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Now that’s what I call a dilemma

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Say you approve of Earth Hour. But say you also like hockey. What do you do?

An ethical question: Is a television set tuned to the Canadiens-Maple Leafs game an essential appliance?

This will be the conundrum facing Montrealers who want to be green and participate in Earth Hour tomorrow night, but don’t want to miss a minute of a game with their beloved Canadiens.

Organizers of the second annual Earth Hour are asking governments, businesses and individuals to turn off the lights and any non-essential electrical appliances for an hour, between 8 and 9 p.m.

Personally, I don’t care for hockey (don’t watch television in any case) and care as much about Earth Hour as I do about, well, hockey. So I’m cool. Phew.

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt

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Abortion is legal in Canada right up until the mother goes into labour. No one can argue that point. What is often disputed back and forth is whether late-term abortions actually occur for non-medical reasons. Here (thanks to Big Blue Wave) is an example of such a debate.

 Says the pro-abortion side:

Although there’s no abortion law in Canada, doctors do adhere to the CMA recommendation of no abortions on request after 20 weeks. Even then, so-called “elective” abortions after 16 weeks are rare…

Though Joyce Arthur is quoted above, I’ve heard many an abortion rights activist cite similar information. Patricia LaRue, Executive Director for Canadians for Choice, claimed late-term abortions “don’t happen… No Canadian doctor agrees to do an abortion past 23.6 weeks for social reasons.” 

But fact responds in the form of Margaret Somerville’s personal experience. She enumerates such examples as a woman, 34 weeks pregnant, who did not want to have a baby with a cleft-palate. Or again, a 29 year old student who “was 32 weeks pregnant and wanted an abortion for social reasons.”

 There is an abortion clinic… in Montreal that… does all the very late term (over 22 weeks gestation) abortions… It’s been reported that the Quebec Government has sent at least one obstetrician to the US to be trained to do these abortions – if they were not happening, why have a clinic and why train someone to do them?

Denying that these late-term abortions occur would, I suppose, make the idea of them less haunting. How is it, then, that we who oppose abortion are faced with their very reality, while those who support their existence get to shield their eyes? In the words of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, I say to those abortion supporters: “Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.”

The androgynous ideal

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On the cover of the New Republic: The merged faces of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I gather it’s to illustrate how so many Democratic party members are having trouble picking one candidate over the other. Which is a reasonably common problem in partisan politics; how often have you wished you could get a little bit of two or more leaders in one person? But, er, I didn’t think we ought to extend that to gender. This is one creepy picture.

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Tanya adds: It looks like a very clean cut David Spade. That is creepy.

Upside down justice

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Abortion is unjust from just about every angle. So why do we keep it around? I’m giving a talk for the Halton ProLife group this evening on the injustice of abortion and arguing that the reason why abortion is offered in this society is because too many people, even those who might be personally against abortion, actually think it is compassionate in some way; that it serves justice.

I think offering abortion serves justice as effectively as riding a horse upside down.

(Photo from Wenceslas Square, Prague)

Marital breakdown live

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The Moment of Truth. Instead of trying to solve problems–this show creates them. They find the most dishonest, shallow and superficial married couples in all the land and then poke and prod them into divorce.

This is why I don’t have cable. And could this be why so many more North Americans are staying single, getting pregnant out of wedlock and just generally not holding marriage in high esteem? Well done, Fox!  

Common reasoning

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Here is a perfect example of the type of argument I find hard to swallow.

…the anti-abortion campaign is a scare tactic, not a pro-life lesson. If we want to debate children’s rights, let us look at all the neglected, abused and lost children who need loving homes.

Sadly, it seems that a woman can have numerous children to increase her welfare cheque…

This is a recurring thought. Let me point out, then, that abortion is legal in Canada, and that neglected children remain. How can this be? If abortion is legal and accessible, shouldn’t the problem of “unwanted” children be solved? However, the number of children in foster care increases exponentially every year. (There are currently over 76,000 children in foster care in Canada.)

Let’s face facts. Abortion has not created a society where “every child [is] a wanted child,” as the Planned Parenthood slogan goes. Rates of child abuse and numbers of foster-children have only increased since legal abortion became part of our national profile.

Is it safe for me to say, as it has been suggested many times before, that abortion has offered a skewed view of the value of children within our society? Could it be that our country has it all wrong? Maybe, just maybe, devaluing unborn children has caused Canada to under-appreciate the value of all children. Who dares call that a scare tactic?

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Andrea adds: That same letter writer says this:

The CCBR website offers a number of convincing but fundamentally wrong arguments. When anti-abortion gimmicks stop, and pro-life rationale presents itself in the abortion debate, I will be on board…

Really? For years and years and years the pro-life movement has been offering nothing but a sound rationale–reasoning up and down the block, reasoning that runs circles around pro-choice arguments. That letter writer may take issue with the Genocide Awareness Project; I know many reasonable people who do. But she says she’s on board if only pro-lifers could present arguments “minus the propaganda.” Well, this is her lucky day: I can personally refer her to any number of pro-life groups that do nothing but that, and have done so, day in, day out for years on end.

Spring rant

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It must be spring. Calls for nominations of women of influence for various awards seem to be blooming in all my ladies’ magazines. Calls for applications for various fellowships and other Gold Medals awarded to “outstanding graduating students” are raining down at McGill. I seem to stumble on “most influential woman under 30” and “young person of the year” awards everywhere. Maybe this is just a reflection of my own insecurities. Maybe this is one of the reasons women are delaying childbirth and having fewer children: Our society burns the fuel of external recognition and motherhood provides very little of that. At this point, I’m not quite sure which of the two needs fixing: my insecurities or the world. Likely both.

At the risk of being offered some cheese with my whine, seeing a beautiful, single, 30-year-old career woman receive an achievement award makes me in equal part depressed, envious and somewhat bitter. All the more if she fits in size four pants, but I digress. This is in no small part due to the fact that I am a married, 34-year-old mother of five who will never again fit into size four designer pants unless I get morbidly sick.

Newly minted with a Master’s degree, I am looking for a job with a resume that is, well, very similar to what it was when I graduated from high school in 1992. Odd jobs, volunteer work, you know what I mean? I resent the fact that I have to remind myself that the subtext of my threadbare resume is “five children.” I have to remind myself that getting a Master’s degree while caring for a household of seven is worth a Gold Medal even though I will never get one. I have to remind myself that my utter lack of professional experience and connections is the cost of committing the last 12 years of my life to carrying, delivering and raising five little persons. And finally, I have to remind myself that if I never get an achievement award but if my children grow into “competent, responsible, considerate, and generous men and women who are committed to live by principles of integrity” (to quote writer James Stenson ) , I will have been successful beyond measure.

But today, I resent having to remind myself. Because it should be obvious and it is not. I don’t think that putting professional aspirations on hold while children are very young is a bad thing. However, women should be able to reintegrate into the workplace post-bambino without feeling like 5, 10, 15 years of their lives have gone the way of the dodo. If we want women to go forth and reproduce, we have our work cut out convincing them that they will not just disappear under a pile of housework. That’s just one of the ways in which being pro-life starts by being pro-woman.

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Andrea adds some spring flowers to accompany the spring rant, a very fine rant, Véronique, and I do agree–it ought to be obvious that what you are doing is worthy of a gold medal. In the interim, before attitudes change, some flowers.

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Tanya adds: A woman has such a peculiar role to attempt to fill in today’s western society. Stay-at-home mothers are sacrificing their dreams and financial security for the sake of family. (Oh! what noble martyrs we are.) Career women sacrifice their families for their own personal goals. (Images of a briefcase wielding woman who missed her child’s soccer game come to mind?) For the most part we are either pitied or scorned by others (and sometimes ourselves). I suppose we should start by fixing our own insecurities if we want the world to view us any differently. (We can’t fix the world if we’re broken.) I’d say we need to reasonably adopt the mantra, “If mom is happy, then everyone’s happy.”

Joyce Arthur resigns on Bill C-484?

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More on Bill C-484, the unborn victims of violence bill, here.  

[Joyce] Arthur described the bill as “lingering sexism”, and said anti-abortion arguments all stem from a patriarchal view of women. “They think a fetus should have some rights, there’s too many abortions, it’s used as birth control,” Arthur said. “They feel the law should be making these decisions. But only a pregnant women [sic] can be making these decisions. Is this a blob to her, or a person?

Joyce Arthur appears to have signed her own resignation slip with that statement, because to the women who were attacked and lost their babies, the baby was a baby, a person, not a blob. Case closed–in Arthur’s world too, then, Bill C-484 should stand.

Mr. Mom

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A woman who underwent a transgender transformation to become a man is pregnant. The child is due to be born this July. Read more here.

Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child … I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family.”

After all, family is whatever you want it to be in this day and age.

[Ethicist Margaret Somerville] added: “It’s a very touchy thing, this deconstruction of our biological reality and the institutions that have existed across all kinds of societies over thousands and thousands of years to establish stability, respect and certainty. I think we’re just playing with fire.”

When progressives want to restrict choice

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Interesting piece about private daycare operators in various parts of the country… who are being targeted by the Left for being bad ugly people who use children to make a profit. Or something; it’s hard to understand exactly what it is that the NDP’s Olivia Chow objects to, since even state-sanctioned not-for-profit daycare centres employ people who make money caring for children. But anyway. Ms. Chow, whose private member bill “would commit Ottawa to a national daycare plan and deny funding to any new for-profit centre”, seems reasonably certain that “private” money is somehow worse than the “public” kind. (Though I agree with her when she says that “Tax dollars should not be going to a company’s bottom line” – it’s just that I would apply that principle across the board, not just against companies I don’t like.)   

But that’s not what got my attention. What really grabbed me is right in the first paragraph:

Private sector daycare is under attack in many parts of the country, with vocal opponents claiming that earning a profit is fundamentally at odds with proper child care. [emphasis added]

Isn’t that what people used to say about health care?  That it was wrong to make a profit caring for sick people? That it would be better if the state took over?

We all know how well that turned out, do we.

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Tanya remarks: “Tax dollars should not be going to a company’s bottom line.”  Oh, like the bottom line for an organization like Planned Parenthood, say? 

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