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Our money, their choice

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Rebecca has a great piece in the Post today about how abortion is not a private choice if you and I are paying for it:

Let’s take supporters of access to abortion at their word: Elective abortions are a personal choice. For example, in a recent posting on the Post’s Web site, Joyce Arthur, co-ordinator of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, insists that abortion be available as backup birth control so women can have “sex for pleasure.” But then the same advocates immediately push abortion firmly into the public domain, and keep it there, by insisting elective abortions be paid for by taxpayers, a large percentage of whom are completely opposed to the procedure.

Well done, Rebecca! (Who would have thought you could get a tagline so long in the paper? “Rebecca Walberg is a Winnipeg writer and policy analyst, and a founding member of ProWomanProLife.org, recently named the best new Canadian blog of 2008.” Neat-o.)

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Rebecca adds: These pro-abortion folks, they’re all class (well, some of them, anyway): the headline on my blog was “If it’s a private choice, why am I paying for it?” I just got an anonymous reply saying “Because it’s a health care cost, and paying professionals to pick womb-boogers reduces the cost of paying for the results of bungled abortions.”  Aren’t they charming?

So, if people threaten to do their own back-alley breast implants, risking sepsis and permanent injury, possibly even death, will medicare start providing all women with perky DD boobs, gratis?

As to the “womb-booger” – keep it up, my friend.  The more Canadians hear from this wing of the abortion-rights crowd, the more you make the pro-life case for us.

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Brigitte wonders: Does the term “womb-booger” apply to all former fetuses, including him/her, or just, you know, other people?

Sounds like a story to me

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One of the inventors of the birth control pill denounces…his own invention: 

Djerassi outlined the “horror scenario” that occurred because of the population imbalance, for which his invention was partly to blame. He said that in most of Europe there was now “no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction”. He said: “This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete.”

He described families who had decided against reproduction as “wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it”. 

The fall in the birth rate, he said, was an “epidemic” far worse – but given less attention – than obesity. Young Austrians, he said, were committing national suicide if they failed to procreate. And if it were not possible to reverse the population decline they would have to understand the necessity of an “intelligent immigration policy”.

Sounds like a story, but we aren’t hearing about it, as Get Religion points out. (That’s because a lack of information, old, stale news, and pats on the back and possibly high fives for whatever we choose are fundamental women’s rights.)

An exercise in logic

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A reaction to our Ottawa Citizen opinion piece, here. I especially like this bit:

What Brigitte Pellerin and Andrea Mrozek failed to take into account in their main objection to unregulated abortion is that making any sort of regulation, however seemingly harmless (such as regulating late-term abortions, which rarely happen save for medical emergencies) or even “good” (harsher penalties for criminals who kill a fetus in the process of committing a crime) will set a legal precedent that will be impossible to reverse or ignore.

As soon as there is even one regulation on abortion, more will be able to follow, and much more easily after that precedent is set, until eventually, abortion is no longer legal.

Two things: A) We do take this into account even though we are not actually trying to get legislation passed that would limit access to abortion – see here for details. But more importantly: B) Why is it that “as soon as there is even one regulation on abortion, more will be able to follow”? This letter writer is not the first one to make that point. But as far as I know nobody has explained why… Why, do you think?

Because once you start thinking about what abortion actually is, it becomes a lot harder to justify allowing (or worse, condoning) it, to the tune of 100,000 cases a year in this country alone, maybe?

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Andrea adds: What I absolutely love about this letter is it lays out what I’ve been saying for quite some time: That pro-abortion activists can’t have a debate, because debate (freedom of speech) leads to thinking–and thinking about abortion and what it does leads to curtailing the practice. Which very much means most Canadians have their hearts in the right place and are against killing our smallest–the powerful should not have indiscriminate rights over the powerless.

On a sarcastic note, I’d say this to her–sure, I’d take the good at the expense of the perfect. The good being some limitation on abortion, the perfect, the ideal being to remove all abortion from the Canadian landscape in favour of real compassionate help for women.

Price check, price check: sanctimonious shopper in aisle 2

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I laughed when I read this column. And while it centres on sanctimonious shoppers and their bags–it is about a mentality: Give me canvas or give me death, those who believe fair trade coffee actually makes the world a better place, etc. For the record, I agree, reusable bags are better. But I’ll be “blessed” too, as Hannaford puts it, if I lose my sense of priorities, and figure that not using plastic bags is actually “making a difference”. Getting their knickers in a knot over the wrong things, indeed.

Too many people are getting incensed over the wrong things. Years ago on Vancouver Island, I saw the same people who publicly demonstrated to save the forests, wave placards supporting abortion at a different demo. Today, you can be all kinds of things that weren’t cool 50 years ago, but if you bring your own shopping bag, you’re halfway to being a good person.

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Véronique adds: Yesterday, we went to the grocery store as a family. All seven of us. I asked my designated driver (a.k.a. husband) to please park in the pregnant ladies parking spot: I am having an increasingly hard time staying upright in deep snow and ice (I am 34 weeks and 2 days pregnant, not that anybody is counting…). I think that pregnant ladies parking spots should be reassigned as mothers of toddlers parking spots becauser what is really riskier? A pregnant woman in a parking lot or a mother of three kids under age four trying to make her way to the mall entrance? If you have been either, the answer is a no-brainer.

Anyhoo, half-way through the grocery shopping experience (and grocery shopping with 5 kids is an experience, believe me)–it became obvious that we would not make it on time for my daughter’s gymnastics class next door. So I abandoned ship, grabbed said daughter and proceeded to walk over two snowbanks and three parking lots to the gym, thus proving the futility of pregnant ladies parking spots. But, this is NOT the point. By doing so, I left my non-pregnant husband to bring back the groceries and remaining four children to the vehicle.

Oh My. He said he got so many evil eyes, he thought he was morally bankrupt. Some people even slowed down to stare at him pack his groceries into his immorally-parked vehicle. But maybe they were looking at our plastic bags. Or at our large family-sized gas-guzzler. Who knows?

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Brigitte has fun shopping adventures to share, too: I was at evil Wal-Mart the other day, one of the more recent “super” stores that’s even bigger than big. And I noticed, in the gigantic grocery section, that the freezers and fridges had motion sensors on them so that if nobody stands in front of them they are mostly dark but suddenly get all lighty-light (LED bulbs too, unless I’m mistaken) when you walk or stand right in front of them. And I thought to myself: There! It takes an evil capitalist merchant to be so dang smart about not wasting energy! YAY WAL-MART! I must have looked a bit funny standing there, imagining the save-the-earth types chewing off their own right arm rather than give any kind of green credit to Wal-Mart…

Something very wrong, no matter how you look at it

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A 37-year-old kills her newborn baby because she doesn’t want her parents to know she’s having premarital sex? Sounds very fishy to me; something is not being reported here. Still, you can’t help but think had she killed the baby a month or two before she was born, there would have been no trial, no courtroom, and no attempt to lay charges.

Jody Ann Lee, 37, of Barrie, pleaded guilty to infanticide and failing to provide the necessities of life after police found her newborn baby girl stuffed into plastic bags in the trunk of her car Nov. 8, 2005.  Lee is allowed to spend three days a week with the surviving twin at her home where she lives with her parents as she awaits sentencing, court has heard.

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Tanya adds: “Doctors say she [the infant victim] had taken her first few breaths of life.”

And that’s the reason this story is getting any press. It’s the reason the mother of this child, the one being accused of infanticide, can be called “manipulative and devious” while onlookers nod in agreement.

I don’t believe the public’s scrutiny of this woman would have softened had the child been born with a heart defect or with down’s syndrome. But a child in the womb, even one past the age of viability, can be aborted with only sympathy for the mother. It just can’t be explained.

Or maybe she’s just nuts

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A bit of a kerfuffle in France over Rachida Dati, the Justice minister, who went back to work (quite stylishly at that) five days after giving birth to a baby girl – by c-section no less.

I’m sure all those who fiercely criticized Sarah Palin for returning to work days after delivering her fifth baby will be equally critical of the fetching French woman. Right?

This is “lashing out”. Really?

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You know my bias. I like Sarah Palin. Yahoo News tells me “Sarah Palin is Lashing Out At The Media–AGAIN.” I go check it out and this is what I find. CNN commentators who can’t shut up, and about 20 seconds of Palin looking fairly composed. (If this constitutes “lashing out,” you have to be hanging out with some really boring folks.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v87FjdgUy40]

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Brigitte says: Hey! (Am I boring?)

Seriously: If she’d denied bias, they wouldn’t have believed her. If she’d shut up, they would have said she was afraid to speak for fear of hurting her chances in 2012. They will not give her any chance at all. I think she can manage pretty well regardless, mind.

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Tanya might need to watch this again: but did the CNN guy actually compare Sarah Palin and her image to Dan Quale and the P-O-T-A-T-O incident?  That can’t be right…tell me I heard wrong, please.

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

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Andrea adds: No, Brigitte, you are not boring. Quite the opposite. My point was that if the news editors at CNN think this is “lashing out”–Sarah Palin quietly and demurely sitting by–then they need to get out more. And possibly have a chat with just about anyone in my family. We’ll show them “lashing out.” Oh ya.

“Achieving Peace in the Abortion War”

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New book out by psychologist Rachel MacNair. Should be interesting:

Applying the principles of peace psychology to the abortion situation of the United States, this book shows that the insights of the psychology of violence that are so well known from the practice of war and similar killing can also apply to abortion. Most particularly, evidence for the effect that the practice has on the doctors and nurses that do it is detailed. Also, the drive for consistency of the human mind interplays with this to show us something about effective strategy: as people understand the practice is declining, it becomes safer to hear what’s wrong with it, and it becomes more likely for people to try to explain the decline by noting what’s wrong with it.

Pro-abortion folks will often complain when anti-abortion folks are not pacifists.(Hypocrisy charges.) But if you are against most or all wars because they are killing, then you most assuredly cannot afford to be pro-abortion. Rachel MacNair is a pacifist…(I’m not.) But I appreciate her unique angle and I’m keenly interested in what MacNair has to say about the effects on doctors and nurses who are involved with killing for a living; and this “people understand the practice is declining, it becomes safer to hear what’s wrong with it,” intrigues me too.

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