Tomorrow marks a celebration of Roe v Wade for some folks. Those pro-abortion folks have been doing a “blog for choice” day for six years now.
Since “choice” is a euphemism for the very painful and heartwrenching concept of killing your child, some other bloggers will be asking a simple question: What do you mean by choice?
I’m sure they’ll have plenty of answers to skirt the issue.
No one should celebrate abortion, which is what they are doing.
…from Philadelphia, (warning: readers may find this story disturbing)
An abortion doctor has been arrested and charged with the murder of a patient and seven live infants whose spines were severed with scissors at a West Philadelphia clinic that has been described as a house of horrors, officials said today.
District Attorney Seth Williams said the doctor, Kermit P. Gosnell, was charged following a grand jury investigation.
Gosnell, 69, lost his medical license last year after health officials determined his clinic posed “a clear danger to the public.”
Gosnell was arrested this morning, officials said. He has maintained his innocence.
The seven infants were born alive in the 6th, 7th and 8th months of pregnancy and killed by severing their spinal cords with scissors, William said.
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Brigitte adds: Safe, legal and rare. Yeah, right.
I remember once hearing that the most lucrative type of book you can write as an author are Harlequin romances. Not good news for people like me, not good news. Those books are read by women, and now we have a corresponding world of TV.
The question is, as raised by this Globe and Mail article: Do women watch crap? And I’m inclined to say yes.
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For once (!), Brigitte wants to be contrarian: I have read a few Harlequin romances (it was research!) and while I got tired of the predictable writing style (the mouth goes dry, the knees go weak – I cannot STAND the see the words “mouth” and “dry” together anymore!), I have to say some of them are not altogether bad reads. At least they tell a straightforward and old-fashioned story, as opposed to so much modern literary fiction. But television, yes. A different kettle of fish to be sure. I used to loooove Will & Grace and Seinfeld and House and now (thanks, Netflix!), I’m going through Mad Men (second season) and the good ole Get Smart. None of which is particularly uplifting. But see, getting uplifted isn’t why I watch TV shows…
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Véronique comes clean: I watched Bulging Brides today while eating lunch. It was that or I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant on TLC, which scares me stupid, along with A C-section Story and Bringing Home Baby.
Until work installs iTunes on my desktop, I will need to watch low-brow tv on my soup minute (“lunch hour” too generous). At home, I watch House on the treadmill, Mad Man with my husband and The Good Wife while catching-up on work, all iTunes downloads. We do not want cable in our house: the content is too bad, the ads too many and the bills too high.
Look, I’m not against breast-feeding. Not at all. It’s great if that’s your thing. I’m not even that squeamish about lactating in public (though not very wild about it either). But this is pushing it.
The Wisconsin Bang variety is “deliciously creamy,” City Funk has a “dizzying sweet finish,” and Sweet Air Equity is a “mild, hard cheese that crumbles in your mouth.” The fromage connoisseur might salivate at these tantalizing descriptions, but for those who know the key ingredient — human breast milk — these culinary accounts elicit everything from curiosity to utter disgust.
To New Yorker Miriam Simun, a breast-milk cheese-maker who recently served up the creations as part of a university project, the question is: To eat or not to eat. We consume breast milk as a baby, so why not spread it on a baguette as an adult? We consume cow’s cheese, so why not sink our teeth into cheese coagulated from human milk?
You’ll remember Abby Johnson as the Planned Parenthood employee who crossed the line, becoming publicly pro-life.
She’s written a book about it, called Unplanned. Here’s a review of the book, which I’m also hoping to get a copy of shortly. It’s a sad story, starting with this:
Johnson was raised pro-life, but “if you’d put me up to a debate, I would’ve lost, because it’s something we didn’t discuss a lot.” When facts are fuzzy, they are easily manipulated. Johnson was recruited on her college campus by a nice woman in a hot pink booth” convincing her that “Planned Parenthood’s goal is to make abortion rare, except for women in dire need.” Johnson was finessed on the spot by the slick marketing job. “Her compassion really captured me..We both cared about people… I really wanted to help hurting people. I was glad I’d met this woman.”
For those of us who are pro-life, we should never forget that plenty of people who say they are pro-life don’t know why. The result is that when they are pushed even a little bit, they lose the debate.
(Never fear! ProWomanProLife is here. Seriously, people. Information is power. And we bring it to you, in snappy, post-sized bits.)
Rebecca Walberg is in the Financial Post today, here. This is great for many reasons, but the one I’ll cite here is that if we aim to change the culture with regards to abortion, it doesn’t mean we (pro-lifers) have to write exclusively about abortion, all the time. Some people, will, of course, but I think it is also important to have experts in all fields, people who are pro-life but may never reference it overtly. Of course, Rebecca is not like this, as she is openly on this web site, I’m just glad she is having such success in other areas too.
A new decade, a new kind of creepy crime:
A California man faces six years in prison for using personal information found on women’s Facebook profiles to take over their e-mail accounts, steal nude pictures of them and sometimes even blackmail them. One victim likened it to “virtual rape.”
George Samuel Bronk pleaded guilty in Sacramento Superior Court Thursday to seven felony charges, including computer intrusion, impersonation and possession of child pornography.
The charges stem from a nine-month period ending in September, during which Bronk hijacked the e-mail accounts of hundreds of women across 17 states and in England, the Sacramento Bee reported.
A press release from the office of Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general, says Bronk targeted his victims by searching Facebook for women who posted both their e-mail addresses and also personal information such as their favorite foods, their father’s middle names, their high-school mascots and their favorite colors.
Such details are routinely used in “identity challenges” when changes are made to online personal accounts. “Social engineering” scams, such as phishing scams, are designed to trick the victim into revealing this sort of information — but Bronk found it all right there on Facebook.
With it, Bronk could pose as a legitimate e-mail user, hit the “Forgot your password?” button, pass the identity challenge, change the password to one of his own and take over the e-mail account, locking out the victim.
And then the problems would begin.
Bronk, 23, searched hundreds of “sent mail” folders for any nude photographs or videos. If he found any, he’d often sending the most scandalous or pornographic pictures to the women’s contacts lists, or would contact the victims directly and threaten to make the pictures public unless they sent him even more revealing ones.
In some cases, he’d go back for seconds. After he’d taken over an e-mail account, he’d e-mail Facebook from it and tell the company he’d forgotten the victim’s Facebook password — and then take over the woman’s Facebook account as well.
In October, when police confiscated Bronk’s computer and arrested him, they found more than 170 files of explicit photographs stolen from e-mail accounts he had hijacked.
Here’s the part I *really* don’t get: Why do people keep nude and/or explicit pictures of themselves on web-based servers? Are they trying to get in trouble? I don’t know about you, but my sympathy switch is broken. If you’re going to post explicit pictures of yourself online, you deserve to be embarrassed publicly.
What is it about women feeling like they must be perfect all the time?
Almost one-quarter of mothers admit they cover up how much television their kids watch, and one in five lie about how long they spend playing with their kids, according to a new survey of 5,000 people by website Netmums. Mothers often make each other feel “inadequate,” it notes, and the pressure to seem like a perfect parent leads many to lie. Almost two-thirds of moms also said they’d told white lies to other mothers about how well they were coping, and almost half cover up financial concerns. More than nine out of 10 admitted they compare themselves to other mothers.
What if we just chilled a bit and realized that having kids isn’t perfect and we don’t need to be, either?
The federal government is looking for ways to stop honour killings in Canada.
TORONTO — They are disturbing stories of fathers trying to kill their daughters, of brothers murdering their sisters.
Long prevalent in certain Muslim, Hindu and Sikh cultures in South Asia and the Middle East, “honour killings” have increasingly been making headlines in Canada in recent years.
Now, the federal government is urging more community groups to come forward to help fight the rise of such crimes.
Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose first called for a pitch from organizations for projects targeting this type of violence in July.
Since then, the department has received a couple of dozen formal applications but says it still has more funding that can be put toward helping eradicate these “intolerable” acts.
Women still don’t know much about baby-making… That’s the conclusion I get from an otherwise very long and tediously non-judgmental article on egg freezing.
Women are born with a finite number of eggs. At birth a woman’s ovaries contain approximately one to two million oocytes — immature eggs; by puberty, the count drops to 400,000. During each menstrual cycle, about 1,000 oocytes begin to develop but only one becomes a mature egg. The others left behind die. Not only does the supply shrink but egg quality decreases over time as well, since the best eggs are used up when young, so that each egg now offers less chance of pregnancy and a higher risk of miscarriage.
By the time a woman reaches age 39, “there aren’t many (follicles) left that have got enough strength to raise their hand,” says Dr. Al Yuzpe, co-founder and co-director of the Genesis Fertility Centre of Vancouver.
“My usual response is, ‘You may not look 40, you may not feel 40 but your ovaries don’t know it,’ ” Yuzpe says. He frequently encounters women who had no idea of the limits of their fertility. “They’re not only shocked, they’re tearful, they’re angry. ‘Nobody told me that I wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48.’ ”
I don’t expect everyone to know every detail about the production of eggs in female humans. And I speak as someone who knows fairly little, beyond the basics. But I always knew that if I waited too long, I wouldn’t be able to have children. What do you mean, nobody told you that you weren’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48? There’s not much point “educating” people who just won’t listen.