Archives for 2011

If you are interested, you can listen to the debate audio by clicking here. The question: Can Canada have a maternal health policy in the developing world that excludes abortion? Yours truly for the Yes We Can side and Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada in opposition. Enjoy.

If you live in the Ottawa area, consider coming to First Place Options’ Festa and Concerto Italiana, a fundraiser for a great local charity that helps women, men and families through unplanned pregnancies. It’s on October 28; click here for more info.

In Saturday’s debate at Queen’s, much was made by my opponent of women being the ones to decide in abortion. Keep in mind we were debating maternal health and abortion in the developing world. My point was that where women don’t have autonomy in the first place, they certainly won’t have the ability to freely choose an abortion. (Furthermore, I believe this “free” choice is highly exaggerated here in Canada, just the same.)

Anyway, this article from India on a young mother forced to abort twice, who hung herself with the third pregnancy after her in-laws ordered another abortion…because the baby was a girl. Just so long as they have access to abortion though. So she can make a choice as to whether to end just her baby’s life and/or her own, too.

Many people fall prey to this idea of putting second things first, not just pro-lifers. (BTW, this is not to say that every pro-lifer is a Christian. But so many are that this is worth posting.) 

I love this C.S. Lewis quote which essentially says the same thing: “When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now…When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”

As some of you are aware, I debated Joyce Arthur at Queen’s University yesterday afternoon. Behold: my short report.

There were about 150 students there, though I am bad at estimating crowds. It was peaceful, with the exception of some guffaws of laughter at me from a very limited group of possibly 5 to 7 anti-Andreas. (I am working with the language here, since I got called anti-choice all night. Incidentally, this suits me just fine since I am anti-this-one-“choice”. Those kids were certainly Anti-Andrea. Probably anti-life, too, if I were to guess. Oh yes, I have a keen sense of discernment.)

Joyce was respectful and pleasant in her demeanor, and wore her trademark flower as well as a lovely black skirt. She wore a shirt too, I might add, but I didn’t notice it in particular.

The question: Can Canada have a maternal health policy that excludes funding for abortion?

As expected, I said Yes We Can! My arguments came down to 1) describing that the unborn are human like you and me therefore abortion means taking a life and 2) highlighting the way in which abortion is irrelevant for saving women’s lives. I showed (if I do say so myself) a great graph showing how Canada’s maternal mortality declined well prior to 1969.

I found Joyce’s arguments (not surprisingly, let’s remember whose web site we are on) less than compelling. To address the humanity of the unborn she said simply it doesn’t matter, because the woman still decides. She is very set on legalization of abortion western-style for the developing world, so much so that she failed to wholly address the fact that maternal mortality declines with good medical care, sans abortion. She made the point that abortion is a mainstay of every woman’s life: normal and routine, nothing to see here. So where my main point was to ask the question that if we can decrease maternal mortality without abortion, and the data clearly shows we can, why wouldn’t we do it? However, she doesn’t view abortion as negative, so she sees no point in trying to avoid it.

That was jarring for me, as I suspect it was also jarring for those girls in the audience who have had abortions. There’s no amount of saying something is super easy that will make it so, when it’s not.

My other points: abortion in the developing world has been used to get rid of girls, legal abortion does not equal safe abortion, limited funding from government means we ought to use measures that garner the biggest bang for your buck (things like providing antibiotics and oxytocin).

I believe the only video recording is on my iPhone, so I’ll try to get that up. It’s not the greatest quality, sorry. I also have an audio recording of dubious quality, but I’ll transfer it to my laptop and see if I can improve it there.

Many thanks to the University of Ottawa pro-lifers who came out to support me! I think the bulk of the audience, however, was neither strongly pro-life nor strongly pro-choice and therefore this was a great event to introduce your average student to both sides of the story.

Maclean’s on Brad Trost speaking out against his own party’s funding of International Planned Parenthood:

Indisputably, politics parties serve an important purpose. But so should Members of Parliament. And publicly that should involve something more than reading cue cards, repeating party lines, filling out TV camera frames and providing the sufficient number of warm bodies required to pass legislation. They should be something more than representatives of a brand.

If Members of Parliament don’t represent constituents, then I have no idea why we bother voting in the first place. Hats off to Brad Trost for doing just that.

Many women in the west believe that choice is their right; they’ve the right to choose abortion. But we live in a world of commodity, a world of economics, where being part of the communal economic stream, those same women also think things like “abortion is good because there are too many children living in poverty.” Women in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad don’t live in this world, and I’m getting pretty frustrated that people keep thinking they do.

…according to Newsweek, “Women have no legal rights in Chad and most marriages are arranged when women are 11 to 12 years old.” […]

In the aftermath of its devastating civil war, certain parts of Congo continue to be terrorised by militias and rebel armies. Rape, sexual abuse and brutal violence have become common forms of oppression. In a bone-chilling indictment, Newsweek states that “more than 1,100 women are raped in Congo every day”.

So when I read this from the NY Times, I was of course angry that people still don’t realize that in a country where rape is normal, where it occurs regularly, committed by spouses, soldiers, and boyfriends, that abortion for these women could never be a choice. If you live in a country where you have little or no control over your sexual acts, you will certainly have little or no control over your sexual health. To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.

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Andrea adds: I thought Jennifer’s words at the end there were worth repeating, emphasizing. “To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.”

We also fail to pay attention to the fact that for many women living in DRC, while rape is horrible, so too is abortion. Women there may not see it as the “solution” it is presented as in the West.

This article from China actually has a Planned Parenthood director admitting that there is such a thing as “too many” abortions, and that the procedures carry a physical and mental risk to the mother. Read more here.

Among the 8 to 10 million induced abortions performed on the mainland each year, nearly 47 percent involve unmarried women younger than 25, according to Cheng Linan, director of the center for clinical research and training of the Shanghai Institute of Planned Parenthood Research. […]

A 2008 survey involving more than 50,000 induced abortions in Beijing showed that roughly 70 percent of the women undergoing the procedure were migrants. For many, it was not their first abortion.

According to a nationwide study by the Chinese Medical Association (CMA), of all women having received induced abortions, nearly 56 percent had two operations and 13.5 percent had three or more.

“That not only causes the women certain physical or mental problems, but it also gives the country a huge economic burden of more than 3 billion Yuan” or about $470 million, she said.

Among Chinese women who became infertile, more than 88 percent previously had an induced abortion, a study conducted in 2007 showed.

Other potential health hazards include haemorrhage, uterine or pelvic infection, uterine perforation and cervical laceration.

Though this article argues that more contraception is the answer, another option is of course to educate unmarried young women (especially those that are migrants with distinct socioeconomic burdens) that they aren’t socially obligated to have sex.

I’m starting to think that education is the opium of the elite, and they’ve all been high for quite some time. It boggles my mind, truly astounds me that when results like this are released after years and years of very open sex education there are calls for what? More of the same. 

Young people across the globe are having more unprotected sex and know less about effective contraception options, a multinational survey revealed on Monday. The “Clueless or Clued Up: Your Right to be informed about contraception” study prepared for World Contraception Day (WCD) reports that the number of young people having unsafe sex with a new partner increased by 111 percent in France, 39 percent in the USA and 19 percent in Britain in the last three years.

The following is by Will Johnston, MD and President of Physicians for Life. It’s for the Physicians for Life newsletter coming up, however, he assures me that I can post it, given that they are not vying for advertising dollars. An excellent, short piece. Thanks, Will.

As a society we have largely conquered cold weather, hunger, disease and early death, so in our leisure we now busy ourselves arguing over who to kill.  Are you young enough? Unwanted enough? Old enough? Depressed enough? Inconvenient enough? Does your Down syndrome leave you with too many 21st chromosomes to suit the 21st century?

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