ProWomanProLife

Two things I’m interested in here. What was it before? (Chances are they never asked the question but my money would be on fewer men believing it is OK to assault a woman in “the olden days,” for lack of a better term) and secondly, did they ask how many women think it is OK to hit a man? Because when relationships go sour, we see plenty of that, too.

As the U.S. presidential election heats up, maternal health initiatives may fade into the background of daily news, but the need for something to be done still looms large over the poorest countries in the world.

We know abortion access isn’t a positive long-term solution for maternal deaths, and we know, pretty much for a fact, that it won’t empower the women living in these countries. Looking at the number of women in Africa living with HIV, we can begin to understand what choices those women do and don’t have when it comes to their sexual health.

In Southern Africa, the HIV statistics for young women are high. In Nomasonto’s village, over half the young women aged between 20 and 24 are living with HIV[...]

The most compelling risk factor is women’s lack of power to ensure they have safe sex. There is evidence that many women are unable to abstain from sex, guarantee that their partners will be faithful or insist on the use of condoms [...]

In many African countries, particularly where people have been displaced by war, women are extremely vulnerable to sexual violence and “transactional sex”. Even in countries where there is no war there is a high level of coercive sex. In one survey, 40 per cent of young South African women reported being sexually abused before they reached the age of 19.

Pooling our resources into providing abortion access won’t elevate the status of women in these regions or keep them from contracting HIV. Giving women the resources and support they need to say “no” to sex really is a life or death situation. Let’s focus on that.

It’s hard to think that women and children would be military targets, but for militias and rebel groups operating in the DRC, that’s exactly what they are.

The killings of the civilians took place on Monday and Tuesday in remote villages in the territory of Shabunda, in South Kivu Province, an area still troubled by armed groups more than eight years after the end of a war there. An army spokesman said the 45 victims were mainly women and children, including one pregnant woman, and a leader of a village was decapitated.

There’s a petition to President Obama you can sign here to send an envoy to the region. If you know of something similar in Canada, please let us know.

In 2009 the NY Times reported,

Christine Schuler-DeSchryver, a well-known anti-rape activist, vented about all the empty promises from the stream of high-ranking visitors who have recently come to eastern Congo, “one more important than the next.”

“In the end, all we got was a pile of business cards,” she said.

The Congolese women have been waiting too long for action.

This article from CNN is difficult to read, you might even be unable to look at the written words of rape survivor Masika. But what I hope you will see is that the situation in eastern Congo is beyond war-time, it’s beyond temporary, and it’s a humanitarian crisis of horrific proportion. Fiona Lloyd-Davies writes,

Rape has now become generational.

Davies has spent 10 years in this region, and her recount of her time there illustrates just how unimaginable life has become for these women. Women in the west, thankfully, have never walked in these women’s shoes, and our priorities simply do not apply here. In no one’s mind should abortion access be at the forefront after reading this. Abortion will not make the Congolese women “on par” with their male counterparts. Abortion will not promote equality, and it will not save lives. What the women in eastern Congo need is help, whatever we can give them, as much as we can give and as soon as possible.

Many women in the west believe that choice is their right; they’ve the right to choose abortion. But we live in a world of commodity, a world of economics, where being part of the communal economic stream, those same women also think things like “abortion is good because there are too many children living in poverty.” Women in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad don’t live in this world, and I’m getting pretty frustrated that people keep thinking they do.

…according to Newsweek, “Women have no legal rights in Chad and most marriages are arranged when women are 11 to 12 years old.” [...]

In the aftermath of its devastating civil war, certain parts of Congo continue to be terrorised by militias and rebel armies. Rape, sexual abuse and brutal violence have become common forms of oppression. In a bone-chilling indictment, Newsweek states that “more than 1,100 women are raped in Congo every day”.

So when I read this from the NY Times, I was of course angry that people still don’t realize that in a country where rape is normal, where it occurs regularly, committed by spouses, soldiers, and boyfriends, that abortion for these women could never be a choice. If you live in a country where you have little or no control over your sexual acts, you will certainly have little or no control over your sexual health. To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.

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Andrea adds: I thought Jennifer’s words at the end there were worth repeating, emphasizing. “To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.”

We also fail to pay attention to the fact that for many women living in DRC, while rape is horrible, so too is abortion. Women there may not see it as the “solution” it is presented as in the West.

What kind of thing gets you on “The List”? Forced marriage, human trafficking, not providing your women with a hospital to give birth in, rape, female foeticide, and frighteningly, female infanticide. Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan are at the top. Read all about it, here.

The “M” word (for morality) might even be slightly less popular than the “A” word. Nonetheless, we can’t escape it. More on the riots:

What Cacnio is telling us, then, is that, on a night in which she says she was so jumped up with adrenaline and booze that she found looting a store to be a perfectly rational thing to do, she was also morally aware and clear-headed enough to put her love of the natural world into action by saving some trees.

The same sort of morality is often on display in the abortion debate. I’ve met vegetarians/environmentalists who have had abortions. It’s a question of what you believe to be right and wrong, and I say that in a dispassionate tone. We teach today that the natural environment is sacred. We simultaneously teach that it is a choice to have an abortion.

It doesn’t matter that those two contradict each other or that our sense of morality is skewed. (People, not trees, anyone?) People respond to the teaching they have received. I don’t know anything about Cacnio, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she had also learned that capitalists are immoral, and if that didn’t inform her choice to steal from the “greedy bastards.”

The federal government is looking for ways to stop honour killings in Canada.

TORONTO — They are disturbing stories of fathers trying to kill their daughters, of brothers murdering their sisters.

Long prevalent in certain Muslim, Hindu and Sikh cultures in South Asia and the Middle East, “honour killings” have increasingly been making headlines in Canada in recent years.

Now, the federal government is urging more community groups to come forward to help fight the rise of such crimes.

Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose first called for a pitch from organizations for projects targeting this type of violence in July.

Since then, the department has received a couple of dozen formal applications but says it still has more funding that can be put toward helping eradicate these “intolerable” acts.

Talk about vulnerable women:

It has become a grim Christmas ritual: hundreds of innocent civilians massacred in remote corners of Africa by the Lord’s Resistance Army, one of the world’s cruellest and bloodiest guerrilla forces.

Now, fearing a Christmas attack for the third consecutive year, the United Nations is mobilizing 900 peacekeepers to protect villages in Congo, and the United States has promised its own action against the LRA.

[...]

Women from the Great Lakes region on Wednesday held a peaceful walk in the Democratic Republic of Congo condemning the increase in mass rapes in the country.

The women drawn from Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda and Sierra Leone joined their female counterparts in Congo to urge the government to criminalise the culture of impunity and end the sexual violence.

Women in the region are mustering what little resources they have to draw attention to the continued threat of violence in the DRC. Without supplies, without the support of their government or judicial system, they stage marches abundant in courage.

This from the mouths of MPs on both sides of the C-510 (Roxanne’s Law) debate.

One young female MP claims the bill is a “front to attack a women’s right to choose.” A spokesperson from the National Abortion Federation calls it a “bad bill” and “anti-choice.” Words designed to carry heavy negative associations but that essentially don’t say anything in relation to C-510.

Neither of these “arguments” point to specifics of the bill they disagree with, because opponents actually can’t find fault with bill itself. Instead, they elect to disagree on the basis of what it could potentially be rather than what it is. Which is interesting, because traditionally pro-abortionists don’t give any value to potentiality.

The spokesperson for the NAF does concede that violence against women increases during pregnancy, and it is this specific situation of violence during pregnancy that the bill sets out to criminalize. As the bill sponsor Rod Bruinooge points out, we have specified laws for sexual harassment because of its unique nature, and this bill seeks to do the same with domestic violence towards pregnant women. A similar bill has been passed in the US, without threatening a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion.

On the night of February 8, 1992, Glendale Black had a fight with his pregnant wife.  Tracy Marciniak, his wife, was nine months pregnant and due to deliver their son in only four days.  They had already given their son a name: Zachariah.  Tracy was eager to have her baby and anxious for the day to arrive.  Glendale, however, flew into a rage that night and decided that that day would never come.  He killed their child.

He punched Tracy in the stomach.  Hard.  And then he punched her again.

Tracy was severely injured, and Zachariah began to bleed to death in her womb.  She begged her husband to dial 911, but he refused.  When she reached for the phone herself, he kept it away from her.

Eventually, he relented.  Tracy was rushed to the hospital and delivered Zachariah by Caesarean section.  He was dead.  Tracy herself was on the verge of death, but was saved by her doctors.

Glendale Black was arrested. But in 1992 killing an unborn baby was not a crime.  Black was convicted of assault and nothing more.

On August 26, 1999, three men attacked Shiwona Pace in Little Rock, Arkansas.  She was due to deliver her baby the very next day.  Knowing her baby would be a girl, she named her Heaven Lashay.  But her former boyfriend, Erik Bullock, paid three men $400 to kill Heaven the day before she was to be born.

Shiwona lay sobbing and begging for mercy on the floor while the hit men brutally beat her, choked her, and clubbed her with a gun.  They kicked her in the abdomen repeatedly, killing her child who was to be delivered the very next day.  One of them shouted, “—- you!  Your baby is dying tonight!”

Unlike Tracy Marciniak, Shiwona Pace saw Bullock and her assailants go to prison for killing her daughter.  Only a month before, Arkansas had passed legislation making the killing of an unborn child a prosecutable offense.  If Erik Bullock had hired those killers only a month before, they would have gotten away with manslaughter.

The House of Representatives is voting this week to make the killing of an unborn baby a crime if it happens in a federal jurisdiction.  The measure, called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, has the support of the House, the Senate, and the President.  This is an uncontroversial bill that has passed the House before by wide margins.  Abortions, protected by Roe v. Wade, are specifically exempted.

I call this a similar bill, because coercing a women into an abortion essentially forces her into the role of a hired hit man.