Archives for 2010

…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.

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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.

Australia has been abuzz with pregnancy related news this month, covering everything from drinking during pregnancy to prenatal vitamins. But it’s the abortion debate that’s been picking up momentum this week.

The survey of 1050 Australians investigating attitudes to early and late abortion is published in the Medical Journal of Australia. It shows remarkably strong public support for women being able to access abortion at all stages of pregnancy, including after 24 weeks. The level of support depends on the circumstances.

One of the differences between this survey and previous ones is that respondents were asked to think specifically about situations where either they or someone close to them such as a partner, sister, daughter or close friend was facing specific clinical and social circumstances.

The Sydney Morning Herald titled this article “Abortion laws don’t reflect public opinion,” citing this study by Crosby/Textor as its supporting evidence. In my opinion, asking someone what they think about their daughter’s hypothetical abortion is a very emotive and inaccurate indicator of their position on the legal status of abortion. But Crosby/Textor seems to have little interest in gathering factual, usable data…

Knowing what people think is one thing. Taking this knowledge and using it to influence the way people behave to achieve your goals is another.

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). Notice the paragraph in the awareness campaign details dedicated to a mysterious company titled MSD who wants you to ‘be well’ at the bottom? It appears disconnected from the rest of the campaign information. Who are MSD anyhow, and what do they have to do with Marie Stopes or awareness? Well, they’re a large pharmaceutical company who sells, among other things (like Nasonex, the nasal spray with the cute little bee in the commercial), contraceptives. It seems there is a lot of money to be made backing a campaign that pushes your product, but Marie Stopes and MSD just want what’s best for women, right? Right.

People who complain about uneven or poor access to abortion leave me completely cold. This is different:

A 21-year-old Ottawa woman who had been sexually assaulted was refused immediate treatment at the Ottawa Hospital over the weekend, the Sun has learned.

The woman was taken to the Civic hospital early Saturday to have a rape kit completed but Ottawa police were told there were no sexual assault nurses available.

The victim was given three options: Lie in a bed until Monday morning when a nurse would be available — but she wouldn’t be able to shower — or go to either Cornwall or Renfrew hospitals.

She ended up being taken to Renfrew to get treatment.

“This is unacceptable and it’s upsetting to hear,” said Concillia Muonde, spokeswoman for the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Ottawa.

“The message it gives to women in the community is nobody is going to do anything about it.”

[…]

Eight women are sexually assaulted every day on average but only one reports it, according to Ottawa police.

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Update: Apparently, this problem is widespread.

A great piece by one Rebecca Walberg:

There is another way to live, though, one that focuses on personal responsibility: to be a person who recognizes that every moment of our lives counts, and that in every moment we can choose anew how we want to conduct ourselves.

This article from the London Times on June 30, 2010 is worth copying in full. I couldn’t find the link online, so here’s a link to a commentary about the article:

I’ve been wavering. But a woman’s right to choose her own way of life is paramount.

In the Cradle Tower at the Tower of London is an interactive display that asks visitors to vote on whether they would die for a cause. Hmm, let’s see. I like dolphins, but if it came down to a straight choice, goodbye Flipper. I’ll shout abuse at a Uruguayan linesman when my country calls, but I wouldn’t take a paper cut for England, let alone a bullet.

Standing where religious martyrs were held and tortured in Britain’s turbulent reformation, I could think of one cause I would stake my life on: a woman’s right to be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses. And that includes complete control over her own fertility. [Read more…]

Child-free, or child-less? I can’t believe there are people with so much time on their hands that they can indulge in such silly linguistic sparring.

Interesting advice: