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A terribly embarrassing oversight on the part of the media

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Egad. Céline Dion hasn’t waxed her thighs. And it makes the news. Surprisingly, the reporter failed to notice the chanteuse’s hair was also a touch frizzy. I think I’ll write a letter to the editor to complain about this egregious oversight.

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Andrea adds: And no one noticed that she appears to be wearing a black bag of some sort? To me, her outfit is the stuff of nightmares: Only marginally better than forgetting to dress at all.    

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Rebecca adds: Judging by the facial expression, she’s also smelled something quite terrible.    

Can we talk? Honestly, I mean?

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Any time you mention late-term abortion pro-choicers tell you a) it doesn’t happen and b) even if it did it would be in extreme cases to save the life of the mother, or something similarly reasonable. I, for one, am not so anti-abortion as to sacrifice a mother for a fetus, especially not if she already has other young children to look after.

But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it:

The number of late abortions in Britain has reached a record level, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Almost 3,000 were carried out on women who were at least 20 weeks pregnant, according to the latest annual figures in England and Wales, representing a 44 per cent increase in less than a decade.

The vast majority were for “lifestyle” reasons; less than a quarter were because of a risk that the child would be born handicapped.

I wish we’d stop lying to ourselves. Late-term abortions do happen, and they shouldn’t. At least, not for “lifestyle” reasons.

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Rebecca adds: I’d love to see the numbers on how many third trimester abortions are done to save the life, or health, of the mother. While it’s always better to go full term, in this day and age almost all babies born early, but in the third trimester, do alright – better than they’d fare if aborted, certainly. And any medical condition caused by the pregnancy that would threaten the mother’s life, that would be resolved by ending the pregnancy, would respond to delivery as well as to termination.

Watch your language

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Headline: “Girl Once Comatose and Scheduled for Euthanasia Will Testify against Attacker”

“Scheduled for euthanasia?” In Massachusetts, USA?  (Did I miss a news item on the legalization of euthanasia in Massachusetts?)

The story explains. Ventilator-dependant Haleigh Poutre was not “scheduled for euthanasia,” however, they were going to remove her from life support.

Haleigh was in fact scheduled to be left to die of her injuries by the child protection services who had authority over her medical care. In short, there is a lot to condemn in that decision without labeling it euthanasia.

LifeSiteNews reporter Thaddeus M. Baklinski’s use of the word “euthanasia” is wrong. To win the euthanasia debate we use terms correctly. If pro-life advocates call every questionable death “euthanasia” we will not meaningfully engage proponents of euthanasia.

We can debate whether Haleigh’s planned withdrawal of life support was premature, unjustified or motivated by administrative rather than medical imperatives. But it was not “the intentional killing of a person by another for compassionate motives,” which is the definition of euthanasia.

Calling removal of life-support “euthanasia” is a concern for critically ill patients and their families. In Canada for instance, euthanasia is not legally different from murder. Where life-support is often needed to help a patient survive a critical event, it was never meant to maintain life at all cost. Equating withdrawal of life-support – however unjustified it was in Haleigh’s case – with euthanasia may cause families to refuse life-support for their loved ones because of fears over over-treatment. On the flip side, families may request over-treatment for fear of “euthanizing/murdering” their loved ones.

The indiscriminate use of controversial words like euthanasia causes suffering. (See “Thad’s” comment on systemic concerns about addiction to pain killers in dying cancer patients.) Let’s be aware of it.

Cultural change is what counts

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Mark Steyn reviews Amazing Grace (the book, not the movie, although he discusses both), about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who essentially laid the framework for ending slavery. (After a sudden and dramatic religious conversion, but of course we must all keep religion out of politics these days, right?) The quote all of us who hope for a more humane future should remember:

[T]he life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising.

But the theme of the book is that Wilberforce accomplished more than a change to British laws, he transformed the culture of the western world to the point that, albeit it after several painful convulsions, no civilized person found the idea of slave-owning acceptable, or even palatable. The parallel between slavery and abortion isn’t perfect, although heaven knows it’s been belaboured enough already. But it does illustrate how changing minds is more important than changing laws. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, slavery is nominally illegal but in practice common. In Canada, the US and western Europe, though, I would venture to say that even if there were no laws against slavery, common decency would prevent it from occurring; we are hardly, after all, nations of people who quietly wish we could own slaves and chafe at the laws that forbid us from doing so.

Would that we see the day when it isn’t a law against abortion that stops people from seeking one, but a deep-seated repugnance, and a profound recognition of the barbarism of the practice. Who, I wonder, will be the William Wilberforce of the pro-life movement?

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Andrea asks: Anyone got the focus group numbers for the pro-life cause in Canada?

He doesn’t need to be perfect, he does need to be right

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When I’m not blogging for PWPL, I’m a social policy analyst on the marriage and family beat. So when a friend passed on this article by Lori Gottlieb in the Atlantic Monthly, I read it with interest and truthfully, an increasing sense of despair.

You’d think, being the pro-marriage kind of gal that I am (marriage, properly understood, is both liberating and offers protection; it allows families to flourish and in the two-person Mom and Dad form nurtures strong, healthy children) that I might just agree with the author. She suggests women ought to focus on marriage sooner, they ought “to settle.”

And if marriage is such a good thing, why wouldn’t this just make sense?

But marriage as she considers it is not always a good thing. Her understanding of marriage is limited to the “What’s in it for me?” variety. What’s in it for her is something slightly more elevated than the usual romantic pap. She now wants a father for her child. (Quite poignantly, she describes at one point how marriage offers a partner to watch your toddler so a mother can grab a bite of lunch.)

She as a single mom of one artificially conceived son (ie. fatherless) now sees how valuable marriage is.

I could forgive her for getting things backwards, on purpose, but I can’t quite forgive her for giving other women bad advice out of her own feelings of desperation. In the whole article, she never uncovers what marriage actually is.

This article does a lot better.  Referring to the Atlantic Monthly piece, she writes:

If only she had been brave enough to inquire into the nature of true love and not dismiss it in a throwaway line (“whatever that is”) she might have done her sisters a real service. Instead, she has tried to persuade us that love can be put in brackets while we persist in our twentieth century habit of getting what we want. Perhaps few people will be swayed by her argument; certainly, no-one will be helped…

And that’s the truth: Gottlieb’s article on first glance is a good read, and seems credible. And to be fair, she highlights quite a lot about marriage that is true. What’s more important, social liberals will listen because of the source. She’s not sitting pretty as a married mom of 2.2 children, with a white picket fence and a van in the suburbs.

But her piece does not help anyone get at the truth of what marriage is. Marriage is not a compromise, it’s not “infrastructure” (exclusively) for children and most importantly, marriage is not and never will be a contract, as so many libertarians are fond of saying. On the academic side, I know a whole lot about marriage; that’s not to say I know anything at all. But in considering marriage, we simply cannot do it from a selfish angle.

If you read the Atlantic Monthly piece, be absolutely sure to follow it up with Mercator Net’s piece; lest the single women in the crowd be pushed toward a sad state of depression and anxiety completely unnecessarily.

A propos nothing in particular

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I’m reading Maggie Gallagher’s 1989 Enemies of Eros and found this on page 37:

I don’t know how they can have failed to notice that, as a matter of hard empirical fact, not every woman who smiles at a man is signalling an uncontrollable desire to become his own sweet patootie. But from their point of view, it seems, men are constantly surrounded by lustful women who perversely refuse to sleep with them. (Lack of discrimination is a trait common to males of all species. As Fred Hapgood points out in Why Males Exist, male frogs and toads will inadvertently try to have sex with males, some insects court females of the wrong species, and a few particularly broadminded male flies have been spotted trying to mate with raisins. But those were the sexual liberals.)

Admit it: You smiled, too.

What day is it anyway?

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Why it’s International Women’s Day, of course.

ProWomanProLifers don’t look to international, top-heavy, unaccountable bodies to guard their rights. (The United Nations can support women’s rights about as well as they guarded against genocide in Rwanda.)

Véronique adds this:

Here’s my $0.02 on Women’s Day. Now that my oldest daughter is teetering on the verge of adolescence, the dizzying task of helping her come to term with her femininity in ways that are emotionally, physically and spiritually healthy looms large in my mother-eyes. Women’s rights, self-affirmation and confidence in one’s abilities start early, especially if that girl must grow-up in a culture of early sexualization, where girl-power means the power to turn men on and self-expression means being available for intercourse (think I’m making this up? Check this out: Shut up, girls, and let your genitals do the talking…).

With all this doom and gloom, I still have great conversations with my daughters about love and sexuality, body image and romance…Another important battle front is the education of our boys. Having two of them, I am constantly reminded that they will also play an important role in upholding gender equality and the dignity of women. Women’s Day at my house is an ongoing event. It started with an exclamatory “It’s a girl!” in an Ottawa-area delivery room almost 12 years ago.

So who does look to anti-democratic bodies to support their rights? These ladies do.  They’re the ones who have their knickers in a knot because of the anodyne Unborn Victims of Violence Bill. The ones who guard abortion rights without ever thinking about what those “rights” are. The ones who, across the country are trying to silence women like us.

So in honour of International Women’s Day, I’m changing one of the categories on this site. You’ll note the former category “Feminism” is now “Feminist nonsense”-a home for all the tired and ridiculous assertions of the old-school, pro-abortion 1960s feminist crowd. It’s Michelle Malkin’s idea-and I like it.

I hope our readers continue to enjoy the thought-provoking content of our non-feminist ProWoman team. And happy International Women’s Day!  

(Cross-posted to The Shotgun.)

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