moved to resume his studies and decided to get in touch.

He found out that his cousin had been sleeping rough on the Gold Coast, was 32 weeks pregnant, had no shoes or phone and was almost illiterate.

With the baby’s father in jail and her parents not on the scene, Mr Connolly said he took his cousin in “to make sure she’d keep the baby, stay off the streets and have a better life”. […]

Mr Connolly admitted he had taken on “the father role as you’d imagine,” but added: “[My cousin] does 90 per cent of the work – and if it’s one or two years of my life I have to put on hold to make sure two lives are going to be saved it’s nothing at all.”

Was it a sacrifice? Yes. Will his immediate life be harder and more challenging? Yes. In fifty years, is he likely to look back on this period of his life and regret giving of himself to help a girl and her baby make it in this hard world? I doubt it.

Tommy Conolly

Love and support for women facing unexpected pregnancies can take all kinds of forms. Connolly proved that self-sacrifice and love, even from someone without extraordinary means, can and will change lives. It might even save them.

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