Archives for 2009

Barbara Kay writes a funny column about attempts to legalize euthanasia in the form of a letter to her children:

I do not want to be bumped off. I can’t state the case more unequivocally than that. I don’t care if I am a “burden” to you (you were once to me, that’s how life works); I don’t care how long it takes me to die, and how inconvenient that is to the medical system; and I don’t care how selfless an example other parents are setting in graciously exiting the world for their dependents’ sake before nature intended.

The whole thing is worth reading, if only because it’s not often that one can laugh while reading about euthanasia.

I’m glad that Vancouver’s public library cancelled this:

The Vancouver Public Library has told an Australian group that it can’t use the library’s public meeting rooms to hold a suicide workshop for the terminally ill.

On the other hand, I have a bit of a morbid curiosity (pardon the pun) to know who would have come, if anyone. Probably some of the saddest, most depressed folks around–in which case, if I lived in Vancouver I would have gone, found out their addresses and started some sort of home visitation program. Bring by some fresh flowers, ask about their lives. Infuse a little something to make life worth living.

Who on earth offers “suicide classes” anyway? And there, my post title is less a joke, and more a sardonic statement of reality. Not messengers of hope and decency, these folks.

A fine post by Paul Tuns. Especially this:

The problem is that pregnant women are routinely tested to see if their child has a genetic anomaly for which there is no treatment. Doctors, who can’t stand to do nothing, offer what they can: abortion to get rid of the “problem”. This leads to a vicious cycle; I’ve talked to doctors who are concerned that with fewer Down Syndrome children being born, there is less impetus to do the type of research which could enrich the lives of those who survive the womb for nine months because there isn’t enough demand. Future lack of resources to help parents of Down Syndrome children will only encourage more parents to abort such children in the future.

Testing to see if the child has some “problem” for which there’s no treatment is one of those “illusion of technique” traps – better living through science (except of course for those whose lives are cut short in the name of perfection). Expecting mothers, not all of whom are geneticists, are often made to take those tests as a matter of routine because that’s just what’s expected, especially if you’re an older expecting mother. But those tests that determine (that’s assuming the tests are accurate, not an altogether water-tight assumption) whether a fetus has a condition for which there is no treatment are not medicine.

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Andrea adds: This breaks my heart.

The Washington Post cites Skotko’s research indicating that 92 percent of women who learn they are carrying a baby with Down syndrome choose to abort the pregnancy. That is more than nine out of ten.

Does anyone know when it comes to ultrasounds then, what is the point? Because I’ve always said I would not have one, period. But are there any conditions that can be viewed in utero for which abortion is not the answer? (As in, if you see something in the fetus early there is a bona fide treatment?)

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Rebecca adds: “Does anyone know when it comes to ultrasounds then, what is the point? Because I’ve always said I would not have one, period. But are there any conditions that can be viewed in utero for which abortion is not the answer? (As in, if you see something in the fetus early there is a bona fide treatment?)”

I maintain that there is good reason to have these tests – maternal blood screening and ultrasound, which are non-invasive for the baby – even for people who would not consider abortion no matter what the result.  The major downside is false positives for problems, but a good obstetrician or radiologist will explain what are the odds of a false positive (and negative) to women being tested.  There are good medical reasons for finding out about problems in utero.  In some cases, babies can have surgery prior to being born, which can repair some otherwise fatal defects.  In others, when parents and doctors are aware of major problems, they can do a C-section and transfer the baby to immediate surgery; I know a healthy teenager who had a severely malformed abdominal wall, and since it was detected in utero, this is what happened.  If he’d gone through a vaginal birth, or not been taken immediately into a prepared operating theatre, he would likely be dead.  Down Syndrome in particular causes a higher risk of heart defects that can prove fatal at or shortly after birth, so it’s good to know if your child has this problem, so you can ensure optimal care at delivery.

The other big reason in my opinion is to prepare yourself psychologically.  Sarah Palin talked about being overjoyed when her son was born; she’d already come to terms with his medical condition, so the birth was a joyful occasion, not mixed with grief as it would be it were also the occasion on which you first learned your childhood had a lifelong disability for the family to cope with.  When major surgery is needed right after birth, it’s a lot easier on the family if it’s not a surprise, if they know what to expect and have made arrangements to help them all get through it.  Coping with a new baby is stressful and exhausting even when everything is perfect; coping with major surgery for your newborn would be a excruciating.  If that could be mitigated by some knowledge in advance of what the risks are and what’s likely to happen, I’m all in favour.

I fully support the choice to refuse prenatal testing if that’s what the mother wants.  But diagnostics themselves are not the problem, it is the mentality of the people within the system and how they use diagnostics.  These tools can certainly be used to mark some unborn children as unworthy of life.  But they can also be used to ensure best outcomes and the smoothest transitions even for babies with severe problems.  There is no inherent contradiction between being pro-life and being in favour of prenatal testing.

(I don’t discuss amnio because that, unlike maternal blood screening and ultrasound, does present a risk to the baby, with between .5% and 2% of amnios causing miscarriage, depending on when, how and where it’s done.  That’s a whole separate set of ethical issues.)

Further,”as commenters point out, there are other reasons that don’t involve defects or disease.  The reality of medicine today is that, while OBs rely less and less on manual palpation to evaluate pregnancies, it is not unheard of for a twin’s existence to go unnoticed until the birth.
Apart from the shock and logistics for the parents, this is medically
risky: for multiple births, it’s desirable to have extra supplies and attendants, as well as the ability to do an emergency C-section.  And less critically, ultrasound can be a great way of making a pregnancy seem real, and start a sort of proto-bonding.  I don’t know anybody who hasn’t teared up the first time they saw their baby on a scan, even if it’s still at the “peanut with a heartbeat” stage (6 or 7 weeks, if I recall correctly.)”

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Andrea again: Thanks for all the thoughtful comments. I like what Rebecca said about it being the mentality–not the tools. I have two friends who were offered testing in order that they might abort. (It was expressly stated.)

Which is also extraordinarily heart-wrenching. A woman who was implanted with someone else’s embryo is preparing to give birth and hand over the baby to the biological parents. There was no easy way out in this case – how do you justify aborting someone else’s baby? How do you carry and deliver someone else’s baby? I can’t imagine how hard it must be for everyone involved, but I’m glad they chose the option that would let the baby live.

Here’s a fine puzzle for you: What do you tell your child when he comes home confused by a classmate who went from 12-year-old boy to 12-year-old girl over the summer vacation? That you’re pretty confused, too?

A BOY aged 12 turned up at school as a GIRL – after changing sex during the summer holidays.

Teachers called an emergency assembly to order fellow pupils to treat him as female.

The lad, whose parents have changed his name to a girl’s by deed poll, arrived in a dress with long hair in ribboned pigtails. He is preparing for sex-swap surgery.

Angry parents told yesterday how their kids were left tearful and confused after school staff announced the boy pupil was now a girl.

They said the head teacher should have informed them in advance of the “sex change” so they could prepare their sons and daughters and inform them about gender issues.

Three things: 1) While I do not wish to diminish the pain that individuals caught in the wrong gender experience, isn’t 12 a bit early to go ahead with gender reassignment? 2) Why didn’t the school warn other parents? You can’t expect 12-year-olds to accept such concepts without some kind of preparation, and it’s not nice to surprise people that way. And 3) What a stupid thing to do! By not warning the other parents and giving them a chance to prepare their kids so they could deal with their sex-swapping classmate, they made it even harder on said classmate:

[Parents] added that the school’s failure to do so [give them a heads-up] had left the boy to suffer cruel taunts and bullying.

One mum said: “They behaved appallingly by throwing this hand grenade into the room and then leaving the inevitable questions about it for unprepared parents.

“Maybe we could have explained sexual politics and encouraged our kids to be more sensitive if we’d had a chance to be involved.”

So here’s the lesson: If you’re going to let children undergo sex-change operations, you must be prepared to do some work to ensure other children react reasonably well to the change. I do think 12 is way too early for this kind of operation, but that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to treat this kid and other children in his situation badly. Dressing up a 12-year-old boy as a girl and sending him to school with no preparation is dumb and stupid and cruel.

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.