So apparently the students at Lakehead University could have had a pro-life club, they just can’t
Next thing you know they might want to hold an event. Clearly, this club is demanding.
I’m not even going to get into the delicious irony of a university that forbids education from student clubs. A new motto perhaps? “Lakehead University–no learning, now or ever”
I’ll keep brainstorming…
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdu7xoHU9DA]
When I was a teenager in the mid-sixties, an unwanted pregnancy was a nightmare. One girl I knew who did not want to tell her parents travelled secretly to a small town to visit a semi-competent abortionist. Another 17-year-old friend had an abortion performed on her family’s kitchen table by two women who injected a saline solution into her as her wealthy mother stood by. She delivered a fetus into the frilly wastebasket in her bedroom.
She also touches on the gritty 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a film about an abortion in communist Romania, which had Timson “protectively pressing my legs together, thinking back to those comparatively benign but still bad old days in Canada.”
Someone send this woman a history book: Comparing communist Romania with Canada in any fashion is hopelessly naive and historically untenable. Did I say “hopelessly naive”? Back to the topic at hand.
Abortion has not become a dirty word “again.” It was always a dirty word. She’s cheering the normalization of death that never happened, the women’s right that never materialized, because whether into a wastebasket or a sterilized hospital dish, women, girls, none of us, are comfortable with delivering our unborn children–dead.
Timson says she feels like she’s living in a time warp. How to put this delicately-that’s because she is. Her own 1970s time warp. Since then, time has shown the supposed liberation of abortion to be nothing more than science fiction–a cast of eccentric characters dancing over graves. The modern and hip know how abysmal the whole affair is.
On January 10, the Lakehead University student union denied the pro-life club official status.
Generally speaking, when the anti-democratic, myopic nitwits at Canadian university student unions go about banning pro-life clubs, as they have done at Carleton University and at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia already, they do so on the grounds that the pro-life view is hateful toward women. You are either pro-life OR pro-woman, and ne’er the two views shall meet. I wrote about this flawed thinking for the Ottawa Citizen at the time of the Carleton “debate.”
If I were a student at Lakehead I’d get every student to start their own club. A chess club, a new age mysticism club, a Muslim club, a doily crocheting club and yes, of course, a womyn’s club-all with the express mandate to do nothing but discuss the theology of the body and watch abortion videos, whilst doing other club activities. Which club would the student union ban first? Would they have the tenacity to ban the Muslim pro-lifers? Or would they target the chess players first, which would allow the chess players to rightly assert they have been unfairly discriminated against. It could take months to sort out the banning order. But it would be good preparation for their first jobs at human rights tribunals.
[Side note: Indoctrinate U is playing in Ottawa on February 18.]
To think: I could have had ProWomanProLife up and running years ago and retired at 25 to Hawaii.
More women than men are pro-life. 34 per cent of Canadian women believe a baby should be protected from conception, as compared with 26 per cent of men. Read it here.
Now why bring out this news from October? Because information and good, old-fashioned logic are the main defence against those in favour of extreme choices, like abortion. And they’ll be out, guns a blazin’, to celebrate Morgentaler this month. [Editor’s note: “Guns a blazin'” is an idiom. No human rights tribunals, please, on how I have hurt some downcast feminist’s feelings over her passionately non-violent stance on everything but abortion. Thank you.]
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Rebecca adds:
That’s interesting. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy. I think one function of readily available abortion, though, has been to weaken the link between sex and reproduction in a way that particularly lessens men’s responsibilities toward an unplanned child.
I think we all need to thank my former employer Ezra Levant for this. That Alberta Human Rights Tribunal employee worked for her (taxpayer-funded) pay that day.
My favourite exchange comes around the three minute mark:
Ezra Levant: I published those cartoons to use the maximum freedom allowed. I published it without reservation. I published it in the most unreasonable manner.
Bureaucrat: What do you mean by unreasonable?
Ezra Levant: Whatever offends you most.
Right on.
This blogger with Canoe.ca talks about Juno, the new movie whereby a pregnant teenager has the baby in stark contrast to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a movie I grew up with.
He says:
All I can say to that is that “choice” implies making a decision based on a set of options…
Options. I can recall thinking in my teens and even 20s that I’d rather be dead than unexpectedly pregnant. I meant it. In hindsight, that wasn’t the most mature response, but there you have it. Would have been great to have some mentors putting things in long term perspective.
But a movie that shows there is life for the mother, forget about the baby, after an unplanned pregnancy, is a good thing. And another good thing is to have a Canoe blogger writing about it.
Even if he is a man, and should therefore, by conventional wisdom, sit silently and quietly reflect on how abortion has nothing to do with him.
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Raji adds:
Another Juno article in the NYT on January 13: “Sex and the Teenage Girl”
I liked her comments, especially “….Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple…”
Hats off to George Jonas for this in today’s Ottawa Citizen.
The suggestion that America, or western societies in general, are still patriarchal is a state of mind. Evidence that in key professions — law, medicine — where female graduates now either match or outnumber males, won’t make a dent in it.
Today, feminists everywhere celebrate what would have been Simone de Beauvoir’s 100th birthday. She was Jean-Paul Sartre’s “life partner.” But let’s be perfectly clear: It’s not that she would have needed Sartre, no no, she was indeed independent. No woman ever needs a man. It’s just that articles about her tend to mention her relationship to him straight away, and then segue into her completely unique contributions to feminism and philosophy. One of her beliefs, as per Der Spiegel:
…Beauvoir refused to buy into the notion, considered a matter of course in the bourgeois society of the day, that beauty and intelligence are incompatible.
Though it’s certainly not clear that they always go together, either. Probably need to go on a case by case basis on that one.
Spain’s abortion clinics go on strike.
They say they face persecution. I’m going to guess that ProWomanProLife is among the few to find that ironic.