Archives for 2011

Abortion proponents and providers keep reiterating their claim that more legislation and inspections of facilities will be putting up road blocks and that in the end it’s the women who want abortions that will suffer. But the gruesome story of Dr. Kermit Gosnell exposes just what happens when facilities go unchecked, and it’s not simply a shorter wait time.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania abortion provider, was charged with murder and infanticide. Gosnell is accused of breaking state laws by performing late-term abortions, killing children born alive as the result of botched abortions and using unsterilized medical instruments. At least one patient died while under Dr. Gosnell’s care and many others have been infected with venereal diseases.

For 17 years, these practices went undiscovered because Gov. Ridge felt that forcing abortion clinics to undergo a yearly health inspection would be “putting up a barrier to women.”

On June 20 of this year, Planned Parenthood of Kansas filed a lawsuit against the state of Kansas in order to prevent the implementation of new laws passed by Gov. Sam Brownback aimed at expanding health requirements and inspections of abortion providers. Planned Parenthood is, thus far, the only one of three abortion providers in Kansas to receive a license to continue performing abortions. The license was given after the clinic, at the last minute, purchased a “neo-natal crash unit” required under the new provisions. Planned Parenthood has since dropped its lawsuit but is still fighting the new regulations.

Planned Parenthood sells itself as “America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.” Trusted? Planned Parenthood is fighting health regulations aimed at ensuring women’s health and safety. These regulations are modeled after similar ones in South Carolina, and specific provisions in the law have been taken from the “industry standards” set by the National Abortion Federation. Yet Planned Parenthood is seeking and claiming to have the “trust” of women?

After the tragic discovery of the practices of Dr. Gosnell in Pennsylvania, one would expect that an organization that claims to be “pro-women” would be embracing measures aimed at keeping them safe. Sadly, this is not the first time Planned Parenthood has fought against common-sense laws to protect women, despite its supposed commitment to “protect women’s rights and health.”

Worth reading every word of this one. The author, Kay Hymowitz, debunks myths about the gender pay gap (again) but takes the whole idea seriously, identifying and attempting explanations where real problems remain.

Should Canada reconsider the criminal prohibition on assisted suicide?

Vote in this CTV poll. Scroll down on the right hand side.

…I go to The Onion, America’s Finest News Source. (I love the fact that for a joke, satirical newspaper, you can pick it up on the street in boxes in Washington, D.C.)

The beauty is that they pick up on a strain of truth, so that the satire resonates:

During a press conference, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards told reporters that the new state-of-the-art fetus-killing facility located in the nation’s heartland offers quick, easy, in-and-out abortions to all women, and represents a bold reinvention of the group’s long-standing mission and values. Although we’ve traditionally dedicated 97 percent of our resources to other important services such as contraception distribution, cancer screening, and STD testing, this new complex allows us to devote our full attention to what has always been our true passion: abortion,” said Richards, standing under a banner emblazoned with Planned Parenthood’s new slogan, “No Life Is Sacred.” “And since Congress voted to retain our federal funding, it’s going to be that much easier for us to maximize the number of tiny, beating hearts we stop every day.”

Be sure to click on the map of the new enlarged facility. My fave there is the daycare space where “young children can play while their unborn siblings are being terminated elsewhere in the facility.”

This may well be old news by now. I’m on a longer than usual holiday weekend and it’s hard to take a computer with you on your windsurfer. Sorry about the slow posting days, but I think we all need a couple of those. Anyway, Facebook will now have a new “expecting” option:

The social networking site has added that option — “Expected: Child” — that users can add as part of their family members.

This is surely a sign that Facebook is quite far away from the coolio university network that Mark Zuckenberg first intended. It also does betray the idea that there is a child on the way in every pregnancy. Stating that is not quite as obvious as it may seem at first glance… plenty of people “on the other side” of this debate work pretty hard to pretend otherwise.

Is ignorance really bliss? On June 17 The Guardian ran this article,

In 1979 China signed a $50m four-year deal with a UN body designed to help it control its spiralling population through family planning. It was the largest foreign aid package Beijing had accepted in almost 20 years.

But the funds became entwined in China’s one-child policy that was just taking hold, and instead of sponsoring an education drive for small families, the money was used to pay for posters in Chinese villages proclaiming “You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it.”

The story of the complicity of the UNFPA, the UN’s main population agency, in the tyranny of China’s forced abortion policy is just one of the examples given in a book that explores western involvement in what has become a modern scourge: sex selection.

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.

While the article highlights some excellent points, Mara Hvistendahl was unhappy with her books misrepresentation. This is perhaps due to the fact that the UNFPA responded with their own letter refuting the claims of the original article. On July 20, Hvistendahl wrote the following:

I did not argue, furthermore, that the United Nations Population Fund was complicit in these abortions – rather that the agency provided $50m in funding ahead of the one-child policy’s unveiling, and then looked the other way when foreign press reports made clear that forced abortions were occurring. There is a difference between outright funding an injustice and ignoring injustice once it occurs.

UNFPA responded to the article with a letter contesting my supposed claims (Sex selection, China, and human rights, 25 June). The letter may not have been necessary had the article veered more closely to the message of my book.

Sex selection is an important issue, perhaps the most impacting issue on the female population to date, and I just hope that authors and reporters aren’t feeling intimidated because the agencies they’re reporting on are so well financed and multinational. It’s always frustrating to be misquoted, but especially when you just might get a letter from one of the largest agencies in the world.

I’ve had a week chockablock with illness, summer camps and puppy ownership. Inevitably during my downtime, I was watching mind numbing telly to escape the circus. Enter Rosie Pope of Pregnant in Heels, who proclaimed… “I’m happy you’re not for time-outs. A lot of people think time-outs humiliate a child.”

Now, I use time-outs, and I naively thought this was the social norm for discipline. Our western world doesn’t fully accept spanking anymore,

Those who oppose spanking as a form of discipline say that, in modern democratic societies, hitting a child — in any circumstance — is unacceptable. Not only does it encourage violence, they argue, it is an affront to human dignity.

Was I spanked? Of course, but did some parents abuse the power they had? Yes. It seems that now the same thing is happening with time-outs.

Parents are posting their child’s time out videos on the Internet. All of these children are all under 24 months of age- still in diapers. […]

This is a clear example of where American parents are failing their children and our society. It’s humiliating enough for a child to be disciplined in private, but then to post it on the Internet? What purpose does this serve?

The point is, any form of discipline can be misused, but older children and grown-ups should feel bad when they do something wrong. Discipline achieves that, and we shouldn’t let a handful of parents who use more than reasonable force set the bar for the rest of us. I’m assuming Rosie Pope has a lot of followers who may take her advice without any salt, but I’m keeping my time-out step.

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Andrea adds: Thanks, Jennifer for this post. This is one I must add to before it imports to Facebook where people will think I’ve been sick, at summercamp and that I got a puppy. So. My two cents: any child discipline can be abused, be it spanking or time-outs.  I’m not opposed to parents using either of those things, done appropriately.

The tragic shootings in Norway have the country mourning not only the lost lives of so many young people but also the loss of the people they could’ve become. More from The Guardian,

Lejla got involved in politics, convinced that words and not weapons were a way to make the world a better place.

That’s how the 17-year-old came to be on the island of Utøya last Friday when Anders Behring Breivik arrived dressed as a policeman with a pistol in his belt and a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, telling the campers he was there to protect them following the bomb in Oslo – only to open fire over the course of 90 minutes, killing 68 people.

Lejla was attending the youth convention on Utøya as head of the Fredrikstad branch of Norway’s youth labour movement, Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF. On Thursday night she sat with friends around the campfire as they practised a pop song they hoped to perform for the rest of the group the following night. The performance never happened.

Now Lejla is missing, presumed dead at the bottom of the Tyrifjorden, just one of dozens of young activists tipped for the top of Norwegian politics who will never reach adulthood, let alone the Stortinget, Norway’s parliament.

Obama said it as best anyone can in response to such a devastating loss, “To the people of Norway- we are heartbroken by the tragic loss of so many people, particularly youth with the fullness of life ahead of them. No words can ease the sorrow but please know that the thoughts and prayers of all Americans are with the people of Norway, and that we will stand beside you every step of the way.”

I get shivers watching this. Holy powerful communications through a well done video. Jarring. And I’m not even sure that I agree with it. (Planned Parenthood is evil, don’t get me wrong, but I think they want anyone and everyone to have “access to abortion,” not just black people. That said, the numbers don’t lie, and more black women are having abortions. And so that is worth addressing and doing some PR on, especially within the black community. I’m just not sure this is a race issue.)  

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkfdGg76JH0″>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkfdGg76JH0]

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Andrea adds: Here’s another clip from the same group. Note the different tone. Note also that it has about 300 views compared with 20,000 plus for the other one.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKMI1DCrnYA&feature=related”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKMI1DCrnYA&feature=related]

Interesting reasoning on why American federal health insurance should not offer birth control free. It is my hope that people will read this article and think about it, instead of the usual kneejerk “contraception helps prevent abortion” comments.

It is no surprise, then, that the rates of every outcome harmful to women–uncommitted sexual encounters, sexually transmitted infections, nonmarital births, and abortion–have climbed precipitously during the decades that the federal government has escalated both public and private support for contraception. Yet the IOM report–a report on women’s health–makes no reference to this substantial body of literature. Americans are likely to support its conclusions generally. They assume, understandably, that widespread distribution of contraception successfully reduces pregnancy rates. Four decades of history and empirical data, however, demonstrate otherwise. Women’s reproductive lives are more, not less, outside their control in a sex and mating market dominated by the notion that it is not sex but “unprotected sex” that makes babies.