I have this book in the large stack beside my bed:

Now a stunningly candid new book, Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, illuminates the unexplored side of that equation: the plight of Chinese women who give their daughters up for adoption. And that arithmetic is far more complex and brutal, the journalist Xinran writes: “a black hole in the woman’s heart and unanswered questions in her daughter’s.”

It’s generally about adoption of girls, not abortion, due to pressure to have boys in Chinese culture. But I wonder whether the hole in a woman’s heart is any less after an abortion.

Here at ProWomanProLife sometimes we remember days like St. Patrick’s Day and Valentine’s Day and such, and sometimes we don’t. In 2008, I posted about the more serious side of St. Patrick. In 2009, Tanya posted the Muppets singing Danny Boy. Both are important and either will do to wish a Happy St. Patrick’s Day for 2011. (2010 got left out. Two out of three ain’t bad.)

Family Research Council held some breakout sessions at the United Nations. This short clip highlights why exporting abortion, particularly chemical abortion, is a dangerous thing for resource-poor countries. It also gets into the psychological side effects of abortion. Worth watching.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0lRL5QtJI”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0lRL5QtJI]

(h/t)

This is rich:

A Chinese official said Monday that New Zealand should consider special compensation to parents of Chinese students killed in an earthquake last month because their loss was magnified under the country’s one-child policy,” Associated Press reports. “Seven students from China have been identified among the 166 confirmed deaths in the quake that devastated Christchurch city on Feb. 22, and as many as 20 others are still missing. Chinese Embassy official Cheng Lei said Monday that Chinese quake victims had lost not just their only child, but also a future breadwinner. He said New Zealand should consider providing additional financial assistance to those families.”

I’m not quite sure why New Zealand is responsible for China’s one-child policy. Perhaps the Chinese government should take steps to outlaw the untoward death of the children they allow to live.

A study assesses the situation with regards to sex selection abortion amongst immigrants to America from India:

We found that 40% of the women interviewed had terminated prior pregnancies with female fetuses and that 89% of women carrying female fetuses in their current pregnancy pursued an abortion. These narratives highlight the interaction between medical technology and the perpetuation of this specific form of violence against women in an immigrant context where women are both the assumed beneficiaries of reproductive choice while remaining highly vulnerable to family violence and reproductive coercion.

A friend of mine has helped pull this event together, which features former residential school students. March 28, 7 pm, St. Paul’s Auditorium, Pavillon Guigues Hall, Ottawa. Sounds interesting and it’s open to the public. Some online info can be found, here. “No sector of society is immune to sexual abuse or the darkness of heart into which it pulls children, families, communities and subsequent generations. Three well-known Canadians reflect on their journeys from the heart of darkness to the heart of forgiveness.”

Inspirational speech from a past American president, Ronald Reagan. Neither can Canada survive as a free nation when some decide that others are not fit to live. I look forward to such a speech from a Canadian prime minister. Some day, my friends, some day.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WTiK9Dd9z0]

(h/t)

I’m certainly concerned that this teen is very ill-adjusted:

Monique Smith, 19, of Brooklyn was arguing with a family member in June when she reached for the hamster, choked it and threw it outside the house, police said.

I actually think grabbing an animal and killing it just because you can is horrifying and is a sign of something desperately wrong. I also think taking yourself off to a clinic to kill your unborn child is a sign that something is desperately wrong. It’s just that we are more concerned about hamsters in our current cultural milieu. There’s no other way to put it.

That sexual revolution…what a hoot:

Dr. Eric Genden, head and neck surgeon at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, has seen his practice change dramatically over the past decade. “My waiting room used to be filled with smokers and drinkers, blue-collar workers,” recalls Genden. “Now it’s filled with professionals who were never smokers or drinkers.” This “new set of patients” is presenting with head and neck cancer, particularly in the tonsils and at the base of the tongue, at a younger age than the hard-living seniors. Genden was puzzled by the change. What could have triggered malignancy in these folks, he wondered, when in the past some 95 per cent of the head and neck tumours he saw grew out of a life dedicated to tobacco and booze?

He now knows the culprit: the human papillomavirus, or HPV. “What we’re seeing is almost an epidemic,” he says, referring to a growing acceptance by the medical community over the last several years that at least one strain of HPV (HPV-16, which also causes cervical cancer) is leading to what’s known as oropharyngeal cancer. “These patients are younger, in their 40s or 50s, mostly male, and they never smoked or drank.”

David Warren writes in the Ottawa Citizen about Linda Gibbons as a modern-day hero: