Archives for 2010

An article here about Rod Bruinooge’s new bill to ban coercing someone  to have an abortion.

So does this happen in Canada? Certainly not to the extent that women are being murdered, right, left and centre, no, as was the case for Roxanne after whom MP Rod Bruinooge is naming his bill.

I’m way more concerned about the subtle form of coercion or influence that happens in just your average abortion. Women are very susceptible to just even the smallest expression (or lack of expression) of their partners and family, I think.

And the burden of proof does not lie in proving that no one is coerced into keeping the baby, not in a culture where there are 100,000 plus abortions annually.

First I hear of this. Not sure what to think – how do you even begin to enforce it? But in principle, I agree that women should not be coerced into abortions.

Update: Perhaps the least surprising news story of the week…

The maternal health saga continues:

The number of women dying in childbirth worldwide has dropped dramatically, a British medical journal reports, adding that it was pressured to delay its findings until after U.N. meetings this week on public health funding.

Get your two minutes of hate here… My favourite part:

It’s sort of a misconception in some circles that ladies who choose pregnancy termination would be interested in adoption, that’s one thing people don’t understand.

Abortion is birth control. Adoption is giving up your child and not accepting your duties as a mother. Most women are not interested in that. It’s only in a religiously-altered mind that that’s a true option.

[h/t]

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Andrea adds: Wow. That’s all I have to say at the moment.

More news from the revolution!

An alarming new superbug may be on its way — an incurable form of gonorrhea. The disease, once easily killed with a shot of penicillin, is increasingly becoming drug-resistant. Soon, the world may face a version that can’t be killed by any known antibiotic, warned Catherine Ison, the director of the sexually transmitted bacteria reference library with the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency.

A reader sent the link to this McGill piece. The author is against graphic images–fine, some of the women on this team are, too. He’s also against the rather soft-spoken women of Silent No More, standing with images that say “I regret my abortion.”

Fohl’s professed love for dialogue is bizarre, since for a brief period this year, it seemed that Choose Life’s tactics had destroyed any hope of a meaningful discussion of reproductive rights on campus. When you confront a woman with a sign reading, “I regret my abortion,” for instance, you cannot expect students to eagerly engage in dialogue.

One is left with the distinct impression that the author wants women–only pro-life women, though–to go and “dialogue” in a dark closet somewhere, by themselves. Talk about a wimp. If you can’t handle a gentle woman holding a sign, you’ve got a problem and should probably get some help. Just by the by, this is precisely the sort of person I warn women against dating: in a crisis pregnancy he’ll smile and nod and say–it’s your choice, honey. (Now I’m gonna get a beer and watch the playoffs.)

That’s what this story implies:

Just two years after it celebrated its opening with the blessing of a Catholic priest, a “pro-life” pharmacy in Virginia has gone belly up. The Divine Mercy Care Pharmacy in Chantilly was one of a few in the United States to peg its business model to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Accordingly, its shelves were free of condoms, porn, cigarettes, and even make-up. Turns out, though, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of stuff people actually want to buy.

Or maybe banning make-up was too much?

For those who’ve been following the failed Russian adoption story. An adoptive parent gives us some perspective on difficult cases.

Our family’s adoption was far from perfect, although for the moment it seems to have ended better than Hansen’s. Of course, we still don’t know how it really ends. Even if my adopted daughter turns out fine, there are the other children to consider — my three-year-old biological son may spend years on the couch because my adopted daughter displaced him; either my older son or my older daughter could seek the love and affection they lost this past year in a cult or a series of destructive one-night stands. We won’t know until we know (and we’ll never know what might have been different).

With the publicity surrounding his return, Hansen’s adopted son will surely be taken in by some Russian family, and no matter what’s said about it publicly, that will not be a smooth sail down the Nile. Probably none of it will work out as anyone would have intended — in fact, by definition, it already hasn’t. A perfect world would be one in which every child could be well cared for by the mother he or she was born to. That’s not what we’ve got. A “successful” adoption story is one in which you can tell yourself that it worked out better than the alternative. That has to be enough.