I’ll get the discussion started with a little debate statement.

BIRT it is okay to kill girls when a North American feminist advocates for this on the grounds of free choice but not okay when someone does so because of cultural dictates for son preference. Talk amongst yourselves.

Facebook temporarily removed the profile picture of Rebecca Gomperts, the Dutch founder of Women on Waves, an organisation that works to provide women with safe, legal abortions. The image consists of a block of text providing information on how women can self-induce an abortion without the assistance of a doctor. Women on Waves was furious, but media attorney Quinten Kroes said there was little they could do….

Describing the contentious picture, Rebecca Gomperts said, “It’s actually a sticker we designed to provide information on how women can safely induce an abortion using a medicine called Misoprostol. The text is based on information and research from the World Health Organisation. So it is really quite safe.”

“Quite safe.” Wow. I’m severely underwhelmed.

One surprising trend, according to Dr. Mann, is that girls have caught up to boys when it comes to binge drinking, cannabis use and other problem behaviours. In many instances, it appears that while male substance use has remained relatively stable or even declined, the number of females engaging in those activities has risen significantly. For instance, in 1999, 20.3 per cent of boys and 15.7 per cent of girls reported hazardous or harmful drinking behaviour. By 2011, those numbers were 18.1 for boys and 17.6 for girls.

Of course, this falls into the category of things feminists will never “take credit” for, but I’ve read enough articles now about distraught feminist mothers, wondering how on earth their daughters could misconstrue their message of female empowerment by sleeping around, wearing atrociously skanky clothes, and generally avoiding engineering and math departments like the plague. They don’t see themselves as granting the “freedom” of licentiousness to their girls, at all. Doesn’t mean they didn’t do precisely that, though.

SlutWalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.

-Margaret Wente

Almost missed this column from Thursday, May 12, about the “Slutwalk” phenomenon. I had avoided commenting on that precisely because I view it as what you get when grad students in women’s studies run out of other things to do.

This is a quote from the letter Andrea posted yesterday. It reminded me of a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while and here we – finally – go!

I am currently taking a journey in the unexplored confines of our society’s split personality when it comes to abortion and the status of the fetus. Last February, I found out with great surprise that I was expecting. For those who are keeping count, that would be number 7. Oh well, thought I, we’ll have one for each day of the week. Our children were ecstatic, people thought we were crazy (same old same old). Except that 3 weeks ago, we found out – with even greater surprise – that 7 days wouldn’t be quite enough. I am expecting twins. If I ever thought I had heard it all with my large family, expecting twins takes the cake. I now qualify as a bona fide circus animal. I should have known from the tone of pessimistic disbelief in the ultrasound technician’s “…well, you seem to be taking it well…” that I was in for an interesting ride.

Reading everything I can put my hands on, I learned a few factoids. Twinning rates have been increasing steadily for the last 20 years, partly due to increasing maternal age (check!) and assisted reproduction technologies (uncheck, just in case you’re wondering). This means that my search for the best double-stroller has lead me to countless assisted reproduction message boards and Internet sites. In the ART world, gametes are babies. They are loved and expected from implantation, a time when mothers like me don’t even know they are pregnant. They are mourned and remembered when implantation fails, a time when mothers like me just have another period.

Every book about twins starts with a detailed chapter about twinning and early conception. With quotes like “this is when your babies’ cells start specializing”, “this is when your babies’ hearts start beating”, “by so-many-weeks, your embryos are now fully formed and will only get bigger and bigger until they are ready to be born…” there is no grey zone. But then, the whole gig gets positively weird when it tackles selective reduction or the selective abortion of some fetuses in a high-order multiple pregnancy (usually triplet and more). Presented as just one more medical procedure, it balances out the advantages (higher chances for the remaining fetus(es) to be born at term) with the risks (higher chances of mortality following the procedure for the remaining fetus(es)) in a cold medical calculation and barely touches the psychological impact such a decision must have on the parents. You may think that it must be because there Is no psychological impact but I once met a woman whose ovaries had been over-stimulated through ART. She was only told that she could be expecting as many as 8 babies and should consider selective reduction. She spent the following week in a complete state of shock at the thought of having to choose which babies to dispatch after spending years struggling with infertility. A simple risk-benefits analysis it was not. Thankfully, only 2 embryos implanted and she carried healthy twin girls to term. Ten years later, she still cries when she recounts this episode.

And so this is my journey at the heart of our collective split personality. On one page, fetuses are pint-sized human beings with all the bells and whistles of personhood, the next page, they are subject to reduction, like a wart or a tumour. When the pendulum stops swinging, I hope it will be on the side of the baby.

To be certain, this is not my target audience…someone this doctrinaire is certainly not the person I aim to encourage. But I thought it’s good to know this view is alive and well. I’d say a comment of “no comment” is perhaps most appropriate…if you choose to comment, be nice.

You are not “pro-woman” and as a woman it is deeply disturbing that you would attempt to call yourself that. It makes me sick that women band together to unempower themselves after years of fighting and winning their rights. What you are, plain and simple, is ignorant religous nuts. After all, religion is the only reason you all seem to cling to this idea that a fetus is a baby or a human. Perhaps your thinking will go back another century and you will inform us all that sperm are sacred and the use of condoms is a sin. I hope you all come to your sences and remove this website before you actually cause any harm to the women’s rights movement.

You should be ashamed of what you are doing to your own people. Abortions are never forced, and no woman commenting on here would ever have an abortion if she did not want one. Why do you want to remove that right from others? It does not affect you. It does not involve you. It is none of your buisness. And yet you are so passionate about it.

Women spent so long fighting for their place and say in this man’s world and here you are, a group of women, commited to unempowering the women of this country.

If you could all focus your attention and energy on something that is actually important perhaps you could make a positive change in this wourld. But you don’t want that. You just want to ignorantly bitch and complain. Nice. I hope your proud. I’m not proud to be a woman today, and I truely wish I never found this disgraceful website.

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Jenn happily adds: “NeoCon”? Wow, I didn’t even know Canada had NeoCons, let alone that I was one of them. I digress…I find the idea of a political group (or in this case, a pair) refusing to debate anything particularly amusing and incredibly irrational. How does one expect to make the collective decisions necessary without discussing them?

Others believe it because they think men have babies. No really.

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Brigitte adds: Hey! I’ve seen that gesture before! Right, Andrea?