Female sexual dysfunction – which is claimed to affect up to two thirds of women – is a disorder invented by the pharmaceutical industry to build global markets for drugs to treat it, it is claimed today.
I’m going to sound awfully old-fashioned, but you know, if we could only stop treating sex like some kind of machine that needs technique and oil and tinkering and stuff, we might start enjoying ourselves a bit more.
Hey, look! Somebody I know published a fine piece on that famous “hooker ruling”. And it neatly addresses something that’s been bugging me for a while about the debate over whether prostitution should be legal – the way people confuse “legal” with “good”. As in: prostitution should be legal because let’s be honest, what’s the big deal? So what if some women (and men) want to sell their bodies? It’s theirs, right? Well, no. Not right.
Countries with legalized prostitution should consider the number of young girls transported in dirty containers from places like Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria and elsewhere, to service western buyers. Will Canada join their ranks?
Some in the Netherlands are now hoping to undo the damage of legalized prostitution. Amsterdam’s Mayor Job Cohen told the press in 2007 human trafficking was on the rise and crime was running rampant: “Since the legalization in 2000, things have changed. The law was created for voluntary prostitution but these days we see trafficking of women, exploitation and all kinds of criminal activity.”
Prostitution is dangerous whether legal or illegal. Furthermore, it’s not a choice. The vast majority of women come to it through drug and sexual abuse, mental health problems and extreme poverty.
Maintaining strict laws is about protecting women who are abused by the very way in which they survive. This is also about the kind of country we want to live in.
Because I have too much spare time, I’m taking a couple of MBA courses this year. One of them is marketing. I went into this with no expectations whatsoever – didn’t really know what the content would be, how it would be taught, or anything other than it’s a core course for the program. And it’s fascinating. One of the ideas that I found particularly resonant was the argument that really good marketing makes selling obsolete. If you have identified a need, developed the right product, priced it and promoted it properly, it will sell itself. (Example: Apple’s new gadgets which are sold out within about twenty minutes of release. If you think Steve Jobs is the devil, choose a different example.)
This goes to the heart of why I don’t think criminalizing abortion is the way for pro-lifers to spend their time, money and influence. Yes, it might well reduce the number of abortions that happen in Canada (or it might increase the number of Canadians who drive to the nearest US state that allows abortion on demand, or the number of doctors doing stealth abortions. Probably a combination of all three.) But why not eliminate the need for legislation, the way good marketing of products obviates heavy-handed sales?
I’m convinced that if we could have an honest discussion about what abortion is, how a fetus develops, the short and long term effects on women who abort their pregnancies, even if they think it’s a positive choice or an exercise of freedom, or how sexual politics have changed to the detriment of almost everyone in an abortion-on-demand culture, we wouldn’t need laws – the vast majority of decent people would no more consider abortion to be a solution to an unplanned pregnancy than they would consider murdering their spouse to be the solution to a marriage hitting a bad patch. Let’s work on the message – the substance but also the packaging and the distribution method. If it helps the pro-life cause to sell itself, it will have been worth it.
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Andrea adds: Don’t forget cutting government funding for abortion and abortion-promoting groups.
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Andrea adds again: Was at an interesting talk last night and conversation turned to how to market the pro-life message. The difference between marketing in the world (Coke versus Pepsi, for example) is that this type of marketing capitalizes on self-interest. So too does the pro-abortion mindset. Where pro-lifers are marketing an “other-focussed” view–also a long term one. And so I wonder whether Rebecca’s course addresses those factors at all. Marketing the pro-life message comes down to a civilizational shift.
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Back to Rebecca: To Andrea’s point: actually this sort of did come up in the discussion, as when the prof was (introductory seminar) outlining what marketing was (and what it’s not – which is simply advertising.) Briefly, there are short term marketing tactics, which involve attempts to boost sales, usually of a specific product, through flash and gimmickry. And then there’s a long term approach where you want to change how people think and live for years down the road.
Governments and lobby groups do this a lot – think recycling ad campaigns, public health campaigns involving cancer prevention and detection – but so did Apple, which foresaw and helped bring about a world in which computer were everywhere and in everything, and Microsoft, which saw a chance to give people far more control over the inner workings of these machines.
The point of much political, cultural and religious discussion is ultimately people’s choices and behaviours. So looking at pro-life (and, as commenters have pointed out, the culture of promiscuity) messages as part of that discussion is interesting. But what I really found intriguing was this idea that if your strategy consists of loudly and obviously exhorting people to do something at the final stage of the decision-making process, whether it’s waving placards in front of a clinic or having giant balloons outside a car dealership trying to get people in the doors, you’re missing the bigger and better window of opportunity – to shape people’s perceptions and beliefs so that they don’t consider going into the clinic, or the Ford dealership, because they believe deep down that abortions are wrong and harmful, or imports are more efficient and safer.
I’m not saying there is no place for other strategies in trying to change how Canadians perceive abortion. But one thing business does extremely well is figure out how to get the most bang for their buck.
If the marketing industry has concluded that the best way to sell something is to understand your market and tailor your message so the product sells itself, maybe we should give it a shot in the abortion discussion.
…that refugees in Canada do not have easy access to surgery with one exception? Yup, you guessed it: Abortion.
When it comes to surgery, the federal plan appears to be much stricter than what Canadians are offered through provincial health care. Other than abortions, which appear to be offered and paid for on demand, all surgeries must be either an emergency or deemed essential by a doctor.
I can’t imagine many legitimate refugees wanting this “benefit” though. You escape an oppressive regime and travel a great distance, all to arrive in a new, safe place so that you can… kill your unborn child? Doesn’t really resonate with me.
ProWomanProLife received an email from Marie Stopes International Australia, an abortion provider, recently. They were concerned from across the oceans about a post where I wondered whether they might be affiliated with a particular polling company, Crosby/Textor.
I wondered this because Crosby/Textor released a poll saying that (to paraphrase) Australians favour abortion at any stage of pregnancy on the same day as Marie Stopes International Australia launched a public relations campaign.
You can read my original post in full, here.
Here’s their letter in full now:
Dear Sir/Madam,
A blog post written by Jennifer Derwey (The debate down under, 6 July 2010) has been brought to our attention.
The writer implies that Marie Stopes International hired Crosby/Textor to conduct research recently published in the Medical Journal of Australia.
The writer states:
“So who hired Crosby/Textor and employed their ‘results driven approach’? I’m not pointing fingers, but I will say that it comes as a striking coincidence that Marie Stopes International Australia, the countries leading abortion provider, launched it’s new awareness campaign promoting their services and focusing on contraception the day this article was published (after a six month lull in their Australian news department).”
Marie Stopes International has never hired Crosby/Textor for any services, nor is it involved in any way with the conduct and publication of this research. A review of the Medical Journal of Australia article and author listing can also confirm this.
Marie Stopes International also undertakes regular media activity, issuing media releases on a monthly basis where appropriate and assisting media with requests. It is therefore also inaccurate to state that there has been a “six month lull” in our Australian news department.
We request that you advise the author of the above and amend these incorrect statements as a matter of urgency.
Regards,
Marie Deveson Crabbe, CEO
Marie Stopes International – Australia
That’s entrepreneur Marie Deveson Crabbe, Chief Executive Officer, because selling family planning is big business. Coincidentally, this email was received on September 13, two days before I suddenly lost all access to the MSIA site for seven days (at least from all of my home computers).
Chen Guangcheng accused officials in Shandong province of forcing 7,000 women into abortions or sterilisations.
Chinese Human Rights Defenders said he was released from jail in the city of Linyi, where he had helped people sue over the injustices.
Mr Chen, 39, is a contender for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr Chen, who lost his sight in childhood, has no formal legal training as the blind were not permitted to attend college.
He has also advised farmers in land disputes and campaigned for improved treatment of the disabled.
The view from Quebec. Where, apparently, misinformation guides a woman’s “right” to choose. Let’s start at the top:
For a long time, the province has been at the forefront of the freedom of choice fight. It is here that Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a Quebecker, started his lonely crusade before being vindicated by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988.
The Supreme Court of Canada did not vindicate Morgentaler. They threw it back to Parliament, where such debates belong. We haven’t had that debate since an attempt in 1989.
If someone thinks human life starts at conception, then of course he will see abortion as murder whatever the circumstances.
Human life, according to medical textbooks across the continent does start at conception. It’s personhood that provides the debate, and that’s where pro-abortion folks hide. Sure it’s human life, but is it a person? We can’t say? It’s all so confusing (to them, not me).
On the day after the National Assembly’s motion supporting abortion rights, Prime Minister Stephen Harper let it be known that he would force his MPs to vote against any private member’s bill aimed at recriminalizing abortion in Canada. This is a sharp break with tradition – normally, MPs are not bound by party lines on matters of conscience. But this shows how far Mr. Harper is ready to go to reassure the partisans of free choice – if only because they are the majority of voters.
As the maternal health motion in Parliament showed, you can whip your MPs and still find they vote against you (see the Liberal dissent). On matters of conscience, like abortion, many MPs simply won’t follow this. As for the “majority of voters” being pro-choice, the majority of voters don’t actually know that Canada has no abortion law. Ignorance is the pro-abortion lobby’s bliss.
The foreign women to whom the Harper government is refusing to fund access to safe abortions don’t vote here, so there is no political cost in denying them a right granted to Canadian women two decades ago.
Again, abortion is not a right. I’d like to see her evidence for saying that. Because merely saying it, on repeat, doesn’t make it so!
Abortion has often been defined as a ‘necessary evil’, and for those in the immense grey zone of attitudes towards abortion, this powerful phrase tends to push them towards acceptance of the procedure. It allows one to support abortion, while still retaining a recognition that it is not ideal, a sort of moral give and take that softens the callousness of being pro-abortion. But those who are adamantly and unapologetically pro-abotion desire a procedure that is quick, painless (both emotionally and physically for the women), and accessible with as little emotivism as possible, rendering the term ‘necessary evil’ itself unnecessary.
So the pro-choice side is celebrating the latest study from Oregon:
Teenagers who have abortions do not appear to be at increased risk for depression or low self-esteem, according to the first nationally representative study to examine the issue.
Jocelyn T. Warren of Oregon State University and her colleagues analyzed data collected from 289 teenage girls who reported having at least one pregnancy when interviewed as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health between 1994 and 1996. Sixty-nine reported having had an abortion. They were also interviewed again five years later. The analysis found no association between having had an abortion and depression or low self-esteem within either a year of the pregnancy or five years later, the researchers report in apaper being published in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.
In their minds, they must see this as an achievement. Women will be less likely to require counselling as part of the abortion process (which will speed up things in the waiting room), and women will feel (similarly to postpartum depression) an ever increasing pressure not to ‘feel bad’. So while some women are suppressing their thoughts and emotions, others still will feel nothing, and the effect of these states of mind are not only possibly detrimental to the individual, but to the society as a whole.
Remember, these teenagers will one day be deciding what to do with all of us when we’re seniors.
Took a while, but they did it. The UN begrudgingly accepts that fewer women are dying abroad than they had hoped. (Funding depends on the problem being very, very bad, so that comment is actually less sarcastic than you might think.)
This is the sort of abortion that doesn’t happen, we are told. Late term for lifestyle reasons. (“I couldn’t possibly have an unperfect child.”) Wonder if the Canadian taxpayer paid for it. Probably.
BALTIMORE – A New Jersey abortion doctor accused of shuttling his patients to Maryland for late-term abortions is now accused of mistreating two additional patients, including a woman from Canada who received an abortion of a nearly full-term fetus. The new accusations against Dr. Steven Brigham are contained in documents filed by the New Jersey attorney general’s office, which is seeking to have Brigham’s license suspended or revoked. Brigham has agreed to stop practicing medicine until a hearing next month.
The documents show that in early August, Brigham performed an abortion for a 35-year-old Canadian who was 33 weeks pregnant. The fetus had Down syndrome.
The baby had Down syndrome. Summary execution for falling below our very high standards of what it means to be perfect.
(If you’re getting an angry tone from this post that’s because I am.)