I blogged the other day about how Canada needs more children.

Canada also needs more foster parents.

Fostering isn’t something I know very much about. I know that the Children’s Aid Societies have their hands very full.

I also know that for some parents, getting involved in the bureaucracy and having an arm of the government scrutinize your private life isn’t high on the list of things to do.

I still think fostering is a valuable gift a family makes to the community and to a child.

I also hope this charity called Safe Families takes off–there clearly is a need. Their solution is to help to keep kids out of the foster care system by providing community based help for children who are not in danger of any kind of abuse, but rather, the parents (or more often parent) is facing a short-term crisis and they have no one to help. It’s a cool charity–check them out.

Abort, or hold a person until he dies and maintain hope:

Dustin and Sierra Yoder, from Sugarcreek, a small town in Ohio, knew that Bentley had a rare condition in which his brain was growing outside of his skull. Sierra Yoder said doctors told them that their son would not live long past his birth. If he didn’t die, she said doctors warned, he would live with no cognitive function.

She said she and her husband were urged to consider abortion – and they did – but the night before the procedure, they chose to continue the pregnancy.

But the couple started to wrestle with their decision, still wondering whether they should abort or deliver him and hold him until he died. “The night before the procedure, I told Dustin I couldn’t do it,” Yoder said. “He had a big sigh of relief. He was very happy.”

…

No one quite knows what Bentley’s future will look like but, his mother said, the Yoders have hope again. “Because of how different his brain really is, they have no one to compare him to,” Sierra Yoder said, adding that the doctors think “he will have a rewarding life. We just have to take it step by step.”

…is not A for adulteress but rather C for Christian. Mary Eberstadt has written a new book called It’s Dangerous to Believe.

Mary Eberstadt’s powerful new book, It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, is filled with arresting formulations, like the idea that C for Christian has become the new scarlet letter. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was about Puritans and sex, of course, but so is Eberstadt’s. It’s just that her Puritans are “secular.”

The bizarre turn in our culture wars that is America’s debate over transgenderism is nothing if not spectacular. The danger is that the dramatic and seemingly unprecedented nature of the transgenderism controversy is keeping us from making out the big picture. What actually is the position of Christianity in American society at this moment, and how is the Christian dilemma connected to changing views of sexuality? What can and should be done to preserve the freedom of religion that created this country? Eberstadt poses and answers these questions, and I don’t think the debate over religious freedom can rightly take place now without engaging her arguments.

This quick review gives you a sense of the book, as does this article by Mary Eberstadt herself. I look forward to reading it!

Mary Eberstadt, author of Adam and Eve after the Pill and newly It’s Dangerous to Believe

People, there’s a new blog for fathers. Papa Alpha is Paul Attia, a friend of mine who is driven to do more and more, such that just reading his blog makes me feel a bit tired.

That said, there is indeed a need for resources for fathers. So this Father’s Day, forward Papa Alpha to the dads in your life. It’s not a blog about life or abortion, though I suspect Papa Alpha won’t shy away from the tough topics as needed. I am linking here because good people doing good things should get attention. You can start reading with one of his first articles: Want to Be a Super Dad? Try Being More Selfish.

Papa Alpha may claim to give advice about being selfish, but I don’t think he really means it. Look, here he is playing with his child!

As reported by the CBC:

A pregnant woman in a car was shot and killed by gunfire from another vehicle in Toronto’s Rexdale neighbourhood Sunday night, and her baby is in critical condition after delivery by emergency caesarean section, Toronto police say…

…The baby remains in critical but stable condition, according to Toronto police. The gender of the child is not known.

In case anyone (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) wanted my thoughts on this piece:

1. Where abortion rates are falling–hurray! I (and many others, too) celebrate this. This is what we want.
2. It’s very hard to know in Canada what the abortion rate is doing. This is because we do not force compliance on submitting numbers from private clinics. So chunks of data are missing.
3. In the world, it is harder still to know what the abortion rate is doing. In countries where abortion is illegal, they are obviously not collecting the stats. They use, as stated in the article, modeling and extrapolation, published, and, wait for it, unpublished studies (what is that?)
   “The study was based on statistical modeling of information collected from national surveys, official government statistics and other published and unpublished studies and was funded by various countries as well as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the United Nations.”
4. Back when I looked at this more closely, they were taking the abortion rate in the one town where they knew what it was and extrapolating further… so it would be like taking the abortion rate in Orillia and saying that applies to the province of Ontario. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. We can’t say.
5. I am hereby concluding my cursory thoughts on abortion stats worldwide. I don’t know much–willing to learn more and be corrected. But whenever the A word comes up it comes with a lot of baggage and ideology that people (yes, pro-lifers too) cling to. So it is wise to view data, science and research on this topic with a salt mine of salt.
   

   This is the Wieliczka salt mine, a World Unesco Heritage site in Poland. Each crystal in the chandelier is salt. They carved a chapel down there, and some people get married there. Crazy. Anyway, this is how much salt you need to take abortion stats with.

Biking in to work today, I could see lots of brightly coloured t-shirts on folks walking around on Parliament Hill and on Sparks St. saying things like “I AM PRO-LIFE” –me too, young people, me too. Carry on.

Today is a rare day when if you are pro-life you will be surrounded by hordes of others who feel similarly. That is to say, today is the March for Life on Parliament Hill. The rally starts at noon, the marching starts at 1:30 pm.

It is a beautiful day–the best we’ve seen yet this Spring. See some of you on the Hill!