Archives for 2011

…to “come out” to colleagues that you’re pro-life. For me personally, it doesn’t affect my job, though it will I’m sure affect any further university study I do. Even then, I admittedly have to overcome a certain level of personal apprehension. But what if you work in the educational or health care fields where your opinion might just have more of an impact? That’s when a pro-life stance is seen as dangerous.

A Christian mental health worker is facing the sack after giving two colleagues a leaflet warning of the physical and psychological damage some women suffer after having an abortion.

Margaret Forrester passed the booklet to family planning staff at the health centre where she works because she felt that the NHS was not offering patients enough information about the risks associated with terminating a pregnancy.

But Ms Forrester, 39, said she was suspended from her job as a psychological wellbeing practitioner based in Westminster because managers at Central North West London Mental Health Trust disagreed with her personal beliefs.

She will appear in front of an internal disciplinary committee on Wednesday, charged with “distributing materials some people may find offensive”. Her supporters fear that she could lose her job.

_____________________

Brigitte adds: What bugs me the most about all this is the use of euphemisms. Distributing materials some people may find offensive? My foot. What they mean is: We are pro-abortion and those who want to be pro-life will have to be pro-life somewhere else. They could at least have the guts to say it.

There are awards given in Margaret Sanger’s name, for all her very fine work to exterminate undesirables encourage “reproductive freedom.” A quote I stumbled upon from the lady herself:

The American socialist Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and is still a feminist and liberal icon. On black people and immigrants in general, these were “human weeds” and “reckless breeders,” “spawning human beings who never should have been born.” She believed in the sterilization of the mentally ill, in “racial purification” and the elimination of those she labelled the “feeble-minded.” She was aware, however, that her racism might cause a few problems and warned that, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population” because it might provoke “their more rebellious members.”

Now tell me–if her life’s work had been in chemistry or engineering or math, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell she’d be held up as an icon today. But no, her life’s work was birth control and abortion, and so, the abortion distortion means we are meant to put aside her racism and generally abhorrent views, or contextualize them–she was living in a eugenic age, so we should tolerate her views–etc., etc., etc. Enough of the excuses–hers is not a byline you’d want in your paper today, and we shouldn’t give or accept awards in her name. More to the point, her racism was not a side view, it was intimately connected to her life’s work. Despicable.

A friend in Australia recently sent me Giving Sorrow Words, by Melinda Tankard Reist. It’s a book for women who don’t exist, the author writes, because women who grieve the abortions they had are told it was just another choice and that if they suffer, it’s their fault:

Attitudes towards women overwhelmed by grief following abortion demonstrate a cruel indifference to women’s pain. Their suffering is considered a figment of their imagination; their guilt and remorse a byproduct of social/religious conditioning. In short, they are an embarrassment.

The book allows women to tell their personal stories. I read one last night and cried–a woman followed by the ghost of her child everywhere she went, for whom suicide felt like it might provide welcome relief.

I think I’ll likely quote from this book as a I read it, from time to time, but I wanted people to be aware of the book in the first place. It’s the first time I’m seeing all in one place, detailed stories of how and why these women went for an abortion and what that did to them. And I think it’s important both for women who have had abortions and are suffering right now, but also for the rest of everybody to remember that abortion causes tremendous pain for so many.

Still think it’s because they want what’s best for women?

London – “The global hormonal contraceptive market is a fast growing market, with oral contraceptives considered to be the most common method of avoiding unplanned pregnancies by women. In 2009, the global contraceptives market was $11.2 billion and is forecast to grow to $14.5 billion by 2016, which represents a growth rate of 4% between 2009 and 2016.”

You can’t find reports like this on Men’s Health Markets, because they don’t exist. Sure, there are reports on Viagra revenues, but nothing to the extent of a Contraceptives Market report. $14.5 billion makes that Facebook kid look like a bellhop, and it’s not an amount the major pharmaceutical players are willing to part with easily. New growth is on the way, with new players vying for their piece of the birth control pie. What can we expect? More ads, new forms of contraceptives, and all of this at a record pace. We can also expect more of the same in terms of real consideration for women’s health.

Hundreds of women have become pregnant after a long-term contraceptive implant failed, it emerged last night.

Even more have complained that they were left injured or scarred by the rod inserted into their arm, which was supposed to protect them against conceiving for three years.

The NHS has had to pay compensation to women hurt when the implants were inserted and seven women who were left traumatised by unexpectedly becoming pregnant have received payouts totalling more than £200,000 – an average of more than £28,000 each.

A lawyer revealed that many of the women affected had suffered ‘psychological difficulties’, had miscarriages or decided to undergo abortions after the implants went wrong.

One woman who became pregnant and underwent an abortion said the trauma had led to her marriage ending.

The fiasco involving the implant, called Implanon, is one of the worst mass contraceptive failures to hit the NHS in living memory.

A total of 584 women who had the hormone-filled rod inserted in their arms have reported unwanted pregnancies to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency – the Government’s drugs and medical devices watchdog.

But the total could be far higher, as many women may not have complained after becoming pregnant and either undergoing abortions or giving birth.

The MHRA received 1,607 complaints about the implant going wrong, some from doctors deeply concerned that the devices are difficult to insert and that it is impossible to check if they are correctly installed because they are invisible to X-rays.

Implanon’s manufacturer MSD, a subsidiary of global pharmaceutical giant Merck, has now replaced it with an updated product called Nexplanon, which has a new pre-loaded applicator and can be detected by X-ray or CT scan.

I know when I use a product that injures me and fails miserably that I’m certainly not going back for a refill from the same supplier. Merck, hmm, why does that name sound so very familiar? MSD are not the only giants scampering to release new product, Bayer (partnered with the IPPF) is also looking toward the next big market.

Objectives of Bayer’s Sustainability Program

Lighthouse project “Family Planning”

• Introduce original contraception products at prices in line with the market in 11 African countries jointly with USAID by 2012
• Double current family planning activities in collaboration with our partners (e.g. USAID, UNFPA, IPPF) by 2012
• Increase annual provision of oral contraceptives to 110 million cycles jointly with partners (e.g. USAID)

The pipeline looks something like this: A projection of $14.5 billion in contraceptive revenue is made, companies push to produce, approve and market the next big drug, Bayer sends out a “Youth Truck” to assess the prospective customers and get Ugandan children familiar with the idea of prescription birth control (while women in the west see more and more ads), and Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes have their clinics, those philanthropic beacons of family planning, write the prescriptions. At what point are we going to realize that women’s health may not be at the forefront of their priorities?

I linked to Dennis Prager on this question earlier, here.

Now with a different view on a similar theme from the UK, a study suggests women aren’t as interested in financial independence as we may think:  

The report concluded that equal roles in the family, where husband and wife shared employment, childcare and housework, was ‘not the ideal sought by most couples’.

Dr Hakim added: ‘It is thus not surprising that wives generally earn less than their husbands, and that most couples rationally decide that it makes sense for her to take on the larger share of child care, and to use most or all the parental leave allowance.’

…The study comes after a series of measures announced by the Coalition intended to decrease the pay difference between women and men.

Since we hear about the “gender wage gap” here in Canada often enough, it’s wise to be savvy to why such a gap exists and the extent to which it simply reflects women’s desires.

From the Belfast Telegraph,

Ireland’s smallest surviving premature baby is today thriving at home with her parents.

Tiny Sive McDonald was just 420g — less than a pound — when she arrived into the world 16 weeks early.

She was smaller than the palm of her dad’s hand at full stretch — about the length of a Biro (ball-point pen).

Aisling McDonald (32), from Mullingar, Westmeath, and her husband John McDonald (30), from Bagenalstown, Carlow, met in Australia and married back home. They were looking forward to the birth of their first baby last summer.

But they were given “no hope” when baby Sive had to be delivered 16 weeks premature on June 11.

Aisling suffered from high blood pressure during her pregnancy.

“It all happened really quick. We were brought from St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny to Waterford Regional Hospital where there is a special baby unit,” said Mr McDonald.

“They were giving us no hope, to be honest. They gave us a room to stay in by ourselves and were really supportive. There was a priest there all the time and we were facing the worst-case scenario.”

Aisling’s system was under pressure and the doctors wanted to ensure her life was not in danger.

“She could have had a stroke. They said they were doing the best for the baby but Aisling was the priority.”

[…]

“We were told babies don’t survive outside the womb unless they are more than 24 weeks. Sive was 23 weeks and five days.”

[…]

“We still can’t believe it. We brought her home to Kilkenny a month before Christmas and she is 9lb 6oz now. She’s the equivalent of two months old. Her eyes are perfect, her ears are clear and she’s responsive for two months.”

The parents are sharing their story to comfort other families of premature babies. “We are doing up a poster for the wall of the special baby unit to show how Sive survived. She’s the best. We feel like the luckiest people alive.”

A recent comment from a reader about regret and abortion led me to question the link between regret and our current cultural climate. Studies vary on the percentage of women who do and do not regret their decision, some quoting 70% do not regret it, others quoting 80% (pregnant from sexual assault) regretted their decision. Assuming for the sake of argument the 70% for absolutely no regrets is accurate, one wonders how this high percentage is possible.

In a growing “Culture of Me”, perhaps instead of thinking these figures are high we should be asking ourselves why women who undergo abortions should be any more remorseful than the rest of the population. In fact, narcissism, a primary trait of which is lack of empathy, has become so prevalent in our society it may no longer be considered a disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association recently announced it’s considering lifting narcissistic personality disorder — along with four other personality disorders — from its highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

[…]

…the diagnosis may be dropped for the manual’s 2013 edition, Campbell says, essentially because it’s a manifestation of normal personality.

So, he says, the same patient would be told he or she has “a combination of traits that maybe lie on a continuum or a spectrum. You have high levels of traits that are associated with narcissism.”

A New Normal?

But the way narcissism is treated — in the majority of cases, with therapy — wouldn’t change much.

“There’s no treatment for extreme narcissism that’s somehow different than moderate narcissism,” Campbell says.

And while things won’t change much for those on the couch, he says, the way we talk about narcissism in culture might.

“When this happened I went and looked at Twitter just to see what people were saying about it,” Campbell says.  “The most common response was, ‘It must be so normal now, it’s no longer a disorder.'”

And the second-most?

“‘Gee, I guess I’m OK, then’,” Campbell says. “People see there’s narcissism everywhere, and they’re just shocked … that they’re considering getting rid of it. It’s such a perfect term for so much of what we see in society.”

It’s easy to laugh at the amount of “Me” promoting we all participate in on a daily basis, the status updates of our every thought and a general sense of entitlement to whatever we desire. We should have it, we deserve it, and dag nabbit we want it now. Quite a disconnect from Mother Teresa’s “A life not lived for others is not a life.” to Snooki’s “I think I’m fascinating.” But what effect will a narcissistic society have on our children?

The Narcissist turns other people from people into objects and they relate to other people primarily in terms of what the other can do to enhance their self esteem.   This is what I mean by my title, “objectifying the object.”

In our culture, one of the worst outcomes of such objectification concerns the way in which we treat our children.  We give lip service to the idea that our children are the most important people in our country and then turn around and make cultural and legal decisions that enhance the desires and pleasures of adults, often at the expense of children.

A growing body of literature supports the idea that children do best when raised by two, married parents.  (There is not enough data yet to know how children of same-sex couples fare.)  Yet our culture has consistently made it easier for people to have children without marriage and easier to divorce once children are in the picture. In the weighting of what is best for the parents versus what is best for the children, the children’s needs come in a distant second.

Another place where this is an issue is in abortion. At one time there was no question among people that life began at conception. Whether or not you believe that holds, it is certainly true that for a wanted pregnancy, the child begins to become a real person, invested with the love, hopes, and dream of its mother, fairly early in pregnancy. By the time of quickening, when the baby’s first movements are felt, no prospective mother would call her baby anything but a human being. On the other hand, in order to make it psychologically possible to abort an unwanted baby, the prospective child has to be turned into a devalued object, a mere “fetus” or a “choice”.

[…]

In a Narcissistic culture, children are increasingly seen as objects, possessions, if you will. Abortion fits into this paradigm because a possession can be easily disposed of while a child is a person who may have other desires.

If NPD is removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will it simply be the norm? Currently, there is no treatment for narcissism, but the first step, as always, is to recognize that there is a problem.

Ross Douthat writing in the New York Times about the paradox of North America’s unborn:

No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

Sad but true.

Neil Reynolds has a fun piece on why good old Mother Earth is quite capable of sustaining many more people, here.

For that matter, though, it was once said – most famously, back in the 1970s – that the world’s population could fit comfortably into Texas. As it happens, this apparently idiotic assertion has been fact-checked once again. Here (from the Simply Shrug website) is the methodology and the math.

The global population is roughly 6.8 billion people. For this exercise, say seven billion. Use Metropolitan New York (population: 8.3 million) as a guide to tolerable density. With an area of 790 square kilometres, the Big Apple population density is 10,500 people per square kilometre.

How much land would be required to accommodate seven billion people with the same density of population that New York already has? Answer: 666,265 square kilometres. But New York City is already taken. Where could you find space for the rest of the world’s people? As it happens, Texas fits the bill perfectly: The Lone Star State has 678,051 square kilometres of land – or roughly 10,000 square kilometres more than needed.

He also has numbers for food and water needs, if you’re the nitpicky type. If you’re not getting the reference in the headline, please go here for the explanation.

…so why didn’t the G8?

At the end of last month President Obama recognised the threat the LRA is having on this underdeveloped area of central Africa when he launched a plan to tackle the notorious fighters and the shattering impact they have on communities. The African Union (AU) is also taking welcome steps to find solutions.

But despite commitments and political initiatives, the LRA has been allowed to operate for more than 20 years. It’s impossible to calculate how many lives have been ruined but in the last two years alone the group has become the deadliest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo killing more than 2,300 and abducting more than 3,000 people across the region.

[…]

Seventy-two-year-old Papa Peleke runs an upholstery business in Dungu town in north-east Congo, where he lives with his wife of 44 years, their nine children and their “many grandchildren”. He and four of his teenage granddaughters were abducted by the LRA in November 2008 and taken deep into the forest. His youngest granddaughter recently escaped after 15 months in captivity. The others remain missing.

“The world must end this war and this suffering,” he told Oxfam. “I don’t want to have to hear the name LRA in Congo any more. The Congolese army aren’t able to do much – on the day we were abducted there were 10 soldiers nearby but they didn’t do anything.”

The UN and the international community are asking what can be done for people like Papa Pekele and his family. The answer is simple: they must finally make sure there is peace, security and development.

What bothered me most about the G8 Maternal Health Initiative was that it was ignoring pressing urgent issues effecting the lives of women in the regions it was covering while focusing on issues that, at this stage, the women in countries like Sudan and Congo simply aren’t able to debate for themselves due to lack of status, lack of education, and lack of infrastructure. What is it these women want and need? They want to be protected from self-proclaimed prophets turned military leaders like Joseph Kony.

Mr. Kony, who has been wanted by the International Criminal Court since 2005, has engaged since the late 1980s in the mass abductions of children from villages and government-run camps in the Ugandan countryside. His hostages, seized in ambushes along roads and in raids on settlements, became the living fuel for a grim, millennial war.

Mr. Kony did not ransom his captives. He had another design. He indoctrinated the boys as foot soldiers in a guerrilla campaign against the Ugandan government and, when directed by his sponsors in Sudan, against villages and rebel groups in Southern Sudan. Abducted girls were put to work, too — as labor, as soldiers, and, once they reached puberty, as sexual chattel for Mr. Kony and his coterie of commanders, who called them their wives.