Archives for 2011

Pro-choicers (the ones who campaign for abortion access, not the mushy middle) aren’t very concerned with the idea of missing people the result of abortion. They look at a woman’s situation, consider a myriad different factors and identify that she could do nothing else. The person done away with gets lost in the other factors.

That is (fairly) easy to do in individual circumstances, because the person who is missing is, well, not there, but the woman who remains can tell you about the difficulty of her circumstance.

Not so when nations are faltering because of missing girls. The sheer numbers make it impossible to ignore, made more evident because of the gender imbalance.

Click here to read this fairly in-depth report from the BBC about India’s aborted females.

We’ve heard this story before but I’ll continue to draw attention to it. Because at the end of the day, those of us who are pro-life are saying whether it’s here in Canada or in India, those missing people matter. Not more than the woman who bears them, but in concert with her, they both matter.

We ought to work hard to stop female foeticide, as the article calls it, but in general we ought to work to stop all foeticide. These are the hidden societal ramifications of abortion, and if they don’t show up in the gender imbalance, those ramifications show up in other places.

…has moved into the womb:

Dr. Hassan Shehata wants to keep potentially pudgy babies from tipping the scales too high at birth, which can expose them — and their moms — to serious complications and lifelong problems. The solution, he believes, is to give the pregnant, obese women the popular diabetes drug metformin — even though the expectant mothers don’t actually have the disease.

This is the story of a couple undergoing infertility treatments at great cost, first in Montreal, then in New York, only to get pregnant “the old-fashioned way.” So it’s a success story, in the end. I suppose I read it somewhat fearfully, thinking of all the broken relationships the result of the strain and cost of trying to conceive so desperately. Only to end up wondering whether you needed to do any of that in the first place.

Each woman is on her own journey. I don’t think mine will ever include invasive fertility treatments. It follows with my “some things are not a choice” philosophy. If it were to come to pass that I couldn’t have biological children I’d be forced to consider that there’s a reason for that. From time to time, when sadness hits because I don’t have any kids yet, I consider that maybe, just maybe, there might be even one child out there who was not aborted thanks to something I said or did. And then I consider all the great things I can do precisely because I don’t have my own kids. And then I call a friend with kids and listen to how she hasn’t slept since early January 2010 and the sadness pretty much dissapates.

Where was I? Fertility treatments. I have hesitated to comment too much on this precisely because it is so very emotional and personal, and I don’t want to hurt anyone experiencing infertility and going about solutions in their own way. But I do harbour some concerns about the manner in which we try to conceive, and this article highlights some of those.

I came across this article, an interview with sociologist Mark Regnerus (who spoke at my workplace’s conference in early May) and thought, this is interesting. He discusses marrying young, building a life together, and the conundrum many Christians face when they are told both to wait to marry until they are “ready” and to wait til marriage to have sex–not a winning advice combo. In any event, I clicked over to Yahoo to send this article to a friend, where I got distracted by another relationship type column with the headline “Is this the recipe for a happy relationship?” Their advice? Drink cocktails together. No really. So there you have it: Two drastically different worldviews in close proximity.

This article is about how more and more kids clothes are made to be “sexy”–for as young as seven-year-olds. That’s a story in itself but I found this quote intriguing:

It’s important to realize that these clothes are ubiquitous and they are hard to avoid,” [said] Mackey. “But when young girls wear these clothes they send the message that they are sexually available. And the more they are exposed to clothes that suggest they should be attractive to the opposite sex, they could put themselves into risky situations.”

Seems to me this comes awfully close to saying that how we dress matters, because it sends certain signals. But that’s taboo, and I believe the genesis of the “Slutwalk” came about to protest a cop who implied that women should be careful about how they dress. Just wanted to highlight the discrepancy.

Signal Hill in British Columbia does great work and they’ve come out with a couple of pro-life ads. I like the first one; I’m not such a big fan of the second one. Terribly hard to get “abortion ironies” right in tone and I’m not sure they 100% get it here…Still, I’ve always wanted to do short YouTube segments like this, so hats off to them for actually getting it done!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJE5gEMTLF0&NR=1″>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJE5gEMTLF0&NR=1]

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOm41wZN9C4&NR=1″>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOm41wZN9C4&NR=1]

Survey says one in three German students would consider sex work to pay for school.

Now that would be shocking, however, my hope is that it is purely theoretical since higher education in Deutschland is free.

Good news for women’s health:

Kansas will require annual, unannounced inspections of abortion clinics, impose new health and safety rules specifically for them and prevent them from using telemedicine systems to dispense pregnancy-terminating drugs under legislation signed Monday by Gov. Sam Brownback.

Oftentimes women are under the delusion that abortion has no side effects, or that taking Plan B type drugs to terminate at home are easy. This is not true and taking steps to ensure abortion clinics can’t get away with facilitating what are actually difficult procedures is a good thing.

SlutWalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do.

-Margaret Wente

Almost missed this column from Thursday, May 12, about the “Slutwalk” phenomenon. I had avoided commenting on that precisely because I view it as what you get when grad students in women’s studies run out of other things to do.

It’s kind of a big deal to have this kind of national event, so I’m going to add just one more post about the March for Life. Below are some photos from the Halifax event. You can also listen to my own presentation here, as well as other presentations here. Thanks to everyone who was able to come out that day!