Archives for September 2009

At sundown, Rosh Hashanah begins. It’s the Jewish New Year, but more broadly it’s the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve. Tradition holds that the entire universe was created so that God could then create mankind to occupy it.
If the world exists so that we may live in it, we must surely be accountable for how we live in it, how we treat ourselves and each other and our surroundings. This too is part of Rosh Hashanah. The two most common images used to describe our relationship to God portray him as a king ruling over us, and as a shepherd tending to us. Shepherds and kings both hold the power of life and death over their charges.

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time.”

So says one of the holiday prayers, in which we acknowledge this aspect of our relationship with the Creator.
I certainly don’t think we’re meant to see God as the Grim Reaper, or an actuary, tallying our merits and marking the errant for death. There is equally an emphasis in the liturgy on repentance and atonement, and God’s forgiveness, and his boundless love for us. But what most of the world has forgotten is not that we are mortal, but that our mortality is within the domain of a greater power.

It is a mark of our decadence and arrogance that we have written God out of the equation. When doctors decline to care for a premature baby because they’ve decided his life isn’t worth living; when the elderly are denied care because their quality of life calculation is too low; when babies are aborted because their arrival doesn’t suit their parents’ schedules; when patients are euthanized, even with their consent, because the care they are getting doesn’t ameliorate their suffering – we are not only taking it upon ourselves to end another’s life, harming them, we are perverting our relationships with God, society, and ourselves.
May we all learn to hold life as dear as God did when He created a glorious world for us to inhabit, replete with smoked salmon, apple challah, flannel sheets on a cold night, bonfires in the fall, and the giggle of a toddler. Shana tova!

Check out perspectivesonagirl.ca, “Girl Guides of Canada’s First Annual Online Film Festival”. It’s a pretty clever-looking website, and some of the films are quite cute. Like this one.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fkP0grx9KY]

Whatever this ad was supposed to be for (see YouTube clip below), it sure wasn’t tourism. This news item about the debacle explains that the offending ad has been pulled.

I would have thought it was an ad warning against random sex with strangers, be it in Denmark or otherwise. If that was the point, I’d say it’s probably not half bad–because, as we are so fond of repeating here at PWPL, sex sometimes does result in pregnancy.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFB42TUtUQU]

To conclude, remember, if you are off to Denmark to have sex with strangers, you could be leaving a terribly beautiful Danish woman behind with your child. Thanks, Denmark Tourist Bureau!

Isn’t offending communists the whole point?

Plans for a monument on Parliament Hill to honour the estimated 100 million or so innocent men, women and children killed at the hands of Communist regimes around the world, on the other hand, have hit a snag, with the NCC worried that a “Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism” risks giving offence to communists. … [S]everal members expressed concern the name was too provocative, and should be revised to eliminate any mention of communism.

“I was unsettled by this name, and other members of the committee agreed with me,” Hélène Grand-Maître, one commission member, said at the public approval hearing. “We should make sure that we are politically correct in this designation…. I feel this name should be changed.”

Clearly, we have a little ways to go in changing historical consciousness on this one.

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Rebecca adds: We need to learn a lesson from the English.  Just as they label terrorism carried out by Muslims in the name of Islam to be “anti-Islamic activity,” since Islam is a Religion of Peace, we should recognize that Communism is fine – it’s just never been implemented properly, so its victims actually died because of anti-Communist activity.  Isn’t it obvious?

Competitive suffering is a bit of a mug’s game; it doesn’t do anybody any good to argue over which atrocity was greater, and usually such discussion has very ugly undercurrents.  I remain baffled, though, that civilized people who would (rightly) recoil in disgust if someone wore a baseball cap with a swastika or the SS insignia think a red star hat, or Che shirt, is just fine.  I would never minimize the sheer evil of Nazism, but it’s extinct today, while the offshoots of Communism are alive and well and causing death and persecution to this day.

Abortions pose a risk for future babies. This is one of the risks of abortion that is unknown and (I think) uncontested.  

As an aside, from what I can tell, this Canadian study is not in the Canadian press. Is it just me, or do we get study after study after study on issues small and large–in particular when the researchers are Canadian? Just not when the A word comes into play.

Just because abortion is also a moral issue and sometimes a political issue don’t mean it isn’t also a medical one. Buck up medical reporters! Take a deep breath and at least ask some questions about stuff like this.

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Andrea adds this link, which says the study is “thorough and well-conducted” and “supported by a body of research.” This from a thoroughly pro-abortion source: see the part about how “[t]he most important message is not that this should be used in any way to prevent women having a termination of pregnancy…” OK, we get it. No women should EVER be denied access. But a refusal to report these sorts of findings amounts to denying women legitimate information.

At the risk of sounding like a crusty old goat (again), isn’t this a high price to pay for sterile sex? We’re talking about teenagers, here, not adult women.

When it comes to birth control, it’s widely believed that the lower the hormone dose, the better. But according to a new study, pills with lower levels of estrogen may interfere with the bone development of teenagers. Dr. Jan Stepan of Charles University in Prague found that teens who took low-dose pills experienced lower levels of bone growth and bone density compared with those who took higher-dose pills. The reason, says Stepan, is that lower levels of estrogen suppress the body’s release of the hormone but does not fully replace it.

I dislike stuff like that, because to me behaviour is something one controls using one’s will power. Saying something unfavourable is “caused” by one’s genes is a great way to excuse bad impulse control, and my inner Calvinist wants to tear her hair out in frustration. Not everything is as scientific as some people believe.

The fact that children raised in homes without a dad have sex earlier is down to their genes, say US researchers.

The study tested for genetic influences as well as factors such as poverty, educational opportunities and religion.

The more genes the children shared, the more similar their ages of first intercourse regardless of whether they had an absent father or not.

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Rebecca adds: I think there’s something to this (and I also think that having a genetic predisposition to something – drinking, anger, unacceptable paraphilias – doesn’t give you a blank cheque to indulge, although it does mean you deserve extra credit for being disciplined.)  J. Philippe Rushton, not by any means uncontroversial but not automatically wrong on that account, points out that animals and their reproductive strategies fall along a continuum, with frequency of reproduction increasing as the amount of effort put into parenting decreases. Humans, horses and elephants are at one end of the extreme; the vast majority of their pregnancies are singletons, gestational periods are long, and offspring require sustained and expensive care before they are autonomous. Rabbits and mice are at the other end for mammals, having large litters few of whom need to make it to adulthood for the genes to be passed on, and shorter gestational periods. Non-mammals trend even more strongly towards frequent reproduction and low investment parenting; think of the number of tadpoles produced by one pair of frogs.

Rushton suggests that humans show variation on this continuum by group. We would expect that a high frequency, low involvement approach would manifest biologically in greater frequencies of multiple births, slightly shorter gestation, and earlier sexual maturity. He gets people smoking out their ears by grouping different races along this continuum. But we can dispense with that dimension entirely and still consider a genetic connection here. It’s notable, though, that minorities with conservative social values and largely intact families seem to suffer vastly less from “racism” than other groups with particularly high out of wedlock births and their accompanying ills; if racism were indeed the causal factor, it’s puzzling that it harms some “non-whites” so much more than others.

Another, less inflammatory, approach is the “cads vs dads” theory. This holds that men in particular can ensure that their genes are passed on in one of two ways: by having relatively few children and focusing extensively on their nurturing to adulthood (dad), or by fathering multiple children and relying on the odds that some of them will make it to adulthood even with his dissipated involvement and resources (cad). What I would find really fascinating would be a look at whether sexual maturity comes earlier to children raised without fathers, since this is more a result of nature than first sexual activity which, being largely behavioural in a way that physical puberty isn’t, is a product of nurture.

A long piece on the harsh, cold reality of gender selection in India – especially in wealthier areas. Chilling.

Indian women of any class rarely make decisions about their reproductive choices themselves: Husbands and in-laws are usually intimately involved.

At a south Delhi abortion clinic this week, for example, five of six patients booked for appointments had been accompanied by their mothers-in-law. The clinic director, who did not wish to be quoted by name because of the sensitive nature of the subject, noted the large sign – which must, by law, be posted – saying sex determination was illegal and not offered there. Five of the 200 patients she sees each month are well into their second trimester, when fetal gender can be confirmed, and claim to already have daughters. She turns them away, fearing sex-based termination is their primary motive.

“But others lie, and how can we check? They say they have sons already, and came because of contraceptive failure, and that entitles them to abortion … and there is nothing I can do about that,” she adds.