ProWomanProLife

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

-John McCrae

Black History Month is not only an opportunity to revisit black history but is also a chance to follow that time-line and look progressively forward to the contemporary civil rights movement.

The Rev. Clenard Childress Jr., told Pennsylvanians for Human Life Scranton Chapter that its cause is the modern civil rights movement.

Delivering the keynote address at the group’s annual prayer breakfast Saturday, the Rev. Childress, who heads the Life Education and Resources Network and founded the website Blackgenocide.org, equated abortion with genocide and an attempt to control undesirable population.

“The African-American community has been targeted by abortion,” he said. “A pregnant woman who is in poverty and destitute and may appear not to have much chance at a fruitful life seems to be a candidate for abortion, but that is the mindset of an elitist group making the rules of who lives and who dies.”

More than 400 people turned out for the breakfast,

[...]

Pennsylvanians for Human Life President Helen Gohsler gave a political overview in which she decried the elimination of abstinence-only education funding from the federal budget but cited the election of Gov. Tom Corbett, who is anti-abortion, as a bright spot. She also mentioned the offenses that came to light recently at a West Philadelphia abortion clinic where employees stand accused of killing viable newborns and conducting late-term abortions.

The Rev. Childress noted he rarely addresses black audiences since he critiques contemporary black leaders and fellow preachers who tolerate or support abortion.

“I tell them they are blind and being played like a harp,” he said.

Following the breakfast, attendee Kathy Tumavich of Clarks Summit saw parallels between the Rev. Childress’ ostracism and former Gov. Robert P. Casey, who often found himself at odds with his political party over abortion.

“Rev. Childress gave a great, thoughtful speech,” she said. “I think he is carrying on the true message of Martin Luther King (Jr.)”

The Victorian period is full of canonical literature from women writers. Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen paved the way for later writers like Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. And much has been written about the prevalent theme of madness that serves as a common thread to underpin all of these works. The suspicion of the woman as “unstable” and prone to madness is embedded in the bedrock of western culture, through such classics as Medea and continued through early and medieval Christian assumptions that women were more prone to heresy and demonic possession. The later development of the asylum allowed for a more general accusation of mental illness to permeate the fears of women. Michelle Iwen writes:

While women’s proportion of admission did rise modestly above that of men, I believe that it was the nature of confinement that so effected women’s writing enough to perpetuate the concept of the unruly woman unjustly confined which, in turn, helped advance this idea in popular culture and eventually into medical discourse, in a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. It was this cycle which led to the trope becoming reality in the 19^th century as women internalized this threat because of its unique dangers to what was believed to be their inherent female qualities.

The idea that certain female characteristics need to be bridled has not escaped our contemporary writers, nor has it’s hum faded from the background of women’s lives. I experienced these inherited fears myself when I, like most new mothers, was given my first questionnaire on depression from my family physician. Sleep deprived, with images of Vivienne Eliot in my mind, I filled in the blanks.

As you have recently had a baby, we would like to know how you are feeling. Please UNDERLINE the answer which comes closest to how you have felt IN THE PAST 7 DAYS, not just how you feel today.
I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things.As much as I always could
Not quite so much now
Definitely not so much now
Not at all  

I have looked forward with enjoyment to things.As much as I ever did
Rather less than I used to
Definitely less than I used to
Hardly at all [...]  

This article brought back the memories of these questionnaires.

An influential medical group says pediatricians should routinely screen new mothers for depression. Depression isn’t just bad for moms: It can also harm their babies.

That’s according to a new American Academy of Pediatrics report published Monday in the journal, Pediatrics. It cites research showing developmental and social delays in babies with depressed mothers.

The academy says that every year more than 400,000 babies are born to depressed women. Estimates say that between 5 per cent and 25 per cent of women develop postpartum depression.

The pediatrics academy says severely depressed women should be referred to experts for treatment.

There’s no simple way to screen women, women having feared being institutionalized for centuries. While we need screening, I would advise extreme caution to physicians who choose to use generalized tools like these questionnaires. Relying on the answers from these tools will not only give inaccurate results, but may put women and their children in danger. Instead, emphasize the commonality of postpartum depression, look for the more obvious signs, and provide accessible counselling to not only the obviously depressed but perhaps to all new mothers. And of course, avoid words like “treatment”.

An interesting book review in today’s Globe:

Mr. Brog, in his In Defense of Faith: The Judeo-Christian Idea and the Struggle for Humanity, concedes that Christians have committed horrendous crimes in the name of theology but sets out to prove that Judeo-Christian beliefs gave the Western and, ultimately, entire world its most important spiritual value: an obligatory reverence for life.

Mr. Brog advances his argument in a series of historical vignettes. He introduces Tacitus, the Roman senator and historian, who (in his major work, Histories) describes the Jews as wicked, stubborn and lascivious and lists the Jewish beliefs he finds most revolting – especially, he says, the belief “that it is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child.” The Romans were “proud practitioners of infanticide.” As were the Greeks. As were the other nations of the ancient world.

The value we place on life is a values judgment, ever evolving. What was established (life is sacred) can easily be torn down, and one could argue, has been substantially in recent years. Over to you, Tacitus!

There is an assumption in sections of our culture that abortion is progressive, that history is moving inevitably towards greater acceptance of abortion globally. But legalized abortion is not in any way a new or a recent phenomenon. Abortion was legal in many ancient societies, including that of Rome. Not simply abortion, but infanticide. The killing of babies was common.

An extensive study of a mass burial at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley suggests that the 97 children all died at 40 weeks gestation, or very soon after birth.

The archaeologists believe that locals may have been killing and burying unwanted babies on the site in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire.

At this particular site, Sheppard Frere claims in his work Britannia that these children were not only victims of infanticide but were the unwanted female offspring of the slave-run establishment. The site is now believed to have been a brothel. There are interesting parallels between these gruesome practices and those of today, as Roman infanticide led to the deaths of many more girls than boys, boys being considered more valuable. So to consider abortion as progressive, when it is a legislative regression to a time when the value of life was bound up with a perceived worth based on gender, wealth and power, is incorrect.

Infants were not considered to be human beings until about the age of two and were not buried in cemeteries if they were younger than that.

Life. Who knew I’d be sitting here writing largely about contentious Canadian social issues? At one point, not too long ago, I wanted to be a foreign affairs guru, yes, guru, or perhaps an academic: get a PhD in German history and teach.

Clearly I’m not doing that, but I always read German history with interest.

So I might pick up this book, The year that changed the world, the untold story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall:

The good historian is a myth buster. Michael Meyer is a very good historian. As Newsweek’s bureau chief for Eastern Europe in 1989, he watched the world turn on a dime. The myth he busts in this book concerns the contribution the United States made to the collapse of communist regimes that year. Some Americans want to believe that those regimes crumbled because of White House manipulation — clever diplomacy backed by raw power. In fact, American meddling was rather benign and, during that fateful year, conspicuously ill conceived.

Good historians are myth busters where myths need busting. Otherwise, good historians read primary sources and eye witness accounts and do vast amounts of archival research to tell the story of what happened. There is no need to denigrate the role of Ronald Reagan or the United States in bringing down the Berlin Wall, and that story line is not at odds with the rest of what the review describes. Certainly the thousands of people on the ground played a critical role, certainly the Soviet Union collapsed because it was bankrupt… Few to none think that Reagan’s rhetoric alone brought the wall down (myth creation so that then a clever reporter can bust it?) but many Eastern Europeans (in particular those who already escaped and were now living amongst the socialist chattering classes in downtown Toronto) found it truthful and inspiring that someone like Reagan would speak out against The Evil Empire.

My two cents, anyway.

Rod Bruinooge started it:

The bottom line is that people like myself are not going to stop until, at the very least, unborn children have more value than a Canadian kidney,” he said.

Dr. Sneddon went on about kidneys, too, as he argued the pro-choice side of things.  (see the comments section)

[He] relied heavily on an analogy of a mother whose son needs her kidney to survive, and that she has the right to deny her son her kidney as her rights to her body part trumps his.

Now back to embryonic stem cell research.  Contrary to what Bill Clinton thinks, the embryo is a fertilized egg, and the the earliest form of human life.  How do their rights get trumped in the name of scientific research?  Even if there had been any sort of success story regarding embryonic stem cell research — and I’ve been looking, believe me — how would one person’s, say, cerebral palsy treatment justify destroying an embryo to harvest its stem cells?

Clinton really kills me when he suggests that using those embryos which would otherwise stay on ice indefinitely for medical research is a pro-life position.  Running scientific experiments on human beings is what Hitler did!  Should we then say that it was more noble that these humans — the Jews — be used for the advancement of science rather than be sent straight to the gas chamber? That is, in fact, how the doctors in Auschwitz justified experimenting on human beings.

It was really a way of exploiting a human resource which they deemed to be already lost.  They thought. “Well, they’ll be dead tomorrow, so let’s use them today.” (2:32 into the film)

Today George Jonas writes about the anniversary of Russia crushing Prague Spring. Et voila: Canada got the Mrozeks.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. While most of us will never come close to being as brave and unflinching as he was, we can all look to him for inspiration. The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it’s stronger than corrupt ideologies. Let us never forget that.

There are a couple of exhibits on in Ottawa now that I’ll definitely want to see. One is at the National Art Gallery, 1930s: The Making of ‘The New Man’ and the other is at the war museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The Hill Times cites Ann Thomas, a curator at the National Art Gallery who says this: (subscription only)

Everybody has something to learn from both of these exhibitions and I think… that it’s good not to see these as sick moments in history but to look at the world today as it is, to look at our own society today, and to ask questions about our society and whether we redress these issues in the right way, whether we are moving beyond this kind of behaviour en masse, you know? I think it’s really easy to look back and go, ‘uh that was so terrible,’ and to feel as if we would never ever repeat anything like that and that we are so pure and untouched by evil ourselves and I think it’s always a good exercise, to be able to look and sort of learn something.”

True enough. And for the purposes of this blog, that is why abortion is not private—one woman may abort a Down’s Syndrome baby, but if enough women do so, suddenly we are all walking in that new world, where people with that disability don’t exist. Same goes for sex selection abortion. No, we’re not pure and untouched by evil. Eugenic practices are happening right now, but we don’t generally have the courage to face up to it.

Today’s Post also has an article by Michael Coren about how the socialist left popularized eugenics, contrary to what many believe.