There are some pro-choice articles that just have a way of making one more…pro-life. This is one of them.
Community MIA
Three articles in yesterday’s Macleans on community Missing in Action. Barbara Amiel talks about Daul Kim, a South Korean model who killed herself at 20, writing before she died that “the more I gain the more lonely it is. I’m like a ghost”; Kate Fillion interviewing a former Tokyo hostess who provided emotional comfort to Japanese men for a living, thereby losing her own husband and finally, a short story referring to Nadia Kajouji, who committed suicide after discussing it online.
Community is one manner in which to combat systemic loneliness. Sadly, we don’t have strong communities.
I think about this problem from a public policy perspective often enough. Would we have a campaign for government-funded daycare, if families weren’t so atomized? Would we have a campaign for the legalization of assisted suicide if people didn’t fear becoming a burden as they age and sitting around by themselves, staring at the walls? Would we think abortion was a viable option if women and men and families were supported in a meaningful way? I wonder.
With community MIA, government tries to fund it. This doesn’t work, generally speaking. I say strong families and/or friendships create the strong communities, not the other way around.
I am reading a book just now by Jean Vanier about community. It’s a good read. We may have no community in modern, North American life because it’s easier to live in the delusion that one is perfect, simply because one is alone.
Just rambling thoughts for a Saturday morning.
Defending Vellacott, part II
I continue to defend Maurice Vellacott in the face of Liberal histrionics. Yikes. Is there valium available in the House of Commons?
Neville said the comments were “vile” and “completely degrading to women” and demanded the Harper Conservatives reject them. “His comments show an odious attitude toward women,” she said, comparing him to a “Reform party extremist.”
At the same time, I will say this: he had to know his comments would be received this way. We live in an abortion-friendly culture. People by and large think abortion is sad but necessary in some circumstances. Coming out guns ablazin’ with the idea that it constitutes a battery (true) and that the mere presence of the choice does women wrong (true) is all well and good but there were probably a couple of steps that could have come first in nurturing old-school feminists like Anita along. She is living in the 60s, and we need to get her to the 70s, even the 80s, before hitting her with the new millenium.
That said, I’m glad when abortion comes up.
A chivalrous defence–that’s me defending him
This may come as news to many–but it’s not to me. There is a valiant history of women defending the pro-life position. In fact there was a time when feminists actively campaigned for the criminalization of abortion in support of women’s rights.
One pro-life feminist, Rachel MacNair, calls abortion a “battery”–“Surgery done on a healthy body is mutilation, and such surgery done without adequately informed consent is a battery.”
This is not currently the mainstream consensus, but it once was. Discussing and debating this from every angle will be very important. I for one support getting full information about abortion and what it does out there.
Furthermore, I also acknowledge that where there is the presence of this choice, it holds a magnetic pull for short-term “resolution” of “the problem.” I would not have been immune to it–but supporting women means doing so within the context of our reproductive capacities, not outside it, demanding invasive surgery to eradicate a natural outcome of having sex.
Here ends my rant for today.
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Brigitte adds: Allow me to join you in his defence. He’s not the first to make that point, and he won’t be the last one, either. Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy against her will (say, after a rape) isn’t fair, even if in many cases having an abortion wouldn’t really “solve” that woman’s problems. But neither is pressuring her to have an abortion against her will. And those who think women in Canada today are almost never pressured into having unwanted abortions are deluded.
This just in from the United Kingdom
Why is criminalization the response to this problem? Why do the women always have to pay? Oh the injustice of it all.
Seriously, though, I say arresting those who imitate Jane Austen is not severe enough. I have tried and tried again to pull through just one Jane Austen novel and after the latest concerted effort, have vowed never to try again.
Sarah’s Choice
I was on the treadmill yesterday watching Fox News and they did an interview with Rebecca St. James about Sarah’s Choice coming out this week on DVD (only, I think). Haven’t seen it, but worth maybe trying to find a copy to see what it is like.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGtEQ2tbxaU”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGtEQ2tbxaU]
Cause and effect
I tend to agree with this op-ed in the Post today about normalizing teen pregnancy through shows like 16 and Pregnant. We shouldn’t make teen pregnancy look easy because it’s not. Neither are teen abortions.
As a result, we shouldn’t also make teen sex look so easy. But the author won’t touch that issue:
Positive reviewers have called the show “educational ” and “sweet and touching.” But those words say more about the people using them — for they suggest an increasingly casual attitude toward the underlying subject matter. Maybe when contraceptive use drops among young females, and 16-year-old girls begin dropping out of school to start families, the wisdom of such attitudes will be revisited.
If we are going to say teens will be teens–they are going to have sex anyway, then I’d advocate for teaching them about marriage, making their already very serious sexual committments permanent, and worrying less as a society about whether our kids have advanced degrees.
I know the abortion clinics are filled with girls who never envisioned getting pregnant with the guy she was having sex with, and now she feels she must have an abortion to escape his memory. If that is the case–why on earth are we treating sex so lightly? A girl who doesn’t actually like a guy should not be having sex with him.
And if these are little Romeos and Juliets–well then, get married and have kids. Enough already with engaging in adult behaviours while studiously avoiding–or glorifying–the sometimes difficult adult outcomes.
Abortion politics in the USA
It’s a busy time for me just now. Still, wanted to post something about the many myriad emails I’m getting about what’s going on down south. This one is funny–apparently the Stupak amendment which would not allow federal funding to pay for abortions “denies women’s rights.” Really? Because there’s never been federal funding for abortions through health care as I understand it but now that the status quo remains it somehow has a devastating effect on women?
Like I said, I’m busy these days, so maybe I am misunderstanding something here. Either way, whenever someone says “abortion is a woman’s right” that’s my cue to jump in and ask why. And people don’t generally have a very good answer for that. (Ya, I don’t accept “her right to control her body.” Come up with something new and even just a tiny bit logical.)
If you support abortion, you should also be able to watch one
Abby Johnson (quit Planned Parenthood after watching an abortion through ultrasound) on what Planned Parenthood does not want employees to see:
If clinic workers saw what was happening on that screen, they would be running out of those clinics. This is what the abortion industry does not want their workers to see. They don’t want their workers to see what’s actually happening during an abortion. That’s why Planned Parenthood doesn’t do, that’s why so many of these large abortion industries don’t do ultrasound-guided abortion procedures. They don’t want people to see what’s really happening in the woman’s womb.
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Brigitte couldn’t agree more: And here’s a link to a video of an abortion at 11 weeks. Warning: It is not for the faint of heart. But I hereby challenge every person who is either in favour of abortion or indifferent to it to watch it. It shows exactly what it is that you support and if you can’t bring yourself to watch it, why are you in favour of it?
Commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall
I have in my office a big picture of a small child behind barbed wire, with a soldier anxiously looking over one shoulder as he leans to pick the child up and put him on the other side. It’s a real life photo that I purchased in Berlin and it reminds me of what I can’t take for granted: that I live in a free country. (Human rights tribunals aside, I am free to rail against the pro-abortion status quo, and no one has declared me an undesirable on an official level or put me in prison, or threatened my family because of beliefs I hold, or pulled me in for questioning because of things I’ve said. I understand what is at stake with the HRTs but the reality is there are those who are fighting against them and winning, too.)
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, really, living in a Communist country, but I do think many underestimate the cruelty–even without murders and jail, etc. That, and they overestimate the role of the Russians in bringing the whole thing down. Toss in a splash of anti-Americanism and we are into full blown historial revisionism territory.
So today’s post offers a link to George Jonas because he really gets it. When the Berlin Wall fell, I remember it well, at least in part because no one in my family believed it would.
Things to be grateful for.
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