Trending toward life in the USA. Good news:

The wave of pro-life bills enacted from 2011 to 2013 reflects the 2010 elections and the reaction they represented to the Obama administration’s overreach on health care. In 2000, Guttmacher estimates 31 percent of U.S. women lived in one of the 13 states considered “hostile” to abortion. By 2013, nearly double that percentage, 56 percent, lived in one of the 27 states now labeled hostile to abortion. Twenty-four (if one includes conservative Nebraska, which has a nonpartisan legislature) of these 27 states have Republican legislative majorities and all but four have Republican governors.  This “troubling trend,” as Guttmacher terms it, is a fruit, for better or worse, the polarization that’s occurred on this issue alongside the decline of pro-life leadership in the Democratic Party, after the death of Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey in 2000. …

Right-to-life advocates should be encouraged by the realities that so dishearten the Guttmacher Institute. Four decades after the revolution that gave the nation abortion on demand, Americans clearly want something better for women and children. The federal courts can slow down this momentum, but the nation will benefit if judges let the people rule and continue to seek a path that eschews the the most barbaric abortion practices.

Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute, one of my favourite people on the marriage file, is asking you to sign a petition, if you feel you are a victim of the sexual revolution.

People, I have strong feelings on this subject. From realizing there was a sexual revolution, to realizing it was largely negative, to thinking, wait a second… am I victim of this… my views have really shifted and I have come to see how troubling most aspects of the sexual revolution really are.

The problem is that conservative types like myself don’t like to play the victim card. So I’m not going to go too far down that road.

BUT I will say I agree with Jennifer Roback Morse’s general take on this issue and I believe so so many are negatively affected by this.

Sign the petition. (If you are in Canada, I had some trouble, but I know we have US readers too, so consider lending your support.)

Speaking of creative extremists, my friend Stephanie Gray is in Ottawa giving a talk on Wednesday. It’s at St. Patrick’s Basilica, 7 pm. This could be your big moment to join the ranks of creative extremism. Many thanks to Knights of Columbus, Holy Spirit Ukrainian Catholic Seminary and Ottawa Against Abortion for sponsoring this talk.

Please join us for an inspiring evening with Stephanie Gray, the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

In the battle against abortion, everyone has a role they must play. At times, it can be difficult to know what one can do to help save lives. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something- what are you called to do?

We are called to action in our every day lives- to speak the truth at work, in our families, to strangers, to our peers.

Come and be empowered to speak the truth.

Oh yes we do. This interview with Lila Rose is not new, but it is very interesting. This phrase “creative extremists,” which she uses, is from Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter from a Birmingham jail.

Honestly, there is no doubt in my mind that within my lifetime we will see people change their views 180 degrees on this issue–and turn away from abortion as a valid option or choice. I think people like Lila Rose are helping us get there.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjx7bNwbwEw&feature=c4-overview&list=UUzYY14szIFejUXYbk4BjZmw]

Well, my goodness. To what do we owe this great treat of two pro-life columns in short succession? Another good one:

I don’t know why the heroic daughter of a yellow perch in Georgian Bay took such a risk. I don’t think she was a Catholic. I doubt if she was even religious. I’m certain she didn’t weigh an ounce over two pounds. Yet for the sake of her unborn children, her putative spawn — spawn, hell, her still unfertilized clutch of eggs — she was ready to take on a 200-pound competitor in the shallow early-morning waters of 12-Mile-Bay.

This doesn’t tell me that the defense of the unborn is a religious imperative, tied to some Catholic dogma. On the contrary, it tells me that defending one’s spawn, one’s breeding grounds, is a natural position, available to a fish that, whatever she may be, has never been part of a Popish conspiracy. You don’t need to be more religious than a perch to be pro-life.

You don’t need to be religious to be pro-life. Of course not. That said, there is a Judeo-Christian worldview that undergirds the pro-life position. This is because more and more we are seeing folks say yes, the fetus in utero is a baby, a child, but women ought to be able to have an abortion regardless. This is the idea that killing innocents under circumstances x, y or z is OK. Where the Judeo-Christian position is that it is not OK. Is that a deeply religious view? I’m not sure. It certainly is a different worldview, however, than the secular tendency toward convenience and independence.

I don’t know what spurred on this column about life in the “civilized west.” It is more direct than his usual:

Oblivious to experience that amply demonstrates it’s easier for two parents to support 12 children than for 12 children to support two parents, we try putting the burden of our support til we’re 120 unto the one lucky child we didn’t abort.

And this:

Had I been born a little earlier, say, 30 million years ago, in the same place, I wouldn’t have become a columnist. What geologists call the Pannonia basin was the bottom of a shallow sea then, covering much of Europe. Born in such a place, chances are I would have been an ancestral fish. I couldn’t have participated in building a society in which the least safe place is the womb and babies have no one to fear but their mothers. Yes,  I would have missed something for sure.

I don’t know what brought this on, but I like it.

Reality TV and me are not friends. That said, for some reason I’ve seen an episode of Millionaire Matchmaker. Today I get this news item about how the star of Millionaire Matchmaker regrets her abortion and not having kids:

My biggest regret is I didn’t have children and I had an abortion in my 20s,” Stanger, the star of Bravo’s “Millionaire Matchmaker,” said in response to a question. “I was pregnant and I didn’t have enough money and I didn’t think it was OK to have a child and be a single parent. Now, look, everyone’s doing that.”

She said she didn’t find the right person at the time, reiterating that her biggest personal blunder was “not having kids.”

I continue to be somewhat fascinated by concepts of choice and control. How much we have or don’t have. The way I see it being childless is one thing. But being childless with an abortion in your past is another. I think many women would mourn or regret that, and we ought to be able to talk about that. If it takes a reality TV star to bring up the conversation, I’ll take it.

The mother is murdered, the baby survives. Tragic at all times but especially so around Christmas. Her grandmother had this to say:

Fannie Casara said she raised Eva Casara since infancy and hopes to care for the newborn as well. “She looks just like her mother,” Fannie Casara said. “She’s beautiful, and she’s so tiny, all those tiny fingers and toes.”

I would have posted this earlier but with the ice storm in Toronto, power became a complicated thing. As a side note, we think we are very advanced in our culture with instant communication of all kinds, however, when hydro goes down, all of us are returned to the late 1800s. The great equalizer. I digress.

I wrote this up the day the Supreme Court of Canada decided our prostitution laws are unconstitutional. It’s a bit of a different kind of article to write for me, less academic than usual. Feel free to add reasonable comments, as I note it already has the usual well-informed ones lining up.

So often those of us who are against the legalization of prostitution are portrayed as prudish. Scared of sex. Moralistic.

We think more highly of ourselves than the rest of those other folks who are dirty and disgusting, be it johns or the women who prostitute themselves. So the storyline goes.

But the legalization of prostitution is not wrong because it is an “us versus them” battle. It is wrong because the legalization of prostitution will affect every household, every family and every person in similar ways. This is because human nature is the same. We face the same temptations in our hearts.

The only difference between me and a woman who prostitutes herself is that the seeds that would have launched me onto a path of prostitution were not watered. In short, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” as the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote.

Melissa Ohden survived her mother’s attempt at abortion. Here’s her story.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4WJIvbEdWk]