Archives for 2011

A column in today’s Post by Barbara Kay. This part caught my eye, in particular:

Gosnell’s gruesome practice was no secret, but the Pennysylvania Department of Health had decided to stop inspecting abortion clinics because “officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women seeking abortions.’” Thus, for 30 years, thanks to activists’ remorseless protection of unconstrained abortion access, Gosnell ran his little house of horrors without any oversight whatsoever.

It seems to me our main concern these days is not with women’s health but with “access.”  And oftentimes this comes courtesy of those who claim to advocate for “women’s health.”

I may be losing it a little (Brigitte! Come back!) but I can’t remember whether I posted this article I wrote for The Interim. It’s a bit of a review of that Australian book I so appreciated called Giving Sorrow Words:

Each woman is unique but two ideas unify the voices. The first is the myth that abortion is a neutral or easy choice. The second is that abortion is actually a choice.

So many women felt cheated because they could never have envisioned the aftermath. Stories are punctuated by comments like “I’ll never be forgiven for what I did.” Jasmine, from Melbourne, recounts her nightmares: “I dreamt I was covered in blood that would not wash off.” Marguerite, who describes herself as non-religious, writes “for many months after termination, I woke during the night to hear my baby screaming.” For her, the grief was “palpable” and “permeates waking and sleeping hours.”

The second myth is that abortion is a choice at all. Many women awaited their abortion appointment with dread. Justine called her long distance boyfriend on regular intervals, desperate for him to change his mind. He didn’t – until the after the abortion was done. She literally wandered hospital halls prior to her abortion searching for someone who would help her keep the child. Finding only a doctor who confirmed her worst fears that her boyfriend truly wasn’t interested, she went ahead. For Anne, her mother oversaw the unwanted abortion, coming afterwards with presents “like I’d had my tonsils out.” In another, the father, “stands over me while I ring to make the appointment.” Barbara also begged her husband to change his mind, “but all he did was hiss ‘get rid of it.'” While being wheeled to the operating room she plaintively asks: “won’t anyone save me?”

We can’t forget these stories, knowing that they are all too common and also knowing that young women out there are not hearing these voices.

As with most news, there are two sides and I’ll try my very best to be positive about this one.

The bad news: Brigitte will no longer be blogging at ProWomanProLife.

The good news: She’s still anti-abortion. (Phewf!) It’s just she’s taken a job with Sun Media and as such can’t keep blogging here. So if one considers the platform and influence she’ll now have, I think we can all agree this is a big success.

That said, no one, NO ONE, was more instrumental in helping me get ProWomanProLife off the ground. I’m almost inclined to remove the “helping me” part. She did it cheerfully, professionally and promptly, because she wanted to. And she’s never gotten anything but a few frappacinos for all her work (which I understand will be different at Sun Media). Over the last years there have been moments when I communicated more with Brigitte than my own family. We’ve run posts by each other and we’ve written some most excellent op-eds. The end result from this blogging adventure is that we are fast friends. So yes, I’m sad this era is over (the blogging, not the friendship) but I am very glad for her as she starts a new and exciting thing.

Good luck, Brigitte!

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Brigitte adds: Thank you, Andrea! It’s been a privilege to work with such fine ladies.

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Véronique adds: This is definitely a severe case of bad news, good news. I am thrilled for Brigitte and yet very sad for PWPL readers. But mostly thrilled for Brigitte as she launches into the next phase of a very successful career!

Since this week was spring break for lots of schools, I saw a lot more teenage girls out and about than I normally do and I was struck by how inappropriately they dress themselves these days (and I don’t mean just this 1980s comeback which is bad enough in and of itself). I found this article this evening and found it very interesting and relevant:

In the pale-turquoise ladies’ room, they congregate in front of the mirror, re-applying mascara and lip gloss, brushing their hair, straightening panty hose and gossiping: This one is “skanky,” that one is “really cute,” and so forth. Dressed in minidresses, perilously high heels, and glittery, dangling earrings, their eyes heavily shadowed in black-pearl and jade, they look like a flock of tropical birds. A few minutes later, they return to the dance floor, where they shake everything they’ve got under the party lights.

But for the most part, there isn’t all that much to shake. This particular group of party-goers consists of 12- and 13-year-old girls. Along with their male counterparts, they are celebrating the bat mitzvah of a classmate in a cushy East Coast suburb.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really know what this is like. Maybe the other girls my age did, but when I hit junior high, I turned into the biggest dork ever (that’s me on the right, don’t worry, things got better after university). It seems worse than when I was their age and I’m not sure why, but maybe the author is on to something:

I have a different theory. It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?”

[ . . . ]

So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We somehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn’t), and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don’t know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily. We’re embarrassed, and we don’t want to be, God forbid, hypocrites.

I think she might be a little hard on herself here, calling herself a hypocrite. It’s perfectly okay for us as human beings to change our opinions and views on things over time. It’s okay to learn from past mistakes.

I’d like to see more girls respect themselves enough to cover up more. If you ask me, when it comes to the superficial, pretty is way more important than sexy. And as a dork, I have to point out that what is on the inside is what really counts. It’s not hypocritical, it’s GOOD if mothers teach their daughters these things. When girls stop treating themselves as objects, it’ll make it much more difficult for men to do treat them as objects. Personally, I plan on being an obsessive control freak mother and will dress my daughter (if I have one, we’ll see in a few weeks) every day until she’s 18. (Okay, maybe not, but I won’t let her dress in 1980s fashions. Or 1990s. Or 2010s since they’re just a repeat of the 80s. Okay, I’ll just try to give her really good advice.)

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Véronique adds: As the mother of four girls (so far) I consider myself to be an expert of sorts. We can say what we want about society but I lay the responsibility solely at the parents’ doorstep. It is the mother’s job to lead by example from a very young age. My daughters have never seen me in a triangle bikini, a painted-on t-shirt or with my boobs sticking out of my cocktail dress. You may say “after 6 kids, thank goodness” but whether I would look good in these items is beside the point (and if you have been to a water park recently, you know that looking good is not a factor, holy TMI people!) There is no need — certainly not the demands of comfort — to show so much anatomy to the public at large. It is the job of the father to avoid objectifying women, whether it is by the movies they watch or the magazines they read or the drinking holes they patronize. But most importantly, it is the job of the father to teach his daughters how men are wired when it comes to physical attraction. My husband is brutally honest when he tells my oldest daughter what 15 year-old males think when they see skin. Sex-ed is about more than the birds and the bees… If my daughter left the house for a party looking like a clown, I would tell her in that many words and why.

Modesty and good taste have never been issues with my oldest daughter. But her two younger sisters, who are competitive gymnasts, are a bigger challenge. Gymnasts, for one, spend a significant amount of their childhood wearing what amounts to a bathing suit. Their notion of “enough fabric” is not the same as mine, let’s say. They are very comfortable in their own skin, used to be trained and spotted by male coaches and quite proud of their six pack. Every spring, I have to explain to my daughters why they cannot have a bikini. Who cares if they look great in a bikini? Pedophiles? Seriously!

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Deborah adds: I could not put it better myself, Véronique. Maybe I’ll make you my go-to woman on raising children in the near future! I must confess that I do wear a bikini. However, 95% of the time it’s covered by a 5mm full-body wetsuit (which makes a person look like a black pillsbury doughboy).

Didn’t he mean “clump of cells“?

It’s mad because I suppose, you know, as a woman you carry the baby for nine months and you’re very conscious that you’ve got a baby, but for a guy – all of a sudden there’s a baby there. But it’s amazing, he’s great.”

I have this book in the large stack beside my bed:

Now a stunningly candid new book, Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, illuminates the unexplored side of that equation: the plight of Chinese women who give their daughters up for adoption. And that arithmetic is far more complex and brutal, the journalist Xinran writes: “a black hole in the woman’s heart and unanswered questions in her daughter’s.”

It’s generally about adoption of girls, not abortion, due to pressure to have boys in Chinese culture. But I wonder whether the hole in a woman’s heart is any less after an abortion.

Here at ProWomanProLife sometimes we remember days like St. Patrick’s Day and Valentine’s Day and such, and sometimes we don’t. In 2008, I posted about the more serious side of St. Patrick. In 2009, Tanya posted the Muppets singing Danny Boy. Both are important and either will do to wish a Happy St. Patrick’s Day for 2011. (2010 got left out. Two out of three ain’t bad.)

Family Research Council held some breakout sessions at the United Nations. This short clip highlights why exporting abortion, particularly chemical abortion, is a dangerous thing for resource-poor countries. It also gets into the psychological side effects of abortion. Worth watching.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0lRL5QtJI”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0lRL5QtJI]

(h/t)

Like most of you, I anxiously check the news several times a day to hear more about Japan, what’s being done, and how we can help. The situation is increasingly tragic in Japan and almost every resident, including the unborn, is at risk.

Douglas Almond, a Columbia University economist who has studied the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, is concerned that the Japanese government may not be doing enough to warn pregnant women to leave any areas at risk of radiation exposure. Those areas can be much farther from the nuclear plants than many people realize.

Mr. Almond, in an e-mail, explains. The fetus may be particularly sensitive to low doses of ionizing radiation, a susceptibility that current public health responses in Japan seem to have overlooked. Evidence comes from a recent study of Chernobyl fallout in Sweden, which experienced comparatively low radiation doses from the accident; indeed radiation levels in Sweden were believed safe at the time. While this has been largely confirmed in subsequent studies, there is one important exception: children in utero at the time of the accident. Swedish students who were in utero during the accident experienced significantly lower cognitive function, as reflected in performance on standardized tests in middle school, especially those tests that correspond best to IQ. The damage was greatest for cohorts in utero in regions of Sweden that received more fallout by virtue of rainfall during the time the radioactive plume was over Sweden, and were of gestational age 8-25 weeks at the time of the accident. This last finding mirrors earlier epidemiological analysis of the survivors of Atomic bombings in Japan, which found reduced IQ and head circumference among the cohort exposed to radiation at those gestation ages.

[…] I’m grateful to Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economist who is also director of the Hamilton Project in Washington, for calling this research to my attention. “The point,” Mr. Greenstone says, “is that the Japanese government should be issuing stronger warnings to pregnant women.”

This is rich:

A Chinese official said Monday that New Zealand should consider special compensation to parents of Chinese students killed in an earthquake last month because their loss was magnified under the country’s one-child policy,” Associated Press reports. “Seven students from China have been identified among the 166 confirmed deaths in the quake that devastated Christchurch city on Feb. 22, and as many as 20 others are still missing. Chinese Embassy official Cheng Lei said Monday that Chinese quake victims had lost not just their only child, but also a future breadwinner. He said New Zealand should consider providing additional financial assistance to those families.”

I’m not quite sure why New Zealand is responsible for China’s one-child policy. Perhaps the Chinese government should take steps to outlaw the untoward death of the children they allow to live.