Archives for 2010

…then I can think of ways to help:

Couples struggling to conceive are about to get financial help from the Quebec government, as the province becomes the first jurisdiction in North America to pay for fertility treatments.  Health Minister Yves Bolduc announced Tuesday the launch of a provincial plan that will cover up to three cycles of in-vitro fertilization, starting on Aug. 5. Bolduc anticipates 3,500 fertilization cycles will be administered this year at a cost of more than $25 million. That figure could reach $63 million by 2013-2014. “It’s good for Quebec because it will increase the birth rate,” Bolduc said.

I expect a defunding of abortion to follow very, very shortly. Don’t all jump at once, now.

News that Bristol Palin and her once fiance, father of her child Levi are engaged is not like a soap opera.

I haven’t watched The Young and the Restless in years, but if I did, I’m pretty sure Victor would still be kicking around doing the same old thing. So really, Bristol Palin is moving too quickly.

For those of you familiar with Lila Rose, undercover investigations of crisis pregnancy centers is a familiar plot line. This week, however, it was pro-abortion advocates doing the impersonating.

The report, titled “Unmasking Fake Clinics: the Truth about Crisis Pregnancy Centers in California,” asserts that the clinics make false claims linking abortion to breast cancer and infertility and dissuade particularly vulnerable women from receiving accurate medical advice.

The investigation, which included visits to 14 clinics in six counties and phone calls to an additional 200 centers across the state, was conducted by the NARAL Pro-Choice California Foundation unpaid staff and volunteers over a six-month period ending in August 2009. […]

More than half of the clinics investigated highlighted mortality as a claimed complication from abortion and the unpaid volunteer investigators were ultimately “dissuaded from considering abortion as an option.”

Really? If they had been dissuaded, would they continue to volunteer for NARAL?

Amy Everitt, the California organization’s state director, said that the report will be distributed to community-based organizations that provide medical referrals to the most at-risk groups of women, including those who are young, low-income, of color or from rural locations.

Because medical staff don’t need to provide abortion alternatives to those women?

Part of the problem, Everitt said, is deceptive advertising, which is why the organization collected more than 66,000 signatures on a petition targeting two online information sites, YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com

On these sites, more than thirty centers nationwide, including two in California, were listed under “abortion information and referral services” or “abortion clinics”, but were found not to offer those services or referrals, according to the report.

One crisis pregnancy center, Options for Women in Concord, which is listed on the crisis pregnancy clinic website www.lifecall.org, is a self-described “abortion clinic alternative”.

If only there was a category for “abortion clinic alternatives” in my phone book. There wasn’t, but when I looked for “tattoo removal”, low and behold they were lumped in with the tattoo parlours. Shameful… those two things aren’t related at all.

Please forgive the serious topic for a moment (some days, you gotta do what you gotta do). Hold onto your bonnets, ladies, because it appears the new Old Spice Dude is making personalized videos for bloggers and random fans. Please please please, can I get one?

If you’re somehow unaware of this phenomenon, read about it here. Below is my personal favourite (“I’m on a horse”).

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

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.