Archives for 2010

There may be more to this story than what I can read here, but still. What on earth is going on? How do people get from disagreeing with your pro-life position to threatening violence for expressing it?

Lifesite news report that Mariska Orbán de Haas,  a Dutch Catholic pro-life journalist, has‘received hundreds of death threats and more than ten threats of torture. Her ‘crime’ against Dutch sensibilities was to write an open letter to pro-abortion parliamentarian Representative Jeannine Hennis-Plasschaert.

Lifesite news report:

‘The letter, published on October 27, sparked outrage in the largely liberal, pro-abortion Netherlands.  Orbán soon offered a public apology, but that has not prevented her from receiving an avalanche of angry responses. French journalist Jeanne Smits reports that the letter has generated 350,000 tweets on Twitter, and various sites have created distorted pictures of her face, portraying her as a devil.’

Mariska Orbán had written an open letter to Hennis-Plasschaert because she had called a letter from Bishop Everard de Jong ‘disgusting’ for asking ‘representatives to stop the killing of the unborn in the face of impending budget restrictions, pointing out that defunding “bloody abortion clinics” would save money and help preserve future generations who could care for the elderly.’ Along with the letter the Bishop had also sent a plastic model of a fetal humanbeing.

Orbán wrote to the representive publicly, pointing out that both she and Hennis-Plasschaert have experienced the suffering of miscarriages, and that the fetal model she received from Bishop De Jong would resemble their lost children at the time of their deaths.

“In that light,” asked Orbán, “is it not ‘disgusting’ that our society permits us to abort more than thirty thousand babies in the Netherlands every year?” She noted that children who die by abortion are “exactly the same as the mysterious little lives that we expectantly carried within us.”

Yesterday at the dinner table, we asked our children a very dangerous question. We said “If you were the parents of six children, what would you do differently?” Suckers for punishment, I know. “I wouldn’t have six children” was the first (half) joking reply, followed by “make more money.” Then the conversation turned more serious: “I would do more things with my children, fun things” said one, “I would better protect the older children from the younger ones” said another. It was humbling, if entertaining.

Which is why I was so excited to see this morning’s feature in the Ottawa Citizen: Family 101 with Angelina. Help is at hand, thought I, she also has six children and she’s a celebrity, so she must know what she’s doing. Right?

So how does Angelina do it, with six kids, including toddler twins, a full-time job and a hot husband partner? As it turns out, the answer is that she lets her seven- year-old do the cooking. That’s it! Despite the best assurances of the journalist, I have an inkling that childcare and household staff *may* be involved.

So for the rest of us, I have created a hair child-raising assignment that Angelina will need to successfully complete before claiming a seat among the parenting experts:

1. Your teenage daughter, who rides horses and knows how to keep them alive, tearfully demands a horse. Lovingly shoot her down. Lose points for laughing. Absolute failure if you purchase a horse farm and/or a groom.

2. Your toddler’s life mission is to trash everything that is not bolted down. Your life feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. Your challenge is to cook a healthy meal for eight and clean the toilets. Fail if the toddler ingests cleaning products or climbs in the oven.

3. School lunch challenge: your daughter is sick of homemade cookies. While looking for snack options, you learn that your son is selling his homemade cookies at school to buy chips from the vending machine. He is concerned about his clientele’s reaction to the change in menu. Mediate. Loose points for referring to personal Chef.

Email results to Véronique at keeping it real dot nut.

Forgive the topic, here, but if this is happening, I suppose it’s something to blog about: Australian women having surgery to obtain “designer vaginas” so they can, apparently, compete with the porn industry:

He said the young women he treated often felt pressured into surgery because they feared men would not find them attractive if their labia did not conform to a standard seen in pornography, in which the labia are often airbrushed out.

Another articles highlights a tripling of demand in Australia. Sounds like a self-imposed form of genital mutilation to me.

I don’t know what to think of Saturday morning’s feature on older mothers in the Ottawa Citizen. What I found in equal parts troubling and interesting was to see the feature in the Life section, alongside maternity fashion and the comics. One article reported on “midlife mom” and blogger Angel La Liberté whose website heralds midlife pregnancies as so many fashion statements. You too can have children after 40… look at Céline!! As thrilled as Céline must be with her newborn twin boys, I’m not sure she considers years of fertility struggles and failed IVF attempts, briefly carrying triplets and losing one before finally giving birth prematurely to the remaining two babies on par with choosing the best maternity fashion to fit her midlife curves (not that Céline is particularly well-endowed in that department, which may or may not explain a lot). I don’t know Céline but I’m guessing.

I have no doubt that the particular challenges of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing after 40 make La Liberté’s blog timely and relevant, still I was struck by the “us against them” tone of the gig. Happy as I am to no longer qualify as a SMUT — well-toned Stepford Moms Under Thirty-five — being neither well-toned or under 35; I did not buy it. Truth is, having children late in life is not so much a choice as the culmination of previous choices not to have children before. Women have children in their late-thirties or early forties for many reasons: some married late,  others were unable to conceive right away, other wanted to get a head-start on their careers, sometimes all of the above.  Their choice not to have children at any given time morphed into a choice to have their children late.

Nobody argues that delaying motherhood is not the healthiest option for mother and baby. And I have yet to meet women who delayed childbearing because it was a bad health choice. We shouldn’t  transform midlife childbearing into a lifestyle choice but wonder why women are not having their children earlier in life. As someone who had two children in her early 20s, I do not recommend it. When my young friends get married and start having children at 21 (usually in the reversed order), I cringe. As a society, it is much easier to look at pictures of Céline, Kelly Preston and Mariah Carey and attribute it to lifestyle than to wonder where we took a wrong turn.

“Up, up with people, you meet ’em wherever you go”…That was a song we used to sing at summer camp. (“If more people were for people then people everywhere, there’d be a lot less people to worry about and a lot more people who care!” Wow. The things you learn when you are young really do stay with you. I digress.)

Why am I thinking this today? Because I quite enjoyed seeing Mine Your Own Business this afternoon. And the focus of that documentary was…people. People who need jobs, and the environmentalists who hinder that. The director Phelim McAleer said in the question time afterwards that the two most dangerous words he knows are “sustainable development” because what it typically means is sustainable poverty. Bam! You never hear that in Canada.

So I went to shake his hand after to say I enjoyed the film. (By the way, he and his wife also did Not Evil, Just Wrong, another great documentary.) I also mentioned I’m pro-life, and perhaps he could do a film about the population control side of the environmental movement. He jumped in to point out that they want to get rid of certain people–the brown and black people who are poor. That’s when he pointed out that he cares for people, not the environment.

This reminded me of our t-shirts, People for the Ethical Treatment of People, because you really wouldn’t treat a dog like this. Sadly, with people, it’s all fair game. Pun intended.

I saw this article when it came out last weekend. And sighed. Brenda Major was the lead on the American Psychological Association assessment of abortion and mental health, an assessment that basically discarded every single abortion and mental health study but one. One study. Their conclusions were based on one study. (Read more about that, here.)

So after seeing Major’s article, my exact thoughts were I wonder if Dr. Priscilla Coleman will get a response in the paper? I don’t know if she pitched to the paper and they rejected it, but she did write a response here. She is a psychologist who has conducted much of the research on abortion and mental health (in peer-reviewed journals).

Incidentally, much good literature showing negative mental health effects the result of abortion comes from Europe, and Brenda Major makes it clear she only examines US studies (some of which are great studies, too, don’t get me wrong). It’s just that she is openly admitting there’s a great sphere of literature she isn’t looking at.

The study wars continue, unabated. For me, as a non-psychologist, I’ll always believe that some things are not a choice and we don’t kill to solve our problems. It seems reasonable and logical that when we choose to kill innocents to solve our problems, there will likely be some repercussions to that. But people call me crazy. What’s a girl to do?

______________________

Brigitte adds: I don’t understand this. To me, whether abortions have negative mental-health consequences or cause breast cancer or limp hair really is besides the point. I don’t want the studies to show one thing or the other; this isn’t where it’s at. Even if there was definitive proof that abortions increased happiness in women I’d be against it. I’m guessing pro-abortion types don’t justify their position on the lack of definitive proof that abortions cause limp hair or breast cancer or terrible mood swings. So why the endless study wars? What’s the point?

I’m listening to people call in with their recollections of war on 580 CFRA in Ottawa. One fellow recalls how his father went to war and his mother was home with nine children from age six months to 11 years, eight boys, one girl. He said he remembers his dad today, but he also remembers his mom. Very moving.

It will take a heck of a lot more than that to restore my lack of faith in the UN, but I’m still pleased about this:

UNITED NATIONS — Iran failed Wednesday to secure a seat on the board running the new UN super agency for women in the face of a fierce diplomatic onslaught against its rights record.

Gotta start somewhere…

This story starts with hubby sending me a link to this:

A Muslim religious channel in Britain is being censored after allowing presenters on air to condone marital rape and violence toward women, and for calling women who wear perfume in mosques “prostitutes.”

The U.K. Daily Mail reports that in one program, the host told viewers that it was “not strange” and “not such a big problem” for a man to force his wife to have sex.

The U.K.’s T.V. watchdog, Ofcom, ruled the Islam Channel breached the broadcasting code in five different programs between May 2008 and October 2009.

At first, I must admit, I was rather confused. Weren’t we just told marital rape was impossible under Islam? I must have misunderstood.

And then I went googling around for fun, to see who was picking up the story (yes, looking for outraged feminists – no, didn’t find none… so far), and below is a screen capture of what I found. Look at the list of headlines (and news sources), and see if you can correctly identify each outlet’s bias. It’s a fun game!

In support to Andrea’s previous post, here is an article that gives a well rounded view from the mother’s perspective of various types of adoption in some of the most trying situations.

Carrying your baby to full-term and then giving it away is preferable to terminating the pregnancy for some women, but there’s no ‘easy option’. Here, three mothers tell KATE HOLMQUIST about putting their babies up for adoption.

[…]

THE RAPE VICTIM WHO RELINQUISHED HER BABY

Four years ago, 27-year-old Toni was raped on a holiday abroad. Having been made pregnant by her rapist, she says she spent a lot of her pregnancy in denial about the consequences, yet at the same time never considered an abortion. “From the second I found out I was pregnant, I knew I was in no position to be a single parent and I would not have considered a termination. I always believed everything happens for a reason. I think the child has a right to live.”

The options can range from open, semi-open (which Toni eventually chose), and closed. This article gives great insight into what can sometimes be a confusing process.