Brian Lilley reports here about 40 Days for Life, a “protest” that involves praying outside abortion clinics.
Just yesterday I learned that if there is any presence of pro-lifers outside an abortion clinic, it decreases the number of abortions. This is something we all want–or should, anyway, and so I’m grateful not just for the people who do 40 Days for Life, but for those who report about it, too.
This article is from January 2014. How civilized:
As horrifying as the killing of newborns seems to modern people, in ancient Rome, babies weren’t considered fully human upon birth, Mays said. Instead, they gained humanity over time, first with their naming a few days after birth, and later when they cut teeth and could eat solid food.
Whereas today, they are considered fully human after birth, but not before. Moving target, these “progressive” ideas.
This article is not about abortion. It’s about India, and why her booms have been busts. But this part interests:
The dystopic details don’t end there. The use of new technology to abort fetuses selectively has led to a rapidly declining female-to-male birth ratio, with a nationwide average of 914 girls per 1,000 boys in 2011, as opposed to 940 to 950 girls in European countries—and with Gujarat, its development such a shining exemplar in the Modi campaign, boasting an average of 891 girls in 2011, among the lowest such numbers in India. At the same time, India—and especially in states like Gujarat—is a growing provider of rent-a-womb services for wealthy European and North American couples.
Of course, this is the result of an abhorrent bias/hatred against women. Were abortion not available, infanticide through exposure like in First Century Rome would likely be the means to rid our world of women. But abortion access facilitates these deaths. I don’t think you can get away from that fact without jamming your head pretty deep in the sand.
Seriously, I’m asking. I am certainly pro-life. I acknowledge that, and I see things through that lense, that worldview.
But can anyone, pro-choice or pro-life watch this girl recite her poem and not feel a sinking sense of pain?
That is what I felt.
She spent way too much time describing how she would have taken her little girl to the museum to see dinosaur bones, she would have put stars on her ceiling, she would have measured her height. She would have… She would have, but her little girl is dead. She wraps it up by saying “This is my body.” But we have just been very thoroughly reminded that the dead body was not her own. It was separate, and it is gone.
Abortion: pro-life, pro-choice. It is not a success story.
…But deciding what a woman must think–now that is totally kosher.
Really ridiculous for Justin Trudeau to tweet this, that the days “when old men get to decide what a woman does with her body are long gone.” Apparently the days of dictating thought are here to stay?
I hope people realize what is happening here, and it has nothing to do with abortion in particular. Freedom of thought is at stake. For this great freedom, my parents left their home and came to this country. Not so someone could tell them what we must believe in order to be “progressive.”
Ian Brown is the author of The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Journey to Understand his Extraordinary Son. It’s going to be put on as theatre, and that’s a play I’d like to see.
Ian Brown in this interview expressly says what so many of us feel about people with illness or disability of one kind or another (I’d argue that includes every single last one of us, but that is an idea to explore later). He says his son enhances his sense of happiness, and teaches him that fragility is not weakness, rather that it is at the core of being human.
Basically, as he describes it, he is saying his son is a gift, because having him in his life has taught him things he might not otherwise know.
And yet, he entirely balks at the notion that children with disability are a gift from God.
People say, “Oh, I would never trade my disabled child. They’re gifts from God.” I hate that sentimentalizing. If Walker is God’s idea of a gift, then God really needs to read the instruction manual because not only is he not a gift, but he knows he’s not a gift. I would not change him for my sake, but for his own life – it could be easier and less painful, and I would change that in a second if I could. But if you are not sentimental about him and just look at who he is, he’s kind of revealing.
This made me think about how sentimentality, cliches, they can really turn people off, even when they are thinking the same ideas as someone else. It reminded me, to be frank, of a sometimes tendency of the pro-life movement to sentimentalize. I, for example, don’t do pro-life work “for the babies.” I do it because I value our shared humanity and I think killing children in the womb detracts from that and makes us, the living, more callous. It’s two ways of saying the same thing. But I am guessing there’s many a pragmatic pro-lifer who felt he/she couldn’t join the broader movement for the sheer sentimentalism of it all.
I certainly believe all children are gifts, yes, from God. We don’t choose when the gift comes, or the wrapping. (In fact, I believe everything is a gift, so the fact that I’d like to have children, but have none, also some form of unwanted gift–but this we are not allowed to mention.) Everything I own is merely on loan to me, from God. But something about the Oprah Winfrey age of constant talk diminishes the deep significance of these things. I don’t need happy pictures of babies to enhance my desire to want them to be treated as the gifts they are. And so I share, perhaps, some of Ian Brown’s frustration at the sentimentality of it all.
Recently, Huffington Post had a great little picture montage honouring fathers. Number 19 is the best one to me but they are all good. Juxtapose with this story about a father whose girlfriend aborted their baby. He describes how he felt during the process. Sad.
Wounds do heal over time – even deep ones – but scars remain. Eight years later, I find myself incredibly blessed with a beautiful, bright and loving wife, a 19-month-old son and a daughter due in January. At times, I can’t help but look into my son’s deep grey-blue eyes and wonder what his older brother or sister might have been like.
(Mayim Bialik is in Big Bang Theory.) This is encouraging to read:
There is one for Ariana Grande, and I will go ahead and admit I have no idea who she is or what she does. Based on the billboard, she sells lingerie. Or stiletto heels. Or plastic surgery because every woman over 22 wishes she has that body, I’m sure. Why is she in her underwear on this billboard though? And if she has a talent (is she a singer?), then why does she have to sell herself in lingerie? I mean, I know that society is patriarchal and women are expected to be sexy and sexually available no matter what we do in society, but I guess now I need to explain that to my sons?
The mega-huge ads of (mostly) women in suggestive poses all around us all the time is as anti-woman a trend I know. It’s also anti-men, given that men and women work together, and where men gain a skewed vision of women, they then suffer the loss of what and who women really are. Normal people, is the secret answer there, who aren’t “sexy” all the time. Which is why I like the way she concludes her post:
Am I a crotchety old lady? I guess so. But I just don’t understand why this is what ads need to look like. What good does it do for humanity or society? Why do I have to be OK with young women literally in lingerie on gigantic billboards? If I want to see women in lingerie, I can walk through any mall with a Victoria’s Secret.
Which, by the way, is a misnomer because there is nothing secret about what’s being sold at Victoria’s Secret.
You know what I think the secret is? The secret is that when there is no camera around, Victoria probably likes a cozy robe, a cup of tea, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiography.
I can’t remember whether we’ve posted about this before or not. A moving story. The family’s blog is here. (h/t)
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDY2OQqETP0#t=137]
To say that abortion is birth control is a controversial statement.
It is also controversial to say that men and women are different. Following this, it is also controversial to say that it is a misogynistic culture/country that thinks that women getting pregnant with random men they meet at Stampede and then getting abortions as the fix is AOK and unworthy of discussion. (The men never land in a clinic for a surgery–wondering what they are doing–some weeks/months down the road.)
These musing are sparked by this post from We Need A Law, about the post-Stampede increase in abortions.
Our former classmate began by telling me about the time she lived in Calgary and worked at a downtown medical lab. This particular lab was located near the Kensington Clinic, a private, for-profit abortion facility. Her lab handled the majority of the clinic’s blood work. My classmate explained that the month of September was always extremely busy and was known as “Stampede Month” to healthcare workers. She must have sensed my confusion so she spelled it out for me: between eight and twelve weeks after the Calgary Stampede, a large number of women come in to abort the unexpected pregnancies resulting from sexual trysts during the Stampede.