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Dumping your kids in daycare is good for your social status?

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I don’t get it. Gordon Brown is promising a free daycare spot for every 2-year-old in what is billed as a scheme that “will play a central role in his drive for ‘upward social mobility’, which he intends to put at the heart of government policy.”

Huh? The only way that could work is by costing so much folks who are already upwards, social-mobility-wise, end up paying so much more in taxes to pay for this thing that they are dragged down to the level of, well, folks who are lower, social-mobility-wise.

Oh, wait. I think that’s the plan:

At present, three and four-year-olds receive up to 15 hours of free child care a week. The new plan to extend this to two-year-olds will take several years to introduce and could cost more than £1 billion a year, according to government sources. They admit that the scheme would need “significant additional resources”.

Ministers have already announced a smaller scheme aimed at the parents of 20,000 two-year-olds from the lowest-income families. The new policy, for which pilot projects will be announced imminently, could eventually include up to 600,000 children a year.

Why marriage matters – and to whom

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The issue seems mysteriously to have become dead in Canada, perhaps because everyone is too polite to risk hurting anyone’s feelings by pointing out that marriage isn’t just one of a Baskin-Robbins type assortment of flavours of relationships. In the US, the contribution of David Blankenhorn, a self-described liberal Democrat who opposes same-sex marriage, to the debate has been invaluable, and I wish more Canadians of all political persuasions paid more attention to him. Liberals who believe insisting upon the traditional definition of marriage is judgemental (it is – and that’s a good thing) and libertarians who think that marriage is a private good and therefore not the concern of government or the wider society (it is a definite public good) could learn a lot from him. Here’s a concise summary of his work on marriage and parenting, in the LA Times today.

All about Betty

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A commentary today for your reading pleasure on Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique. (Just as I head out the door to a REAL Women conference here in Ottawa. How fitting!) I have read Betty, and found her largely absurd. (It’s the “motherhood as waste of human self” that stuck with me–now really. How did she teach that one to her daughter? But I digress.)

I continue to ponder how those second wave feminists took off–while being so anti-woman in many regards. And I think it has to do with this quote below–from the piece in the New York Sun that I’m linking too.

But her essential point was both down-to-earth and true: Postwar America had taken the ideal of femininity to absurd extremes. Women in the ’50s were encouraged to be childlike, passive, dependent, and “fluffy” (Friedan’s word).

When I look at the magazines in the grocery style aisle, I can’t help but think they are still, for all their “tough working women” rhetoric, consigning women to a “fluffy” bucket. And if not a fluffy bucket–they are certainly defining women in one way, and one way only.

I do believe women are happy and fulfilled where they are free to do what they want to do. The thought I have is that the current wave of feminism (and I lose track, so many of them crash into the shore) is as condemning, as unfriendly, as dictatorial as anything Friedan herself experienced.

Protesting the laws of protest

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The bubble zones around abortion clinics are interesting. They are an infringement on freedom of speech, and this has (possibly–I’m not a lawyer) broader implications. Example: If I run a Wal-Mart, say, and someone starts a protest of globalization outside my doors, and that offends me, might I get a bubble zone too, based on this precedent?

In any event, someone is sandwich-boarded up inside the bubble zone not to protest abortion, but to inform about the bubble zones. Read about it, here.

Soon after two plainclothes Vancouver police officers arrived and went directly into the building. They emerged 45 minutes later to speak with von Dehn, informing her that she was not breaking the bubble zone law, and adding that clinic workers were upset at her actions.”

Clever protest, that. Keep up the good work.

Your duty to decrease the surplus population

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Especially if you’re old and suffer from dementia:

Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are “wasting people’s lives” because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves.

That’s supposed to be ‘ethical’? Yikes. I’d hate to see what she considers morally abhorrent.

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Rebecca adds: Those who don’t know history may not be condemned to repeat it, but they do seem to be condemned to remain too stupid to know whom they’re imitating. As to people being a burden on the NHS (which is more properly understood to be a burden on the British people) – how long until someone tallies the cost of a second trimester abortion against the cost of a lifetime of care for someone with Down’s Syndrome, and declares it a moral imperative to abort babies diagnosed with it?

Good, but not enough

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So the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario backed down from its ridiculous proposal that would see doctors punished for taking their moral and/or religious beliefs into their practice. Good, but not nearly enough, says Fr. Raymond de Souza:

Good for the OMA for not advocating some middle way between a healthy recognition of human rights and the diseased approach of the OHRC. But more aggressive confrontation of the OHRC’s overreaching is necessary. It is not enough just to prevent the cancer from spreading, which is what was achieved yesterday. It needs to be eliminated.

Professional groups such as the OMA — those representing writers and clergy, for example — have been sounding the alarm on the human rights commissions for some time now. There needs to be a corresponding sense of urgency from Canadian governments, whose statutes sustain human rights commissions. Provincial ministers of justice have been largely silent. The federal minister of justice, Robert Nicholson, a good man who surely knows better, has been disconcertingly reserved in regard to the abuses taking place on his watch. The federal government’s irresponsibly lackadaisical approach sends signals to otherwise respectable bodies, like the CPSO, that the OHRC and similar bodies are not to be challenged.

That needs to change–otherwise we shall eventually be whistling past the graveyard of Canadian liberty.

Choice or treatment?

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Just received a critique. How can we at PWPL take away medical treatment from women? Here’s the quote:

You people are just about as frightening as the men who seek to make this medical treatment unavailable to women. If not more so seeing as you are women. The women who find themselves in this situation should be free to choose and make their own informed decision and have access to whatever treatment or option they choose.

If it’s medical treatment–then it’s not a choice. And if it’s a choice, it’s not medical treatment. I don’t choose to have a colonoscopy. Or my appendix out. I listen to my doctor. I don’t waltz into her office and demand treatments. (Forget the fact that pregnancy is not an illness.)

So which is it, ardent pro-choicers?  Hone in on your argument there, because this one’s pretty superficial.

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Rebecca says: I mostly agree, with a slight quibble. As a health consumer advocate (shameless plug) I would argue that in fact all medical care involves choices. Some of them are no-brainers – if you have an appendix about to rupture, choosing not to have surgery is tantamount to suicide – but lots of other legitimate medical choices exist, when deciding whether or not to use HRT in menopause, for instance, when choosing between treatments for cancer, each of which has its own risks and benefits, or even when choosing orthodontic treatment (pull some teeth to make more room, or have braces on for longer, and more painfully). The thing is, these are choices about treatment to address a medical problem.

One of the things feminists got right was insisting that pregnancy and childbirth are not medical problems. Putting on my Ivan Ilich hat, I agree that the construction of obstetrical care as a tool for managing the disease of pregnancy resulted in an incredible power imbalance in which (often male) obstetricians imposed a huge degree of control upon women. That model is no longer upon us. But if a healthy pregnancy is a natural part of life, not a disease (with which I fully concur) then abortion on demand is absolutely not a medical matter but a cosmetic one.

Save the girls

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Save the girls–by not advertising “gender selection” kits. If one wonders whether abortion is good or bad, one might look at what it does–the world’s missing women being one of those outcomes.

India’s Supreme Court had last month asked the two companies plus Yahoo to respond to a complaint that they were illegally advertising do-it-yourself kits and expensive genetic techniques to find out an unborn baby’s gender. Activists said the products — which have not been scientifically proven to be accurate or safe — damage efforts to stem mass abortions of girls because of a traditional preference for boys in India.

Defending eugenics

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Note to this dude’s family members: Guard your health. If you don’t–he’ll take you on a cruise only to pitch you overboard. Something about people who are not self-sufficient requiring too much “constant care and supervision.” What a classy guy.

So in the anti-abortion advocate’s eyes, a parent’s desire to raise healthy children by squelching unhealthy fetuses while the are still in the womb is little more than a pernicious quest, but it is not considered a pernicious quest to knowingly bring severely disabled children into this world. On the contrary, such a choice is held out as an great example of upstanding morality.

Um, yes, you got it. It is upstanding morality to care for the weak and disabled. 

This group “The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism” says they are “dedicated to advancing individual rights and economic freedom through Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.”

They might want to update the mission statement: “Dedicated to advancing the individual rights of healthy folks…” “economic freedom for self sufficient types” etc. I’d be happy to help them toward greater accuracy.

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Update: The words above are the “upclass” version of this. You can pretend to be erudite to conceal your contempt, or you can just make a t-shirt. (Quoting Kathy Shaidle on this one: “Stay classy, liberal America!”)

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Véronique adds: Hmmm, you know what I find “interesting”? I have recently been reading several Human Rights Tribunal proceedings through my day job. Regardless of what you think about the CHRT, all I will say is that there are some pretty messed up individuals out there. Anyway. Reading the quote from Andrea’s post reminded me of a lot of sample hate material dealt with by the tribunal. Except that you replace “severely disabled” by “blacks” or “jews” or “gays.” Now, you would never get away with that. But it is worth remembering, when arguing for “the rule of reason,” that you can make a reasonnable case for eliminating just about anyone on the planet. Well, except yourself of course. Because we all know that were everybody like me, the world would be a much better place. Lonelier too.

Update: I was looking for something on the National Post website when I stumbled upon this video http://www.nationalpost.com/multimedia/video/player.html?video=71742a12-b27c-4a66-a6e5-f49bf9e7c4da

At some point toward the end the mother comments about a letter-writer who posted a comment to the effect that had her daughter been a dog, she would have been put down by now. 

So yeah. All this to say: there are some pretty sick people ou there. And I’m not referring to Kenadie.

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