Got an email from the folks who run Rachel’s Vineyard in Ottawa. They run weekend retreats for those who want help dealing with a past abortion and wanted to get the word out on this. Check it out if you are interested.
An interdenominational healing retreat for women & men hurting after abortion will be held in the Ottawa area in the fall and spring every year. Contact Lynda or Terry for the next retreat date and details.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM18W9Oz9Bg&feature=player_embedded#]
Watch protestors at McGill disrupt Jojo Ruba’s presentation. I had heard of this but there’s something you experience in watching it. (For me it really drove home what idiots they are.)
(h/t)
Someone sent me these photos, and I do think it’s amazing what they can see going on “in there.” (Scientific language, I know.)
I also believe most abortions occur at about eight weeks, which is the photo above.
I’m going with appropriate, though in the past I would have said “uptight.”
Billy Graham had a rule. He was a powerful man, away from his wife and children more often than he was with them. Aware of the significance of his reputation and convinced of the moral value of the Gospel message, he took precautions to guard against his own human weakness. He gave his ministry colleagues explicit instructions: never leave me alone in a room with a woman who is not my wife.
This article is about how marriage is hard–harder for evangelical Christians than others, apparently. But since it’s true–marriage is very hard–admitting that will be the first step toward curbing our divorce/adultery epidemic. If marriage matters, and I think we all know it does, we would do well to start taking it a bit more seriously. Even if that means instituting “over the top” rules about not being in a room alone with a woman/man who is not your spouse.
____________________
Rebecca adds: Interesting. There’s a similar concept in Judaism which prohibits the seclusion of an unrelated adult man and woman, and the reasoning is the same. I go back and forth as to how useful this is in reality.
It’s true that if you’re never alone with someone of the opposite sex, you’re highly, highly unlikely to have an improper relationship with them – unless you’re so brazen that you’d do it in front of witnesses, in which case you have other issues. I worry that taking it to extremes can hinder all kinds of other things – I know male professors who won’t meet with a student of the opposite sex in their office, even during work hours, with the door open, but rather meet in a public room (for reasons other than religion), and while this may be prudent, it’s also sad that a closer, mentor-student relationship can’t be forged. And some (extremely) strict rabbinical interpretations forbid adult men from being alone with even underaged children, even if they’re relatives, although I’ve yet to meet people who follow this ruling. Of course, if your attractions are not to the opposite sex, does it follow that you should never be alone with anybody? That would make normal social and work interactions tricky, to say the least.
Nevertheless, whether Billy Graham’s approach is a bit over the top or not, the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of blurring boundaries, obliterating privacy, and loosened norms that a steering in this direction can only be an improvement, even if we disagree about what the theoretical ideal would be.
_______________________
Brigitte says: If the choice is between uptight and this, I’ll take uptight any day.
Another article about disappearing Down Syndrome children. The author describes how his friend had a baby born with Downs and
once the dust settled it became clear that, despite the bleakness of the diagnosis, she was still a very proud, very committed, and very loving mother to a tremendous and joyful young child. …She even embraces the idea of having another child with Down syndrome.
He goes on to say this:
As current evidence would suggest, my friend is in the ideological minority.
And if he’s commenting on having Downs children, then yes, stats suggest most are aborted and keeping a Downs baby puts a woman in the minority.
But if he’s commenting on a mother embracing her child, even with a diagnosis of Downs then I’d hazard to say she’s in the majority.
It’s the abortion choice that robs a mother of the chance to love and embrace her child, no matter the difficulty. Which I think, once the initial shock is over, is the way things go. It’s getting there in face of this culture that devalues “imperfect” life that is the hard part.
There’s been a spate of articles lately of diehard feminists turned normal. By normal I mean they suddenly realized what everyone already knew: Having kids is meaningful. Difficult. But meaningful. And fun. Families matter. Men and women can indeed be friends. Women enjoy homemaking-related stuff sometimes, not always, but likely more than most men. This sort of groundbreaking thing.
So today’s Globe has another piece on this same subject. And where I had resisted posting about the other articles, well, now I’m breaking down.
______________________
Brigitte smirks: I hope she’s wearing a helmet.
The so-called tween years are starting as early as six.
Experts said that by age six, girls needed branded clothes, at seven they wanted styled hair, by eight they were beginning diets, at nine they were styling their hair and by early teens were engaging in sex or sending sexually explicit text messages.
I’m trying to avoid the standard rant here as we’ve heard of this before from books like So Sexy So Soon. There are so many factors at play. Commercialization of childhood, consumerism, yes. But also a culture that worries incessantly about socialisation of children, even at the age of one or two and herds them off into daycare for hours that aren’t legal for many teachers. As I recently told a friend–I wouldn’t personally worry about the socialisation thing: Plenty of time for my child to succumb to peer pressure and pick up smoking/drugs/horrifying sexual ethics later.
In a culture that’s big on personal hygiene–and really, who can find fault with that–we tend not to look at the spiritual side of life. But basics of moral hygiene must also be maintained.
Brigitte writes about ACORN here. A great little article.
As as aside, three cheers for James O’Keefe! He was the racist donor on the phone who caught Planned Parenthood happily accepting his money to get rid of black babies, and played the pimp who caught ACORN. Love that kind of chutzpah. And since the mainstream media ain’t exposing it, someone has to.
______________________
Brigitte adds: Funny, the first comment on that piece is from a dude in Australia who wonders why he’d never heard about this story, which neatly proves my point.
Today’s Post contains this piece about a woman who had 15 abortions and wrote a memoir about it. I had already heard of this through thoughtful readers who sent me the link about her soon-to-be-released book, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict. But I didn’t post about it because it’s been a busy week; that said I was also slightly reticent to read about this strange and deviant case.
Indeed, it’s not easy to read about. But here are the interesting points to me:
Firstly, she has tried to kill herself several times. Secondly, she writes that motherhood made her feel accountable for her actions.
The first part is a sad, sad note on what abortion does to a high percentage of women, who can’t cope, can’t escape and try to kill themselves as a result or spend many years imagining they should.
The second part about motherhood making her take note of her actions is interesting insofar as I have heard about this from several post-abortive women: When the do have a child or get pregnant and that child is wanted, even if they did not feel bad about the prior abortion (or did not realize they felt bad) becoming a mother brings all sorts of problems with the thing to the surface.
This speaks to the long term outcomes of abortion. The highest percentage of abortions occurs before the age of 30. Many women do see it as a solution in the short term and feel a sense of relief. The reality is that short-term “solution” comes back to visit them later in life.
Yesterday I heard a very wonderful woman speak at the de Veber conference. Her name was Teresa Harnett, and wow, I just found her captivating and inspiring for her strong compassionate presence, her words, her expertise in counselling women considering abortion. She’s been doing it for over 20 years at Birthright Pregnancy Services in Hamilton.
She spoke of her work as making a bridge between that catastrophic moment for a woman when she realizes she is pregnant and considers it truly to be the end of her own life and later on, to a future she can’t yet see. She can’t see it in her fear and concern. But Teresa spoke of making this bridge–to the point where she could see that her life will not end, that there is support, that there are true and meaningful choices.
All this rambling post to say I’m distressed when I read about someone having 15 abortions–and I’m sorry it takes a trigger like childbirth for many women to realize the fullness of their actions. But then there are women like Teresa, many, many women like her, doing great work as a bridge between a terrible present and a more hopeful future. And then I feel encouraged.
(More on the de Veber conference later. It was a really inspiring day.)
So that’s why I’ll post this item about Canada’s high infant mortality rate…
Prada said Canada’s relatively high infant mortality rate — the rate at which infants die before their first birthday — may be due to a high number of premature births and fertility programs increasing the number of multiple births, along with a variety of socio-economic and environmental factors
…while reminding you of this item, about how abortion is correlated with the subsequent premature delivery of wanted pregnancies.