Archives for 2010

Astounding. Previous stories here and here.

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Update: Looks like she wasn’t released at all.

The first ever scan of a live birth:

Now that‘s science!

… who has five children, would like you to have just one. To save the planet, of course. Thought I’d pass this amusing tidbit along.

As you were.

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Andrea adds: A global one-child policy. Wow. Sounds like a mandate for the United Nations. They might already be on it, who knows?

I am not sure if I’m reading the tone in, but this doesn’t read as the honouring obituary Heather Stilwell most certainly deserves. Heather Stilwell was an anti-abortion activist, a Surrey, British Columbia school trustee and a mother of eight, who passed away of breast cancer at the age of 66 this past weekend.

I interviewed Heather over the phone once for my story on sex selection abortion:

Heather Stilwell noticed something strange was going on in her hometown of Surrey, B.C. A school trustee for Surrey District No. 36 for 12 years now, one of Stilwell’s personal causes has been to promote literacy among kids. On her own time and her own dime, she sews bookbags for kindergartners, using wholesale or donated fabric, and stuffs them with books. The girls like Wemberley Worried, tales of an apprehensive mouse. The boys, usually anything to do with dinosaurs. She estimates she’s given out about 5,000 of these gifts since she started.

In recent years, Stilwell realized that she’d been having to make more and more of the plaid or striped bags she gives out to the boys, and fewer of the pink floral bags for the girls. More dinosaur books, fewer Wemberleys. She can’t put her finger on why, but the boy-girl ratio seems to be increasingly out of whack. “The numbers look pretty skewed to me,” she says. She’s sure of one thing: “[There’re] more boys.”

As it turns out, Stilwell is right.

I remember she spoke out on this politically incorrect topic willingly. I remember being surprised that she was happy to go on the record. So many, on such a topic, would not have been. So she struck me as being a courageous and confident lady. Very pro-woman. And very pro-life, as it turns out, though I didn’t know it at the time I interviewed her.

I’m sure she contributed to her community in countless other ways, but this was the one contact I had with her. And as I wrote above, Heather was right about her feeling that there were more boys than girls in the classrooms. So too, will history judge her right in her support of the unborn, though she may not have won the battle while she walked this earth. May her family find peace at this difficult time.

From CBC News:

A desire for anonymity is sending P.E.I. women to a private abortion clinic in Fredericton and that needs to change, says a local women’s group.

There are no abortions performed on the Island, but the procedure is publicly-funded and performed in Halifax for P.E.I. women. It costs the provincial government $250 and requires a referral by two doctors.

But one Island doctor who refers women to Halifax told CBC News some are uncomfortable with the public route because their names are on government documentation, and typically more women go to the private Morgentaler clinic in Fredericton, and pay the $600 to $800 cost out of their own pocket.

The Women’s Network says that policy needs to change.

“If fear of being identified, whether that’s by a medial professional or if it’s by a record keeper or if that information is just stored on a server somewhere on a computer, if that fear of being found out, so to speak, is there for women, some of them will refuse to access publicly funded abortion,” said network executive director Michele MacCallum.

If you really don’t care about the impact of abortion on women’s health, then by all means, let women file in and out undetected. However, if you want women to have an accurate health record for a health care provider to access they’re going to have to put their names down.

Pat Maloney at the National Post read my mind.

One would hope that in a country where there are no restrictions on abortion there could at least be a public debate — especially about a bill whose sole purpose is to protect women from unwanted abortions. Remember that there is no consensus on abortion; polls consistently tell us show that many Canadians want some limits on abortion.

In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country’s abortion law. But the court did say that Parliament has the right to legislate protection of the unborn.

Even though Mr. Harper would not support such a bill, he doesn’t have to. Bill C-510 is a private member’s bill, not a government bill. The purpose such bills is to give backbench MPs from all parties the opportunity to bring forward legislation they believe in, independent of what’s on the government’s agenda.

Mr. Harper would get one vote — just like any MP — and he could vote as his conscience dictates.

The National Post has been covering the recent events at Carleton University where the students union, CUSA, has decertified the anti-abortion group LifeLine.

There is a striking parallel between what is going on at Carleton University and what is going on in Parliament.

As the Post recently stated: “The fact that these young men and women are anti-abortion should have nothing to do with whether they are worthy of coverage. This is about certain students, CUSA, acting like petty tyrants because they do not like the views of some of their fellow students. This goes against every principle of free speech. Why is there not more outrage about this?”

And why is there not more outrage about abortion debate being shut down in our Parliament? This also goes against every principle of free speech.

Think about it: why should CUSA allow pro-life students to speak out about abortion, when our political leaders won’t allow pro-life MPs to speak out about abortion? CUSA has learned that it’s okay to shut down free speech on unpopular topics.

And where that kind of thinking ends God only knows.

As a relatively new immigrant here, I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of Canadian government. However, I have always been annoyed that the Harper government has been allowed to give the abortion topic the silent treatment, even to the point of making the lack of discussion an election platform.

“I have been clear throughout my entire political career I don’t intend to open the abortion issue,” he said. “I haven’t in the past; I’m not going to in the future.”

Refusing to debate any topic is wholly undemocratic and doesn’t fulfill the government’s duty to be a tool for public opinion. Maloney cleverly parallels this situation with what is happening at CUSA. She asks an important question here, why isn’t there more outrage about this violation of free speech?

You know, I have no idea what she’s talking about… And I suspect she doesn’t, either.

A friend sent me this great link. It’s a TV panel where three women discuss the choice of remaining childless. The anthropologist from Rutgers University describes having large families as littering. To be fair, she relates how some people consider having lots of children as littering. Whether or not this is her belief is anyone’s guess. Is this view of motherhood increasingly prevalent, as many Catholic commenters  suggest? I don’t know. I’m too busy tending to my litter to pay much attention to inanities of this type. I think that we will run out of affordable food and oil long before we make ourselves extinct, personally. Then only the resourceful – like children of large families who learned early how to do more with less – will survive. University professors, especially anthropologists, won’t. But I digress.

I will not be breaking any news to our readers with large families but if we were walking around with our environmental footprint hanging over our heads (à la Eeyore), each one of my six children would have a much smaller cloud than any of their friends. See, I have the dubious blessing of having  friends who are significantly wealthier than I am. I say dubious because it is the root of much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the children gallery. We are asked questions like “Why don’t we have a house in Florida? Everybody has a house in Florida!” , “Why don’t we go to Europe every summer? Everybody goes to Europe every summer!” Everybody has a ski chalet, everybody goes to Hawaii for spring break, everybody gets a car at 16… you get the picture. And hopefully, by now, you will also understand that we may drive a full-size GMC Savana but we are burning nowhere as much fossil fuel as our friends who fly to Florida for a long weekend. And I’m not even getting near the relative size of our houses per inhabitant and the new clothes we’re not buying.

In the meantime, to all our readers with large families: happy littering! Don’t mind the academics: we outnumber them.

It may surprise some of us to hear that the number one killer of pregnant women in the United States is not unsafe abortion, but homicide.

According to a March 2001 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) using death records and coroner reports, state health department researchers found 247 pregnancy-associated deaths between 1993 and 1998, suggesting that the maternal murder phenomenon is the leading cause of death among pregnant women.

This information is important when we’re considering the necessity of Bill C-510. Pregnant women, according to this research, find themselves in more vulnerable situations than women who are not pregnant. In situations of domestic violence, it is necessary then to provide pregnant women with additional support and further protective legislation. The murder of Laci Peterson in 2002 was an ignored harbinger, and Bill C-510 is an attempt to make up for 8 years of lost time and lost lives, like that of Roxanne Fernando.

“People think that pregnancy is a joyful, happy time for families. That’s not always true,” said Phyllis Sharps, an associate professor at The Johns Hopkins University’s school of nursing who researches violence against women.

In some cases, the woman has been abused for years, and the violence escalates to murder after she’s pregnant. In others, pregnancy itself sparks emotions that can lead to murderous rages.

“Violence in intimate relationships is all about power,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. “There are fewer times when you can have power over a woman than when she’s pregnant. She’s vulnerable. It’s an easier time to threaten her.”

In an attempt to educate and raise awareness, the Elliot Institute created this UnChoice Pop Quiz that provides statistics on coercion prior to abortion. Those who oppose Bill C-510 fear that it will negatively affect abortion providers. In my opinion, it’s more important to save women’s lives than to consider the risk to abortion providers.