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Having fun with numbers

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Try as I might, I’m having a very difficult time imagining how one can spend upwards of $54,000 on a child monthly. But I’m sure it’s possible if you put your back into it. My husband and I spend thousands of dollars yearly on our children’s athletic endeavours and we think we are certifiably nuts. Our entire family’s clothing budget, per month, runs around $400 (including months of no clothing and months of snowsuits) so the $3,000 monthly figure for one child is positively entertaining. What do rich people do all day? Shop?

Accuse me of delighting in the misfortune of others, but this piece of courthouse news from this morning’s Ottawa Citizen made me laugh. A nervous laugh. Far from diminishing the great toll that marital breakdown can exact on people, there is a business case to be made for earning 10 million dollars for the dubious achievement of having been shortly married to a wealthy businessman. 10 million PLUS $100,000 PER MONTH! For that kind of money, I’d be willing to put up with a lot of marital strife. Don’t get me wrong: in the amount of time — roughly 8 years — normal marriages get long in the tooth (even loving ones), Mr. Potter had had 2, producing 3 children. The guy cannot be easy to live with. But if I wasn’t already married, and if I didn’t believe that we marry once, especially when children are involved, I’d say “Sign Me Up!” I mean, how many sucky jobs don’t pay that well? Most people don’t have the privilege of getting rich while being unhappy.

I laugh at the adults but the children make me cry. Because while the grown-ups are arguing over the necessities of life such as a pied-a-terre in Paris or a house in Rockliffe Park, and what will the girls wear on their trip to the Galapagos if the court doesn’t uphold the clothing allowance, the children are stuck between adults who need a judge, a third party, a stranger, to decide for them where their own children will go to school. Stuck between two grown-ups who need a third party, a stranger, to tell them what the best interest of their own children is. Money can’t buy happiness. And it sure can’t buy good judgment.

A moving testimony

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In Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen. Read it here. The accompanying picture, taken by a photographer associated with the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Foundation,  is worth buying the paper copy. I don’t know what else to write. I read it and I cried but my tears were a mix of grief for Joseph’s parents and joy for Joseph’s life. It showed me once again that very short lives can be jam packed with meaning and purpose.

Quote of the day

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The National Art Gallery in Ottawa talking to the Ottawa Citizen about its rule prohibiting the carrying of small children on one’s shoulders:

“Unfortunately, we just can’t allow that kind of liberty”…

Uh, yeah… My point exactly. I have argued many times that talking about “abortion rights” wasn’t the end of the discussion, we also had to understand the basis for that right. We seem to accept the limitation of rights just about everywhere so long as they serve some notion of “greater good.” Like the protection of delicate artifacts. But suggest that abortion might weaken society and erode women’s rights and you’re told to get your nose out of women’s uteri.

Head shake. Eye roll.

Challenging the debate

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An interesting opinion in today’s Ottawa Citizen. The author is admittedly pro-choice, believing that abortion must remain a question of individual conscience, but comes swinging against Morgentaler’s Order of Canada nonetheless. I would love to hear more discussions like this one, where the outcome of the debate — should Morgentaler have been nominated? — does not hinge on one’s moral position on abortion. Morgentaler’s nomination is wrong for many more reasons than his morals (or lack thereof).

That being said, I must still register my disagreement with the author’s statement that a fetus’ moral status can be circumscribed by its inability to value its own life. I recently had to take my dog to the veterinarian to be euthanised, a decision I don’t wish on anybody. My oldest daughter was tearfully telling me, a couple of days later, how heart-breaking it was to see the dog go in the car like it was just another car ride, and had he known, etc. Warnings about the uselessness of anthropomorphizing the dog went into deaf ears. The dog didn’t understand where he went — or why — and while to Liesl this was heart-breaking, I found it somewhat comforting. Some years ago I read Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking and I cannot yet wrap my head around the expectancy of death, particularly when it comes at the hands of another. Assuredly, the ability to value one’s own life makes looking forward to one’s own death with more poignancy or fear. Similarly, we could say that people who take their own lives do so at the end of a tragic road of self-devaluation. However, I do not think that we can so easily equate moral status with self-valuation. Because, if you will allow me a moment of very bad taste, I’m not sure my 2-year-old son is yet able to value his own life. In fact, according to the decibel register at my house lately, he would convince anybody that his life is very miserable. Still, if I took his life, I would not only be a criminal in the eyes of the law but a very sick or rotten individual in the eyes of everybody else. In a nutshell, the ability to value one’s own life may be enough to abortion supporters but it doesn’t explain why it no longer matters after the child is born.

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Rebecca adds: To take Véronique’s point further: at the moment, we (as a society) do not believe that the elderly infirm can be killed because they may not be aware of their own existence and consciousness, nor do we believe this about people of any age suffering brain damage that impairs their consciousness. There are alarming signs that this may be changing, though, thanks to the valiant efforts of Peter Singer and his fellow travellers.

Reflect and ponder

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Read in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen in the letters section (sorry, I couldn’t find the web version of the full letter):

Under no circumstances should sex lead to a life sentence.

I daresay, this letter-writer has learned her pro-choice lesson well. Sex? Leading to pregnancy? No way! But on a lighter note, her statement reminded me of a joke, you know, the one about life being a sexually transmitted condition leading to death?

Among other letters, we also read the testimony of a woman who found herself in the leftover 1% for whom the pill is not “efficient” and who had an abortion as a result. She writes: “But birth control does fail some women who are then faced with unplanned pregnancies that, for various reasons, they cannot continue.” So much for birth control making abortion rare. Sex shouldn’t lead to babies and we need abortion because we have relatively effective birth control, not in spite of it.

Interesting.

Our work cut out for us

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This argument comes up quite often:

Please, isn’t it about time to use the correct 21st century medical nomenclature. A fetus is not a baby any more than a man’s sperm or a woman’s ova is a baby.

Er, actually, there’s a big difference between sperm and a baby, and an egg and a baby. Modern man: You’d think we’d have nailed down the birds and bees by now.

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Tanya adds: This letter is a great example of non-sensical pro-abortion thought.

As for those people who seek out an abortion for sex selection, this reflects their misogynistic attitude towards or about women… 

The fight for enlightenment and equality and access to safe medical abortions is part of the women’s movement and is still an ongoing struggle.

Pairing abortion with equality is misogyny. If we embrace women, why draw the line at rejecting their capacity to reproduce?  It’s not an illness, the fact that we get pregnant from having sex!

 

Watch your language, part II

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I am a bit of a stickler for how we use words, especially in the context of hot-button issues like euthanasia and assisted suicide. We can’t settle these issues without debating them and we can’t debate them if we are not talking about the same thing. In an otherwise excellent article in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, Naomi Lakritz writes:

The killing of Tracy Latimer was not euthanasia. It was murder. Euthanasia is also known as assisted suicide. Tracy did not commit suicide, let alone ask for assistance in doing so.

True, but euthanasia is not also known as assisted suicide, at least not in today’s academic literature in bioethics. With assisted suicide, a physician provides the means or information necessary for a person to end his or her own life. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) also describes situations like Sue Rodriguez’ where the patient is able to express a desire to end his or her own life but unable to perform the required actions. Suicide is no longer criminal in Canada and the sticky issue with PAS is whether or not physicians should be allowed to facilitate it. Another sticky issue with PAS lies in the validity of someone’s desire to die. Is it a desire to die or a fear of suffering?

Euthanasia refers to the termination of someone’s life by another for the purpose of ending that person’s suffering. Accordingly, if PAS is technically suicide, euthanasia is technically murder and both should be debated as such.  Suicide is legal in Canada but assisted suicide is not. Accordingly, we oppose PAS by arguing that the presence of a third party no longer makes it a private decision. Since euthanasia is murder (or at least should be), we oppose it by arguing that disabled life in any way, shape or form, is as valuable as another. One of the sticky issues with euthanasia is precisely the lack of active involvement in the decision by the person whose life is to be ended. That person may have expressed a desire to be “euthanized” in the past, but the actual life-or-death decision is made by an external party. This is in great part why the Latimer debacle is so worrying for disabled Canadians: once you let able-bodied people decide what a life worth living is, you eliminate the experience of disability from the decision-making picture.

All this to say, both are wrong for similar reasons. But that doesn’t make them synonymous.

Excellent Ottawa Citizen letters page today

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Why such a good page, you ask? Because there are two ProWomanProLifers on it all on the same happy day. Very much unplanned. My letter, here and Véronique’s here.

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Rebecca adds: The insistence that if one opposes abortion, one must support birth control is a fine example of question begging. (For the record, while I reject the notion that abortion is a consequence-free private decision that is the prerogative only of the woman involved, I believe birth control to be none of anyone’s business but the couple’s, informed by medical, theological and other considerations that matter to them. Although I do have some serious qualms about the medical basis for a number of birth control methods.) But the argument takes as a given that a) sex can be severed from reproduction and b) perfect birth control, or close enough to perfect, is achievable. Neither of these is true.

The world would be a happier, better, saner place if fewer teenagers (and, dare I say it, unmarried adults) had sex. This is partly the case because of the inevitability of unplanned pregnancies. No birth control method is 100% effective; sterilization comes pretty close, but even then, whether through a faulty procedure or natural regeneration, sterilizations sometimes don’t work. And the numbers typically given for the effectiveness of the pill, diaphragm, condom and so on are usually “perfect use” statistics; in reality, very few users reproduce these circumstances, and the “”real world” reliability of most birth control methods is much lower. This may tie in well with certain political or religious views, but it is not a political issue or a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.

So we create a culture in which sex is separated first from reproduction, then from marriage, and finally, in the age of the hook-up, from commitment or even affection. We raise a generation with the mantra of safe sex (omitting the fact that some diseases can be transmitted even while using a condom) and provide them with flawed tools to prevent conception. And inevitably, we end up with unplanned pregnancies, men leaving smoke behind them in the manner of the Road Runner as they head for the hills, and women convinced that their lives are ruined, who try to flee by terminating their pregnancies.

The fact that only abstinence is guaranteed to prevent pregnancy is also a matter of fact, not opinion. Young women (and men) who think their lives will be ruined, or (less melodramatically) recognize that premature and single parenthood will radically alter their plans, should keep this in mind. As a society, we can have “consequence-free” sex or we can value all life. We can’t do both, and no matter how hard we try (and many people have tried very hard indeed) we can’t sever sexuality from reproduction. Which is, I believe, part of the teaching of the Church on this matter.

When choice doesn’t involve choosing

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I have issues with “a woman’s right to choose.” Particularly when the said “right to choose” becomes the only yardstick of morality, that is, the standard against which we measure whether things are right or wrong. As we wave “the right to choose” furiously nobody seems too concerned about what the choice is about. As a result, we – that would be the royal “we” – become righteously indignant when our “right to choose” is threatened rather than when the options that substantiate that right are threatened.  

Don’t understand what I am referring to? Go and read the Ottawa Citizen’s ongoing coverage of Catholic Archbishop Terrence Prendergast’s statement that pro-choice Catholic politicians should be denied communion in the Catholic Church. Today’s front page article present reactions from Catholic politicians although to what extent these politicians are “in communion with church’s teaching” is highly questionable. Regardless, reactions fall into two categories: those who recognize that the Archbishop is giving Catholic politicians a choice and those who think he is attacking choice, be it in their political careers or in women’s lives.

Members of Parliament who accuse the Archbishop of blackmail and bullying don’t realize that they do have choices. Plenty of them. They can support abortion laws – or lack thereof – on the Hill. They can also walk from their offices to the nearest abortion clinic if they want to. They can get four selective abortions if they need to. In fact, they have more choices than pro-life activists in just about any setting . To that long list of choices, Archbishop Pendergast has added one more: they can receive Catholic communion or not. What these self-proclaimed pro-choice Catholics want is not so much choice as choice without strings attached. But that can hardly be called choice, can it?

Finally!!! (Another view)

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My, oh my… The Ottawa Citizen’s front page about Catholic politicians being refused Communion in light of their public pro-abortion positions. But this is not what I’m shaking my head about. As with many newsworthy Catholic positions, who would you think the paper would ask for commentaries? Not the Catholic men and women who support the Archbishop’s position (there are at least a couple). No, the coordinator of Catholic for Free-Choice Canada and David McGuinty, a pro-choice Catholic (writing these two words together feels very weird in the fingers, not to mention the brain) politician.

In a bid to gain better understanding, I have a few questions for pro-abortion Catholics who might be reading this blog. When Rosemary Ganley writes that Canada is a country “with a Charter of rights that has been interpreted to protect a woman’s right to choose” does she mean that immoral laws should never be challenged? Whether or not you consider abortion immoral is not the point. The point is about the incontestability of law. I’m asking because abortion used to be illegal and abortion laws were successfully challenged by abortion advocates who thought it was immoral to impose one’s pro-life views on women. According to Ganley’s myopic view of law, women shouldn’t be persons and we should be allowed to own black people (oops, my mistake, blacks wouldn’t be people…). Or is there a point in history where law, who has always been malleable, became fixed? Maybe the day it coincided with Ganley’s personal views? Just trying to understand here…

My second question concerns the separation of church and state, on which I am no expert. But, if there is indeed a separation of church and state, wouldn’t that be an argument upholding Archbishop’s Pendergast’s position? There are state positions (abortion is a legitimate personal choice in a free and democratic society) and church positions (life begins at conception and belongs to God). Who gets an abortion is state matter. Communion is a Church matter. I don’t understand why Ganley thinks the State should be allowed to meddle with who is receiving a Catholic Sacrament… not if she wants to declare in the same breath that the Church has no business meddling with who is receiving an abortion.

Finally, my last question maybe should have been the first. Why care so much about the Catholic Church? With the number of Christian churches and denominations that support abortion, contraception, women pastors, divorce and same-sex marriage, why so upset about the Catholic church? I just don’t get it. Don’t you want to be happy when you go to Church? Spirituality through disgruntlement. Never heard of it.

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