Archives for 2011

Well, I’m not a rock star. Not in the musical way, anyway. Although if you blast the right music in my kitchen loud enough, on occassion, you might be confused.

Anyway, yes, this blog post does have a point and I’ll get there in a second. This morning on the radio I heard that the rockstar Pink has taken up knitting. Please feel free to listen to her hit “So What” while you read this, this fine Saturday afternoon:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJfFZqTlWrQ&feature=relmfu]

Where was I? Oh yes, knitting. Apparently upon the birth of her daughter, she can’t get enough of it. The actual quote on the radio I heard was that she said couldn’t believe that she is doing this, but as a new mom, it just brought the knitting out in her.

And it made me think of the very many cool ways in which motherhood has changed some of my friends. My friends were cool before they were moms, but some of them became even cooler. None of them, incidentally, picked up knitting, but my point is that motherhood can change you in ways that are entirely unforeseen. When you are pregnant, you couldn’t possibly know that you’d be knitting away in nine months, could you?

So one of the great things in life is to expect the unexpected and hold on for the ride. Forget all the moralizing for a minute–it’s a life! it’s a person! from conception! (all of which I believe, don’t get me wrong), expecting the unexpected while maintaining your rock star status is just one more reason to be against abortion.

Apparently Sarah Palin is going to have another grandchild. Her eldest son got married two months ago and he and his wife are expecting. There are already snarky speculations that the baby is older than two months. Check out the tone of the article linked above, which concludes with the words “The Palins did not respond to our request for comment.” Ya think? Who would?

Anyway, it’s not Sarah Palin who isn’t practicing what she preaches. This isn’t the first time a parent’s child has gone off the rails, nor will it be the last. What she’s preaching–no sex before marriage–is worth preaching even if not followed. My feeling is that this author is from the “get a quickie abortion to cover up” crew. Hypocrisy comes in many different flavours.

Well gosh darn it! If you can get rid of tellers in banks, and just do your transactions online, why can’t you do that with abortions? So much easier. And just as safe! Of course, later we read the real story:

Clearly we don’t have enough primary care providers. One way to solve this is through telemedicine. We don’t want to be attacking that, we probably want to be celebrating it.”

Celebrate the good times, oh yes.

This time I’m looking for academic/intellectual assessments of what repercussions a high abortion rate has on a community, province/state or country. I’m looking for social repercussions, the big picture, not mental or physical health effects. Research from anywhere in the globe would suit me just fine.

A very reasonable column about Tim Hudak’s prior statements on abortion that is, quite frankly, neither pro-life nor pro-choice. Just reasonable. I like this part, especially:

And there is a subset of Canadians that unleashes online hellfire against anyone who sees anything worth discussing about this country’s unique legal vacuum on abortion.

Elizabeth May found this out in 2006 by daring to suggest abortion isn’t an ideal outcome in the abstract, even as she opposed any infringement upon a specific woman’s right to choose. Fair enough. That’s democracy. What’s annoying is the terror that small subset instills in the political class.

And that’s what I mean about having a little chutzpah, Mr. Hudak. Really, it is a very small subset that unleashes the online hellfire. A shrug and standing by your principles is the way to go. There’s no reason to struggle for talking points on this one. And the more any politician does, the more that small subset smells blood and goes in for the kill.

Is it so very hard for a politician to say “I’m pro-life” even when he follows it up by saying “I won’t do anything on this issue”? Apparently, yes. Some chutzpah would be nice, please, to stand up to the bullies who insist everyone must drone-like repeat the same pro-choice mantras. Actually the very worst thing any politician can do is sit in the middle on this one–best to be clear and forthright.

A friend of a friend is looking for some help caring for a two-year-old. If you or someone you know is interested, email us here and I’ll forward it on to the right person:

Large family in rural Ottawa looking for a full-time nanny or mother’s helper to look after 2 year-old. Live-in or live-out. Area is not serviced by public transit. Has pets.

What kind of thing gets you on “The List”? Forced marriage, human trafficking, not providing your women with a hospital to give birth in, rape, female foeticide, and frighteningly, female infanticide. Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan are at the top. Read all about it, here.

Pharmaceutical companies are first and foremost companies. It’s not in their best interest to make one-shot wonder drugs that get you sorted out for life, so they aren’t on the market. Contraceptives are no different. With over 50% of women in the US using “The Pill”, that is big business. Multiply that by their average length of usage, which from the women I’ve spoken to can be anywhere from 5 to 35 years, and you’ve got yourself a money making scheme with serious longevity. So will this new male contraceptive see the light of day?

After a more than 30-year struggle, an unassuming Indian engineer named Sujoy K. Guha is on the brink of what could well be the most revolutionary contraceptive technology since the pill — and this time it’s for men. […]

So what you get is a one-time, hormone-free sperm blocker that you can turn off whenever you want. […]

“We had no support from industry,” Guha said. “And basically neither I nor my colleagues were really knowledgeable and experienced with respect to new drug development.”

Part of the problem was the elegance of Guha’s design, which from a marketing perspective was, frankly, too effective.

“To men, an ideal method would be cheap and long-lasting. To company shareholders, an ideal method would be expensive and temporary,” Lissner explained by email.

“Pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to develop a cheap long-lasting method, and we can’t expect them to take the lead. Men will get one if, and only if, they demand it of their governments,” she said.

I’m not in favour of this drug, but this article exposes the problem with pharmaceutical companies not wanting to make anything “too effective”. What’s worse is that they tie themselves to social issues in a way that has sway on public opinion (throwing a few million to advertising for Marie Stopes is going to have big impact). They simply won’t manufacture a product or support an organization that won’t make them serious bank, social impact be damned. And this is a problem, because the consumer/patient ends up with a product that they’re told is in their best interest when it’s really in the best interest of the company. I’m not sure we can have it both ways.

I’m reviewing Unnatural Selection, the recent book by Mara Hvistendahl about female sex selection resulting in 160 million missing women. It’s equal parts fascinating and depressing. I could easily cut and paste the whole book into a blog post. But here’s just one part in the section about how the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were enthusiastic promoters of population control in India, alongside the Population Council, staffed by an American, Sheldon Segal, who likewise supported sex determination “as an effective method of population control.” (Segal is also the inventor of Norplant, the contraceptive implant.)

The Emergency [started on June 25, 1975] as the period came to be known, affected all areas of life in India, crippling the economy and scaling back civil liberties. But it was an especially blean era for reproductive rights. Health officials in Indira Gandhi’s administration saw an opportunity to force drastic measures on Indians who had previously resisted birth control. The task of overseeing the gruesome campaign fell to Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi, who held no official political title. He wasted little time in announcing a massive effort to sterilize poor men. Widespread sterilization was an idea that had been introduced to India by Western advisers, but Sanjay Gandhi ratcheted it up to an unprecedented scale. At first his mother’s government rewarded men who consented to vasectomies. Before long, however, Sanjay Gandhi was issuing quotas so high that local officials could meet them only by dragging men to the operating room—typically a makeshift camp that had sprung up practically overnight. (Nearly two thousand men died from botched operations.) In some areas, police surrounded villages in the middle of the night and apprehended all the men. In others, they combined sterilization with slum clearance, razing whole neighborhoods and robbing men of both their reproductive ability and their homes at the same time. Protestors were killed. The scale of the campaign, which was memorialized by Salman Rushdie in the novel Midnight’s Children, is striking, given that many Americans today remain unaware of its existence. By the time democratic rule was restored, 6.2 million Indian men had been sterilized in just one year—fifteen times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis.  (pp. 87-88)

Many Americans remain unaware of this, and many Canadians too, including me.

The review will follow when it’s published. Getting into the realm of massive understatements, suffice to say that “population control” has wreaked a lot of havoc in nations across the globe, including as one outcome, missing women at a devastating scale.