Archives for April 2012

I’ve decided to pick up the slack (feeling a little guilty) and this certainly caught my eye.  The great investigative journalism of blogger Pat Maloney brings us the numbers of signatures on the latest petitions asking for protection for unborn Canadians, but more interestingly, who is presenting them in the House of Commons. It’s nice to see democracy at work, and like Pat, I think we need to keep it up!  The more, the merrier.

There are on-line petitions garnering support, but the more effective petition is the officially approved, old-style paper one that everyone signs and then you send it in to your MP.  That can be found here.

Friends, I’m sorry I have not been able to update the blog. Those of you who have tracked with us for a while, however, will know this is the first break since 2008. I’m in Israel, doing a week-long course at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem. Fascinating, heavy, busy: A fantastic learning experience from the academic perspective but also because the participants are literally from across the globe from Africa, to Europe, to North America. Lots to ponder. I’m sure I’ll be able to include some of the information I’m learning for a long while to come.

But for now, enough of you have emailed me this link about six hospitals in Toronto hiding the knowledge of fetal sex.

It’s amazing how slow people are to wake up to the fact that yes, this is happening in Canada. And it’s further amazing to me that some women defend it and claim they are “defenders of women’s rights.”

Danielle Smith on social issues:

In our Wildrose, when our members elected me, they knew they were electing a candidate that was pro-choice and pro-gay marriage,” Smith told an all-candidates gathering in Okotoks, a town of 24,000 located south of Calgary. “The only way we’re going to be able to become a mainstream, big-tent conservative party which is capable of forming government is to focus on the issues that matter to Albertans.”

Wildrose is a populist party. If abortion matters to Albertans, it will have to matter to Danielle Smith. I seem to recall a referendum where abortion did matter to Albertans, and they were pro-life. I’ll try to look that up.

I may be on holiday and hardly blogging at all, but let it not be said I don’t pay attention to the important stuff.

Angelina and Brad are going to tie the knot!

Now seems like a good time to mention I am going to be away a lot in the coming weeks. Blogging will be lighter than usual. (And by the time I am back, it will be tulip time in Ottawa! Hence the photo.)

Happy Easter!

Join us in Halifax on April 14 for a day-long conference hosted by Campaign Life Coalition (registration required).

A perfect storm is brewing in Canada right now to reopen the long-silenced debate on abortion and so now is the time to step up our efforts to fight for the unborn in the culture and the public square.

This conference is dedicated to inspiring, equipping, and mobilizing Nova Scotia’s pro-life supporters to foster a deeply engaged andeffective movement for life in this province.

com·pla·cen·cy: self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies. (Thanks, Merriam-Webster)

It means that you naively feel good about something but that maybe with a little more awareness you might not feel so good about it. I can think of quite a few abortion related uses for that word. How about not knowing what abortion really does (the unborn are just a “bunch of cells”)? Or how about not knowing Canada’s unrestricted law (or lack thereof)? I would say that there is a dangerous sense of complacency surrounding abortion and that abortion rights activists might like to keep it that way. What I wouldn’t say is this,

Pro-choice activist Rolanda Ryan said the head count might be misleading, as there is what she called “complacency” among many Canadians about existing laws that make abortion legal.

“I think we just need to counter the anti-choice protest, and let everybody know there is a lot of people who support women’s rights,” she told CBC News.

Amy Ryan, who described herself as a Catholic, said she felt compelled to stand with the pro-choice side.

“I fast for Good Friday,” she said. “He died so that we could have a choice …I respect their right to protest, but it’s Good Friday, and [they are] ruining my day.”

But of course there can’t be complacency about existing laws if so many Canadians still aren’t aware of them. It’s the reason we protest in broad daylight on busy streets, to spread the word. Yet once again, a peaceful abortion protest with over 100 participants is forced into the background for an article focusing on the minuscule but more boisterous group of pro-choice demonstrators.

Demonstrators, I might add, who are as wrong about complacency as they are about The Passion. I’d rant heartily about why He didn’t die “so that we could have a choice”, but I don’t want to let one silly protester ruin this incredibly important day in the Christian calendar.

Well over 100 people quietly marched outside the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's on Friday morning. (CBC )

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Andrea adds: Reading “He died so we can have a choice” actually made me grimace. However, I won’t let it ruin my day, since He died for my flaws, mistakes, sins–and hers too. And that’s good news.

Read about it, here:

My party’s suppression of debate is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Today I am saying sayonara to my Liberal membership.

It’s strange to see the Liberals try and capitalize off of abortion support. When did they get this extreme?

Lila Rose on being a woman in today’s culture:

We don’t wish to take the country back in time; rather, we aspire to move it forward, beyond a time when women are treated as objects and pitted against their children and their religious institutions — and toward a time when truly emancipated women embrace their intrinsic dignity and, with it, their authentic womanhood.

(h/t)