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Being nice about life and death

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Can frank language change the outcome of a debate? Some (here and here) are saying Sarah Palin has won a round against President Obama, thanks to some “inflammatory” (if you hate Palin) or “frank” (if you like Palin) language. Her “death panel” phrase drew enough attention that part of the proposed legislation on end-of-life medical care was scrapped:

A Senate panel has decided to scrap the part of its healthcare bill that in recent days has given rise to fears of government “death panels,” with one lawmaker suggesting the proposal was just too confusing.

I am certainly an advocate for diplomacy. (Does that make me too nice?) However, the words we use do matter. (Say for example when you use “choice” or “women’s rights” instead of “killing.”)

A moving testimony

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In Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen. Read it here. The accompanying picture, taken by a photographer associated with the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Foundation,  is worth buying the paper copy. I don’t know what else to write. I read it and I cried but my tears were a mix of grief for Joseph’s parents and joy for Joseph’s life. It showed me once again that very short lives can be jam packed with meaning and purpose.

With allies like these…

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Remind me again why we’re in Afghanistan? Oh right. So we can make sure only nice moderates like this one are in power:

A controversial bill that Afghan President Hamid Karzai promised to review before implementing quietly became law last month, allowing police to enforce language that stipulates a wife’s sexual duties and restricts a woman’s ability to leave her own home.

Karzai had promised to send the bill to parliament before it was published, but this week women’s rights advocates learned it had already become an enforceable law despite heavy international and national criticism.

The Shiite Personal Status Law which applies to the country’s minority Shiite women, was originally even more pernicious than the final version. In March a western embassy translated a portion of the law as defining a woman’s role as “readiness for sex and not leaving the house without the husband’s permission.”

And now for something really important

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A campaign I can get behind:

LONDON- Hairy hunks who love skimpy swimming trunks, beware! A British theme park wants you to cover up and think about getting a wax job.

Alton Towers, which boasts rollercoaster rides, hotels and a waterpark, has banned male visitors from wearing tiny swimming trunks and is considering a waxing service for hirsute men.

The park said it banned the tight and tiny trunks on the grounds that they are “not deemed public or family friendly.”

“We are also looking into offering complimentary male waxing, which will ensure we preserve the dignity of all our guests,” Sales and Marketing Director Morwenna Angove said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

We need fewer cliches, not more

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André Picard is a perfectly good reporter on any number of topics, except abortion, at which point I feel like I’m reading a National Abortion Federation press release. True to form, this column (“We need fewer barriers to abortion, not more“) is no exception. “Access is threatened!” “The battle for reproductive rights is never done!” “Financial barriers remain!” “I am in the pay of the National Abortion Federation!”

OK, so he didn’t write that last one, but I’m beginning to have serious questions.

All in the name of “women’s reproductive health,” of course, Picard advocates for a double standard so that abortion clinics in Quebec would be exempt from the same standards applied to other clinics. On small points like hygiene and sterile environments and such. Cuz where abortion is concerned it’s all access, access, access! And deviating from that is punishable by up to four years in the bad books, with no chance of parole, so says Judge Vicki.

What the real deal in Quebec is deserves greater scrutiny. Bill 34 as it is called, would force abortion clinics to abide by the same rules as every other surgical clinic:

Bill 34, which was adopted by the National Assembly in the spring, says abortion clinics must adhere to the same guidelines as specialized medical clinics that provide such procedures as cataract and knee surgery.

In Quebec, where access to real health care for just about everything is severely threatened, abortion rates remain the highest in the country. That doesn’t stop “medical specialists” from coming out of the woodwork with quotes like this:

Medical specialists say Bill 34 is unjust and will reduce women’s access to health services. They note that the jeopardized clinics’ abortion methods conform to national standards.

I would link to those national standards, but it’s hard, because there are none. Such is the beauty of our lawless state in Canada where politicians panic at the mere thought of abortion. Actually, they don’t fare much better on the healthcare debate all told, but I digress. We have the best system in the world! In the world, I say, with the exclusion of France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, many Asian countries, the better part of North Africa and Cuba, among others.

Still, we should be concerned about access to abortion in Quebec, I agree. The abortion rate is very, very high there and it’s undeniably used as birth control–and that’s something even pro-choicers pretend to have a problem with.

Seems to me that medical clinics should all follow the same regulations. Seems to me also that abortion is not a medical procedure insofar as it almost always concerns a lifestyle choice–as in, woah, I just didn’t know that sex might lead to THAT and this is terribly inconvenient for me/my boyfriend/my mother/fill in your excuse here. As such, if pro-abortion activists are prepared to admit once and for all that abortion has nothing to do with “health care” then I’d say fine–let them be exempt from medical regulations.

They won’t. So I consider this bill that might grant some women and their unborn children a brief reprieve from the killing a great boon.

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Véronique adds: Wait a minute Andrea. They are not referring to abortion legal standards – of which there are none — but to surgical standards. Pardon my bad faith but, WHAT? Do they mean that abortion providers are NOT held to the same surgical standards as other clinics? And abortion activists are OK with that?

Somebody is going to have to explain this one to me: abortion activists want abortion to be considered basic health care, but they don’t want the kind of regulations that make basic healthcare, well, basic. And safe. And readily available because you don’t have to shop around to find the doctor who cleans his surgical instruments. You just walk in a clinic anywhere and you get world-class, clean, competent healthcare. That’s the theory anyway. That world-class healthcare is the product of regulations: regulations on who can be a healthcare provider, regulations on who can open a clinic or a hospital, etc.

So first, you had illegal abortion, back-alley-coat-hanger abortion. We had to make it legal to make it safe (or so the cliché goes). Now, abortion activists are opposing a bill that would ensure that abortions are not performed in back-alleys with coat hangers. Because if you prevent back-alley abortions with coat hangers, then you might prevent a poor hopeless victim of her circumstances from having an abortion.

Am I getting this right? I hope I’m not.

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Andrea adds: I fear you understand it perfectly, Véronique.

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Rebecca adds: Medical care is the care that is required to correct or ameliorate a disease, injury or pathology. Pregnancy is none of these. Choosing, for no medical reason, to terminate a pregnancy has (moral dimensions aside) as much to do with healthcare as getting breast implants. Should cosmetic surgery clinics and abortion clinics conform to high standards of safety and cleanliness? Of course. Does it trouble me that there are financial barriers to elective, medically unnecessary surgery? Not particularly. Should tax dollars go to non-essential elective procedures when people wait for months to get diagnostics when life and limb are at stake? Oh, please. I can sort of see why any legislative barrier to abortion seems wrong to those who believe that the act of abortion is morally neutral. But expecting abortion to be hassle-free, available at the drop of a hat and paid for by the government is daffy. And pro-choicers are almost never called on it. Even leaving morality off the table entirely, there is much to debate, and we’re still stuck at “pro-lifers want to go back to the 1950s.”

Two cases, two sentences

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A woman who tied a plastic bag around her newborn son’s head until he died gets a conditional sentence that includes 18 months of house arrest. A man guilty of leaving an elderly man with Parkinson’s in his own feces while spending his money just got 12 months in prison.

Why? I do not in any way want to suggest that elder abuse is not criminal and serious. But isn’t killing a newborn baby worse?

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Rebecca is a cynic: Seniors can vote.

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Brigitte is not to be outdone: Actually, I was thinking that many judges are awfully close to being seniors themselves.

The end of chivalry

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I married a man with impeccable manners. In our early days together, he had to teach me, a liberated woman, how to act in the presence of a gentleman. Seeing him pull out a chair at a restaurant, I would grab the other chair and sit down. “Silly” he would say “I was pulling out your chair!” After learning to take the chair he was pulling out for me, I had to learn not to sit down heavily as he was trying to push the chair in for me. “Okay now, you have to help me here! Sit down slowly to give me a chance to push your chair in.” The same thing would happen when he was giving me my coat to wear and instead of letting him help me, I would just grab the coat. It’s surprising how quickly a liberated woman who had learned to despise such little attentions – “Do you mean I can’t pull out my own chair?” – gets used to being treated like royalty. When, as a military officer, he was deployed to Kosovo, I didn’t fully appreciate these little attentions until a family friend opened my car door for me. I started to cry: it was the first expression of gallantry I had encountered since my husband had left three months prior.

I am now used to men, young and old, smoking-up mall entrances while I struggle with a toddler and a stroller. I still notice fathers and sons sporting baseball caps indoors but they don’t annoy me as much as they used to. In fact, one of my university students wore his baseball cap at every class and I didn’t ask him to decapitate even once! But even with low expectations, I wasn’t prepared for my latest appointment with the end of chivalry.

Last weekend, I drove my large SUV – I have six children and they don’t fit in a Prius – to the grocery store and parked it neatly between two cars. I always back into my parking spaces and I make sure to be centered. Still, there is never a lot of space between my truck and the next one, particularly if that other SUV is not parked straight. I was in the process of taking my two youngest children out of their car seats, holding the 3 year-old with one hand while balancing the baby on my hip, when the owner of the next vehicle, a man about the age of my own father, came up to me and barked: “How do you expect me to get in??” Trying not to loose my cool in front of the older children I replied: “I’m sorry. Would you like me to pull out so you can get in?” “Well, you better!” I plunked the little kids back in the truck and hopped back in without resisting the urge to quip “It would have been easier if you were parked straight,” which for me falls squarely in the category of losing my temper. My oldest daughter looked away and said: “Wouldn’t hurt him to lose a bit of girth. Then he could get in easily.” I tried to make this into a teachable moment about passive-aggressiveness and the many polite ways to ask a driver to move her car. But I think that all it turned out to be was a teachable moment about selfish pricks and their expensive SUVs.

Manners and gallantry are just a few ways in which we are people for the ethical treatment of people (I have my t-shirt, do you?). Which part of our declining – some would say altogether absent – moral standards is directly linked to the degradation of small marks of attention and respect?

She lost me at number one

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I was inclined to ignore this 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, because none of the reasons were good. (And if it was meant to be funny, it wasn’t that either.)

But I kind of like this 40 Reasons to Have Children. There are many I would add. My niece is a walking comedian and she doesn’t know it. She spots things even at a distance that I wouldn’t otherwise see. She laughs heartily at, well, sometimes we aren’t sure what, but she has inherited a healthy Mrozek laugh. She’s two and she can sing the entire “Angels We Have Heard on High”–in July. (Yes, including the Glorias, up and down the scales.) Anyhoo. Have kids or don’t. But I tend to think the type of woman who writes up 40 sad reasons not to, including “Rat race plus rugrats: No thanks!” is probably just a bit boring–someone who is unprepared for adventure. (Unless you think the long elevator ride up to your office is one.)

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Véronique adds: Oh my. I too liked the 40 reasons to have children better. In fact, as I write, my 12 year-old on is bugging me to configure my new iPhone. Here son, knock yourself out.

I also have a couple of my own good reasons: The moment they put your newborn on your chest right after you’ve given birth. Children look much better than you do but you get all the compliments. Teenage daughters who bake. You loose “friends” when you have children. You make new friends. Real ones. With children, you have no trouble sleeping (when you get to sleep). Children make family parties more fun. When they don’t, they give you an excuse to leave early. Children force you to share dessert and that’s good for you. It is! Children force you to share and that’s also good for you. Finally, children force you to get off your butt and do something.

Outstanding parenting made easy – start by not having children, then read a book

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Hey, narrating a book is hard…

Jennifer Aniston has won a parenting award – despite having no children.

The Marley and Me actress and her father John were handed the iParenting Media Award in the 2009 Outstanding category for Loukoumi’s Good Deeds, the book they both narrate.

The tome is based on author Nick Katsoris’s cleaning woman Daisy, who worked with him for years and who gave him some gold cufflinks because he always said “good morning” to her.

The story follows the good deeds of Loukoumi the lamb and her friends Gus the Bear, Fistiki the Cat, Dean the Dog and Marika the Monkey.

Jennifer voices Daisy on the CD of the novel, which was released with the tome in April.

I love Hollywood.

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