ProWomanProLife

…for Dr. Mildred Jefferson.

Associated Press

Dr. Mildred Jefferson, a prominent, outspoken opponent of abortion and the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, died Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by Anne Fox, the president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, one of many anti-abortion groups in which Dr. Jefferson played leadership roles.

Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, “gave my profession an almost unlimited license to kill,” Dr. Jefferson testified before Congress in 1981.

[...]

“She probably was the greatest orator of our movement,” Darla St. Martin, co-executive director of the National Right to Life Committee, said Monday. “In fact, take away the probably.”

In a 2003 profile in The American Feminist, an anti-abortion magazine, Dr. Jefferson said, “I am at once a physician, a citizen and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged and the planned have the right to live.”

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Andrea adds: Wow. Memorize that last sentence. “I am at once a physician, a citizen and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged and the planned have the right to live.” Sounds like a ProWomanProLife motto to me.

And all smiles, too: (warning: contains graphic pictures without the prosthetic nose)

Hey, look! Somebody I know published a fine piece on that famous “hooker ruling”. And it neatly addresses something that’s been bugging me for a while about the debate over whether prostitution should be legal – the way people confuse “legal” with “good”. As in: prostitution should be legal because let’s be honest, what’s the big deal? So what if some women (and men) want to sell their bodies? It’s theirs, right? Well, no. Not right.

Countries with legalized prostitution should consider the number of young girls transported in dirty containers from places like Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria and elsewhere, to service western buyers. Will Canada join their ranks?

Some in the Netherlands are now hoping to undo the damage of legalized prostitution. Amsterdam’s Mayor Job Cohen told the press in 2007 human trafficking was on the rise and crime was running rampant: “Since the legalization in 2000, things have changed. The law was created for voluntary prostitution but these days we see trafficking of women, exploitation and all kinds of criminal activity.”

Prostitution is dangerous whether legal or illegal. Furthermore, it’s not a choice. The vast majority of women come to it through drug and sexual abuse, mental health problems and extreme poverty.

Maintaining strict laws is about protecting women who are abused by the very way in which they survive. This is also about the kind of country we want to live in.

Recently, there has been an influx of alternative resource centres for crisis pregnancy opening across north America. The problem? Abortion providers don’t like their new neighbours operating in such close proximity. These alternative centres operate with the goal of offering resources to pregnant women, some (as shown in the documentary 12th and Delaware) with the specific intent to change the minds of women considering abortion.

So, where exactly should these centres locate themselves? If a centre wanted to operate near the highest level of at risk women, a place where it would have the highest level of impact, it would open its doors in poorer areas with young populations. Say… near a public high school? But wait, that’s exactly where the abortion clinics are.

The newest mega-clinic recently opened by Planned Parenthood (the second largest clinic in the world) in May of this year is located at 4600 Gulf Freeway Houston, TX. Thanks to Google Maps, one can clearly see that this mega-clinic is smack dab in between the University of Houston and Austin High School. Where is my local abortion clinic? The Halifax Sexual Heatlth Centre (formerly Planned Parenthood) is located at 6009 Quinpool Rd. between two local high schools.

Location, location, location.

After saying they might not stone one woman accused of adultery, they decide to sentence this 25-year-old to be stoned to death for adultery, even though she is pregnant.

For me, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been a longstanding example of why abortion simply doesn’t solve any problems for the women of Africa. As we in the west debate the maternal health initiative, the Congolese women are supporting themselves and each other by any means necessary in otherwise insurmountable conditions.

Theirs is the stigmatized sorority of rape.

Behind these courtyard walls at Heal Africa, they’ve found a sanctuary and femaled a village of the otherwise damned.

Erased as wives and daughters for a crime done to them, they’ve been cast out from their homes, expelled from their hamlets, reviled by husbands and fathers and brothers, ostracized by neighbours

There is a fundamental problem in the DR Congo. It’s not lack of ‘access’ that plagues the lives of these women, but it’s that they are abused then shunned because of it. Often severely injured, women of rape are not welcome in their own homes or even the homes of relatives, so with no one left to turn to, these women have erected their own communities, safe havens, from the rubble of war and systemized abuse.

It was through the assistance of a local “listening house” — a network of counselling shelters that functions also as an underground railroad for disenfranchised rape victims — that Ushindi made her way to the central Heal Africa establishment in the North Kivu capital.

These women, some trained as counsellors, and their children, conceived through rape, now occupy the 28 safe houses HEAL Africa has provided.

When the subject of abortion is raised, if she’d ever considered ridding herself of the fetus, Ushindi gasps. Not only is the procedure illegal in the Congo — except when the mother’s physical health is endangered — but she, like the majority of Congolese, is Catholic, not the pick-and-choose kind either.

“That would be killing. There is already so much killing in my country. An abortion would make me just another killer, like the soldiers.”

HEAL Africa is not only providing safe houses and care but also works to combat gender and justice issues that are ultimately at the core of the mistreatment of the Congolese women.

HEAL Africa’s hospital and community development work address the root causes of illness and poverty for the people of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The hospital and the 28 women’s houses in Maniema and North Kivu have provided a safe place for many victims of the war, and have been a motor for combating poverty and promoting community cohesion over the past 14 years.

While HEAL Africa is doing all of the right things to empower women, it is all the more imperative that the G8 initiative works to preserve the goals and ideals of such organizations and allows them access to much needed funding without abortion agendas.

It’s all about context:

But wait a minute. Every previous generation in history would have happily traded places with us. So what if the Germans will have to sacrifice a week or two of paid vacation time, or if hairdressers in Greece will no longer be able to retire with a pension at the age of 50? Almost all their babies live.

Way back I remember writing a news item based on UN data showing how the world, not just the west, was improving on various outcomes and how we were all doing better than just a hundred years ago. Not saying there isn’t room for improvement but context is important.

Rightly or wrongly, Catholic clerics are rarely far from the firing line.

Two weeks ago, Cardinal Ouellet said that abortion in the case of rape was wrong. That triggered predictable stories that talked about the ensuing “firestorm of virulent reaction” against the Church, even though Cardinal Ouellet was simply repeating Catholic moral teaching and not proposing an amendment to the Criminal Code of Canada.

Charles Lewis’ article here is an insight beyond the surface story to a look at what the Catholic Church is proposing in terms of proactive solutions to Canada’s abortion rates.

I am launching an appeal with my Ottawa colleague [Archbishop Prendergast] for an awareness campaign and [for] more programs providing assistance for women in distress in Canada,” Cardinal Ouellet said. “There is a great scarcity of information, support and financial assistance to enable pregnant women to make an informed choice.”

So what can we expect? More of these types of programs. The Gabriel Project outreach is in its earliest stages in Nova Scotia though it’s already running throughout the US, and we can expect to see more of these laypeople-run/church-supported programs pop up across this country in the near future. They’re an opportunity for the church to be proactive and to get laypeople, even non-Catholics, involved in the process.

In order to violate them so consistently, you kinda have to have some idea what they look like. That’s the only justification I can think of for this:

NEW YORK — Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

So of course I went over to this fine pro-woman site to see what they had to say about that. Here it is, in full:

I’m sure they’ll get around to it. Any minute now.

I, too, dislike the idea of making doctors withhold information to patients as a way of trying to limit the number of abortions based on gender alone.

One critic, however, questions the measure’s effectiveness, given that parents can mail order DNA tests that accurately predict fetal sex, and abortion clinics generally do not ask the reason for the procedure. The way to tackle sex selection is by combating the social mores that lead people to want sons and not daughters, rather than by limiting abortion, said Joyce Arthur, co-ordinator of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.

“To restrict people’s freedoms, withholding information in that way, I think is unethical and unnecessary and is not going to prevent anything,” Ms. Arthur said. “It’s a little bit paternalistic and authoritarian.”

I agree that not telling patients won’t really help all that much (while annoying all the other parents out there who simply wish to know the gender of their baby as early as possible just because they’d rather know than not know). And yes, probably the best way to fight sex selection abortion is cultural, not legal. But hey, I wouldn’t mind if abortion clinics asked a few questions before going ahead with the procedure – why do you wish to abort; have you thought about other options; that sort of thing – at the very least make those parents who abort girls for no other reason than they prefer boys fess up semi-publicly. And really, it wouldn’t bother me if we could somehow have rules limiting access to abortion for entirely frivolous reasons – like because the baby is of the “wrong” gender. I am far from convinced this is possible and/or realistic, but if it were I wouldn’t be against it.

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Andrea adds: Well gosh, I didn’t know Joyce Arthur was all about freedom of information. I look forward to her advocacy in favour of doctors telling patients about the development of their children in detail then, at every stage. Information about what happens in an abortion (stirrups, suction, piece body parts back together after the fact to ensure that all have been removed)… You know, freedom of information.

When Joyce Arthur advocates for freedom of information for women it will be a sunny day in Canada indeed. It’s just that she really doesn’t want that, so it’s a bit rich to claim it here.

A blanket law restricting what doctors tell is unnecessary, as doctors are very aware when someone is wondering about the gender because they want to kill off their baby girl. It would require not a law, but a doctor telling parents I won’t support your nefarious intentions here, and here’s why. That would require doctors who don’t enforce an abortion culture in other areas. (They shouldn’t be the arbiters of what constitutes “a good abortion.” Here we have an attempt for the pot to call the kettle black. “We don’t like your cultural reasons for killing. We do, however, like our cultural reasons for killing.”)

All abortions are bad news.