Archives for March 2009

No pro-lifer I have ever met wants women to go to jail for having an abortion. This is ye olde refrain of the virulent pro-abortion side. (I think the average pro-choicer gets it, by the way, and are aware that “sending women to prison” is not high on the pro-life list of priorities.)

What I find infuriating is that those who go to jail over abortion these days are pro-lifers offering other options on the sidewalk outside clinics. (Remember Linda Gibbons.) In Canada, it’s because of bubble zone laws. I assume the States has them too–and in fact I personally know one decent, non-violent, generous man with a wife and small children who went to jail for sidewalk counselling. (He preferred jail to a criminal record.)  

Since when is offering options a crime? Today it’s pro-lifers who actually spend time in jail because of abortion–forget the baseless accusations that that’s where we supposedly want to send women for having one.

(h/t The Ruth Institute)

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Andrea clarifies: The title is a pun, one I didn’t notice before publishing. The sentences are not “for life,” but these people go to jail because they are in favour of life, and against abortion…

A rather horrifying piece about date-rape drugs being more widespread than thought. Highlighting once again the dangers of getting too close too fast to people you barely know – and leaving your drink unattended. But also of the incredibly bone-headed idea some people seem to have of mixing bizarre drugs they know little about with too much alcohol.

Although all the victims believed they were covertly slipped drugs by their assailants, and met the medical criteria to support such claims, study author Janice Du Mont says they “can’t say with certainty that that was the exact scenario” in every case (drug tests were not included in the CMAJ data).

While many could have “unwittingly ingested a ‘date-rape drug,’ ” she notes others might have “inadvertently contributed to their own incapacitation” by mixing voluntarily ingested pharmacological substances with alcohol.

Du Mont, a scientist at Ontario’s Women’s College Research Institute in Toronto, believes this supports the need for a public awareness campaign that not only warns of the dangers of combining drugs and alcohol, but also educates men that people who are intoxicated are incapable of consenting to sexual contact.

“It should not all be women’s individual responsibility to prevent sexual violence,” says Du Mont.

Look. I understand partying – certainly I remember its most salient features (some of it was even fun). But if you’re a single girl going out alone (or with a “friend” who abandons you the minute a guy gets her attention), then for crying out loud don’t mix drugs and alcohol. If that’s not a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is. And while most guys I know would not take advantage of a highly intoxicated young woman, I would not want to trust that all the random guys in the random bars are like that. After all, the kind of guy who would take advantage of a highly intoxicated young woman tends to hang out in places where highly intoxicated young women are. It’s so basic it’s threatening to give me a headache. You can have public awareness campaigns until you go blue in the face and it won’t matter as long as young women continue to put themselves in ridiculously obvious dangerous situations. I realize it’s not fun having to police your drink when you go out. But given all that we know about these drugs, what other safe options are there, assuming “staying home watching TV” isn’t one of them?

This made me laugh out loud. Great satire is hard to come by:

THE ANSWER to all our problems is staring us in the face. It may even be quite literally staring at you, right now, across the breakfast table.

So put the paper down, stare back and ask yourself a selfless question.

Does the woman in your life really need a job?

Admittedly, this is not a fashionable question. From Iceland to Australia, men are blamed for causing the credit crunch, while a more feminine approach to finance is proposed as the solution. …

It would be ludicrous to suggest that women should be sacked purely to give men their jobs. In many cases, their jobs should be abolished as well.

This modest proposal is also somewhat unfair. Some of us live alone, and were all women to be canned, the single ones would suffer.

(Hey–is this even the craziest suggestion to “fix” the economy? I think not. Wish the billions shovelled into the money hole was satire too.)

This letter in today’s Post on side effects of abortion:

The Hippocratic Oath urges all health professionals to “do no harm.” Thus, it seems unusual that Dr. Gail Erlick Robinson states that women need access to legal abortions, considering that “women who deliver [a baby] have a 10%-15% chance of developing a major depressive disorder.”

Has the professor not heard of the independent Ontario study of induced abortions published in the American Journal of Medical Quality in May, 2001? It revealed that in the first three months after an abortion, a woman falls victim to a four-times rate of hospitalization from infection, a five-times rate of hospitalization for psychiatric care and a five-times rate of hospitalization for another surgical procedure.

Dr. Andrew Caruk, Kitchener, Ont.

Though for me, taking the life of your own child, punches more weight than medical complications later on. (Not so for those who want abortion available because it “saves women’s lives” and that’s where this letter does good by pointing out abortion is not without medical complications.)  

Still, every procedure has risks–and even if abortion were made 100 per cent risk-free, I’d still be 100 per cent against it.

A US clinic is preparing to offer the service of screening embryos, pre-implantation, for cosmetic factors and sex, not only for disease or birth defects. We are talking here about couples who are already having multiple embryos created, and then selecting one that meets its criteria to bring to term. So far, the selection is only being made on the basis of avoiding medical problems; the “leap” here is to allowing it to be made on other criteria as well. And all kinds of people who are fine with the former are objecting to the latter.

But Dr Gillian Lockwood, a UK fertility expert and member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ ethics committee, questioned whether is was morally right to be using the science in this way. “If it gets to the point where we can decide which gene or combination of genes are responsible for blue eyes or blonde hair, what are you going to do with all those other embryos that turn out like me to be ginger with green eyes?” “

Just as I can’t understand why aborting a baby because it’s the “wrong” sex is worse than aborting a baby because you broke up with its father, I don’t see why choosing one embryo and destroying the rest is worse for cosmetic reasons than for medical reasons. Certainly the desire to have a child without a disease is much more sympathetic than the desire to have a blond child; but if the issue of morality here is creating 8 embryos with the knowledge that 7 of them will be destroyed, the reason why one is chosen and the rest destroyed is pretty much beside the point.

Some countries have figured this out:

Italian fertility law does not permit the creation of surplus embryos or selective testing. Ms Quintavalle said that was “one sure way to avoid the slippery slope”.

Sounds good to me.

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Andrea might argue that it is less heinous to select for cosmetics. One could argue we already do that when we have kids the natural way–we choose mates we are attracted to–and that might mean marrying a man who is tall, dark and handsome, or blonde, or what have you. What we don’t do is test prospective mates for their immunity to disease. In any event, it is scarier to me to choose embryos for medical reasons. Because now we’re getting into the Perfectability of the Human Race and all that has ever meant in the past is really bad things.

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Brigitte dislikes both: Seems to me breeding for looks can be every bit as bad as the other kind.

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Andrea adds: I won’t disagree with you, Brigitte.

Anyone watch Gattaca, oops I mean Bio-Dad on the CBC the other night? And listen to some specialist in California talk about his comfort level choosing embryos by sex? And how he would be fine with checking embryos for genetic disposition to disease?

A long, looooooong piece in the Toronto Star today by “national affairs writer” Linda Diebel on the Liberal leader’s love life. They wonder why newspapers are in such trouble but they shouldn’t, not when they run such admiring, uncritical, adoringly crafted puff. About a politician’s love life. Blech. Like Michelle Malkin would say, we need a drool bucket.

But that’s not what bugs me. Well, it does. But that’s not really the worst. What is particularly annoying about that piece is the absence of any kind of criticism for a somewhat sordid affair (both Mr. Ignatieff and his current wife were once married to other people, and he walked out on his wife of 18 years with whom he had two children to be with Ms. Zsohar) and a complete lack of restraint on the part of the two lovers, who seem very happy to share their personal history with the nation, even the bits that are (and should be) shameful.

I don’t begrudge their happiness or anything. And while I am of the “marry right and marry once” old-fashioned school, I try not to judge those who get a false start too harshly. But golly. The casual way these people describe walking away from marriages like one walks out on a boring movie is quite despicable. And they’re in their 60s… You’d kind of forgive that sort of ditzy bean-spilling exercise on the part of a cute starlet, but coming from adults who ought to qualify as “mature”, it’s just so… icky.

In the most treasured classics, lovers face obstacles, delays and misunderstandings that sweep them to the brink of despair. They come from different worlds, sometimes disliking each other at the outset. With each separation, tension builds, until a final plot twist seals their fate.

On a March 1995 evening, such a twist of plot occurred in the life of Zsuzsanna Zsohar, when the doorbell rang in her Holland Park flat in central London. It’s likely she divined the significance of the moment before answering, being someone who values books like the very air she breathes.

Standing there was Michael Ignatieff, carrying a plastic bag. He’d just done an interview at the BBC and said only, “Can I stay?”

“And, he did,” says Zsohar, now married to the new Liberal leader and living in Ottawa. “He’d made up his mind what he wanted to do. I didn’t make up his mind. He did.”

On a recent afternoon at Stornoway, the residence of the official opposition leader in upscale Rockcliffe Park, she recounts this exhilarating but painful period in their lives. Until that March night, Ignatieff, author, late-show TV host and Canadian expat, lived with his English wife, Susan Barrowclough, and their two children in London. Two years earlier, he was doing a television series on ethnic nationalism, Blood and Belonging, co-produced by the BBC, and it fell to Zsohar, books promotion/publicity manager for BBC Enterprises, to market the accompanying book. Reluctantly.

[…]

As they worked together over two years, she realized he actually was “a nice man.” There was chemistry, but “we broke up because he was married… You go back, you sort it out – I think he sees himself very much as a family man… So we were colleagues, we worked together but we weren’t actually romantically linked. He went home, you know, he lived with his wife and children, and I lived in my own flat.”

So, you weren’t actually romantically linked yet you “broke up”? I know I’ve been away from the dating scene for a while, but, um, how does that work?

When the split came, it caused a frisson in gossipy London town. Ignatieff had mined his family to write about domestic bliss and the joys of fatherhood, and this was too rich to let slip.

“Welcome to the Late Show; I’ve left my wife,” mocked a headline in the Evening Standard, over a story saying:

“The Age of the New Man, it is said, is drawing to a close. Right on cue, his patron saint – the don, philosopher and sensitive novelist, Michael Ignatieff – has fallen from his pedestal. After 18 years of happy marriage in Islington, Michael has up and walked out, setting up home with a lovely young BBC press officer, Susannah (sic) Zsohar.”

The lovely young thing was 48; in September she turns 62.

Zsohar shrugs. “I couldn’t break up his marriage. I wasn’t 20… To a lot of people, it was difficult to understand: If you leave, why do you leave for someone of your own age? Somebody who’s not a bimbo? (I) really didn’t fit the `bimbo’ category. You remember – we were not spring chickens!”

She jokes, but this was no easy time. It was, she says, “a very, very bitter and difficult divorce – difficult because he really walked out – but not on his kids.

“Around that time, Michael actually gave a talk in Canada (about) parents’ responsibility to children. It’s a very interesting piece because it says adults are also responsible for their own happiness. They are responsible for their children’s happiness, yes, but they are also responsible for their own happiness, providing you never leave your children, never abandon responsibility for them.”

Right. You can’t break up his marriage even when you do. And it’s perfectly cool for a father to go live with someone else, as long as he never “abandons responsibility” for his children… Gosh, what self-serving drivel. Could this story be more appalling?