Archives for 2011

When I learned about a local charity and support group for young mothers, SHYM, I was astonished that no one had thought of this before. While SHYM does wonderful work here in Nova Scotia, there is another group in the US. What’s astonishing about this article is that in the whole of a country nicknamed by Michael Moore as “The Big One” they’re the only one.

Americans enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Swaddled within those precious rights is the freedom to be born. Debate rages about a woman’s right to choose, yet many would choose to have their babies if only they had a place to live. For 27 years, Friends of the Unborn in Quincy has given pregnant, homeless women the freedom to keep their children.

Marilyn Birnie, FOTU founder and executive director of the pregnancy crisis center and shelter, has helped more than 2,000 women with this choice. Up to 16 pregnant women, ages 18 and older, can stay for about two years, rent-free, to develop self-supporting skills at the multiroomed Victorian in Quincy. Getting a GED is mandatory. Also offered are additional educational classes and resource assistance. […]

For close to three decades, FOTU has stayed open through private donations that average $25. Each month is a miracle since the annual expenses exceed $350,000.

“We are never ahead. It’s always month-to-month,” said Penny Romano, a 20-year employee at Friends of the Unborn, the only such private organization in the United States.

[…]

The women are here because of an ultimatum from their families, “Get an abortion or get out.”

Boyfriends abandoned them. A logical option loomed – get an abortion – but they didn’t want to. They found FOTU through hospital or agency referrals, or word of mouth.

[…] Some women endure a long, fierce journey. “Esther,” a married woman with three children, was brutally gang raped by soldiers in the Congo. She and her husband were taken to two separate prisons and her children were lost. She escaped alone and after arriving in the US, she eventually found her way to Birnie’s door.

“Esther came to us with nothing more than the wrinkled yellow dress she was wearing. She didn’t know if the baby was her husband’s or the three men who raped her, but she didn’t want to abort her husband’s child. We took care of her. Later a Congolese priest was able to locate her mother in the Congo who was caring for her three children. Esther was able to talk to them, but we were never able to find her husband.”

Now Esther has a daughter and has moved to Lynn.

This from the NY Times,

In three new rulings, federal judges in different states have acted to block immediate enforcement of measures that restrict abortion rights and women’s access to affordable contraception, lifesaving cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These rulings are important victories for women’s health and reproductive rights. […]

On July 1, Judge Carlos Murguia, a federal district judge in Kansas, blocked immediate enforcement of a new Kansas licensing law and health department regulations imposing extensive, medically unnecessary requirements on the state’s three remaining abortion providers — like mandating 50 square feet of storage space for janitorial supplies — with the obvious goal of shutting them down.

While these rulings are preliminary, each is a determination that enforcing the law would cause irreparable harm and that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail at trial. They do not, however, address other threats to women’s health. Those include the slashing of state support for family-planning services by governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey, and attacks from Congress like the bill Republicans pushed through the House in May that would use the nation’s tax system as a weapon to end abortion insurance coverage in the private market.

Still, these rulings serve as a reminder that courts have a vital role to play in blocking the extreme anti-abortion, anti-family-planning movement accelerating in the states and in Washington.

Why am I advertising a book about relationships here on PWPL? A couple of reasons:

1) it’s a good book

2) the blog that aims to help sell the book is likewise, chockablock full of great advice on how to get on in relationships but more importantly, how to conduct oneself with integrity when not in a relationship and enjoy the life you have

3) “Auntie Seraphic’s” advice is very counter-cultural, and that, my friends, is to be respected. She doesn’t fall into mainstream traps around relationships, neither does she fall into religious traps about relationships (The author, Dorothy Cummings is a practicing Catholic of the conservative variety. But I’m not Catholic and I still like it, so there you go.)

4) someday I will write a book and I will want help promoting it

So there you have it. Buy Seraphic Singles if you are single, and for a friend if you are not.

Here’s an interesting Q&A about the thinking behind an ad campaign designed, to, well I’m not exactly sure what the point is.

Stepping Stones, the group behind the ads, denies that it’s normalizing prostitution, and wants to draw attention to violent crimes against prostitutes.  That’s a worthy goal; killing or raping a prostitute is not less of a crime than killing or raping anybody else, and police and the courts should behave accordingly.

But by portraying prostitutes as daughters, sisters and mothers, which to be sure many of them are, it seems to me that the ads try to paint prostitution as a wacky, unorthodox but entirely fine vocation for a woman – like becoming a monster truck driver, or working on an oil rig.  Not for me, but who am I to judge, right?

The problem is that prostitution isn’t like other unusual jobs, and pretending that prostitutes have made this their life’s work and that we should respect that only makes things worse.  For one thing, it turns a blind eye to the abuse, violence and misogyny that are integral to the business of selling women’s bodies, not unfortunate side effects.  For another, it’s redolent of Anatole France’s biting observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges.”  The libertarian take on the flesh trade would have us believe that, if only we got rid of outdated beliefs and gave people more autonomy, we would permit both strong women in thriving communities, as well as marginalized, victimized and frequently badly abused women, to sell themselves on the street.

This would be a victory neither for women, nor for Canadian society.  Compassion and kindness towards prostitutes doesn’t mean destigmatizing what they do, and what is done to them.  On the contrary: prostitutes are people too, as the ad campaign wants to remind us, and people should never be allowed by their families, communities or social safety nets to be so degraded.

Why do I feel a sense of sweet vindication in reading this? I get called crazy for saying the same thing (albeit in a decidedly different way). Maybe Margaret Wente gets called crazy too. I’ll never know. But it’s nice to see these thoughts in print in the Globe:

 Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy sexual liberation as much as I’d hoped. Eventually, it occurred to me that it seemed to be working better for guys than it was for me. Men, I noticed, tended to agree that sex without meaning was pretty swell. Women tended to agree that sex without meaning was impossible. Although we approved of it in theory, we were all too susceptible to messy emotional entanglements. …

If men and women were equal in their sexual desires, we’d have a different conversation. But as that famous piece of doggerel goes, Hogamus higamus/ Men are polygamous;/ Higamus hogamus/ Women monogamous. The long history of civilization is in many ways a progressive effort to rein in the indiscriminate (and frequently destructive) sexual desires of men. This effort, no doubt, frustrates men, but it’s good for women and children, and also for society.

Besides, there’s something about monogamy that some long-married people have discovered (much to their surprise). It’s the same thing Dan Savage tells gay kids: It gets better.

To summarize: “Sexual liberation” liberates men and hurts women. That’s my view and I’m sticking to it. (I might add I also think it hurts men in a long term, societal sort of way, when men find themselves to be 40 and living wholly unfulfilling lives in the fast lane, or in the not-so-fast lane as the stats showing men living in mama’s basement will attest, but this is a short blog post and I won’t get into that here.)

This from New Brunswick,

The New Brunswick Right to Life Association has filed a police report on yet another act of vandalism to its Mother and Child House on Brunswick Street.

“It happened on three successive nights, three different incidents,” said association executive director Peter Ryan. “One night they painted the word ‘Choice’ on one side of our building in large black letters and came back two other nights and ripped off our wooden flower boxes attached to the front of our building which dress it up nicely.

[…]

The property has been the target of different types of vandalism.

“We’ve had quite a few incidents in the last four or five years. I think it’s intensified,” he said.

The Right to Life Association opened its women’s care centre on Brunswick Street in 2000.

The pro-life facility provides support for women who are pregnant and encourages those pondering an abortion to consider keeping their baby.

“We’re appealing to whoever this is to please leave us alone and respect our choice to do what we do here, which is to help pregnant women in need. We don’t do it the way they want us to do it which is to give women abortions.

“We do help these women both before they’re considering abortion and after they’ve had abortions. We help these women just by offering compassion and support and information. We think that’s not a terrible thing,” Ryan said.

“There’s an alternative next to us and we’re the other choice.”

Up front: I’m musing here. I don’t think tattoos are an important matter of morality, or life and death.

However, I do find myself staring quizzically in moments. Take the lady I saw yesterday, who had a small ice cream cone with a heart next to it, tattoed on her leg. It was a cute small icon, just perfect if you worked at Hallmark and were designing a “Hope you beat the heat” card for someone who lives without AC. But as a permanent addition to your skin? Forever and ever?

I recall another friend who got a massive butterfly tattoed on her back. Again, is this because butterflies are just so pretty, that you ache inside without one permanently etched on your body? Or what about the guy who stayed over at my place, a friend of my then-rommate, who emerged from a night of partying to show off the exact replica of the CD case of his favourite band? He’ll carry that on his shoulder, even when the kids don’t know what CDs are, or that they used to come in cases.

I personally feel that if something is going to be engraved in my skin, I’d think a bit more about what that was going to be. There will be no pixies or leprechauns, no butterflies or ice cream cones or favourite bands. Here ends the rant.

Social norms go in and out of fashion like anything else. Some are explicit, others are implicit. Everything from the tip percentage for a waiter to how you raise your children is subject to the scrutiny of acceptability. Unfortunately, adoption too has fallen victim to the whims of social normality, and for many people “giving up” your baby for adoption is simply not a social norm. Martin Narey is looking to change all that.

Teenage girls and women pregnant with unwanted babies should be offered the ‘golden option’ of adoption alongside abortion or struggling on to raise the children, a Government adviser said yesterday.

The call from Martin Narey, the Coalition’s new adoption tsar, will pile fresh pressure on social workers to end three decades of hostility to adoption as a way of finding homes for children with troubled mothers.

Ministers have already tried to clear the way for thousands of children to find new families by ordering social workers and their managers to scrap race rules that have prevented white couples from adopting black children, and barred people in their 40s and older from adoption.

The suggestion by Mr Narey, a former chief executive of Barnardo’s, would mean a return to the practices of the 1970s, when mothers who could not keep their children often offered them for adoption. Since then, adoption has gone out of fashion with social workers, and the number of children adopted from state care has dropped from more than 20,000 a year to around 3,000.

In a report into the state of the adoption system, containing 19 suggestions for improvements, Mr Narey said social workers should no longer press pregnant women with personal difficulties to bring up their children.

And he suggested it was wrong to tell teenagers they would make good mothers.

‘For six months we are all over her telling her how well she is doing – and then she is on her own. What we are doing is cowardly,’ he said in the report, commissioned by The Times.

‘Adoption should be a third option to abortion or keeping the child. It is an attitude that must be allowed to grow.

‘In the U.S. mothers who give their children up for adoption believe they are giving them a great start.

‘Here it is viewed as a success if we talk them out of it..

Changing attitudes: Mr Narey said that pregnant women should follow the American example and believe that if their child is adopted it is being given a good start in life 

‘I am afraid some people just don’t like adoption. They think it is social engineering, allowing middle-class people to bring up working-class children. Where there are successes, professionals are apologetic about it, like it is some sort of tragedy.

It’s controversial to want to encourage young mothers to routinely consider adoption, but the alternative is that they routinely consider less positive options. Wouldn’t it be great if all young girls had it in the forefront of their minds that if they did get pregnant, they could always choose adoption?

Let’s just hope Planned Parenthood doesn’t feeling like suing anyone over it. I don’t know anything about Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, but after reading this article, he’s got my support.

The law requires that signs be posted around abortion facilities and include pertinent information about a woman’s rights, including the fact that it is illegal to coerce a woman into getting an abortion, that the child’s father must provide child support, that certain agencies can assist them during and after the pregnancy and that adoptive parents can pay some of the medical costs.
[…]
“Women deserve to know their legal rights and the protections already afforded to them under the law,” he said. “We are confident that the more they know, the more they’ll choose life and alternatives to abortion.”
[…]
Benjamin Clapper, executive director of Louisiana Right to Life, said a study conducted in 2004 indicated that 64 percent of women who have had an abortion felt they were coerced into making the decision.

“Our society promotes the idea that abortion is a free choice, and statistic show completely otherwise,” he said.

Jindal said the new law is a significant step, but that it wouldn’t be the last.