…has a new web site. The videos (under Strategy and Training) are particularly helpful, I find. Check it out.

(Yes, this is the group that does controversial things, like the Genocide Awareness Project and showing photos of aborted fetuses. It won’t suit all of us, but that’s the point, it will suit some of us and help jar our complacent culture, which is why I support them. And actually, the videos, featuring Jojo Ruba and Stephanie Gray are just very…what’s the word I’m looking for…logical. Can’t argue with that. Well, you can, but I don’t and most pro-abortion types don’t either. I don’t argue because I agree. They don’t argue because they’re missing the intellectual capital. It might be added at this point that the whole abortion debate won’t be won on arguing anything–the debate resides almost entirely in the realm of the emotional. If it were up to facts, figures, and statistics, we’d have a pro-life culture by now. That’s why videos showing faces and people, sympathetic people, will be so important.)

There’s a conference being put on this Saturday by the Work & Family Foundation, a group focussed on the intersection between work and family life, with the understanding that one can’t be strong without the other. More details, here. And you can check their web site, here.

Political men too, are subject to ridiculous articles about their appearance:

And now, with Monday’s fall kick-off of Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially entered spectacle discourse: He sported his glasses in the House of Commons.

Two Brits are taken to jail for showing posters of aborted fetuses.

A post-abortive woman describes her experience. I get a lot of stuff forwarded to me, but this leaves a big impact because the story is so very common, and yet so poignant.

“Sometimes all it takes is one person speaking truthfully to allow others to do the same.” –McKenzie Hahn

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or0tVpGBkK8]

I think we all struggle to cope with failed relationships. And having a failed relationship doesn’t mean you are, as a person, a failure. But reading this  made me wonder whether the author wouldn’t just feel better if he called a failure a failure:

Since I’ve been divorced, I’ve had more than a few people imply this means that my 10-year relationship (and three-year marriage) was a failure, or even that I am a failure at relationships.

My ex-wife, Jane, hears this too, and says she has often felt ashamed to be divorced so young, barely into her 30s. Yet despite the stigma divorce carries, both of us feel that not only was the relationship a success for the decade it lasted, but the fact we ended it at the appropriate time is a sign we are, in fact, quite adept at love.

Keep telling yourself that, buddy. With this illogical idea that failed relationships are actually success, the author does people struggling with a failed relationship a great disservice, a harm. Because there they are, struggling, crying, trying to cope, learning from their mistakes, and along comes Joe Genius here and tells them: There’s no problem! You should feel good about this!

I didn’t intend to write about abortion here, but I will. It’s similar to telling a post-abortive woman that the abortion was a simple matter of choice, no worries, she shouldn’t feel bad. This must exacerbate the pain immensely. (“I’m not even supposed to feel bad!”)

So, Mr. Growing Up Jung, can it, grow up and learn to grapple with your failure and those of your family members. After all, the beauty of life is that we get up when we fall down. (We don’t instantaneously, upon getting up, try to claim we never fell in the first place.)

Just as an aside, I’m not only against abortion, but I’m against the term “abortion rights.” Call me anti-choice, call me a “fetus fetishist” and I don’t care. But abortion is not now, never has been and never will be, “a right.”

Anyway, it’s a term used in a National Post description of Christine O’Donnell, who just won Delaware’s GOP Senate primary.

People seem to be flummoxed by this, Republicans in particular. I don’t follow enough of American politics to know why but I gather this is the “she’s not as smart as David Frum” camp getting their knickers in a knot.

I say “that’s democracy” and laud this pro-life woman, and wish her well.

I owe this woman, Auntie Seraphic (Dorothy Cummings) a book review. She will get it, and it’s gonna be very good.

In the interim, this blog post is gold. Enjoy. Enjoy it if you are single, and enjoy it if you aren’t, because you also can speak into the lives of young (or not so young) men and women. My favourite line lies in the advice section for the men:

How old are you anyway? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Do you know what you are going to be when you grow up? Newsflash–you are grown up. It is time, young men, to go out into the world, to seek your fortune, to win the hand of a beautiful princess, to sire beautiful children who will gladden your old age.

There’s good advice for the ladies in there too. Fortunately, it has been many years since I broke her rule for women, so I just get to laugh. If it hadn’t been many years I might still be crying but fortunately for everyone I was able to regroup, somewhere around 2004…

I don’t know what safety/medical standards our abortion clinics have. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average fast food joint had more regulations. (Private clinics won’t release basic stats in some provinces.)

In any event, a woman in Massachusetts died as a result of her abortion and this article is about the sentencing of the doctor:  

Prosecutors charged Osathanondh with manslaughter, alleging that he failed to monitor her while she was under anesthesia, delayed calling 911 when her heart stopped, and later lied to try to cover up his actions. Osathanondh, who was also a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health, resigned his medical license the same day the state Board of Registration in Medicine issued a scathing list of charges against him, alleging that he had “engaged in conduct that calls into question his competence to practice medicine.”

The board said Osathanondh did not have any means of monitoring Smith’s heart, and did not have oxygen or a functioning blood pressure cuff in the room during Smith’s abortion. The board also alleged that he “failed to adhere to basic cardiac life support protocol” and did not call 911 in a timely manner.

Reminds me of Rachel MacNair’s book, Prolife Feminism, where she describes how when abortion became legal in the United States, previously convicted doctors who had killed women were allowed to get their licenses back:

When [abortionist] Richard Mucie was convicted of a woman’s death by abortion in 1968, his licence was revoked. When Roe v Wade came down, he used it to go to court and get his license back.” (ProLife Feminism, pg. 245)

Not safe, just legal. A new slogan for my pro-abortion friends.

From the set of CSI. No, from the pages of the Ottawa Citizen:

Two local families have asked the Superior Court of Justice to order DNA testing of a celebrated Ottawa fertility specialist to determine whether his sperm was used to create their children.

Dr. Norman Barwin and the clinic he founded, the Broadview Fertility Clinic, have been named in two unusual lawsuits.

The suits contend that Barwin inseminated two women with the wrong sperm samples. …Barwin, the former president of Planned Parenthood Canada, was named to the Order of Canada in 1997 for his contributions to women’s reproductive health. Last year, he received an honourary degree from Carleton University alongside former governor general Adrienne Clarkson. …

Barwin once admitted in a Citizen interview that his “worst nightmare” involved inseminating a patient with the wrong sperm.

That 2001 profile of the doctor revealed that he had failed to pass the exams required to become a certified gynecologist in Canada, despite holding a PhD in women’s medicine from Queen’s University in Northern Ireland. Barwin said he never took the time to study for the exams. 

He’s innocent until proven guilty, of course. But I’m starting to think it really doesn’t take much to get into the Order of Canada.