Archives for January 2011

In the UK, Tory MP Nadine Dorries is making headlines in this article from the New Statesman.

Anti-abortionists are feeling emboldened and they have adopted a new tactic. In both the United States and Britain, campaigning groups no longer implicitly state that they are against abortion, but claim instead that they are offering women “real choices”.

[…]

Her intention is to introduce “fully informed consent” for women seeking abortion, she says, rather than to campaign for a return to illegality. “There are 1,300 couples in this country wanting to adopt, but women are rarely told of that option. They feel railroaded into a cattle-market process and end up in clinic with 60 or so other women every day who are not treated with particular kindness.”

It’s a lengthy read with many issues crowding in for their share of the soapbox, but the general idea is that the pro-life movement worldwide is leaning toward a PWPL style mission. A world without abortion. By choice.

Maybe it’s the realization that laws aren’t enough, or that laws aren’t always enforced, or maybe it’s that this kind of mission does offer real choice (or maybe it’s that PWPL is highly popular and extremely influential). Pregnant, need help? Need housing? Need money? Need support? Need adoption advice? A large and ever growing network of organizations and volunteers are getting those bases covered. And if there is one thing that pro-abortion feminists (because not ALL feminists are in fact pro-abortion) hate, it’s other people offering women choices.

The invaluable folks at Mashable.com produced a handy list of parent-friendly social networks. How to find advice, parents who’ve been through what you’re now going (seems to be a lot of 2-year-olds refusing to eat out there…), or simply to find new friends who are up to their ears in crayons and diapers just like you.

Wow.

“Smart, fair-minded, hard-working good men make all sorts of mistakes in divorce. Executives and professors and doctors make the same mistakes as plumbers and truck drivers,” according to Joseph Cordell in The 10 Stupidest Mistakes Men Make When Facing Divorce. The lawyer and his wife run a bustling St. Louis law practice specializing in men’s divorce. “You can’t make a mistake we haven’t seen,” he writes.

Apparently, one of the worst mistakes is not censoring what your new girlfriend writes on Facebook.

When men ask his firm, “What can my girlfriend put up on Facebook about me and our relationship?” Cordell says their answer is: “Nothing. Not a word. Not a single photo. Nothing.” He goes further, telling men to buy a new computer at the first sign of marital discord. “The cost of a new computer is cheap compared with the cost of an incriminating browsing history.”

Sigh. I suppose “trying to work out a way to save the marriage together” would be too boring and simple.

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Véronique agrees: I always thought that if people spent half as much time and energy working on their marriage as they spend working-out their divorce, the divorce rate would be significantly reduced.

Yes, marriage can be challenging. And yes, everybody has a good reason why everybody else should have worked on their marriage but they couldn’t. Marriage is like riding a bike: you have to keep it going or you fall. And it takes two to tango: it takes two people to make a marriage work and it takes two to ruin it. But people are fooling themselves thinking that the end of the marriage will mean the end of their problems, especially when children are involved. Divorce with children means that you will be in almost daily contact with your ex-spouse over child-rearing and finances, the two leading causes of divorce. So why not seek help and learn to make it work?

From the Herald Sun,

So determined are the couple to have a girl that they recently terminated twin boys conceived through IVF.

[…]

The woman, who is consumed by grief over the daughter who died soon after birth, admits she has become obsessed with having a daughter and it has become vital to her psychological health.

Victoria’s Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 bans sex selection unless it is necessary to avoid the risk of transmission of a genetic abnormality or genetic disease to a child.

All IVF clinics in Australia must stay within National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines that say sex selection should not be done except to reduce the transmission of a serious genetic condition.

Australian IVF pioneer Gab Kovacs – not involved in the case – said he could not understand why the couple should be banned from having a girl.

“I can’t see how it could harm anyone,” he said.

“Who is this going to harm if this couple have their desire fulfilled?”

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Brigitte bites: “I can’t see how it could harm anyone”, he said. Gee whiz, I don’t know. I suppose this works if we decide that the twin boys summarily dispatched just don’t count.

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Véronique adds: Harm anyone? How about the poor girl who will eventually be conceived? I can’t see any harmful psychological baggage here (shaking my head in disbelief). When “having a daughter (…) has become vital to her psychological health” it makes you wonder how fit to parent the mother is. Children, girl or boy, don’t fit neatly in the little moulds their parents want to fit them into.

I am slightly ticked off by this piece (just so you know: if you follow all the links some of them will show girls in bikinis). I get it to some extent (i.e. men do not want their girls to look like men – fair enough; I don’t want my men to look like girls). But to come down so hard on the Miss America contestants for having toned physiques is perhaps a touch exaggerated. We can’t all look like this…

True, I am biased. I’ve always exercised, and I’ve always enjoyed being fit and as much on the slim side as I can manage. I’m coming up to ten years in the same dojo (traditional karate). I don’t have Ms. Holloway’s hips but honestly I don’t want them either. I prefer to have curves that are more discreet but decent muscle underneath. Because you know what? After a while (not that I’m looking at any calendar in particular), without exercise, those nice curves just kinda fall apart on you. Also? Being trained in some kind of martial arts means you’re equipped to wallop the first clown who shows up behind you intending to whack your pretty little head with a hammer. It also helps you handle more, ah, serious weapons. Not much point being armed if you’re not strong enough to control the thing.

So. By all means let’s try to keep looking like girls. No, it’s not necessary to look like you’re headed for the body building competition. But come on. Abs on a girl are not necessarily ugly.

[h/t]

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Véronique adds: I don’t do karate, I run. I run two half marathons a year. (If one-and-a-half years makes a habit.) Last week, as I was leaving work to go for a run, my darling co-worker printed out the sketch of the “hammer dude” so I could get familiar with his face. Maybe I could outrun him, if it was at the beginning of my run and he was drunk. Running will get you some nice legs and burn some fat (assuming you don’t reward yourself with a Starbuck’s Trenta with a cup of whip on top). But it won’t help you wallop clowns.
Recently at home was our annual “Vero starts the generator day” to make sure I can survive when my husband is away. And sure enough, I have great running legs and cardio-pulmonary capacity but not enough raw power to crank-up the genny. So if looking like a guy means that you can survive hammer attacks and crippling blizzards, I say “bring it on”.

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Andrea adds: There must be something wrong with me. I looked at the links above and whether said blogger was criticizing or applauding, all I saw was beautiful woman after beautiful woman. I have issues with bikinis and high heels though. It’s just not practical.

Thailand has something of a tarnished track record when it comes to enforcing legislation. Prostitution, you may be surprised to know, is actually illegal in the country, regardless of how many women and children are trafficked in and out each year for the sex trade. Considered a “sex tourism” hot spot, it is not far fetched to think that abortions, also illegal, occur within its borders.

This article from Times LIVE discusses the finding of 2,000 tiny aborted bodies in a Bangkok temple in November of last year, a finding that has the Thai government threatening to “ban sex with girls under 20”. The article uses a 17 year old unidentified girl as its primary source, while at the same time stating that only 12 to 15 percent of all abortions in the country are performed on teenagers. It seems our reaction in the West, as well as that of the Thai government, is misdirected towards the smallest percentage of women affected. However, given the country’s habit of making unenforced laws to placate a voting public, whatever the legislative outcome may be, it may directly not affect the lives of the Thai people and their unfortunately high abortion rates.

Tomorrow marks a celebration of Roe v Wade for some folks. Those pro-abortion folks have been doing a “blog for choice” day for six years now.

Since “choice” is a euphemism for the very painful and heartwrenching concept of killing your child, some other bloggers will be asking a simple question: What do you mean by choice?

I’m sure they’ll have plenty of answers to skirt the issue.

No one should celebrate abortion, which is what they are doing.

…from Philadelphia, (warning: readers may find this story disturbing)

An abortion doctor has been arrested and charged with the murder of a patient and seven live infants whose spines were severed with scissors at a West Philadelphia clinic that has been described as a house of horrors, officials said today.

District Attorney Seth Williams said the doctor, Kermit P. Gosnell, was charged following a grand jury investigation.

Gosnell, 69, lost his medical license last year after health officials determined his clinic posed “a clear danger to the public.”

Gosnell was arrested this morning, officials said. He has maintained his innocence.

The seven infants were born alive in the 6th, 7th and 8th months of pregnancy and killed by severing their spinal cords with scissors, William said.

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Brigitte adds: Safe, legal and rare. Yeah, right.

I remember once hearing that the most lucrative type of book you can write as an author are Harlequin romances. Not good news for people like me, not good news. Those books are read by women, and now we have a corresponding world of TV.

The question is, as raised by this Globe and Mail article: Do women watch crap? And I’m inclined to say yes.

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For once (!), Brigitte wants to be contrarian: I have read a few Harlequin romances (it was research!) and while I got tired of the predictable writing style (the mouth goes dry, the knees go weak – I cannot STAND the see the words “mouth” and “dry” together anymore!), I have to say some of them are not altogether bad reads. At least they tell a straightforward and old-fashioned story, as opposed to so much modern literary fiction. But television, yes. A different kettle of fish to be sure. I used to loooove Will & Grace and Seinfeld and House and now (thanks, Netflix!), I’m going through Mad Men (second season) and the good ole Get Smart. None of which is particularly uplifting. But see, getting uplifted isn’t why I watch TV shows…

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Véronique comes clean: I watched Bulging Brides today while eating lunch. It was that or I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant on TLC, which scares me stupid, along with A C-section Story and Bringing Home Baby.

Until work installs iTunes on my desktop, I will need to watch low-brow tv on my soup minute (“lunch hour” too generous). At home, I watch House on the treadmill, Mad Man with my husband and The Good Wife while catching-up on work, all iTunes downloads. We do not want cable in our house: the content is too bad, the ads too many and the bills too high.

Look, I’m not against breast-feeding. Not at all. It’s great if that’s your thing. I’m not even that squeamish about lactating in public (though not very wild about it either). But this is pushing it.

The Wisconsin Bang variety is “deliciously creamy,” City Funk has a “dizzying sweet finish,” and Sweet Air Equity is a “mild, hard cheese that crumbles in your mouth.” The fromage connoisseur might salivate at these tantalizing descriptions, but for those who know the key ingredient — human breast milk — these culinary accounts elicit everything from curiosity to utter disgust.

To New Yorker Miriam Simun, a breast-milk cheese-maker who recently served up the creations as part of a university project, the question is: To eat or not to eat. We consume breast milk as a baby, so why not spread it on a baguette as an adult? We consume cow’s cheese, so why not sink our teeth into cheese coagulated from human milk?