Wow, I’m amazed! A PETA ad featuring Pamela Anderson was deemed too racy to air! (You can read about it and see the video here: it’s not that bad, but your probably don’t want to watch it with the little ones around. It’d be hard to explain this much silly nonsense.)
Anyway. I’m almost certain that no one has ever been banned for wearing one of those. Do you have yours yet?
Miss Capewell, who has a five-year-old daughter Jodie, went into labour in October last year at 21 weeks and four days after suffering problems during her pregnancy.
She said she was told that because she had not reached 22 weeks, she was not allowed injections to try to stop the labour, or a steroid injection to help to strengthen her baby’s lungs.
Instead, doctors told her to treat the labour as a miscarriage, not a birth, and to expect her baby to be born with serious deformities or even to be still-born. She told how she begged one paediatrician, ‘You have got to help’, only for the man to respond: ‘No we don’t.’
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Tanya adds: A family member of mine went through the identical thing, only with twins. We mourn them to this day, and though the babies both breathed on their own for a couple of hours outside the womb, the hospital called it a miscarriage. I have a lot of words for what happened; ‘miscarriage’ isn’t one of them.
Life. Who knew I’d be sitting here writing largely about contentious Canadian social issues? At one point, not too long ago, I wanted to be a foreign affairs guru, yes, guru, or perhaps an academic: get a PhD in German history and teach.
Clearly I’m not doing that, but I always read German history with interest.
So I might pick up this book, The year that changed the world, the untold story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall:
The good historian is a myth buster. Michael Meyer is a very good historian. As Newsweek’s bureau chief for Eastern Europe in 1989, he watched the world turn on a dime. The myth he busts in this book concerns the contribution the United States made to the collapse of communist regimes that year. Some Americans want to believe that those regimes crumbled because of White House manipulation — clever diplomacy backed by raw power. In fact, American meddling was rather benign and, during that fateful year, conspicuously ill conceived.
Good historians are myth busters where myths need busting. Otherwise, good historians read primary sources and eye witness accounts and do vast amounts of archival research to tell the story of what happened. There is no need to denigrate the role of Ronald Reagan or the United States in bringing down the Berlin Wall, and that story line is not at odds with the rest of what the review describes. Certainly the thousands of people on the ground played a critical role, certainly the Soviet Union collapsed because it was bankrupt… Few to none think that Reagan’s rhetoric alone brought the wall down (myth creation so that then a clever reporter can bust it?) but many Eastern Europeans (in particular those who already escaped and were now living amongst the socialist chattering classes in downtown Toronto) found it truthful and inspiring that someone like Reagan would speak out against The Evil Empire.
My two cents, anyway.
A long piece on sex-ed and this newish “philosophy of inclusive, non-threatening, pleasure-focused sex education” that’s apparently now making its way into high schools.
Where to begin?
I’m glad the kids are interested to know more about what makes for good sex and happy, healthy relationships. I’m sure they’ve had it up to there with the “how to put on a condom properly” tutorial (sort of like having to watch An Inconvenient Truth over and over again, I suppose – it gets tedious pretty fast). But there is a big giant BUT. Two, actually. One, no matter how fun you think it is to fool around with a “plush pink vulva puppet” in a high-school class, the secret to good sex isn’t technical. It’s something that comes with the kind of commitment very few teenagers are ready to make, and you’re not doing them any favours trying to make them believe otherwise. Plus they’ll find out the truth on their own eventually (I did) and realize then that they’d been lied to all this time (ditto). And two, please people, do not leave this crucial topic for sex-shop owners to deal with for you. Talking to your kids about healthy relationships (yes, including the sex part) is your job. If you don’t do it, somebody else will, whether you like it or not. So get to it.
My friend muses:
So I was watching the kids out doing the Shinerama today, raising money for cystic fibrosis research when it dawned on me. They are raising money for this cause, to find a cure for an awful disease, while also supporting strongly the death of such children before they are born through their student governments and unfettered access to abortion. CF rates fell from 1/2714 before pre-natal genetic testing to 1/3608 in 2000. It could be even lower now.
I’m grateful to disability rights folks for raising these points–it’s incumbent on the rest of us to connect the dots between abortion and the effects it has on the differently-abled around us. Or not around us, as the case is more and more.
This is not a post about why men don’t propose, or gender warfare, or whether too many 30-something men are too busy playing Xbox these days or whether feminism caused too many 30-something men to play too much Xbox. Please hold your angry comments–maybe save them for a non-holiday weekend.
I just thought this was quite a funny ad.
Finally, a long weekend Canadians and Americans can share! (If only we could learn to spell things the same way, too, eh?)
Personally, I’ll be busy puttering and trying to finish various small-scale building projects around the place, and that’s just the way I like my long weekends. Busy with fun, non-policy-related, real-life stuff. Here’s hoping you all have a fun and safe Labo(u)r Day weekend.
I cannot lie. I am friends with the author of this piece. (At least, I think I am, and hope she feels the same way.) That said, it’s a very good piece. Most Canadians would indeed fail an “abortion quiz.”
Now this topic doesn’t “just come up” very often (unless of course you socialize with me, and then it comes up more often than I am comfortable with. “What did you do today?” “I blogged…” “What’s your blog?” “Er, it’s a home decorating thing…” No, it’s not, it’s called ProWomanProLife. I advocate for the position that being pro-life is very pro-woman. This leads to a quizzical and concerned silence. At that point I usually wish I had a home decorating blog. Or perhaps a cake baking blog. There’s a blog for everything, and I could certainly use some advice on how to successfully create these for an upcoming baby shower I’m planning.)
I digress. Where was I? Abortion doesn’t normally come up very often. When it does, or if it does, take a casual poll of whether people know it’s legal all nine months in Canada, and I will bet all 14 dollars of my savings on the fact that no one will, and they will be aghast. Try it and let me know how it goes.
(Tips on the baby block mini cakes also most welcome.)
An excellent reminder that academic success is a team sport. Four of my six children are in school (grade 8, 7, 4 and 3) and I stand by each one of her 16 tips.