As you are already aware, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario is reviewing their current policy on conscience rights for doctors. They have favoured conscience rights for non-emergency procedures to date. This reasonable position is at risk of changing.

What you can do:

Go to this web site, and choose how you want to give feedback. I found it easiest to send a quick email, which said this:

Every physician must be free to practice medicine using their hearts and minds. Restrictions on conscience removes the ability to do so. There will always be disagreements on what constitutes good treatment and this is healthy dialogue to have in a democratic society. Physicians must be free to respond to patients, using their own medical expertise and their conscience, not the enforcement of an outside regulatory body. There is a responsibility on the patient to discern, again, using his or her own conscience, whether they want a different doctor. If conscience rights are restricted, Ontario will lose good doctors.

You can use my letter, or part of it, or just write “I support freedom of conscience for doctors.” Really, it’s that easy. So do it today. They are accepting opinions until August 5.

This is important–and if freedom of thought is curtailed for doctors, we all lose.

It’s almost like they are little developing people, in the womb. Imagine that.

Speech isn’t the only thing that babies absorb while in the womb. Studies have shown that around the 20th week of pregnancy the sensory systems for taste and smell have developed. And that allows the baby to experience some of mom’s favorite foods as nutrients pass into the womb.

I decided after the Miley Cyrus debacle that I was disgusted with Robin Thicke. And absolutely couldn’t dance to his song, Blurred Lines, in spite of how fun the beat was. I recall the cultural-disaster-sliding-into-the-sea-as-a-society-morals-are-dead-I-wish-I-was-too moment at the MTV awards–which I didn’t watch. Of course, we were all “treated” to hearing about it afterwards.

Now, people of goodwill no longer have to choose. Weird Al provides a positive messaging version of the same song. Everyone can dance to this one. (I hope this post is grammatically correct.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc]

Watch this. Sweet. A mom, and I gather a Gold-medal winning gymnast, watches her daughter perform as she comments. (With enthusiasm, shall we say. She’s really living it with her daughter. Which does remind me of my mom, albeit at an entirely different level of sport. If you can call what my sister and I did a “level of sport” at all. Nonetheless, my mom was there, living it, excited. I’d call it a small blessing, except it’s not. It’s a big one, to have supportive parents, these days.)

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycYmjAYaUt4]

Our democracy has a rich tradition of allowing conscientious objection, be it for pacifists or pro-lifers. Not so, argues Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition. Blogger Pat Maloney explains the issue.

I think I feel an op-ed coming on, about why this issue is not about the Pill or abortion at all, but rather a basic issue of the right to free speech, which stems from free thought, which is at risk of being curtailed here. Achtung: No thinking allowed in dogmatic pro-abortion ranks.

Jonathan Van Maren writes about how people doing abortions experience it. Not pretty. I must confess, I’ve had nightmares featuring dead babies. Interesting to know others have too.

It is called “We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story.” In it, she calls abortion a “sweet brutality,” and attempts to justify what she sees as a necessary evil:

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside. The girl asks to see it, sitting up. “It’s not allowed,” I told her sternly.

I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. ‘Let’s do an abortion,’ they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden.

“What makes you different, makes you beautiful.” Yay. So nice to hear someone say that and mean it. And a billboard at Bay and Bloor!! Wow! A major,  busy intersection in downtown Toronto. I hope the bad traffic causes people to sit and ponder it. It looms over a strip of pretty fancy pants shops, with fancy pants people buying expensive stuff.

The blog is Happy Soul Project. And I came to all this through a lovely article in Today’s Parent.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQA27trhfYA]

I’m linking to this piece, which I suggest you be careful about before you read. It’s very disturbing. I’m disturbed having read it. I possibly should have stopped, since I didn’t need to be convinced of the brutality and dehumanizing nature of prostitution.

But since so many media outlets seem happy to re-print the happy-go-lucky, “men just want to be held” version of prostitution, I’m going to link to this anyway. It is my tiny protest of the skewed nature of the debate.

And it’s a wake-up call in a bigger sense. Many people have views on prostitution–it’s wrong, but ought not be made criminal–seems to be a standard one. I can discuss that. In fact, I have time for it. There are a range of legitimate views on the extreme version of sexual deviancy found in prostituting oneself or in purchasing sex. But we all need to look inward at our own lives and the ways in which we are guilty. Looking at porn, having sex with a person you have no intentions of committing to, and possibly never did, the delusion that sex is purely physical and nothing more… all of these attitudes need to be reconsidered.

Last week I read about an educator, a public school high school educator who was on a committee to discipline other teachers (!) who wrote a soft porn book. He defends his right to do so. And never forget the high level educator, friends with Ontario’s current premier, who was charged with creating child porn. I’m guessing these guys are “sex positive” to use the parlance of the day. Who knows what will happen to them; I do know the mean girls in the twitter verse will accuse me of being a pearl-wearing prude.

Bring it on; I can take it. We need to change and I will not be shamed into silence on what is important for the sake of little people growing up who have a chance at living differently.

It is very hard for us, living today, to grapple with human rights atrocities going on around us. I’d say we fail on any number of levels. For example, aboriginal families living in dire circumstances in our wealthy, beautiful country of Canada.

Stephanie Gray tries to awaken the apathetic culture to the reality of killing people–human beings. As such, they do postcard drops. If abortion doesn’t kill a person, then doing such a postcard drop is wholly inappropriate. I would not want my nieces to stumble across the graphic photos. But if abortion does kill human beings, then we are perpetrating a major human rights violation. So which is it? Stephanie Gray discusses with Michael Coren.

A discussion between Michael Coren and Professor Ian Gentles about the effects of abortion in a recently released book.