ProWomanProLife

Picked this one up from Big Blue Wave, who comments that more people need to hear this. I agree. I also think that repeating “You’ll have to trust me” isn’t the most compelling way to make the point. Although trust and faith are what is required when faced with huge, scary, life-altering decisions. I guess reading it on the page like that just sounds a tiny bit flippant to me:

Yes, these are all the realities that await a single parent; however, that doesn’t make these realities devastating or life ending. These are all very small things to endure and over come in comparison to the life long guilt and pain you will experience from having an abortion. People have overcome greater adversity – loss of limb, paralyses, death of loved ones, battles with cancer, religious oppression, torture, the Holocaust. You name it. Being a single parent is trivial in comparison and you are stronger than you think you are. Please, just trust me.

Still, the point of the article, that we can rise to every occasion that comes our way, that we are more courageous than we believe ourselves to be, and that abortion is regrettable where rising to the occasion and giving birth is commendable, are ones worth repeating. Again and again. Somehow, even in our self-esteem culture, many people imprison themselves with their own “can’t do it” or “I have no choice” attitude. I believe we always, I repeat, always, have choices. (And by that I am not making an about face on abortion. Some things are not a choice.)

Here ends the channeling of Tony Robbins.

This week a couple in Alberta welcomed into the world their second New Year’s baby in a row, their fourth child in total. The annual New Year’s baby story is usually a feel-good tale reflecting on the limitless possibility in the coming days, but in true Canadian journalistic fashion, this tale has been twisted into a warning for prospective parents and fertile citizens alike. These parents’ lives have been painted as living nightmares of drudgery that can only be fixed in the form of permanent birth control.

From the Toronto Sun,

CALGARY - Look at the pile of laundry, mounds of dirty diapers and a sleep schedule where actual sleep is only a rumour — then tell Bobbi Jo Ketcheson just how lucky she is. [...]

Ketcheson says she plans to get herself and her husband a gift too, in the form of more certain birth control. [...]

Give the sheer volume of work raising and caring for four babies, finding the time for number five will be almost impossible.

And this from CBC,

Lightning shouldn’t strike in the same place twice, the same person shouldn’t win two lotteries and people really shouldn’t have back-to-back New Year’s babies. [...]

Ketcheson said all four of her pregnancies came in spite of some form of birth control, and noted she was only hours away from signing a consent form to have her tubes tied when she found out she was pregnant with Grace.

Happily, this CTV article with video properly refers to baby Grace as a “bundle of joy” and closes,

…the family is enjoying their latest New Year’s baby, clipping out the articles about their amazing story from local newspapers and pasting them into what will be a very interesting baby book for little Grace Olivia Ketcheson.

Having back to back babies is difficult. I often refer to my first year with our newborn and 1 year old as “the toughest year of my life,” but it’s easier if you have the rest of the world in your corner telling you to stay positive.

The pressure to be sexually active comes at us all from various angles. The ads we see each day run the gamut from subtle ads for “performance enhancing” drugs to use later in life (when some of us may not even want to be all that sexually active) to the more aggressive ones, continuously targeting younger and younger audiences. You can’t escape these images, they’re on bus stops, locker rooms, in a banner on a website, in fact they’re so common that they hardly seem to stand out. As adults, maybe our life experience can buffer some of this imagery, but what about kids, teens who are in the process of figuring themselves out as people? A survey by ESSENCE magazine revealed that,

Black youth report considerable pressure to have sex, according to a new survey of 1,500 Black youth ages 13-21 released by ESSENCE Magazine and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. Of those who have had sex, 47% of those 13-21 (including 21% of those 13-15) say they have been pressured to go further sexually than they wanted to. [...]

Overall, the survey found that almost half of Black teens ages 13 to 21 reported that they have lied to get out of a sexual situation, and 54% of Black males said they feel pressure from their friends to have sex.

But some of the findings in the survey are hopeful. Nearly half of younger children (13-15) say they value their parents’ opinions and that their parents influence whether or not they will be sexually active. This gives parents an opportunity to express to our kids that they’re not expected to have sex.

During this holiday weekend, I’m thankful for my single parenting mother and all the “universe rearranging” she did for my sister and I. This article reinforced my faith in the adaptability of women who happen to become single parents. From SLATE,

When I was pregnant with my second child, I was aware that there were ways in which I was not prepared to take care of a baby on my own, but that awareness didn’t unduly influence or affect me. What I thought to myself was, “The universe will rearrange itself for this baby.” [...]

Someone who was trying to persuade me not have the baby said that I should wait and have a “regular baby.” His exact words were, “You should wait and have a regular baby!” What he meant, of course, was that I should wait and have a baby in more regular circumstances. But I had already seen the feet of the baby on a sonogram, and while he was pacing through my living room making his point, I was thinking: This is a regular baby. His comment stayed with me, though. It evoked the word bastard: “something that is spurious, irregular, inferior or of questionable origin.”

Someone said, similarly, to a single friend of mine who was pregnant that she should wait and have a “real baby.” As if her baby were unreal, a figment of her imagination, as if she could wish him away.

Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort that we create a cultural climate; it’s in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to. Hawthorne called it “the alchemy of quiet malice by which [we] concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”

Poor women are delivered a message in this country, that rather than deliver their baby, their baby would be “better off” having never been born at all. A message we can see at work here.

Among poor women, the abortion rate increased 17.5 percent, rising from 44.4 to 52.2 per 1,000 women [...]

… when confronted with an unintended pregnancy, poor women who might have felt equipped to support a child, or another child, when not in the midst of a recession may have decided that they were unable to do so during a time of economic turmoil.

The message that if you don’t have a house with a white picket fence, then you might not be able to support your baby the way we, the nation, deem fit, is sinister enough. But now in South Africa, poor immigrant women, rather than getting the help they need, are actually facing a battle for custody because they had their children and aren’t able to meet the states criteria for “good parenting”.

Simon Zwane, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Development, confirms that women must have jobs and housing before they can recover their babies, to prove they are capable of caring for them.

“We have taken babies into places of safety until parents can prove they can look after their babies, they have fixed places of abode and they have partners or they have found employment and they will not be on the streets with babies,” he says.

Konjiwa, 26, spends her days remembering. Her 2-year-old son, Joe, is growing up fast without her in an institution far from the squalid building where she lives. She too carried her child across the Limpopo River.

“I can’t survive without my baby,” she croaks miserably. “I miss him more than anything.”

Zwane says some women use their babies to beg. But Konjiwa and Chibura say they cannot feed their children without begging, let along afford child care while they seek money.

As many as 2 million Zimbabweans have flooded into South Africa in recent years looking for work after fleeing their country’s economic collapse and political violence. They find they are not especially welcome, particularly in townships where xenophobic violence in 2008 saw machete-wielding mobs storm through, beating up Zimbabweans and other migrants, burning some to death.

I’ve had a week chockablock with illness, summer camps and puppy ownership. Inevitably during my downtime, I was watching mind numbing telly to escape the circus. Enter Rosie Pope of Pregnant in Heels, who proclaimed… “I’m happy you’re not for time-outs. A lot of people think time-outs humiliate a child.”

Now, I use time-outs, and I naively thought this was the social norm for discipline. Our western world doesn’t fully accept spanking anymore,

Those who oppose spanking as a form of discipline say that, in modern democratic societies, hitting a child — in any circumstance — is unacceptable. Not only does it encourage violence, they argue, it is an affront to human dignity.

Was I spanked? Of course, but did some parents abuse the power they had? Yes. It seems that now the same thing is happening with time-outs.

Parents are posting their child’s time out videos on the Internet. All of these children are all under 24 months of age- still in diapers. [...]

This is a clear example of where American parents are failing their children and our society. It’s humiliating enough for a child to be disciplined in private, but then to post it on the Internet? What purpose does this serve?

The point is, any form of discipline can be misused, but older children and grown-ups should feel bad when they do something wrong. Discipline achieves that, and we shouldn’t let a handful of parents who use more than reasonable force set the bar for the rest of us. I’m assuming Rosie Pope has a lot of followers who may take her advice without any salt, but I’m keeping my time-out step.

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Andrea adds: Thanks, Jennifer for this post. This is one I must add to before it imports to Facebook where people will think I’ve been sick, at summercamp and that I got a puppy. So. My two cents: any child discipline can be abused, be it spanking or time-outs.  I’m not opposed to parents using either of those things, done appropriately.

I know many single parents, almost all of them female. While some seem superhuman in their ability to work and parent, others struggle with the basics of daily life. However they manage, there’s more of them now than ever before, and they could all use a little help.

One in four children in the U.S. is being raised by a single parent – a percentage that has been on the rise and is higher than other developed countries, according to a report released today.

Researchers found that the U.S. had 25.8 percent of children being raised by a single parent, compared with an average of 14.9 percent across the other countries. [...]

Christina Gibson Davis, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Police, said changing gender roles, the rise of contraception, high incarceration rates in some communities and an acceptance of having children out of wedlock have all contributed to the growing number.

Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, added it isn’t being a single parent in itself that raises difficulties.

‘Single moms do a brilliant and amazing job raising their children,” said Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women.

‘It is also true that single moms in this country are systemically underpaid, and systematically under-resourced and systemically unrespected. It’s not the fact they are single moms that makes things difficult.’

Surrogacy carries so many ethical, emotional and biological unknowns that many countries ban it outright, France being one of them. You may have given your French DNA to a surrogate in the U.S., but in a time of dwindling resources, which country takes responsibility for this new life? Apparently not France.

In a ruling that affirmed France’s ban on surrogacy, the country’s top court refused on Wednesday to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States who carried the babies for a French couple. The Court of Cassation said that a California county went too far by ruling that a French couple are legally the twins’ parents. The ruling exposes the legal limbo that many would-be parents find themselves in because of inconsistencies on surrogacy between countries like the United States, which legally recognizes it, and those that ban it. While the court ruled that the girls could not be listed in France’s civil registry, it also said that nothing prevented them from living with the couple in France. The couple’s lawyer said they planned to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Last summer, I read Margaret Somerville’s article on children’s rights to their biological origins in the Globe & Mail.

Adoption is our longest-standing experience of dealing with a situation where children have been intentionally disconnected from their biological parents.

In the past, adoption records were permanently sealed. We now recognize that as being harmful to the adopted person and potentially so to the birth family, and unethical. Yet donor-conceived Canadians do not know who at least one of their biological parents is, because donors here are allowed to remain anonymous, which is no longer the case in a growing list of countries (including Britain, Australia and New Zealand among many others). That also is unethical and, if we continue with gamete donation, it must be changed.

Adoptive parents were once advised by “professionals” – as the parents of donor-conceived children have been and still often are – not to tell their children of their origins; they were told that secrecy was best.

At the time, I disagreed. I thought forcing parents to reveal their identities would deter already apprehensive parents from going through with adoption on both ends of the process. However, a recent experience may change my mind.

A few weeks ago, I was watching NBC’s ancestry reality show called “Who Do You Think You Are?”, which is essentially a very long advert for the website Ancestry.com. I had used this website years ago, but never found much. The show prompted me to give the site another chance. For me, the search entry has always been the same, looking for my biological father. I knew his name but not how to spell it, had his photograph but no year of birth, had his birth country but not his current location. The search on the site? Well, it turned up a matching name with the correct spelling, his year of birth and a matching country of origin.

I think I was a little shocked at first. It was funny, how something I had put so much time and energy into years ago was suddenly so easy. I found more about him through a Google search, his location, more recent photos, details about his life. This wasn’t particularly impacting, I had put to rest my expectations of finding this person years ago. What was shocking was the difference it seemed to suddenly make in me. And it was sudden. One minute I couldn’t have told you where my biological father was or if he was still alive and the next, I could. The effect was instant. There was a confidence perhaps that wasn’t there before. I won’t say something was “missing”, because that implies desiring it to return, but something that was not present before was now present.

We are the stories we tell ourselves, so do I think all children have a right to know their story? I don’t know if it’s a “right”, but I will say…it is, in an inexplicably intimate way, better to know than not know.

We’ve covered a lot about breast milk in the past couple of months on PWPL, and finally, here’s a story about putting it to good use.

Several Nova Scotia mothers have donated their breast milk to help a terminally ill girl in British Columbia.

Julie Bickford was so moved by the story of little Anaya Cassin-Potts, she organized a milk drive through her infant’s clothing store.

The response was overwelming, she said.

“I had so many comments that they’d read it and got goosebumps or cried. It just touches home for so many people.”

Anaya has infantile Krabbe leukodystrophy, a degenerative disorder that attacks the nervous system. The 19-month-old can only digest breast milk.

Anaya drinks about one litre of milk a day. Her mother, Camara Cassin, reached out to nursing mothers across the country when her own breast milk began to dry up.

Cassin’s heart warms every time a frozen package is delivered to her door in Nelson, B.C.

“I pumped myself for 11 months. You know, it’s not fun, and it takes time and commitment, and I just really appreciate every drop,” she said.

Bickford has collected a deep-freeze full of milk — enough to feed Anaya for four months.

Anaya is not expected to live past her second birthday. Cassin hopes the gift of milk gives her more time with her daughter.

If you would like to donate or learn more, here is Cassin’s blog Healing Anya.