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Good news! Ontario can no longer hide abortion data

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Good news! Back in 2015 I blogged about this. Some of you may have donated to the cause, too:

The Association for Reform Political Action and Run with Life blogger Pat Maloney are taking legal action against the Ontario government by challenging the constitutionality of not allowing abortion to be subject to access to information requests. Pat Maloney used to get aggregate abortion statistics by filing these access to information requests, but since the Broader Public Sector Accountability Act was passed in Ontario, she can’t. She is not asking for private information, only the aggregate stats. The denial of this information is the opposite of Public Sector Accountability. Here are the notes from press conference held this afternoon at Queen’s Park in Toronto.

Today I learned she won! Hurray! The Government of Ontario can no longer conceal and hide abortion stats.

Pat Maloney of Run with Life blog, with her legal team

Pro-life poetry

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Alexandra Moldoveanu wrote a comment on PWPL and since I like to feature pro-life women, let me take this moment to link to her site, Pro-Life Poetry. Interesting concept. I don’t think of pro-lifers as poetry writers (or readers). I don’t think this, because my first point of reference is me. Not fair or right, but there you have it.

All I’ve ever done

is create joking haikus

I should read more real poems.

(see what I did there?)…Anyway, why wouldn’t there be poetry about abortion or pregnancy loss in general? Abortion is emotional. It should be emotional. It’s normal if it’s emotional. And poetry provides an written outlet for emotions. Check out her site.

 

Athletes having abortions

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The news broke yesterday that American sprinter Sanya Richards-Ross had an abortion two weeks before the Beijing Olympics. She regrets this and has said so publicly. I am really glad she has found healing and seems to be doing well. Here’s the thing: I don’t think it was any more or less dangerous for her to run with an early stage pregnancy than it was to run having had a surgical procedure. She felt she had to get rid of the baby in order to run–but was that the truth? Could the story have been that she won a gold and a bronze as a mother? Why wouldn’t that have been possible? For an early stage pregnancy it could be.

Abortion is a final act. Keeping a child presents some sacrifice, yes, but many more choices, to use that much loved word. You get additional choices, without the remorse and regret that is so common for women who have abortions. Friends don’t let friends–even Olympic athlete friends–get abortions.

Women writing about abortion who don’t regurgitate talking points

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Sometimes I hear pro-choice advocates on the radio and they say things like “abortion is a settled issue.” Perhaps they believe that. Meanwhile, the only reason they are on the radio is because it’s a very heated, live issue right now, particularly in my town of Ottawa, and not at all settled.

I have not seen any video footage outside the Bank Street abortion clinic. There are reports of harassment and intimidation. I am a pro-lifer who is against harassment and intimidation, no ifs, ands or buts about it. I’d like to know more about what has happened in front of the downtown Ottawa abortion clinic. I confess I pass by once in a while and haven’t seen anything. That’s not to say there aren’t problems. It’s only to say that I need more information other than what the clinic itself provides, given the heated nature of anything to do with abortion. If they have video footage, it would be great if they released that. They’d have the support of the pro-life community in curtailing violence, harassment and intimidation, that much is true.

Christie Blatchford writes about this issue in measured tones. She refers to what we on the pro-life side know as the “abortion distortion” without using those words. The abortion distortion happens when valid health information that would help women make informed choices is suppressed because it appears to be “pro-life.” And it happens when authorities use “an elephant gun to kill a flea,” as Blatchford puts it, which is what is about to happen as regards ensuring there is no harassment or intimidation outside abortion clinics.

This much is true:

But if she and Gibbons were members of Black Lives Matter, or the Tamils who about eight years ago blocked a ramp to the Gardiner Expressway, or almost any other protest group in this country railing about almost any other issue, they wouldn’t be being carted off to jail with such alarming frequency.

“Why Everyone Should Oppose Surrogacy”

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Surrogacy advocates highlight when all goes well. But when (as was published in Toronto Life magazine) a wealthy woman pulls a poor woman out of her home, where she has four children because she is concerned not about the woman, but about the baby, we don’t hear about that.

Wasser’s eye then fell upon an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and she smelled smoke coming from upstairs; the surrogacy contract stated there would be no smoking in the house. ­Wasser snapped. She insisted the surrogate spend the final week of the pregnancy in her guest room in Toronto and threatened her with Children’s Aid if she didn’t come. “Imagine me ripping her away from her children. I couldn’t believe I was doing this to these kids, who were crying, ‘Mommy, Mommy, don’t go!’ and me just thinking, ‘That’s my baby, I have to think of my baby.’ ” The surrogate did go to Toronto, but ended up returning home the next day.

Bold is mine. She couldn’t believe it, and yet she did it. The bulk of surrogacy cases, particularly if we start allowing payment for it, will be wealthy people buying babies from the poor. Who has the power in that arrangement? In all the talk of the Handmaid’s Tale, Be It Resolved that it’s not Christians we need to worry about here, but rather those who, in the main, see little problem with a commercial trade in babies.

That’s why this is an important article, by Jennifer Roback Morse. It gives many reasons why surrogacy isn’t the right path. It’s flat out illegal in several countries, like France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Canada should follow suit. Here are a few reasons why surrogacy is problematic; the article contains many more:

  • Broken bonds: The gestational mother’s bond to the child is treated as if it were important during the pregnancy, and completely irrelevant afterwards.
  • Objectifying women: The gestational mother is used for her womb and then is legally – and perhaps emotionally – set aside.
  • Fewer rights for the mother, compared to adoption: If the gestational mother grows attached to the child, as mothers often do, or if she has concerns about the “commissioning parents,” too bad. Mothers who agree to place a child for adoption can almost always change their minds after the baby has been placed in their arms. Denying gestational mothers the same right is, quite simply, inhuman.

 

Ottawa showing of the Euthanasia Deception

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I got a chance to see this documentary in the dead of winter. Much nicer to head out on a June evening. It’s well done and presents some good information about how euthanasia works in practice, not theory, both here and abroad. Important viewing. This screening is offered by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and the director will be there.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

7 pm

131 Queen St., room 7-52

For more information, click here.

All are welcome, free of charge.

Women’s views on abortion

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A little known fact is that women tend hold pro-life attitudes. A poll from the UK shows the following results:

 

  • 70% of women would like the current time limit for abortion to be lowered
  • 59% of women would like the abortion time limit lowered to 16 weeks or lower
  • Only 1% want the abortion time limit raised to birth
  • 93% of women want independent abortion counselling introduced
  • 79% of general population want a five-day consideration period before abortion
  • 84% of women want improved pregnancy support for women in crisis
  • 70% of parents want introduction of parental consent for girls 15 and under to get abortions

Most interesting to me are these results:

  • 93% of women want independent abortion counselling introduced
  • 79% of general population want a five-day consideration period before abortion
  • 84% of women want improved pregnancy support for women in crisis

This speaks to an internal conflict in women that happens in an unplanned pregnancy. Yes, women can be trusted to make their own decisions. But we’re not robots. Most women are susceptible to the environment and people around us. Independent counselling at a crisis moment could really help sift through anxiety and various pressures. The time lag makes sense too, though, by default, this can never be long enough. I very often consider in my own life how an abortion at age 20 might have made sense but by age 40, it would make no sense at all. Our own perspectives shift over time. This is the problem with abortion–we can’t go back on the decision. So yes to counselling, and yes to a waiting period–I can definitely see why women would believe these are important.

 

Let’s talk about pro-life renewal–without pointing fingers

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This is a challenging column. But one I needed to read. How to advance our important cause, capitalizing off the strengths of those who went before, but also include new people? All good questions, asked by my colleague Peter Stockland.

A grave statistic:

Angus Reid polling data freshly published by Cardus shows 94 per cent of non-religious Canadians now give the highest priority to personal choice when it comes to abortion or doctor-assisted death. Even among the one-fifth of Canadians who are “religiously committed,” just 56 per cent rate preserving life as a higher moral priority than personal choice.

It’s the 56% of “religiously committed” who worry me.

We have our work cut out for us. And blood is on my hands. I pay my taxes, which fund abortions, which perpetuates the normalization of abortion. It’s all very tricky. We can and must do better.

On Mother’s Day

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I found this lovely little reflection from Alice von Hildebrand, which I thought would allow for saying Happy Mother’s Day to just about everyone. The idea is that we all have a role to play. We put a lot of emphasis on biological mothering, all of us, perhaps non-religious folks most of all. Hence the drive to IVF, for example. If we think more broadly about the term, and the need for mentors and spiritual mothers, then it takes a lot of pressure off.

I never had the incredible privilege of having children of my own, yet last year I was bombarded with Mother’s Day cards and wishes. If you don’t have children, for goodness sake don’t believe that you have to give up motherhood.

Motherhood is not only biological maternity. It is spiritual maternity. There are hundreds of people all around who are desperately looking for a mother. A number of people have come to me to tell me about their problems. I listen to them. And I love them. And I say very little. But they know that I care for them. In this sense, I have become their mother….

Spiritual motherhood is more important than biological motherhood. There are plenty of women who are biological mothers and yet are not mothers at all. Some consider their child to be a nuisance and an accident, saying “I didn’t want it.” Take for instance women who have an abortion for convenience’s sake. God offers them a tremendous gift but they say, “No, I don’t want it; it’s going to disturb me.”

From now on your daily prayer should be, “God, send me spiritual children and I will never turn any one of them down. The more the better.” Simple as that. Pray for the gift of spiritual children. It might very well be that in your beautiful desire to be a biological mother you have overlooked cases where you could have become a spiritual mother. Many of my students became my spiritual children, even though they were young adults already.

The Handmaid’s Tale

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I’m genuinely interested in reading The Handmaid’s Tale and only then seeing the movie. Which is to say it may be a while before I can actually comment on the movie. I gather it’s a dystopian book/film in which women are forced to bear children for others at the hands of  religious (Christian?) authoritarians.

The reality is that secularism is demanding a new subordination of women. Doctors are calling for payments to be legal in Canada for reproductive material–eggs, sperm and for surrogates.

As it is, many people in Canada wait indefinitely to have children, resort to reproductive tourism in other countries or import eggs and sperm from the United States, where compensating donors is legal, the group says. Canadians are at a disadvantage “in terms of managing their own fertility care,” said Sherry Levitan, a lawyer and member of the society’s board.

The article discusses how very few women are willing to be donors or surrogates simply out of altruism (duh) so this kind of activity will need to be coerced via payments. I see this as a call for a new dystopia, where women who have no money are compelled to sell their bodies and/or parts for those who do have money but no children.

Watch Breeders, people, before we walk this path. Men can donate sperm endlessly at virtually no cost to their own health, but this is absolutely not true for women. Having children cannot be commercialized.

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