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OCLA position paper on institutional bias against pro-life campaigners in Ontario

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Great to see. I almost have a hard time believing that this is real! Read the whole thing, concluding with what anyone engaged in the pro-life side of things knows to be true:

The OCLA seeks to raise the concern that there is palpable institutional bias against pro-life advocates in Ontario and that this is harmful to society and substantively unjust towards members of the community.

“The abortion distortion” very often means we have free expression up until the point when abortion comes up. I hope that OCLA position paper works toward fixing that.

I also hope that they are prepared for a barrage of insults ranging from how they can’t think, to how they are in the pocket of the radical, religious right etc. etc. etc.

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Debate on campus

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From the Onion:

Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea.

They forgot to get into the part about socially ostracizing, raising eyebrows, looking askew and docking grades for those students who discuss an idea other than the one idea everyone already agrees on. But that story could be for another day.

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“Pro-life position is more ethically highly evolved”

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An old article, that I found myself pondering this morning. Name the author of this quote:

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.

For today, the bold is what interests me.

Also, you can be libertarian and still protest abortion.

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Legal action against the Ontario government

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The Association for Reform Political Action and Run with Life blogger Pat Maloney are taking legal action against the Ontario government by challenging the constitutionality of not allowing abortion to be subject to access to information requests.

Pat Maloney used to get aggregate abortion statistics by filing these access to information requests, but since the Broader Public Sector Accountability Act was passed in Ontario, she can’t.

She is not asking for private information, only the aggregate stats. The denial of this information is the opposite of Public Sector Accountability. Here are the notes from press conference held this afternoon at Queen’s Park in Toronto.

That’s because all abortion information is now excluded from FIPPA: Abortion numbers. Abortion complications. Abortion costs to the taxpayer. The demographic statistics of women who have abortions: their age, how many abortions they have, and the gestational age of the fetus at termination. Anything and everything about abortion is now being hidden by the Ontario government.

This is not about being pro-life. We need good statistics to see trends in our society and to know whether education programs are working.

Challenging the Ontario government for withholding abortion statistics.

Challenging the Ontario government for withholding abortion statistics.

What she said

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Naomi Lakritz on egg freezing, so as to be able to have children later in life:

Save your money, ladies. …Not only is there never a moment when the stars are all perfectly aligned in anyone’s life, but you wouldn’t be able to recognize it, even if there were one. That’s because you have no power to see into the future, no ability to engage in hindsight ahead of time, to look back and assess the present moment while still living in it.

Naomi Lakritz

Naomi Lakritz

 

It’s not her age that bothers me

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Quadruplets at age 65 sounds like a bit of a nightmare to me. Kids need parents, and if you are on the sunset side of life, it’s quite literally harder to be there for your family. But let me just say this, I don’t begrudge this woman her large family. Neither do I get particularly animated because she is a grandmother’s age. To me, the underlying problem is the ethos of “having children when we want them” through IVF. I understand that we mostly all have this idea that children are choices–and we get ’em when we want ’em, but the underlying principle of my worldview for absolutely everyone, 65, 35, gay or straight, etc. is that IVF is not the best option. I realize this is a painful thing to say for some. My reasons are as follows: There are risks associated with it; if the parts are not your own, it commercializes families and even when the parts are your own, there are still risks associated with it. I also confess I want to be consistent. If I’m not a fan of IVF for a 65 year old grandmother, what is the principle behind that if I’m OK with it for myself, or my friends? Who chooses the boundaries? Why this family and not that family? I prefer consistency, so I rule it out for everyone, including myself. The reality is that without IVF, this grandmother would not be having quadruplets. And then we wouldn’t need to worry about all the other associated risks.

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On living plan A, again

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This is a post about self-care for mothers in large families.

However, it is also a post about making plans, and what happens when those well-made plans fall apart.

I imagine Veronique’s story may scare some. But to me, it is inspirational. We often find ourselves in situations we could not have envisioned. Veronique finds herself as the mother of a large family. I find myself doing something for my job that wasn’t ever on the radar, not even remotely.

My “plans” were probably as planned as Veronique’s, which is to say, not at all. Furthermore, my plans were boring. I had ideas about work and family that were entirely conventional.

The thing with family is we’ve learned to think it’s optional. We don’t need help, parents, siblings, spouses or children. We want them, many of us, but then, only when we really want them. Aka, not when it’s inconvenient. In varying degrees, family is always inconvenient. And this is true of many meaningful acts, the most meaningful acts. A pastor once challenged all of us to make sure we took time to smile, speak, buy a meal for homeless people on our way to wherever we were going. His point was that the moments when one is wandering around the downtown core with volunteerism on the mind having allotted the appropriate time are very rare. You have to choose to help in the moment when it is needed, when someone is before you, or not at all. Pretty soon you look a whole lot like one Ebenezer Scrooge asking if there aren’t any prisons or workhouses about for someone else to do the caring.

Learning to care about anyone at all starts in a family, where the care is compulsory either because these are your children or because this is your spouse and you signed on the dotted line for a lifetime, or because these are your parents who raised you and sacrificed for you. One of my greatest fears is that even in the family we now outsource so much that we have lost that sense of obligatory care, which means in short order we will lose all care.

I think I’m rambling now. Go read Veronique’s post.

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“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” One should never miss an opportunity to post an Ebenezer photo so I’m grabbing this one right now. Carpe diem.

 

 

On conscience

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A great article about why denying conscience rights is wrong. And more specifically, about the ideological blinders on at the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons.

After the law passed, a Melbourne physician, morally opposed to abortion, publicly announced that he had refused to provide an abortion referral for a patient. This effectively challenged the government and medical regulator to prosecute or discipline him. They did not. The law notwithstanding, no one dared prosecute him for refusing to help a woman 19 weeks pregnant obtain an abortion because she and her husband wanted a boy, not a girl.

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Photo credit: http://arpacanada.ca/

 

On plan A

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Plan B.

It’s the emergency contraception that works in part by not allowing an already fertilized embryo to implant, so an exceptionally early abortion.

It also works by wreaking havoc on a woman’s body, lots of nausea, throwing up, waiting at home by yourself.

I was waiting in the drugstore yesterday and I noticed it sitting there on the shelf. Plan B.

It’s not called Plan A.

Getting pregnant at the wrong time is never your first choice.

When you are asked about your plans for the future they are never “I’m going to complete my degree, but only with difficulty and perhaps by taking longer because I’m going to get pregnant—round about second year?—with someone I don’t love or know that I want to be with for a weekend, let alone a lifetime.”

Immediately you are launched into “Plan B” territory.

I would say Plan B—the drug, and Plan B the idea is a bad plan, and what you want is a new Plan A.

Your Plan A might not be executed in exactly the fashion you thought, but women should not need to have surgery or take pills to be equal and successful in this world.

Doing so means acquiescing to the fact that this is an anti-family world, and that life is only ever played out on sterile terms.

We don’t make accommodations for people who need special circumstances very easily. Why is that?

Perhaps because we rarely ask?

If we are to build a world where women truly thrive, it can’t include abortion, because this cuts life off, and demands that women function as men.

On this idea of creating new plan As—it happens All. The. Time and is fairly non-controversial in practice.

My Plan A: I thought I would be an international diplomat or journalist. I thought I would live and work in Europe, and I spent near two years there trying to build this future. I was actually fairly fluent in German for a time.

My life today? I am not an international diplomat or journalist. My writing portfolio is focused almost exclusively on domestic, social affairs. I live in Ottawa.

The other Plan A from a slightly earlier stage in my life was to be a kinesiologist. I thought I might do water therapy/rehabilitation for people who have suffered accidents, because I lived and breathed the pool in high school. I love swimming still.

I do swim, three times a week. And that’s as close as I am to that Plan A.

Plan As almost never look exactly as we thought, and a good friend, a good feminist, any strong woman in your life will help a younger woman understand that. As we live through the ups and downs of life there is a long term trajectory toward achieving not just your own practical goals, but your vocation—without claiming a false right to kill your unborn child along the way.

I am not where I thought I would be or perhaps even should be today, but I am happy.

We should never acquiesce to a contrived Plan B when we can live a Plan A adventure.

(I’m so far gone on planning these days that there are no letters left in the alphabet.)

I tried to say a version of this as my concluding remarks at the “Stump the Pro-lifer” event yesterday, but I don’t think I really captured what I meant, so trying to post those thoughts here today.

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Looking out over the coffee fields of El Salvador. Part of me wishes I could be a coffee farmer. But I realize this plan is more than slightly unrealistic.

 

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