Archives for August 2011

For those of you who think, “that Andrea: She’s so conservative,” I’ll have you know that you are…right. However, once in a while, I do stretch myself by reading the autobiographies of communists. Right now I’m enjoying The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. I’m about halfway through and I finally hit the point where she explains the title:

I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness…”

And that rang true to me, so I thought I would share it.

From Gallup,

PRINCETON, NJ — Self-described “pro-choice” and “pro-life” Americans agree about nine major areas of abortion policy, while disagreeing on eight others. Among the areas of consensus, in which a majority of both groups hold the same opinion, especially large percentages are in favor of requiring informed consent for women (86% of pro-choice adults and 87% who are pro-life) and making abortion illegal in the third trimester (79% and 94%).

Norma McCorvey is Jane Roe:

I’m currently in the first stages of putting together a community event.

When I first came to Nova Scotia from Colorado 4 years ago, I was surprisingly pregnant, again, with a nursing seven month old in tow. Needless to say, I didn’t get out much and that first year was pretty lonely. Mom groups did help, but as a new parent, I felt a lot of pressure to “measure up” to other moms and not show my seams. Since that trying time, I’ve been looking for a way to integrate marginalized populations for their mutual benefit in order to curb some of the depression these groups feel from simply being isolated (try wheeling a double stroller around a city and you’ll see just how restrictive urban life can be!).

Right now, I’m looking to organize single or new moms with young children, particularly those who find themselves feeling lonely, for community interaction with senior citizens.

 In 1987, 8.5 million elderly lived alone; by 2020, 13.3 million elderly will live alone.

The concept? Take two lonely groups and pair them together for their mutual benefit. Ideally, this would be a weekly event taking place in a senior home facility. As I said, we’re in beginning stages, and the details have yet to be ironed out, but if there is anyone in the HRM area who would like to get involved, participate, offer advice, offer transportation etc. please contact me. I am currently working with a location, the home is for ladies only, so at this time the project participants are restricted to mothers and their children (hopefully in the future fathers can participate as well!).

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Andrea adds: Sounds like a great idea to me. Our communities today are very, very weak, to our detriment. Best wishes, Jennifer!

Yes, it is still summer. I have noticed people have already taken to doing the old, “wow, how did the summer pass by this quickly!!” thing. Well, it hasn’t. And for me, it won’t. Not until, oh say, October, when you will have to pry the flip flops off my cold feet. Not that anyone would be interested in doing such a thing. I’m getting off track.

Back to summer reading: I’ve just become aware of Reinventing the Rose. I have not read it yet, but the main character wants to keep her baby, and her boyfriend wants to force her to abort. The author, Kenneth J. Harvey, details the development of the embryo alongside the court battle between the mother and the father. Here’s the plot summary:

As a fatherless girl with a mother who persistently encouraged her daughter’s artistic temperament, Anna Wells is highly sensitive to the life developing in her when she discovers she is pregnant. Anna’s gynecologist boyfriend, Kevin, considers the time just not right to have children, so Anna moves to a 100-year-old house in Bareneed, an abandoned cove in Newfoundland, where she takes comfort in renovating the interior of her new home and working on a series of paintings detailing roses.

Paralleling Anna’s own journey is a minutely detailed, day-by-day development of the embryo. All goes well until a car arrives delivering a court summons. Kevin has filed a statement of claim seeking the termination of the embryo as “return of property.”

One night, while still in Bareneed and upset over the impending legal action, Anna discovers an abandoned little girl almost frozen to death in her front yard. Mysterious circumstances continue to surround the children in Bareneed as pro-choice and pro-life factions marshal their forces.

As I said, I haven’t read it, but I will note this: Detailing embryology rarely leads individuals to cherish “abortion rights” because it is so miraculous and there is so much going on at such high speeds, all concealed in utero. This Canadian author is quite prolific and one can only hope that Reinventing the Rose might cause a reader or two to reinvent their thoughts on life, when it begins and why that matters.

British politician David Alton, Baron Alton of Liverpool, and founder of the children’s charity Jubilee Action, delivered this speech in July. It’s worth reading in full, and you can do that here.

There have been around seven million abortions in this country since 1967. Last year there were 189,574 abortions. In the same year, 48,348 women had more than one abortion, Tragically, 383 women had five or more abortions; some as many as eight –  all in the same year.

When I sent these statistics on to the author of the 1967 Abortion Act, David Steel, who remains a colleague in the House of Lords, I had an email back simply asking: “abortion being used as contraception?”.  A good question.

I’m thrilled about these new plans. Japan is taking steps to care for its elderly and ensure they aren’t alone during the last moments of their lives. What are some of their ideas?

One realtor has started to promote the idea of house sharing by single mothers and senior citizens, bringing together senior citizens who are interested in renting space in their house after their own families are gone with single mothers in search of affordable housing and also, perhaps, a live-in babysitter.

[…]

In the end, the simplest solution may just be trying to reach out, Inukai said.

Their are organizations, such as L’Arche, that have been integrating marginalized populations for years now. It’s about time we started to do this with the elderly and single/new mothers as well. I can’t think of any groups that would benefit more from each others’ company.

If you are a single/new mother in the Halifax area and would like to get involved, please contact me. I’d like to pair up with a local senior community for regular “coffee breaks.”

Socioeconomic factors, not your “wantedness”, will play a big factor in how successful you are in life. This article from The Telegraph shows that the educational success of a child has very little to do with being planned or unplanned, and everything to do with being rich or poor.

A study has found that pupils whose parents did not intend to have a baby lagged five months behind planned babies at age five, when their vocabulary was tested, and a further three to four months behind those born after IVF.

However experts say the findings are just down to the developmental gap between rich and poor in Britain. The differences in scores “almost entirely disappear” when family background is taken into account, since children born following assisted reproduction tend to have older, better educated and richer parents. […]

Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, said: “This study shows how important it is to take social factors into account when looking at child outcomes. Children from unplanned pregnancies have lower scores on cognitive tests than those from planned pregnancies, but they are also much more likely to come from single parent, low income households. Once this is taken into account, there is no impact of an unplanned pregnancy on children’s development.”

preventative – remedy that prevents or slows the course of an illness or disease; “the doctor recommended several preventatives”

Pregnancy, is not an illness. But the Obama administration has just classified what your body does naturally as something that needs prevention. More from The Associated Press,

WASHINGTON (AP) — A half-century after the advent of the pill, the Obama administration on Monday ushered in a change in women’s health care potentially as transformative: coverage of birth control as prevention, with no copays.

Services ranging from breast pumps for new mothers to counseling on domestic violence were also included in the broad expansion of women’s preventive care under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Since birth control is the most common drug prescribed to women, health plans should make sure it’s readily available, said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Not doing it would be like not covering flu shots,” she said.

Of course breast pumps and counseling are wonderful things, but comparing birth control with flu shots? When you get influenza, your body is a host for a virus. This is not what your body was made to do. When you get pregnant, your body hosts a baby. Something the female body has been doing since the beginning of humankind (our mammalian ancestors did it that way too).

I wrote the following for the March for Life this year, so I’ll say it again…

Does not reigning in and restricting the feminine functions of our bodies, namely the ability to become pregnant and carry a child, in order to succeed by some predetermined standard devalue the very thing that is “womanhood”?

Can we imagine, if in any other civil rights movement, that the group fighting for those rights would be told that in order to achieve the freedoms they desire, they must first put in check the very things that make them different from the ruling majority?

It’s unthinkable, and yet this is what women across the globe are being led to believe and reiterate day after day.