According to Roxanne, having a uterus is only criteria qualifying somebody to comment on the unsanitary and unsafe conditions of abortion clinics. Her rage blinds her reason. Needlessly putting women’s lives at risk is every one’s business; child abuse is every one’s business (and abortion is the worst kind of child abuse). Speaking out against practises that endanger or kill people is part of every citizen’s concern who values interdependent community and the greater human family.

I gather he got a comment to the effect that since Mark doesn’t have a uterus, he shouldn’t speak about abortion. I’m inclined to sideline those types of comments, since I think they come from a minority fringe. Still, they can sting. Reading your average virulent pro-choice blog can sting, as I learned just this morning where one blogger who often comments here concluded her post with “Happy f’ing New Year.” It was a reminder of the bitterness in which she lives. (I won’t link to her blog or even name her, since I do not relish the thought of inviting such comments here.)

In any event, men should certainly speak out about abortion, and it’s a foolish woman who says otherwise. That said, we should all tread carefully, not with the extremists  who believe men should fall silent because they can’t get pregnant, but rather with the normal women whose abortion experiences may cause ongoing grief.

And while I believe men should always speak up, I do likewise think it is women who are better positioned to speak to our sisters on this topic. I believe this in the same manner that there are issues that men have to address with men.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A woman who had an affair with Laurens County Sheriff Ricky Chastain said in a lawsuit filed this week she was sexually harassed and wrongfully forced out of her county job after refusing the sheriff’s request to have a second abortion.

Chastain, who for more than a decade has been sheriff in the county about 70 miles northwest of Columbia, has admitted to a two-and-a-half year affair with Haley Manley but has denied that he forced her to quit.

According to her lawsuit, filed Thursday in Laurens County court, their affair began a month after she started working for Chastain in January 2008, and Manley became pregnant in the summer of 2010. After Chastain said she’d either have to have an abortion or quit her job, Manley says Chastain drove her to Charlotte, N.C., in his county-issued vehicle and paid for her to abort their child.

In September, Manley says Chastain again demanded she get an abortion when she told him she was pregnant a second time. When Manley refused but told Chastain she wanted to keep her job, she says the sheriff told his subordinates during an October meeting to do “whatever it took” to make her resign, tactics the lawsuit says included “threats of violence.”

Manley subsequently resigned and later opted to have a second abortion, WSPA-TV has reported.

[...]

Chastain on Friday referred comment to an attorney, who did not return a message. In several media interviews, Chastain has said he drove Manley to have the July abortion but has denied he forced her to quit.

In an article in the May issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers at the Eastern Virginia Medical School examined 43 previously published studies involving 28,000 male and female adults and found that at least 1 in 10 fathers became depressed after the birth of their child.

A study in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology even found that half of male partners experienced varying degrees of psychological malaise following their partner’s miscarriage.

If a man can feel negative emotions after every other type of pregnancy outcome, why not after an abortion?

A 2009 study in the journal Public Health examining the associations between abortion and relationship functioning found that “for men and women, the experience of an abortion in a previous relationship was related to negative outcomes in the current relationship.”

It also discovered that an “experience of an abortion within a current relationship was associated with 116 percent and 196 percent increased risk of arguing about children for women and men, respectively.”

Men whose current partners had an abortion were more likely to report jealousy (96 percent greater risk) and conflict about drugs (385 percent greater risk). The authors conclude, “[A]bortion may play a vital role in understanding the [causes] of relationship problems.”

Greg Bruell and his girlfriend of a year and a half, Sandra Hedrick, had a pact. “We agreed that if we got pregnant, we’d terminate because we were not in a stable family unit,” Hedrick says. Or as Bruell more starkly puts it, “I resumed sexual relations with her on the condition that were birth control to fail, she’d abort without waffling.” “Resumed,” because nine months ear lier Hedrick had conceived a child with Bruell and the couple decided to end that pregnancy. Or rather, he decided, and she went along. Their relationship was too rocky—a series of breakups followed by passionate reunions—for them to become parents together, Bruell argued. Plus, both were still in the process of finalizing divorces, and he was a newly single father struggling to balance his needs against those of his eight-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. Bruell wanted to steady their destabilized worlds before jumping into fatherhood anew.

I’m surprised Greg Bruell isn’t ashamed to put his name into print. The lead might as well read “I was using this woman for sex, and forced her to promise me I’d never have to take any responsibility for anything.” And the “girlfriend”–why oh why would you go along with this? Prostitution without the pay.

Man. Ruin a perfectly good Sunday and I only made it two paragraphs in. Let me know how it ends if you manage to keep reading.

OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon is pro-choice but says family planning programs — which include abortion in some countries — will be excluded from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s G8 initiative on maternal and child health care.

He was grilled at the House of Commons foreign affairs committee Tuesday where New Democratic Party MP John Rafferty said an important and cost-effective element of maternal health care is access to contraception and other family planning services.

Cannon said the G8 initiative “does not deal in any way, shape or form with family planning.”

Cannon declined to answer when Rafferty asked whether he would ensure that funds are “secure” for the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

The IPPF has received millions of dollars annually from the Conservative government and its predecessor Liberal governments since the mid-1980s. But backbench Conservative Brad Trost (Saskatoon-Humboldt) has petitioned against the funds, supplied through the Canadian International Development Agency, on grounds the federation helps provide access to abortions.

Cannon said the MP should ask International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda. Oda and her officials have refused to state whether the government will renew an $18-million, three-year contract to the IPPF that expired at the end of 2009.

After the committee hearing, Cannon appeared to try to separate his own opinion from government policy on the G8 initiative, in which Harper seeks to harness funds and resources from G8 countries and non-government organizations to reduce millions of preventable maternal and child deaths in the developing world. This is identified by the government as Canada’s “signature initiative” for the G8 leaders’ summit Harper is hosting in Muskoka, north of Orillia, Ont., in late June.

“The point here is our political party is a political party that offers, on all of these social issues, offers members to be able to express their opinion,” Cannon said.

“I do believe that on a number of these social issues we’ve had the opportunity of making our positions known in the House. Everybody knows what my position is but from a government position, this policy, this announcement by the prime minister has nothing to do with what you’re raising.”

Cannon’s aide later said that the well-known position he was referring to is his pro-choice position on abortion.

Millennia of male dominance in workplaces, governments, companies and countries could come to an end in the next few decades. The resulting changes will reverberate through every aspect of our lives and society. And, as with all revolutions, it may not go smoothly. This revolutionary power shift isn’t due to social programs or social engineering. It’s about economics. Some call it “womenomics” because women already account for 80 per cent of all purchasing decisions. More formidably, women may soon be the primary breadwinners. It’s a trend that began more than 30 years ago as women flooded into colleges, universities and trade schools.

This is a disaster. Not the “death of macho,” which is really only a headline and actually, who needs so-called macho men? The problem is the diminishing of male importance, male leadership and the male presence. The disaster is men, rolling over and taking it. Maybe they’re busy smoking a joint, playing video games, sleeping with their girlfriend before going to Mamma’s house for her to get the laundry done, I don’t know. But men of goodwill should not sit back and let this be. Most disastrous of all is that some men won’t take this lying down. And it won’t be the hardworking, family-supporting men who pipe up. It’s going to be chauvenists who will launch the offensive, blaming women and declaring a resurgence of what they think it means to be manly.

We’re in a mess, is all I’m saying, when it comes to gender, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man and how we interact. In the long term I think things will straighten out and get back to something approximating normal decency. But in the short term, I don’t think this is going to be pretty.

Which is what the columnist also says, except that she concludes this way:

It may well be the death of macho. But it is also the liberation of half the world’s people.

I gather she thinks women have been liberated. That’s up for grabs in this here current culture. But even if we accept this, the “liberation” will be short lived. If it comes down to a revolution, and men are fighting women, on sheer brute strength I think we all know who is going to win.

No: Like most pro-lifers, [Jim Hughes, of Campaign Life Coalition] is simply a purveyor of beliefs whose literal truth he does little or nothing to act seriously upon. (As I’ve pointed out in this space, you can make Henry Morgentaler a member of the Order of Canada, thus offering the grossest provocation imaginable to Catholics and evangelicals who have received the honour, and literally 99% of them will suck it up.) But, very occasionally, some ardent religious loner is confused enough to hear those beliefs, conclude they are true, and follow through. And a doctor somewhere ends up maimed or dead. And we blame only the individual who pulled the trigger.

I can’t speak for others, only for me. Here’s why I blame only the individual who pulled the trigger. For the same reason I don’t blame Muslims (or even “just” the hard-core ones, or even peaceful anti-Iraq war activists) for the shooting death, on Monday, of a young soldier outside a U.S. Army recruiting station in Arkansas. Because every individual is responsible for his or her own actions. You can’t blame those of us who say Dr. Tiller made a living taking innocent lives, or even that he was a murderer, for his death the same way you can’t blame the folks who claim U.S. soldiers are murderers for the death of that Arkansas soldier.

Ideological disagreement, moral confusion, religious bigotry, anger or even blind hatred are not the same as murderous intent, as any first-year law student can tell you.

First, I feel like this is as pro-life as that paper is going to get in the near future. Enjoy it.

Secondly, the comments are really interesting–mostly supportive, some angry because the father wanted his daughter to have the baby at all, some angry because he wanted her to have the baby and give it away, not keep it. Altogether, interesting.

Finally, my opinion: It’s hard for me to imagine that he as the father clearly knows what a baby is (and when life begins) and he clearly has a pretty good relationship with his daughter (they are talking, he is involved in her life) and yet she doesn’t appear to really value life.

But perhaps it’s credit to having a good relationship with her that he was able to coax her away from abortion. (Does the daughter sound somewhat flippant about the whole thing to you? “I’m not keeping it.” “Ok, I will.”) But it’s all about the baby steps (so to speak, no pun intended).

In the balance, nice piece, I say.

A California man has signed papers to symbolically “adopt” and give his last name to his wife’s two aborted fetuses.

Stan Musil said he filed the posthumous “adoption” on Monday as a way to support his wife, Lisa, and help her heal from the pain of having those abortions, Lisa Musil told FOXNews.com.

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Andrea’s gut reaction: It’s weird, but what he is essentially saying to her is I accept you and your past. She is obviously still very much struggling with herself. In that sense, I don’t have a problem with it. That said, this information is not news; it belongs in a counsellor’s office.

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Rebecca adds: It’s creepy because it’s, well, a bit ghoulish – and I’d feel the same way about, say, getting a dead adult you were close to in life to “symbolically adopt” you. It’s sweet because this guy is willing to do something weird to bring his wife some peace. And it’s a wonderful story in that it makes it clear that abortion causes suffering and anguish for women, and it also makes it clear that these were babies that were aborted – nobody grieves over (to pick at random) a surgically removed kidney, much less asks her husband to symbolically adopt a destroyed kidney. The legions of counsellors telling women that most women just feel relief after an abortion – what would they say to Lisa Musil? How do they explain that? Are they willing to concede, in this case at least, that her two abortions ended two lives and caused profound suffering in another?

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Tanya adds: I think the motivation behind this act is what could potentially render it creepy or anything else.  In this case, however, I’m really touched by the couple’s actions.  In giving the children a full name, these are clearly being recognized as people.  The symbolic act of adoption by her husband is the closest these 4 people will ever be to a close family.  It’s not like the man can say, “hey, let’s have your boys over for a barbecue.”  He’s accepting his wife’ past.  He’s recognizing that she loves the children she aborted, and misses them.  He’s loving and missing them along with her.  He’s symbolically taking on the role he would have, were they still alive today.