Archives for July 2010

Follow-up to the Nebraska law LB 594:

OMAHA – A federal judge will hear arguments Tuesday about whether to block a new Nebraska law requiring mental health screenings for women seeking abortions.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland filed a lawsuit last month challenging the new law, saying it could be difficult to comply with and could require doctors to give women information irrelevant to the procedure.

State officials have defended the law. They say the law is designed to make sure women understand the risks and complications that may accompany an abortion.

Planned Parenthood generally tells women the in-clinic procedure takes 2-3 hours from start to finish, including “a recovery period of about one hour”. The pill procedure takes significantly less time at the clinic. This new law will require doctors to evaluate their patients to ensure they can mentally endure the procedure as well as determine whether or not they have been coerced, an evaluation Planned Parenthood’s attorney Mimi Lui calls an “exhaustive review”. Ultimately, it would take more time per patient. And in an industry that boasts…

Abortions are very common. In fact, more than 1 out of 3 women in the U.S. have an abortion by the time they are 45 years old.

…time is money. The evaluations would also cramp the “no big deal” style of the organization’s message. With only two federal judges in the Nebraska District (one appointed by Bill Clinton, the other by George Bush Senior), the outcome is unpredictable.

Well, not quite. But this morning the medical minute on my local radio station (Ottawa’s 580 CFRA) was the Mayo Clinic announcing that parents can have tests done even earlier and less invasively for Down Syndrome. It’s effective, they say, 85 per cent of the time and allows parents to prepare and “make decisions.”

Given that we know that 90 per cent of Downs babies are aborted, what do you think “make decisions” means in this case?

I’ve never seen this show, but it is a very strange argument in any case.

Seated at Tami Taylor’s kitchen table, Becky Sproles wrenchingly lays out her dilemma: The only child of an embittered single bartender who gave birth to her when she was a teenager, Becky is faced with the prospect of recycling her mother’s past and she doesn’t know what to do. […]

Is she seeking an abortion simply to counter her mother’s example? What if she were capable, caring and present as a parent? What if, as an emotionally wounded 10th grader without resources living in Dillon, Tex., with its pageant of grim futures, she could defy sociological prediction?

The tortured expression on Becky’s face tells us how profoundly she would like this to be so and yet how clearly she foresees the bleaker reality. “I can’t take care of a baby,” she tearfully tells Tami, matriarch to Dillon’s lost youth. “I can’t.”

With those words Becky decides to have an abortion.

It seems to make the agrument that if Becky had never been born, her mother wouldn’t have ended up an embittered single bartender. The article ends,

Again and again, “Friday Night Lights” seems to remind us, as if in klieg lights, of the consequences of parenthood pursued by accident or default.

When Rebecca and I wrote this piece about how the World Health Organization conjured up the 70,000 women dying from abortion, Joyce Arthur responded with this. I didn’t link to it yesterday because I thought it was very weak and borderline slanderous–an ad hominem attack in face of strong evidence.

Today, Rebecca and I respond with this letter to the editor in the Post:

Re: There’s No Dispute, Joyce Arthur, counterpoint, July 8.

Joyce Arthur, a devoted abortion advocate, takes us to task for questioning the methodology used to conjure up 70,000 deaths annually as the result of unsafe abortions. She should have taken up the issue of sound research with the authors of the studies she cites, for it is they who pepper their work with caveats, qualifiers and disclaimers. We merely quote their work.

Citing surveys of schoolchildren about whether they know someone who’s had post-abortion complications, as Ms. Arthur did in her piece, is baffling. We feel sure that a sizeable number of Canadian schoolchildren might claim to know a friend of a cousin whose stomach exploded after combining Coke and Pop Rocks. Shall we launch a worldwide campaign against junk food on the strength of those numbers? Schoolyard gossip and rumours do not constitute sound evidence.

More seriously, there is indeed an elephant in the room. It’s the number of women in the developing world who die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. We know with certainty this number is much higher than abortion-related deaths. As we saw at the G8/G20 meetings, abortion was not the controversial topic activists thought it might be. The G8 leaders understood help for mothers in the developing world shouldn’t focus on abortion. Why can’t Joyce Arthur?

I don’t know her. But I stand up for her, because I have recently learned she is to be stoned to death for adultery in Iran. You can read about this horrifying situation here:

Ashtiani was originally condemned to 99 lashes, a sentence which was carried out in front of her 17-year-old son. Now, after re-examining her case, Iranian authorities have decided she should also be stoned to death.

To be clear, these maniacs want to throw rocks at this woman’s head until her brains are dashed out.

Treating people like this is evil. Regimes that do such things must be exposed, rattled and, at times, replaced. And in countries fortunate enough not to be subject to such brutality, we ought to recalibrate our priorities from cozy concerns like reality shows and “climate change” to the plight of our fellow human beings.

This struggle is cultural, psychological, military, and economic. Most of all, it is a test of wills. Do we have the strength to call evil by its name and resist, or will we fumble about and find reasons not to until it’s too late?

I pray it is not too late. For her life first and foremost, but also for ours if we fail to stand up against evil when called.

____________________

Update: Apparently they may not stone her. Though she still could be executed.

We have a new GG. I wonder what he would have done if presented with Henry Morgentaler as a possible member for the Order of Canada. He is himself a companion of the Order, obviously didn’t give it up, so probably not much. Sigh.

…thought I’d still post this little clip from June 24, about the G8 maternal health initiative.

[youtube:”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5vJede0pA”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5vJede0pA]

Wednesday morning I woke up and was getting ready to head in to my part-time job at the Victoria Right to Life Society office, but before I had a chance, my telephone rang. It was our president calling to tell me that our billboard had been vandalised. The society has spent about $3000 on the billboard and it was put up about a month ago on the highway between downtown Victoria and the ferries that go to Vancouver. I’m pretty sure it’s the only billboard that doesn’t advertise food, real estate, or tourist opportunities. A few years ago I was driving along that highway and saw a McDonald’s billboard that had been vandalised from “Treat your friends. Heck, treat them all” to “eat your friends. Heck, eat them all.” So vandalism isn’t unusual there; it gets very quiet late at night along that highway.

Our billboard is a relatively uncontroversial billboard. It simply had a large close-up photo of a mother with her baby and it said, “Love them both. Choose life.” and had contact information for Options Pregnancy Centre, a pro-life pregnancy Centre in downtown Victoria so that women who wanted to make that choice knew who to call or had a web address to look up. Overally, it’s pretty nice. Unfortunately, somebody (or some people) had painted over the word “life” and written above the word “Choice”, “the right to” so that the billboard effectively said “Love them both. the right to Choose.” They didn’t capitalise “the”. (I’m just saying, if you’re going to vandalise, at least use proper capitalisation.)

The funny thing is that the vandals completely missed the point. I don’t think I really need to explain that one, do I? Maybe so. It’s a beautiful image with a recommendation of a pretty darned good choice, one that so-called pro-choicers claim IS a choice . . . but they decided to (how do I put this?) exercise their choice to break the law, deface other people’s property, vandalise, and suppress freedom of speech. That speaks loud and clear that their cause isn’t pro-choice; it is pro-abortion.

If it was really about choice, they would have paid for their own billboard and let women choose between the two.

It almost made the news, but the vandalism was cleaned up too quickly for the news stations to get good footage. I was relieved, because they wanted to interview me in front of the billboard. Of course, interviews would have been good overall so that people could see the truth, but they required a pep-talk from Andrea. I just hope I’m not proven right and it’s not all swept under the rug because little things do matter.

_______________________

Update: It did make the news.

I don’t have a lot of time for “happiness assessment” articles. It seems to me we are so spoiled rotten we just don’t know happiness. We need an introduction. Happiness–hello! Nice to meet you! I’m spoiled, lazy, and overstimulated. We seem to always be seeking an ever diminishing pleasure with ever increasing zeal (CS Lewis paraphrased). We grow bored and we try for a bigger happiness hit. Cocaine, anyone? Now there’s happiness. Is that what science would have us believe?

This article is about how children apparently don’t make you happy. But it also speaks to our prosperity and how that changed the game:

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.

Having spent the weekend with my delightful, beautiful nieces while the deserving parents went away, I will not idealize what raising children is. (Drinks of water in the night, soothe baby by singing rounds of Amazing Grace, put older niece back in bed who woke up crying, morning! Make breakfast–chocolate chip pancakes because I am the Auntie and I don’t have to be healthy–get dressed, easier said than done–babies are squirmy–SUNSCREEN!! lots of it, it’s hot out, wait a second, have to dress myself–make that into a game for kids who are ready and raring to go out, get cold drinks, snacks, extra clothes, diaper bag, shoes–not that foot, the other foot, not those shoes, the other shoes–and out the door! I WAS A HERO!)

Parents are indeed heroes. And happiness may not even be the point. As we walked to the park my niece asked me to stop and take a picture of the ants. The ants. She pointed them out with her tiny finger, following them on the pavement. I did, in fact, and we have video footage now. I expect this to be a popular film anytime soon. Ants: A Special Part of Most Every Suburban Neighbourhood.

Happiness may not be the point, but there is happiness in kids, if you take the time to notice it. There are some things academics cannot measure.

Levi Johnston now says he lied about the Palins. Give him points for admitting it. Better late than never, I suppose.