Archives for 2011

Margaret Somerville weighs in on why the “Win a Baby” competition is unethical.

Just one of the many things I’m thankful for: The Hills of Gatineau. 

I tend to think of lobbyists as well-suited men sporting slicked-back Pompadours working for some hungry tobacco giant, but today’s lobbyist can come in many forms; an advocate group, a bloc of voters, even a non-profit organization. But the familiar ghost of the Pompadoured lobbyist can still linger in the background. The Pompadour is aware that his image needs work, so sometimes he simply steps back and acts as a puppeteer wearing a kinder, gentler, more philanthropic face.

The documentary Empty Handed aims to get people in the west behind initiatives that would supply contraception to women in Africa, a documentary funded in part by the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition. This super-team is comprised of members like  Bayer Pharma and Pregna, both suppliers of contraceptives, as well as other industry giants who supply the chemicals that make up their products.

Africa is home to over 1 billion people, and if a fraction of those people started taking contraceptives on a regular basis… well, I don’t have to tell you what that would do for the industry. So whenever you watch a documentary, claiming to want what is best for any group of people by offering them a product, just remember that every corporation has a board of directors elected by its shareholders.

During this holiday weekend, I’m thankful for my single parenting mother and all the “universe rearranging” she did for my sister and I. This article reinforced my faith in the adaptability of women who happen to become single parents. From SLATE,

When I was pregnant with my second child, I was aware that there were ways in which I was not prepared to take care of a baby on my own, but that awareness didn’t unduly influence or affect me. What I thought to myself was, “The universe will rearrange itself for this baby.” […]

Someone who was trying to persuade me not have the baby said that I should wait and have a “regular baby.” His exact words were, “You should wait and have a regular baby!” What he meant, of course, was that I should wait and have a baby in more regular circumstances. But I had already seen the feet of the baby on a sonogram, and while he was pacing through my living room making his point, I was thinking: This is a regular baby. His comment stayed with me, though. It evoked the word bastard: “something that is spurious, irregular, inferior or of questionable origin.”

Someone said, similarly, to a single friend of mine who was pregnant that she should wait and have a “real baby.” As if her baby were unreal, a figment of her imagination, as if she could wish him away.

Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort that we create a cultural climate; it’s in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to. Hawthorne called it “the alchemy of quiet malice by which [we] concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”

Talk about decreasing abortions, not by law but because that is what women choose. This clip is evidence that 40 Days for Life is working. (Watch the video at the top of the page.)

And while PWPL is a big proponent of the fact that you need not be religious to be pro-life, the fact is that lots of religious folks get involved in the struggle. 40 Days for Life is another valuable approach to decreasing the desire for abortion, alongside the Show the Truth style campaigns. It’s all very encouraging to see.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) acts primarily an advisory council to the European Union, and their recommendations often carry a lot of weight. However, the recent warning from the PACE on the dangers of sex selection may be contrasting to the EU’s very pro-abortion tradition, a tradition the EU may want to reconsider as it negotiates membership for countries like Armenia.

  On October 3, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted the “Prenatal sex selection” resolution, which says that the disproportion in sex selection is “alarming” in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Albania. […]

The PACE resolution appeals to “investigate the causes and reasons behind skewed sex ratios at birth; to step up efforts to raise the status of women in society” throughout the whole territory of Armenia. […]

Doctor-gynecologist at the Armenian-American Mammography Wellness Center Nelly Avagyan’s experience showed that majority of abortions is because of a child’s sex.

“This is an Armenian way of thinking – to have sons by all means, even though abortions of boys are also registered, but the number of aborted girls prevails,” Avagyan says.

On a Halifax sidewalk a spray-painted stencil reads “40 Days of Bullshit” and “It’s your body, it’s your choice”, in response to the 40 Days for Life vigil being held in town. When I walked over this stencil, I had to cringe, because there’s no argument there. It’s just an insult, a crowd chant, but there’s no reasoning behind it. Women who find themselves pregnant and considering abortion feel they have to choose between a life of poverty, or abortion. They feel they have to choose between losing their partner, or abortion. They feel they have to choose between not finishing school, or abortion. Think I’m wrong? Read these testimonies:

my baby was disabled

–and my husband could not bear to raise a child with special needs. He was suicidal. I felt I owed it to my two older children to keep their father in their life. I terminated my pregnancy at 17 weeks and I’m grateful that it was legal to do so (even though it was extremely difficult, both emotionally or logistically). I wanted that baby very much and I miss him every day.

—Guest simone

Matter of who’s life ?

It was 1972 in January, just after Roe and Wade.It was a time when single mothers were shunned. They wasn’t any form of help for single women. Because of my pregnancy, I became homeless, I’d been staying with a widow who had rooms for single girls, I was kicked out my church (they said I could come back when the situation was taken care of). My family turned their backs on me. My boyfriend was getting a divorce. I was desperate, suicidal! It came down to making the final decison of TAKING MY BABY’S LIFE OR MY OWN! I’ve been able to cope and deal with this decision. Since then I’ve gone through much counseling although on the anniversary date,I break down. The pain will never go away. When looking back, I know that I did the only thing I could back then. Today I”m doing well and I have helped many girls who find themselves where I was. I am so grateful for the women of today. There are so many services, especially counseling available for them . FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS VITAL FOR WOMEN.

—Guest Vicki

A reader recently quoted that Joyce Arthur herself admitted that “all of our decisions are constrained”. Personally, I think that having to choose between poverty/losing your partner/dropping out of school/homelessness or abortion isn’t a choice (even a “constrained” choice) at all, it’s a threatening ultimatum.  

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Andrea adds: The testimonies you posted are of the most dire variety. Or are they? I can only think that when abortion was not an option so readily taken, some of these people would not have manipulated their partners or themselves into this positioning of “my life or the baby’s.” It is very, very hard to move forward with a pregnancy in certain cases. But in those testimonies we are presented with “if” scenarios that we simply don’t know would have played out. (Historians are taught not to play the “if” game. As in “if the Allies had bombed the rail lines, there would have been no Holocaust” etc.)

These women tell us after the fact that they would have killed themselves if they had not had an abortion, or their husbands would have killed themselves, but if there is one thing I learned from reading Giving Sorrow Words it’s that men–and women–can come around to their own “unwanted” children. I believe to a certain extent, their guilt over their actions forces them to create an extreme box so that we could begin to understand why it was ok to kill a defenceless (disabled as in the example above) child. One last thing: at the debate, a young woman came to me afterwards, and asked me (kindly) about my positioning on rape. Wasn’t it OK to have an abortion then? I talked to her at some length and I ended up challenging her to watch an abortion, since she hadn’t. We forget how vicious the act of abortion is. I don’t want women to forget that and then delude themselves into thinking abortion was an act of compassion–too much pro-choice rhetoric in our media and the culture at large will do that.

I posted about Steve Jobs and the fact that he was adopted earlier, here.

Here’s a video of him introducing the Macintosh in 1984 for the first time.

Rest in peace.

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Andrea adds: This is worth watching too.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA&feature=player_embedded]

In order to comment on a movie, one typically watches it. I started watching 180, the new and popular pro-life movie, but only got through the first five minutes. This is not because it was bad, but because I ran out of time.

(In those first five minutes the host asks random people on the street if they have heard of Hitler. To be frank, I was amazed that so few people had.)

Anyways, seeing as I have not seen the movie, I am linking to Stephanie Gray’s blog on the topic, a trustworthy source. Hopefully I get to see the movie myself soon, in which case I’ll add my own thoughts.

A Lancet study reveals that where a common contraceptive is used in eastern and southern Africa, HIV rates have gone up:

The reasons behind this association are as yet unclear, and may be biological. But to those who have not been blinded by the leftist global health consensus, another explanation seems quite possible: the aggressive promotion of contraception may increase the rates of sex, both protected and unprotected (especially with multiple partners, the main cause of the HIV pandemic).

Such a dynamic has been seen in previous research on why condom promotion in Africa has also not slowed, and may have even increased, the rates of HIV infection. Edward C. Green, formerly of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard (and a proud liberal), summarized the undeniable evidence in a Washington Posteditorial two years ago.

Those not blinded by the leftist global health consensus will have no problem understanding this. Those who have? Consider opening at least one eye.