I caught this story this week and wanted to blog about it, but didn’t have time. So here I am, catching up with this item this fine snowy Saturday.
Here’s the gist of the story:
The Active-8 program encourages people to make positive changes. It features eight young people from Atlantic Canada, who are meant to serve as an inspiration for building a better world. People can pledge on the Active-8 website to do a good deed in support of one of the youth ambassadors and the person with the most pledges at the end of February wins $1,000.
One of the youth, Kandace Hagen, wants to open up PEI to abortion. It’s the only province that doesn’t have abortion clinics on its soil. A pro-life activist drew attention to this, and asked people to vote for someone else else, hence the CBC story.
What do the other youth activists want?
Anna Fricker wants to put an end to poverty in East Africa, after spending some time in Tanzania.
Deg Nath Neaupaney spent 18 years of his life in a refugee camp in Nepal and as a result wants to work for peace and freedom.
Elena Fenrick has worked in a hospital and school for underprivileged children in Morocco and made a film about it.
Tara Brinston wants to help improve the world for people with disabilities.
I could go on. These are inspiring young people who have seen some injustice and want to rectify it.
Then there’s pro-choice Kandace, whose concern is that when women want an abortion on PEI they have to travel to the mainland to get it.
To summarize, her struggle is that women in her province can’t get a procedure of dubious benefit in exactly the way she wants. (“I said a latté! Not a cappucino!”) Her own abortion, for example, required her to travel.
Let me address the thought you may have had that my latté/cappucino is mean and unwarranted.
And let me further state that I meant it.
This kind of campaign for “reproductive justice” for women is the result of an uneducated, immature worldview that results in true injustice being glossed over and swapped for a twisted fake version of it.
She’s campaigning for the rights of powerful people to trample over little people, in a world where people starve, are put in jail for nothing, have their freedoms removed, have to move across oceans away from their families and homes in order to survive.
She’s sitting pretty on one of the quietest, most peaceful places on God’s green earth and campaigning for injustice to be further perpetuated.
Seems to me that a vote for her is a vote for a string of silly, immature euphemisms, strung together in a way that would make Orwell proud but does nothing whatsoever for the girls and women of PEI, in sharp contrast to a group of focused and concerned young people who have seen real injustice and are working to combat it.
And that’s the way I see that. Here ends the rant.
by 
And a very good rant it was. One of those rants that needs to be ranted …
Just went to the Active-8 web-site, and found it slightly ironic that one of the suggested pledges is around reducing child mortality. Guess, as usual, this only applies to children out of the womb.
Thanks, Joel. I try not to rant too often, but I’m glad someone felt this was necessary.
Tish: if abortion were included in the stats on reasons for death, it would likely be the number one reason and would raise our child mortality stats sky high… would be an easy calculation actually, to include abortion in Canadian child mortality stats and would make a point. Hmmmm. perhaps I’ll get on that!
Awesome post.
Sigh.
You know, if Ms. Hagen really wanted abortion to be available in PEI, she could spend the next 8 years of her life going to medical school, incur hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt, and then pay it off by disemboweling young humans and suctioning their tiny bodies out of their mothers.
There is really nothing stopping her.
But, instead, she wants OTHER people to do it for her. You know, asking someone else to abort your pregnancy is on par with sending a soldier into a war zone. There is bound to be death, and violence, and trauma.
If nothing else, do you think we could maybe put some restrictions on abortion to save the sanity of the doctors who perform it?
I mean, abortion would be available in PEI if there were doctors there who were willing to perform the procedure.
Bah. And now, thanks to the involvement of the CBC, Kandace Hagan is going to win the competition.
Somehow it is nasty and vindictive when a prolifer urges her posse to vote in one of these popularity contests.
But when the CBC goes and endorses a candidate, well, that’s just everyday news reporting.