ProWomanProLife

Because “There is no avoiding the issue, except through suppression.”

I’ll be on the Rick Howe show today at 4:15pm Atlantic time discussing Motion 312 as well on radio station 95.7 (Halifax). You can also listen in live online here.

__________________

Andrea adds: Great job, Jennifer! (For Facebook readers, this “I” is Jennifer Derwey.)

The Huffington Post is featuring a debate about whether or not a parliamentary committee should study when a fetus becomes human and has rights.

What’s interesting is the format. They ask you your beliefs up front, then you read and then you vote again at the end. They tally who has changed more people’s minds, as well as showing you the percentages of agreement and disagreement.

I thought it was a neat way to do things. You can check it out, here.

Given how brothels are newly legal in Ontario, this conference about human trafficking seems all the more prescient. You can get more information and register here.

Are you in law enforcement, social services, community services or a frontline service provider?

We are excited to inform you of an upcoming conference that will offer dynamic workshops and seminars on human trafficking. The Justice Summit will take place here in Ottawa on Saturday, May 5, 2012 at the Metropolitan Bible Church.

It is estimated that 27 million people are enslaved around the world at any given moment.

80% of the victims of sex trafficking are women, 50% or these are children.

Human trafficking has risen to become the second most profitable crime globally after the drug trade.

Young women have and continue to be trafficked in Ottawa and forced into sex slavery.

The Justice Summit will feature presentations by international human rights advocates, human trafficking survivors, and activists.

I must admit, though I’ve certainly heard the story of Gianna Jessen, I thought this was the sort of thing that happens once in a lifetime, and certainly not near me.

Yesterday, I went to visit a friend here in Ottawa. I met her other friend and after she left, my friend, we’ll call her Brenda, recounts what the friend who just left told her.

She is a healthcare worker (I know the details, but I’m leaving this deliberately vague) and yesterday was called in on the case of a baby born prematurely with multiple problems. This is because the mother went for a chemical abortion early on in the pregnancy (not sure how many weeks–but I think it may have been around eight weeks). It did not work and the baby lived. At 18 weeks, the mother rediscovered she was pregnant but did not at that time want to have another abortion. (Words you don’t hear often because abortion is most often “effective” in that the baby really is killed.)

So said baby was born and is now going to be adopted, but is very low birth weight and has some health problems.

That will never figure into the statistics, nor will any newspaper ever report it.

Here’s another angle on the story. My friend “Brenda” is pro-life. Her friend who recounted this story is not. Brenda listened to the story and asked why the mother didn’t abort again. She joked, something along the lines of saying “did she suddenly get all moral?” in that way that you do when you are anxious and not sure what to say.

To which the friend replied, “You can’t say that, there’s a big difference between 8 and 18 weeks.”

So though I am shocked by all of this, I think the take away is that once again, people are largely pro-life in instinct and want to protect babies. Ie. at 18 weeks it’s a “real baby” where at eight weeks, it’s not.

This is why Stephen Woodworth’s bill and the subsequent discussion is so very important. It’s not about abortion, it’s about when life begins. And uncovering that, hoping that the media doesn’t immediately distort the discussion, will be very critical for those of us who already get it.

Gianna Jessen: Abortion survivor 

I ran into a friend yesterday on my way to do the Sun TV hit on “after-birth abortion.” His comment was that we should never trust the experts. At the time, I agreed, but now I realize, I do not. This headline reads “Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say.” That’s cuz abortion is killing babies, which is something some of us have been saying for quite some time.

Trust the experts, after all! (I hasten to add that their conclusions from this statement of fact are something else entirely.)

I missed Joyce Arthur’s piece in The Mark. But today Google Alerts brought me this Lifesite article with Angus Reid’s response.

In short, Joyce Arthur is claiming the polling company is biased for asking Canadians about whether or not there should be restrictions on abortion. Angus Reid replies:

[Angus Reid's] Canseco further lambasted Arthur for taking to task the wording of the answer when ARCC’s own website defends what the organization calls a “constitutionally-based right to unrestricted, fully-funded abortion, without legal or other barriers or discrimination due to gender, class, ethnicity, race, age, location/region (or area of residence), or any other characteristic, including reasons for choosing an abortion.”

“This is not something we wrote—it is the second affirmation in the ‘Our Vision’ section of the ARCC website,” said Canseco. “Ms. Arthur now writes that this ‘unrestricted right’ does not exist, yet it certainly does in her own organization’s documentation.”

This is one of the most interesting parts of the exchange. Organizations like Joyce Arthur’s actively support a Canada in which women can have an abortion up to the time of birth, no questions asked. Yet to state that this is what we have legislatively, on paper, right now, is apparently controversial.

I always find it interesting, how stating this fact of Canadian law raises pro-choice ire. It doesn’t matter to me if few abortions are late term, or if they are done for “good reasons,” like fetal abnormality. (Pains me to write that, but I digress.) We permit it in law to be so, and that’s a fact. Furthermore, I’ve witnessed a conferee at a pro-abortion conference at University of Toronto Law school in January 2008 ask questions about why ninth month gestation abortions should be denied women, even for social reasons. The hosts were disquieted, but that’s their stakeholder group. The premise for pro-choicers is that female autonomy means women can choose to have an abortion for any reason at any time. I disagree with that, vociferously, in fact. But that is their point of view and it is reflected in Canadian law. They should celebrate it, instead of denying it.

That’s Father Raymond de Souza’s view. I tend to agree. I’ve been asked multiple times over the past days what the solutions are to eradicating sex selection abortion. The fact is that in a permissive abortion regime, there are none. And the people who could end the permissive abortion regime don’t want to, ergo, they really don’t care about missing women.

My favourite line:

Is all of [the missing women] due to abortion of girls in utero? No. In 1990, much of it was due to female infanticide. But the arrival of inexpensive ultrasound technology in rural Asia in the 1990s meant that the killing became easier to do before birth rather than after.

On a radio show yesterday I struggled to find the right words, to be less aggressive, more amenable with the general public. How to discuss these “missing women?” I struggled but landed on “killing” too. There just isn’t another word. And while I don’t want to be harsh, I have vowed to not use euphemisms in discussing abortion, either.

This just in, according to the Canadian Association Medical Journal. (Not exactly a bastion of the pro-life movement.)

An editorial in a major Canadian medical journal Monday urges doctors to conceal the gender of a fetus from all pregnant women until 30 weeks to prevent sex-selective abortion by Asian immigrants. A separate article in the same issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal warns that Canada has become “a haven for parents who would terminate female fetuses in favor of having sons” due to advanced prenatal testing and easy access to abortion. “Female feticide happens in India and China by the millions, but it also happens in North America in numbers large enough to distort the male to female ratio in some ethnic groups,” said the editorial by interim editor-in-chief Rajendra Kale.

So why would not telling the sex until 30 weeks limit abortion in a country with no abortion laws? Likely because doctors don’t like doing partial birth abortions on completely viable fetuses. Legally, however, if some enterprising doctor believed in the cultural disposition that encourages having boys, and wanted to do these late term abortions, no one could stop him/her.

Brigitte Pellerin, no stranger to ProWomanProLife and now at Sun News, writes well about the death of Rick Santorum’s baby:

Dennis Miller once explained that he considered “everyone and everything to be comedic fair game, except for the helpless.” You’d think Down Syndrome kids and dead babies would count as helpless. But no – some people simply have no shame.