I received this news item in my inbox, with the very subject heading I’ve used here.

A pregnant woman was gravely injured and her unborn child killed after a traffic accident in Surrey Sunday afternoon. It happened at 4 p.m. at 132nd and 96th Avenue when a van and a smaller car with five people inside crashed in the intersection.

Made me suddenly sad, actually. Because we lose so many unborn babies but we only care about 0.01 per cent of the time. Also, my heart goes out to this mother, who has lost her child. Sad, just sad, all round.

In a comment yesterday, Véronique commented that she knows a lot of pop culture songs because of her kids. Another way to keep up might be to read this scathing critique of Lady Gaga by Camille Paglia:

…[D]espite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

There comes a point when, if anything and everything is sexy, then nothing is sexy. (We probably passed that a while back now, come to think of it.)

It’s the anniversary of 9/11, and this piece takes us back to September 10, 1683. Apparently, September 11 wasn’t a random choice for the terrorist attacks nine years ago.

I never got my invitation to this conference on the future of feminism:

The second wave of feminism, which began nearly 50 years ago and which followed the first wave of the suffragettes, “was about enshrining in law [women’s] rights,” Maureen McTeer, a long-time advocate for women’s advancement, told The Globe and Mail during a break between speakers. The third wave, she said, has to be about “changing attitudes.”

I want to change attitudes. Yes I Do.

This is an ad for a campaign called Born HIV Free with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy at the helm. Upon watching this, my first thought was something along the lines of, “this is weird.” Then I watched it again, and I pretty much thought exactly the same thing.

However, there is a point to be made: strong language is used precisely because it’s truthful, and because we’re not talking about abortion here. “Life is beautiful. Don’t let AIDS kill it before it starts.” I’m surprised someone hasn’t complained about this. (Silly me, I forgot. We only complain when pro-lifers point out something this obvious.)

(And thanks to Kristina for sending this link in.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfQ9aMpoXvQ]

Today I was about to set out on a jog when my iPod up and died. It did not respond to CPR (reset, plug in, pull plug, plug in) so I rummaged through my drawers to find an MP3 player from an age when dinosaurs walked the land. It worked, but only radio (no volume control) and frequently no control over the station. So I was subject to the whims of said dino-MP3 player.

This led to some hits, if I do say so myself, like Africa and Living on a Prayer.

But then there was this more modern song (what are the kids listening to these days??) And I could swear the lyrics were “All I ever wanted was a one night stand.”

And I thought two things. 1) Young man–with standards like that there’s nothing but a bright, shiny future ahead! And 2) Now there’s words a woman would never speak.

(File this one under Love and Romance.)

With back to school came back to work for a friend of a friend. Her mat leave is over and she has really struggled with her return to work. But struggle or not, she’s doing it, because she “doesn’t want to be a housewife.”

Which caused me to ponder: What does that mean? It’s a kind of Betty Friedan type of thing to say. She (the mom returning to work) loved her time with her baby, I’m told. Which is not, incidentally, “time off.” This would have made her a temporary “housewife,” I guess. 

I’ve always thought women should do what they think is best. But when it comes to so many, I see them stamping out their instincts and with it, their desires, in order to pretend they feel AOK when they go back to work fulltime. I wonder why they do it. But it’s not my place to ask or question their personal choice. So I’ll muse about it here, instead, with a kind tone, I hope. I don’t think one decision is more right than the other. This post is about women’s desires, and why they don’t listen to them.

Seems to me that being a strong woman might involve staying home, where the world will tell you that a woman’s strength lies in going back to work. Just one of life’s little contradictions.  

FYI: A fun column about a strong woman who never worked outside the home.

A great editorial in the Montreal Gazette today, since Quebec is holding hearings about euthanasia these days:

Support for mercy killing is usually couched in terms of dignity, which seems bitterly ironic since it’s hard to think of a more extreme denial of dignity than killing, however benevolent the motive.

I’m very pleased this is their editorial position. So rational, logical and life affirming. From this position, however, it’s only logical to say the same of the unborn. We don’t kill to solve our problems, no matter how big those problems might be.

Thinking aloud can be dangerous. I’m going to do it anyway. (Oh yes, living on the edge!)

Why the snide tone for social conservatives, Paul Wells (and Chris Selley)?

As the inimitable Chris Selley put it, “Attention social conservatives: You’ve been had. Again.” But of course, social conservatives like being had and, now that they’ve been informed they’ve been had, will get mad at the Citizen and probably Selley and me for pointing it out. Not at the prime minister of Canada for playing them like a cheap fiddle.

After all, at what point has a voter not been had by an elected official? Aren’t we all cheap fiddles? Has any party fulfilled their promises in recent memory? Are we not all faced with a pretty sad specter of look-alike parties that say one thing and then do another?

If they’re going to come down so hard on so-cons I’d like some concrete action items on how to approach this.

I questioned my initial reaction to Chris Selley’s commentary after a white-haired savvy so-con wrote me to say she never had any trust in Prime Minister Harper on abortion.

And I realized, I’ve been on the record saying the same thing. As have others.

It didn’t mean that when the Conservative government did the right thing by refusing to fund abortions overseas, that I didn’t support that. I did, and I did so publicly. Of course I would. I am a woman of principle and if that were Jack Layton’s new policy, I would have supported him publicly.

I call myself a robust and very much small c conservative, for the record. I’m pro-life. I’m in favour of smaller government, lower taxes (we live in Canada, for the love of the saints!) and the right of families to have fun events on their own property.

Other people call me so-con, and since that tends to annoy all the right people, I go with it.

The people we ought to be challenging are the politicians, not a group of voters who have no representation anywhere, but do get a better hearing with the Conservatives. I’ve known long time Liberals to leave the Liberal fold over the life issue. There’s no pro-life party in Canada by a long shot, but you go where you get the better hearing, and that just makes sense. How is it that they are supposed to change? By voting for the Marxist-Leninists? Spoiling ballots?

So-cons make an easy target. The media enjoy holding them in derision. For the most part, they avoid so-cons scrupulously, the nice, normal ones and focus on the dull windbags, subsequently making commentary that either doesn’t ring true or is blatantly false, all because they couldn’t bring themselves to stretch out a hand across the aisle.

That said, I’m pretty sure many so-cons will indeed stay home come the next federal election. Perhaps we’re having successive minority governments precisely because of that.

Here ends the rant.

Can’t say Chris Selley isn’t absolutely right on this one. Though it might have been reasonable for pro-life social conservatives to hope the Conservatives wouldn’t bungle the issue so thoroughly.

What, just by the by, was the communications strategy here? We shall take the heat when it is really hard to do so, and when the issue has died down and all but disappeared, we shall raise it again in such manner so as to infuriate our supporters?

Lying politicians!
Well, well, well. As the Ottawa Citizen’s Elizabeth Payne reports, Canada’s Minister for International Co-operation now has no problem with funding abortion infrastructure in Third World countries where abortion is legal. But … but … what about all that vote-courting “no Canadian money for abortions” bluster back in April? Aren’t we now risking a terrible “divide [in] the Canadian population,” as Stephen Harper warned? Well, no. Of course not. It was just a ruse. Attention, social conservatives: You’ve been had. Again. And to borrow a line, it’s not going to stop until you wise up.

Please excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall. Not just because politicians lie, no. I’m at least somewhat used to that. But because of all the misinformation flying around about what it means to be pro-life and the wanton disregard we have for human life, while couching it in terms of sympathy and compassion for women.

____________________

Update: Should Minister Bev Oda be fired?