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Eugenics in Canada today

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There are a couple of exhibits on in Ottawa now that I’ll definitely want to see. One is at the National Art Gallery, 1930s: The Making of ‘The New Man’ and the other is at the war museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The Hill Times cites Ann Thomas, a curator at the National Art Gallery who says this: (subscription only)

Everybody has something to learn from both of these exhibitions and I think… that it’s good not to see these as sick moments in history but to look at the world today as it is, to look at our own society today, and to ask questions about our society and whether we redress these issues in the right way, whether we are moving beyond this kind of behaviour en masse, you know? I think it’s really easy to look back and go, ‘uh that was so terrible,’ and to feel as if we would never ever repeat anything like that and that we are so pure and untouched by evil ourselves and I think it’s always a good exercise, to be able to look and sort of learn something.”

True enough. And for the purposes of this blog, that is why abortion is not private—one woman may abort a Down’s Syndrome baby, but if enough women do so, suddenly we are all walking in that new world, where people with that disability don’t exist. Same goes for sex selection abortion. No, we’re not pure and untouched by evil. Eugenic practices are happening right now, but we don’t generally have the courage to face up to it.

 

Today’s Post also has an article by Michael Coren about how the socialist left popularized eugenics, contrary to what many believe.

Uh-oh

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I received this as an email, so I googled it to find the full article. I would write more about this phenomenon only I can’t quite focus.

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Move along–nothing to see here.

AIDS, hysteria, and bad health policy

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The amusingly named head of the WHO’s AIDS department issues the following words of wisdom, confirming what a lot of people have known for a while, but weren’t allowed to say:

Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said at the weekend that, outside very poor African countries, Aids is confined to “high-risk groups”, including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers. And even in these communities it remains quite rare. “It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in countries [outside sub-Saharan Africa]“, he said. In other words? All that hysterical fearmongering about Aids spreading among sexed-up western youth was a pack of lies.

The sad reality is that it will take a long time to undo the damage that’s been done by a couple of decades of AIDS hysteria. Public health educators put a tremendous emphasis on condoms as the best way to minimize risk of AIDS, leaving untold number of teens and young adults unaware of the diseases that can be sexually transmitted even with a condom, including HPV, a precursor to cancer. This emphasis on condoms and AIDS avoidance is also in no small part responsible for the increasing perception that only vaginal intercourse is sex (well, partial credit also to Bill Clinton) and the escalation of other forms of sexual activity amongst ever younger kids.

In a more abstract sense, the preoccupation with AIDS, condoms, and physical safety led to the increased commodification of sex, and an emphasis on sex as a physical act. It’s not a coincidence that a generation who was taught all about the physical details of sex, and almost nothing about the emotional or moral implications of it, proceeded to create the hook-up culture. By all means, let’s do everything we can to minimize unplanned pregnancy, STDs, and non-consensual sex. But if we’re serious about making more responsible choices, we have to ask people to consider their hearts, minds and souls, and not only their bodies.

We should also learn from this the folly of directing healthcare spending according to fads and crazes. AIDS kills far fewer people than cancer, heart attacks, and car accidents, as well as suicides, and for those under 35, homicides. An honest evaluation of who is actually at risk for AIDS would enable us to focus education and prevention where it will help the most, give kids in health class accurate and helpful information, and avoid needlessly scaring people who were never at risk to begin with.

Modern love and loaded questions

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A friend thought I might be interested in the NYT’s Modern Love series. I am, though by this point I think I’ve read all I ever need to on Modern Relationships That Are Not.

This is the winning article. The runner ups are equally perplexing.

Dinner ended; he had to go pack for his trip. I asked casually when I was going to see him again. He sighed. “That’s a loaded question.” I asked what he meant, because I thought the question was fairly straightforward.

And that’s with a man she’s already slept with.

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Brigitte objects: I believe this is modern. But it sure ain’t love. 

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Rebecca’s favourite part:

[…] when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious how he viewed their relationship. “The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right?”

Aw, isn’t it sweet how romantic the kids are these days?

I am woman, watch me spend?

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OK. So I’m not a tax expert, despite having aced fiscal in law school. I pay professionals to do my taxes, in part because they do it way better than I could but also because life is too short to clutter up your brain with such regulations, unless you’re going to make a career out of it. While I’m willing to believe there are measures in the various tax systems that may be unfair to men or women because of their gender (the way, for instance, one-income families are disadvantaged compared to two-income families, as Jack Mintz explained here), I have a lot of trouble believing Canadian tax laws are so inherently unfair to women as to require special, broad-based and forceful action instead of a few tweaks here and there as needed.

So when I see newspaper articles like this one, I shake my little head in dismayed protest.

OTTAWA – Canadian women will be at a disadvantage until federal taxing and spending decisions are made to advance women’s equality, a parliamentary committee concludes in a new report.

The committee on the status of women unanimously recommends forcing the government’s hand on the issue by requiring the Finance Department to publish a separate analysis on how the measures contained in all future budgets will affect men and women.

A majority on the committee — all opposition MPs — also recommends passing legislation by next April to enshrine in law the gender-based budgeting obligations of federal departments and agencies; and the appointment by December, 2009, of a commissioner for gender equality, which would be modelled along the lines of the commissioner of official languages, to audit and analyze government behaviour.

Gender-based budgeting obligations? Does anybody even know what those might be? And, er, aren’t elections already supposed to be audits of government behaviour?

When OBGYNs think they’re helping women but are actually hurting them

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And I’m not talking about abortion. William Saletan defends western doctors who do “hymen reconstructions” to “revirginize” women (overwhelmingly, and in the context of this article, Muslim women) so they don’t face the (sometimes fatal) consequences of not being virgins on their wedding nights. I have very mixed feelings about this.

Certainly, in any individual case, the compassionate and appropriate response may well be to do the operation. Even in situations where women who aren’t virgins (or, in fact, may well be virgins but not have sufficient evidence of this) aren’t in fear for their physical safety, humiliation and ostracism aren’t fun. And if we allow consenting adult women to pay to have saline implanted in their chests or synthetic substances injected into their lips, it’s hard to make a case that hymen reconstruction shouldn’t be done. But every doctor who plays along with this sick worldview helps this sort of treatment of women to limp along for another day.

Abortion survivor will not support Obama

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Well, no wonder. Technically, if Obama gets his way, Gianna Jessen is not a ‘person.’

She survived her own abortion 31 years ago:

Well into her third trimester of pregnancy, Gianna’s biological mother was injected with a saline solution intended to induce a chemical abortion at a Los Angeles County abortion center. Eighteen hours later, and precious minutes before the abortionist’s arrival, Gianna emerged. Premature and with severe injuries that resulted in cerebral palsy. But alive.

Had the abortionist been present at her birth, Gianna would have been killed, perhaps by suffocation.

Obama would like to revoke the status of personhood for those babies who survive abortion and emerge fully from the womb. In other words, even though a baby is fully born and alive, they would not be entitled to life and liberty.

At what point would someone like Gianna Jessen be granted personhood, then? If she makes it 24 hours, or a week, is it then automatically granted? Does she have to prove that she can survive a full year? Or maybe never?

With all the recent talk of laws like Bill C-484 setting some new, ‘dangerous’ precedent regarding the status of unborn children, what are we to make of Obama’s views of personhood? What other strange, sick acts will eventually become permissible if Obama gets his way? Will we be granted the right to kill, “perhaps by suffocation,” a child diagnosed at birth with some sort of physical or mental defect? If that happens, will those with certain disabilities be stripped of their personhood altogether? Yes, let’s talk about dangerous precedents!

Perhaps, someday soon, individuals not conforming to a strict physical norm will either be killed or sterilized and banished to the Fringes. (Ever read The Chrysalids?)

IMAGE: The Median Sib

Monuments honouring “amazing women”

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From the WebUrbanist, 12 monuments to women. I’m good with Queen Victoria (the ultimate have-it-all woman; she had a busy career and a busy family life way back before work-family balance was in fashion) and Molly Pitcher, not sure about the Red Light woman, and somewhat intrigued by the others. An interesting feature to ponder on a nice, warm evening.

 

So this is helping?

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After my post yesterday about Carolyn Bennett’s comments at the Status of Women committee, a reader sent me this link with Bennett’s views on the Morgentaler decision, back in January: 

I remember my first abortion, as a med student in Barbados. She had red hair and braces, she was in grade nine, age 14 — the daughter of the local prostitute, who had been renting her out. I realized it was so important to get her back to grade nine. So many people had their educations interrupted.

So Bennett does the abortion on a 14-year old, who, in her own words has been “rented out” by her own mother–so she can get her right back to grade nine.

I’m sure Bennett dropped everything to remove the little girl from the abusive home, to ensure she would not be “rented out” again by her own mother. I’m sure also that Bennett ensured the mother was given enough money to stop being a prostitute, to care for her little girl adequately. 

Remind me again how abortion helped this little girl? At least had she been pregnant the abuse would have been evident–Bennett, in a position of power, authority and responsibility, took a big problem and multiplied it one hundred fold. Congrats. 

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Brigitte wonders: Why do we so often forget that abortions also “erase” evidence of abuse? And yet, and yet. There are cases where this is undoubtedly true. Obviously I don’t know the particulars of that one, but from the sound of it, I wonder whether keeping the baby would have helped that girl. I’m guessing not really. I’m also not sure the baby would have fared well – what if it was a girl? She might have ended up in the same situation as her mother. I know pro-lifers are meant to prefer life over abortion in all cases, and because we can never tell for sure what will happen I’m of the view that allowing that baby to live would have given him or her more of a chance than abortion ever did, but I do sometimes find it hard.

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Tanya is reminded of: This story.  

 

The writer’s concluding thoughts:

Abortion defenders need to realize that while abortion may keep one of the results of incest and sexual abuse from seeing the light of day, it does absolutely nothing to protect a young girl from continued abuse, and in fact aids the abuser in his crime. Furthermore, birth control counseling and abortion often indirectly contribute to the victim’s sense of shame, guilt, and blame for what is happening, since she is told to “take control” and “be responsible” for her “sexual activity,” implying that this situation is, indeed, within her power to control. On the other hand, pro-lifers need to realize that incest, rape, and child abuse do happen, and often with devastating results. In the assembly-line process of abortion on demand, incest-related abortions are seriously underreported.

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Andrea adds: Brigitte, I agree with you in some ways–certainly a pregnant 14-year-old who keeps the baby is no grand success, especially if she is left in the same horrific situation. My main point is that neither is aborting. We can’t pretend we are heroes in either situation.

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Rebecca adds: So this was in Barbados – I’ve no idea what the laws are there. If a Canadian doctor failed to report to the authorities that a 14-year-old was being “rented out” by her mother, she would herself be committing a crime. But surely one’s conscience would dictate that one not passively let such abuse continue, regardless of the local laws, right? Someone needs to ask the honourable member what she did to ensure that the girl would be “rented out” no longer.

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