Archives for April 2010

In the Medical Post (not available online) there’s a full page article on abortion and grieving from the doctor’s perspective by one Shane Neilson in Erin, Ontario. Very interesting, in particular because the doctor is not pro-life. He doesn’t like abortion, but he does refer for them. He says he has but once seen a women who had an abortion and didn’t regret it. The remorseless 19-year-old who shows up in his office one week after an abortion is the subject of his column.

He says she appears to live in an “emotional dead zone” and that he “wants to shake her, but [does] the Pap and bimanual exam instead.”

He concludes with this line: “It haunts me that I wrote in the chart that her uterus had returned to a normal size.”

I feel for him. Seems to be strangled by his own desire not to press his opinion on others. I’d like to shake him, actually, I’m betting he doesn’t hesitate to impress his view in other areas–maybe weight loss or smoking. So here’s a doctor who consistently sees women grieving their abortions but won’t cease to refer for them. I think he sounds like a good man, a good doctor. But why won’t he stand up for what he knows to be true? That the fetus matters, even if he’s not sure it’s human? That women suffer after the fact?

In any event, sounds like this doctor doesn’t love abortion. And for that I’m glad. If it continues to haunt him, that “uterus has returned to normal size” comment after it was just violently emptied… chances are sooner or later he’ll stop and think some more about his choices in this situation.

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Brigitte seconds that: I’m glad to see he was at least disturbed. Beats this guy.

I laughed out loud at the headline alone but the quotes are even better:

Young Abortion Foes Trouble NARAL Leader

Yes, yes. I’m sure they do.

Oh, look! An excellent oped in today’s Ottawa Citizen by one A. Mrozek, about the new all-day “learning” program being somewhat less flexible than people were led to believe. Here’s the, ah, money quote:

So how exactly is the Ontario Ministry of Education legislating choice out of existence?

For starters, simply by introducing a monolithic taxpayer funded plan — legitimate and regulated child care providers can’t compete. When the government subsidizes a service, it means others are put out of business.

All-day kindergarten also takes five-year-olds out of existing centres. These children are a day-care’s bread and butter. Care of five-year-olds is substantially cheaper than infant care, which runs into the tens of thousands of dollars annually. Since no child-care centre could possibly charge parents the true infant price, they have balanced their businesses by charging less than the real cost for younger kids and more for older ones. The older ones who will now enter the “free” state centres.

Families with a spouse who stays home are, as usual, totally pooched. Their taxes will rise for a service they don’t ever choose to use. Pascal-plan advocates swear up and down the block we can fund the new system, parents at home and everything in between. The problem is they haven’t told anyone where the money tree is growing.

It bears repeating, again and again, just how expensive these programs are. Costed out, the full Pascal plan comes to $6.1 billion annually. All-day kindergarten rings in at a likely $1.8 billion annually. If money spent on all-day kindergarten went to parents instead, it would come out to more than $9,000 per child, annually.

Indeed. But Andrea, you forgot one thing: Parents wouldn’t know what to do with that money. Better let the government manage it.

Fight fire with fire, they say. Outraged by the ridiculous statement from a senior Iranian cleric that “immodestly dressed” women were the cause of earthquakes (I mentioned it a few days ago), one university student decided to stage a “boobquake”:

An Islamic cleric’s suggestion that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes has drawn thousands to join an American student’s busty bid to shake up the world — by revealing cleavage.

Jen McCreight is the creator of Boobquake, an event scheduled for Monday, which has already garnered the support of more than 40,000 people on Facebook.

[…]

“With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake,” she wrote on her blog. “If not, I’m sure Mr. Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble.”

I am usually more on the side of modesty, but I think I’ll make an exception in this case. But fear not: You don’t have to bare more than you really want in order to participate:

Ms. McCreight, who describes herself as an liberal, atheist feminist, said women don’t have to show off their cleavage or wear a short skirt to participate.

“The name of the event may be about boobs, but feel free to show an ankle on Monday — that will still be immodest to someone, somewhere,” she said.

Premier Dalton McGuinty was caught today actually listening to his constituents. He’s giving up on the new sex ed curriculum.

Cherish these moments.

Margaret Wente on the new Ontario sex-ed thing:

I do have one objection to the way sex ed is taught in schools. It is so scrupulously gender-neutral that it ignores the fundamental differences between teenage boys and girls. Boys want sex, all the time. Girls want relationships. It’s hardwired into their biology. The more that girls absorb this cruel fact of life, the better off they’ll be. Teenage girls need to learn that having sex as freely as guys do is not necessarily empowering. In fact, it’s a lot more empowering if they don’t.

Darn right! But there’s more: Not only are girls looking for something other than just casual sex 24/7, they are the ones most at risk when it comes to long-term consequences from sexually-transmitted diseases (what a surprise it must be to find out, in your early thirties, that the family you are now ready to start can’t happen because you are sterile), and they’re also the ones who end up having to deal with a pregnancy when, you know, things don’t go quite as planned. As a very predictable result, many girls are made to feel that, should they get pregnant, it’s their “problem” and theirs alone even though it usually takes more than one person to create a baby. That, too, is far from empowering. Go read Unprotected if you don’t believe me.

On an another note, I also agree with this bit from Ms. Wente’s column:

If you’re a parent, it’s not sex ed that deserves to drive you nuts. It’s green ed. Today is Earth Day, as you have surely noticed – the holiest day in the school calendar. All across the land, millions of schoolchildren are being reminded that the glaciers are melting and the polar bears are drowning and the entire planet is in peril. The schools are there to teach them that they are stewards of the Earth (it says so, right in the Ontario curriculum), which can only be saved by turning out the lights and recycling the dryer lint. Time to make them watch An Inconvenient Truth again! Poor kids. Now that’s indoctrination.

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Andrea adds: I guess I read recently that even in marriage a husband knows his wife loves him if she has sex with him, and a wife knows her husband loves her if he talks with her. Not that I’m reading any relationship self-help books, no, no. But people keep sending them to me! (And I’m not above the help, either.)

The letters page in the National Post is filled with people against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia, from absolutely every angle. The second reading vote on Francine Lalonde’s “Death with Dignity” bill is today. Let’s hope these letters speak into it NOT passing (which would push it to committee stage). Hopefully this bill will die today.

(here, here, here, here and here–just buy the paper)

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Brigitte adds this update: The bill was defeated, and soundly at that (228 to 59).

Sex week at Yale. Read it and weep. Truly.

While the sadomasochism marketer was attaching pinching devices to her breasts, another presentation was in progress next door. A speaker invited by Yale’s Anscombe Society, a small campus group devoted to the cause of premarital abstinence, was explaining that the sexual revolution made “consent” the only moral test of a sexual relationship, ignoring the idea that “some sexual acts are incompatible with human dignity.” He asked the audience, “Can we move from saying what is permissible to asking what is right and what is good?” Attendance at “Babeland’s Lip Tricks,” in which a New York stripper demonstrated oral sex techniques with rubber props for 90 minutes: 2,000 (more than a third of the undergraduate body). Attendance at the lecture advocating sexual restraint: 14. Yale’s motto: Lux et veritas (light and truth). Privilege of attending Yale in 2010: not quite as priceless as it used to be.

Ontario Premier defends sex-ed curriculum. No big surprise there. But I had to give my head a shake (or two) when I heard this on the radio:

I think I speak with an understanding of the information available to children today. They are going to get this information. We [can] provide it in a format and in a venue in which we have some control, or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources like their friends at school.”

The revised curriculum, which will be implemented in Ontario schools beginning in the fall, will see Grade 3 students being taught about gender identity and sexual orientation. This is the first time this topic has been specified in the sex education curriculum.

Students in Grade 6 will learn about masturbation and wet dreams while those in Grade 7 will be taught about oral and anal sex.

I won’t argue that more sex-ed happens in school buses than I care to admit. However, there is a marked difference between a 7-grader telling her schoolmates about anal sex and learning about it in a classroom from a teacher. Being taught in school gives it a legitimacy that school-bus discussions do not. My children have heard things in the bus that I would never have taught them myself but because they had received this information from unreliable sources, they asked us parents about it.  This is where the school should not usurp the parents’ better judgment, beliefs and values. My children, my house, my spin. Or is this what Dalton really means when he says “uninformed sources?”

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Brigitte wonders: So, what’s the next logical step? If we really do care about children getting as much accurate and reliable information about sex as early as possible, why aren’t they staging live demonstrations (along with practice sessions) supervised by licensed experts right there in the classroom?