Archives for 2009

I suspect there is more to this story than what we are being told, but nevertheless, what a mess:

A MOTHER is taking her fight to the European Court of Human Rights after she was forbidden from seeing her three-year-old daughter because she is not “clever enough” to look after her.

The woman, who for legal reasons can be identified only by her first name, Rachel, has been told by a family court that her daughter will be placed with adoptive parents within the next three months, and she will then be barred from further contact.

The adoption is going ahead despite the declaration by a psychiatrist that Rachel, 24, has no learning difficulties and “good literacy and numeracy and [that] her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range”.

Her daughter, K, was born prematurely and officials felt Rachel lacked the intelligence to cope with her complex medical needs Baby K was released from hospital into care and is currently with a foster family. Her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day medical care.

Rachel said last night: “I have been totally let down by the system. All I want is to care for my daughter but the council and the court are determined not to let me.

“The court here has now ordered that my contact with my daughter must be reduced from every fortnight until in three months’ time it will all be over and I will never see her again.”

There are times when it feels like we live in a society that is absolutely determined to destroy the normal bond between mother and child. And another thing: What makes you think typical government bureaucrats know what being “clever enough” to care for your own child even is?

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Andrea adds: I recall going to see The Danish Play way back when (about a woman who resists the Nazis) and at one point the main character’s daughter is taken away because, I believe, the Nazis deem her unfit to care for her.

I note one of the comments to this post is dismissive of your concern here, Brigitte, but I stand firmly in the “freedom is not free” camp and if we aren’t vigilant on such matters we’ll lose our liberty. Europe may not be our society, no, but it is our roots (in particular, it certainly makes up my immediate heritage), and many Canadians look up to the European model.

Here, for instance, you will get beauty mistakes that make you look older. Only about 3 of which I was doing. So I should start looking younger any minute now…

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Andrea asks: Which three? Inquiring minds need to know. (Every once in a while you get to get ready for an event with friends, fun, but I always note–aha–so that’s how you are actually supposed to use mascara/eye shadow/fill in the blank beauty product here…)

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Brigitte confesses: The heavy concealer, the mascara on bottom lashes, and the powder all over. Fortunately I don’t wear makeup most of the time, but, ahem, I shall use different techniques from now on.

David Hyde Pierce (Frasier’s brother Niles) is one of my favourite actors. I like him even more when I see interviews with him in which it’s clear how radically different he is from the effete, rarified character for whom he’s most known; he sells it so completely that it’s actually weird to hear him use contractions and wear jeans.
David Hyde Pierce is gay, has been with the same partner for slightly less time than I’ve been alive, and had a same sex marriage in the interval in California when they were permitted there. He’s now speaking out against Proposition 8, its supporters and the movement they represent:

I’ve been going because I had the experience of having this private thing suddenly dragged out into the public, and have people I don’t know take a vote,” he said. “It was a very angry-making feeling both in November when it was taken away from me and also this past Tuesday when I was sitting in front of my television wondering, ‘Gee, I hope it’s OK the Supreme Court thinks I’m married.’ Excuse me, it’s none of your business.””

The major fallacy here is the blurring of private and public. What a person does for sexual gratification, in his own home, is none of the public’s business (within the usual boundaries: consensual, adult, and so on.) Whether society chooses to confer special status upon a particular sort of sexual relationship is very much the public’s business. Andrea and I will shortly be unveiling an estimate of the financial cost to taxpayers of family breakdown; when more families collapse, they are more dependent upon government programs, and your tax bill goes up. That’s your business. But radically changing and eroding the family has many less crass and obvious consequences. Fatherlessness creates a climate that harms even children with active, present fathers. Rising illegitimacy rates mean that children are even less likely to have relationships with their fathers than if their parents had married and divorced. The lessening of the taboo against divorce, embodied most clearly in removing the need to show cause when petitioning for divorce, makes it far easier for one party to nullify a marriage than it was in the past. Children are most immediately influenced by the marriage and relationship of their parents but they are not insulated from the influence of the divorce of the people next door, the friend at school who effectively never had a father, the cousin who lives with a mother and a series of boyfriends. All of these influences make marriage writ large a shakier thing, and as with choices about drugs, education, gangs and almost everything else, the home environment is the single biggest influence but far from the only influence. So yes, what relationships we privilege are very much something the public should be voting on.
And because this always comes up in discussion of gay marriage and why some of us are opposed: it has nothing to do with liking or disliking gay people, individually or collectively. Just as being pro-life does not mean you dislike women, or fear women’s sexuality, or are repressed yourself, or any of the other ad hominems that come up with such tiring frequency. I haven’t discussed it with every other PWPL blogger, but I would bet every one of us knows someone who has had an abortion, and I doubt we love or like them less for it. On the contrary, while I oppose abortion in the abstract, when I am faced with a concrete instance of it when I learn that a friend had one, I feel not just sadness and revulsion at the act itself but also grief for my friend, who was hurting, made a choice she felt was the only one open to her, and continues to hurt to this day.

These aren’t perfect parallels, although it is very much in the Judeo-Christian tradition to separate our (and by implication God’s) condemnation of an act from our forgiveness and love for the actor. But pretending abortion empowers women to make women who’ve had abortions feel better about it is not fundamentally loving; it is dishonest and destructive. And so is describing the relationship between two men as “marriage,” no matter how much they might want it, no matter how much they love each other and are committed to each other, no matter how much their feelings are hurt by the lack of this social sanction.

…One of the costs may well be my sanity… I’ve been working hard for the day job lately. On June 3, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada will release (drumroll please) “Private choices, public costs: How failing families cost us all.” There’s an event on the Hill, it’s free and open to the public—you can register here if you are interested. This report measures the cost of family breakdown to the public purse.

My co-author on the report is Rebecca Walberg. Since we have our share our skeptical readers who are convinced that ProWomanProLife is somehow connected to/funded by my workplace, and since Rebecca Walberg is my co-author on the study thereby increasing nefarious suspicions, I thought I’d come clean.

Here’s the secret–I like working with smart and kind people. Rebecca is certainly one of them.

Now seems as good a time as any to say that ProWomanProLife is separate from my day job, entirely and totally. I started it on my own, with Sheryl Alger and Teresa Fraser, and subsequently invited the other women to join—none of whom are paid. ProWomanProLife receives no financing (as all the ladies on the blog will confirm). We are unaffiliated with any larger group, and the views expressed not only don’t represent any larger group outside ProWomanProLife, they frequently don’t represent every woman on this blog.

I met Rebecca through policy circles and I liked her right away. Then I invited her to join ProWomanProLife. Later on we decided to partner on this cost of family breakdown in Canada study. It is the start of an “Andrea and Rebecca to save the world” team, one study at a time. Here we go!

A devastating look into teens’ sexual lives (not for the faint of heart).

What floors me is that there are tons of parents out there, including parents of teenagers, who have no idea what’s going on. I know what’s going on (well, I have a reasonably good idea) and I don’t have a teenage daughter. What’s their excuse?

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Tanya adds: The advice on curbing this behavior in your teen?  “Alot of the experts we talked with said, ‘You have to parent today…double time.’ ”  Like with so many of life’s problems, the solution is often to do twice as much of what was missing in the first place.
 
I realize that many people feel they don’t have a choice in the matter, and some in fact don’t.  But the average child today starts their life out in full-time daycare.  As parents, we spend more time than ever at a job that our children can’t even relate to.  (We’re bank proof operators or acturial scientists.)  That means, not only do we not know what they do all day, but they can’t imagine what we do either.  And this sets a pattern for the long-term relationship between our kids and us.
 
My daughter just finished her first year of preschool.  Away from me just six hours a week, I could hardly believe all the things I was not in the immediate know about.  Just six hours a week and she chose a new favorite colour without me.  She decided skirts were better than pants but not as good as dresses.  She’d established that boys are bad because they hit and girls do not.  And her idea of a really fun game is one where you get to stand on a chair and wave your arms.  She made all these decisions without me around.  Next year she’ll be up to 11 hours a week and I’ll have so much more to keep on top of.  I think all this preschool stuff is to get ME ready for kindergarten.
 
When she’s 12 and being confronted with choices girls her age are faced with, here’s hoping I’ll have done a good job establishing solid communication and trust.  Pink or purple?  Not life altering.  Holding hands or oral sex?  A bit of a big deal, wouldn’t you say?

Archie was supposed to marry Betty, or remain a terminally undecided teenager forever. Marrying Veronica was NOT supposed to happen.

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Andrea adds: I just can’t believe it took him 23 years to choose. (Last time I read Archie I was ten, at summer camp.) If I were Veronica or Betty, I’m just not sure I’d wait that long.

If you find yourself in Sudbury June 5-7, you can catch a film at this festival. (I’ve seen one of the shorts, Most, which is Czech for “bridge” and thought it was quite good. A little unfulfilling, and yet, thought-provoking.)

I also think that the way to reach the culture on life as on all issues of any importance is through movies, art, good documentaries, that kind of thing. So this festival is a good idea.

Baby Faith (see earlier post here) passed away this weekend, at the age of 93 days. A short life lived to the fullest. RIP.