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A Czech mom discovers she is pregnant with quintuplets. That’s a whole lot of babies to have all at once! I hope they are all healthy and that she gets the support she is very much going to need.

My piece in the Ottawa Citizen about the legacy of Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

This is Morgentaler’s legacy: The death of a child, renamed a choice, and without limit in Canada.

May 29, 2013 (Ottawa)—Today ProWomanProLife acknowledges the death of Dr. Henry Morgentaler and offers sincere condolences to his family and friends.

For many thousands of women across Canada, this is a day to mourn the sorrow and pain he has caused precisely because he made abortion mainstream. His life, marked by suffering itself as a survivor of the Holocaust, was one in which he “treated” a woman’s suffering with the death of her unborn child.

Morgentaler is not a hero. To the contrary: many Canadians mourn that he remained unrepentant, to the best of our knowledge, unlike the famous abortion doctor and founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League in the United States, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who became vociferously pro-life after seeing abortion for what it is: the killing of an innocent child.

Morgentaler’s death cannot pass by without remembrance for the women, who, in their hour of need faced a doctor who instead of reminding them of the humanity they carry and hope for the future, told them the unborn are merely a clump of cells.

“I never saw a woman enter or leave an abortion clinic joyfully. Morgentaler marked the creation of an era in which ‘I don’t want to do this, but I must’ became strangely, the hallmark of triumph for women’s rights,” says Andrea Mrozek, director of ProWomanProLife.

“In the public sphere, his passing will not be without mourning for those he chose not to see—first and foremost women with all their natural reproductive capabilities and second, the many thousands of lives taken before they breathed their first breath.”

Where the public actions of a man are wrong, it is impossible to speak soothing platitudes at the time of his death. Morgentaler, time will show, stood on the wrong side of history and it is for this reason that ProWomanProLife makes this statement today; that the historical record may show that many Canadian women did not admire Dr. Henry Morgentaler.

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From the news story about the baby rescued from a sewer pipe in China:

The mother of the Chinese newborn rescued from a sewer pipe has said she kept her pregnancy secret after the father refused to stand by her and she could not afford an abortion.

The ordeal of Baby 59 – known only by the number of his hospital incubator – made headlines around the world after extraordinary footage was shown of firefighters and medics freeing him from the narrow pipe. Police in Jinhua, Zhejiang province, initially thought the baby had been abandoned and said they were treating the case as one of attempted homicide.

But they subsequently realised that the resident who had raised the alarm, and who remained present throughout the two-hour rescue on Saturday, was his mother. Local media said she told police she wanted to raise the child but had no idea how to do it.

I wouldn’t mind reflecting for a second on the “could not afford an abortion” part of the report. If she could have afforded the abortion, Baby no. 59, pictured sleeping above, would not be a controversy, because he’d be dead. We go to extraordinary lengths to save babies, once they are born. Now it appears the mother would like to parent. I’d be grateful if she got the opportunity. Seems to me her son got a new lease on life, and so should she.

The concept sounds awkward, but is actually quite funny in moments. This sketch is called “Blind Date.” I post it largely for the laughs, but also because this one, how to put this, highlights a couple of gender differences in a fairly stark way.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG6NbAd8r2Q]

As you may know by now, I do not like reading Jane Austen, but I do thoroughly enjoy the BBC Pride and Prejudice.

So I found this post very funny, I must admit.

God save me from the social skills of Mr. Collins, is all I have to say. (There are moments when I go home from a cocktail party kicking myself, for sure. Which incidentally, Mr. Collins would not do, because he’d be too obtuse to worry.)

The headline of the article reads “Anti-abortion group uses gruesome images to target ridings of MPs who voted against pro-life motion.” An article about my friend Stephanie Gray’s latest campaign, which juxtaposes the faces of pro-choice MPs against pictures of dead babies.

I have my issues with the campaign. I am not confident that the images without the voices of Stephanie and her team are a win. So while I don’t have a problem with the use of graphic images, I do believe there should be a person there to discuss those images when people inevitably have a strong reaction.

However, at the end of the day, I do agree with Stephanie on this:

I’m 100% confident that we’ll win,” she says.

The future is pro-life, folks, of that I am confident.

Finally, no pro-life group garners more attention for the problem of abortion in our culture like Stephanie’s. And for that, I continue to be grateful. It’s not an issue to be complacent over, that’s for sure.

This article gets at the idea that increasingly, put all sex ed aside, we are uncomfortable with the basics of the birds and the bees. Ie. we don’t want to acknowledge where babies come from.

Yes, we are increasingly uncomfortable with where babies come from, no doubt about it. Our lingo betrays us. And it doesn’t take a social conservative to perceive it….

Fully autonomous. In other words, free from embeddedness in relationships. By extension, having little to do with moms, dads, and babies. See what I mean? We’re ambivalent about the procreative aspect of sex. Sex is rather all about pleasure, or, to use the lingo of a public-health friend of mine, all about the f***ing. (Forgive my being blunt and crude, but if the shoe fits . . .)

This is the underpinning of the pro-choice mentality. I can have sex, but I must not associate that sex with even the possibility of a baby. Ironic, even, since these are the folks who are so very concerned about “sex-positive” and all that jazz (what does that even mean?). But get down to the basics of the birds and the bees and they are in total denial.

I finally clicked over to Life Canada’s new campaign and watched “Darby’s story.”

I’m impressed that this young girl possesses a confidence and courage that I didn’t have at 16. Either she was always so, or having a baby forced her to grow into it. Either way, she offers a compelling personal story on how and why having a baby is never a mistake.