Angelina Jolie: “Pregnancy great for sex life”.
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Rebecca snorts: I started to make a list of all the ways in which Angelina is unrepresentative of normative motherhood, but my mother swiped the In Touch I was using for research purposes.
I think the issue for me has been that the substance of the bill doesn’t matter one bit, meaning if this was seatbelt legislation…this is a ploy used by the anti-choice, pro-life movement across the world to try to get the rights of the unborn child, encadré, put into any piece of legislation they can think up.What this committee needs to look at is how, state by state by state, the pro-life movement has been using bills such as this to actually put their anti-choice, pro-life agenda into legislation. That’s what’s dangerous about this bill. I couldn’t give a whatever about the actual violence…. It’s the rights of the unborn child getting into any piece of legislation. There is a tracking that this committee could do of how this has been done in other jurisdictions. That is the danger of this bill.
Woman 18 weeks pregnant discovers her “unborn baby may lose both its feet.” Obviously, women have aborted later for less severe conditions. (I’m reminded of a third trimester abortion due to a cleft-palate diagnosis.)
Operate while still in the womb and there were risks to both mother and child. Do nothing and their daughter faced a lifetime of walking aids and difficulty.
Doctors at the Monash Medical Centre decided that to save their daughter Leah’s feet, they would have to operate on her at 22 weeks in-utero, the earliest operation conducted on a foetus in Australia and possibly a world first.
It’s interesting to note that the operation was conducted by a pediatric surgeon. Definitely puts a different spin on sayings things like ‘My body, my choice,’ and ‘One body. One person. One count.’ I wonder if pro-choice feminists will be up in arms at the idea that a woman was treated by a doctor for babies.
Mrs Bowlen said. “Just hearing the doctor say she’ll have full function in that foot and basically be able to walk. Hearing that, I know I made the right decision no matter what anyone else says.”
I am a bit conflicted on Bill C-484. I don’t object to it, but in a strict legal sense I don’t believe it to be necessary. I’m also far from convinced it would work as a deterrent or do anything to protect pregnant women from violence. But as a political expression of a society’s belief that unborn children are human and fragile and as such, deserve protection, it’s a fine dandy piece. So I guess that puts me in the “pro” camp, if somewhat reluctantly.
It’s not an easy topic, and deciding whether to be in favour or agaisnt Bill C-484 can be difficult. But scary? Not one bit, unless of course you are so entrenched in your pro-abortion views that you consider any indication that society may find the indiscriminate disposal of tiny human beings morally objectionable a threat to your position. I find it hard to believe that’s where most pro-choicers are.
Following this story from France. Please take the time to read this. And explain to me why, as far as I can tell, North American feminists have nothing to say about this issue.
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Andrea adds:
In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt,” said the student, perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery on Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.
Um, how to say this. Clearly it is not, because you had sex. And now want to pretend that you did not.
As for why North American feminists have nothing to say, that much is clear. It is not Christianity they would be criticizing, so why bother.
On Bill C-484, the unborn victims of crime act, a new poll commissioned by Ken Epp and done by Angus Reid shows 53 per cent of Quebec women support the bill.
Who would have guessed?
Still, if journalists and doctors and lawyers keep up the pressure, I’m sure they can change those stats around–turn that frown upside down! Normal, non-activist people are so resilient, answering simple questions reasonably. But what they need is a good dose of Where this Bill Might Go, how it would be Very Scary and Doors That Are Closed Could be Opened…
La Presse–you have your work cut out for you.
The Conseil du statut de la femme has raised the question of choice. No kidding:
The question is to know if girls really make a clear and educated choice to experience a precocious sexuality, or if this is purely a direct impact of the media.
Are we, in Quebec, calling sexually active teens ‘girls?’ Are we raising the issue of ill-informed choice as a potential problem regarding sexuality (and therefore reproduction)?
The article goes on to say:
Among adolescents in a couple relationship, one in five girls (20%) affirms having had a sexual encounter without actually desiring it. These are “extremely worrisome statistics,” figures the CSF.
The CSF confirms that the younger a girl starts being sexually active, the more sexual partners she will have and the higher the likelihood of her contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Hmm…That sounds a bit like a dose of abstinence education to me.
There was no mention of unintended pregnancy and subsequent (ill-informed, undesired) abortion risks.
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Rebecca adds: “… purely a direct impact of the media.” That’s a handy bit of slicing and dicing of reality, isn’t it? Are those really the only two possibilities: a) “girls” are making informed and rational choices to be sexually active or b) it’s the media’s fault? Parents, teachers, clergy, and all the other adults who are more directly connected to individual children have a responsibility to provide young people with not only facts, but also moral guidance and support. I can gripe about the media with the best of them, but there are some rather more specific culprits in the discussion of why teenage girls might be making regretable choices.
The marriage debate. Frustrating. If marriage was strictly about love and equality–then of course there was never any reason to deny it to anyone. This article reminds me about the level of emotion associated with the marriage debate. The “equality soundbite” prevailed. I always thought the “children’s right to a mother and a father soundbite” was quite compelling too. But all it ever resulted in was the comment, “ya, but not everyone has children.” And we were back to square one.
To argue against gay marriage on the grounds that children need a mother and a father required proving without doubt that children don’t do well with two or three parents of the same sex. Proving that, meanwhile, was impossible, because no long term studies without significant design shortcomings exist. Back to square one. Frustrating.
The author of the Globe piece doesn’t seem to find the “unintended consequences” of gay marriage very compelling. I on the other hand, do, and this piece by Jennifer Roback Morse, which landed in my inbox today too, highlights some.
Bottom line: Had there been more freedom of speech associated with the whole debate I’m not sure we would have legalized same sex marriage. Marriage as an institution is complex–and we just don’t learn about it anymore, beyond the Hollywood love angle. And the Hollywood understanding of marriage is not, quite frankly, an institution worth keeping.
I’d hate to call this piece in today’s Globe paternalistic and simple, but what the heck. That’s what I think it is.
The situation highlights what pollsters see as an escalating political trend line: the Conservatives as the party for men, the Liberals as the party for women. … The Harper government was doing better with women earlier in its mandate, explained Mr. Nanos, with emphasis on such policies as health care. But as the focus switched to things such as defence spending and cutting taxes and a crackdown on crime, the support drifted away. … But now, as women progress on so many fronts, it is hard to find them or their causes in this governing party.
Really? And if we’ve progressed soooooo much, one would hope we’d have moved away from the idea of the One Unanimous Female Voice. (And the idea that women don’t worry their pretty little heads about things like defence and taxes.)
One of my very first writing assignments while still a student was to cover a Take Back the Night rally. I went (no journalistic training) and was surprised to find I was close to the only female in attendance over five feet, not sporting a brush cut and army pants. I had a hard time taking the event seriously. The resulting article was promptly published in the opinion section of the student paper, with a clever accompanying cartoon that read “I thought this was Take Back the Right!”
But why this walk down memory lane? Because of this article, which is worth a read (and should you not be able to follow my non-sequiturs, mentions Take Back the Night rallies).
The article prompted more than nostalgia for my university days, but also the question: What would a woman’s life look like today without the second and third waves of feminism? This sort of analysis would interest me. I’m aware of my schooling being infused with these waves of what I think is shallow and faulty thinking. I’m aware in small moments of these second and third waves when I meet women who refuse to acknowledge that any work associated with hearth and home could have any value (the legacy of Ms. Betty Friedan, I’d wager; for those who have not been so lucky as to read her, she called mothering a “waste of human self.”)
It would present an interesting study. But sadly, I think, impossible. Firstly because we can’t really entertain “what if” questions (as in what if Churchill had been more aggressive at Yalta? What if the Allies had bombed the rail lines leading to concentration camps?) and secondly because the only type of academic likely to entertain this particular question is a feminist, whose conclusions I would mistrust.