I just noticed this story in my recent edition of Costco Connection (I read them all!), and thought some of you might enjoy it. Seems like not all women have to choose between being a mom and being successful in the big old world of business. Good for them, I say!

A priest offers advice on which men not to marry.

Step forward, Senator Nancy Ruth!

OTTAWA – Aid experts alarmed by Canada’s new anti-abortion stand in foreign policy have received some raw political advice from a Conservative senator: “shut the f— up” or it could get worse.

“We’ve got five weeks or whatever left until G-8 starts. Shut the f— up on this issue,” Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth told a group of international-development advocates who gathered on Parliament Hill on Monday to sound the alarm about Canada’s hard-right stand against abortion in foreign aid.

“If you push it, there will be more backlash,” said Ruth, who fears that outrage will push her boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to take further measures against abortion and family planning – abroad, or maybe even in Canada. “This is now a political football. This is not about women’s health in this country.”

Me, I thought she’d hit rock bottom with that comment. But apparently I was wrong.

Abortion should be part of our development commitments abroad because it helps reduce child mortality and better the lives of children. Or so says the Green Party of Canada.

Of course. Why didn’t we think of that?

Perhaps the saddest story I’ve heard in a long, long time. How come nobody noticed anything?

In order to violate them so consistently, you kinda have to have some idea what they look like. That’s the only justification I can think of for this:

NEW YORK — Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

So of course I went over to this fine pro-woman site to see what they had to say about that. Here it is, in full:

I’m sure they’ll get around to it. Any minute now.

A colleague just posted a link to this story with the comment New “Wuss in a Can!” Guys: If you see this, run the other way, OK? It’s true that girls want their man to understand them better, but there are limits.

Researchers in Germany sprayed oxytocin in the noses of 24 men and then showed them emotionally charged images of a crying child, a girl hugging her cat and a grieving man.

Their reactions were compared with those of men who had not received the spray.

The empathy expressed by the men who had been sprayed with oxytocin was so high it was on a par with what would normally be expected of women.

Oxytocin is a hormone released to trigger labour in pregnant women and also helps bonding with the newborn child.

It has been called the cuddle hormone or the trust hormone as it is released at orgasm.

The study, published by the University of Bonn in the Journal of Neuroscience, is the first to suggest oxytocin is also important for feelings of empathy.

Oxytocin sprays are being sold commercially on the internet.

So, um, not wanting to fund abortions abroad as part of a renewed effort to improve maternal health in third world countries amounts to a “no sex” approach to foreign policy?

Wow. Does that mean sex and pregnancy are sometimes related? I had no idea…

Baby boy survives almost two days after abortion.

A baby boy abandoned by doctors to die after a botched abortion was found alive nearly two days later.

The 22-week infant later died in intensive care at a hospital in the mother’s home town of Rossano in southern Italy.

The mother, pregnant for the first time, had opted for an abortion after prenatal scans suggested that her baby was disabled.

He was discovered alive the following day – some 20 hours after the operation – by Father Antonio Martello, the hospital chaplain, who had gone to pray beside his body.

He found that the baby, wrapped in a sheet with his umbilical cord still attached, was moving and breathing.

The priest raised the alarm and doctors immediately arranged for the infant to be taken to a specialist neonatal unit at a neighbouring hospital where he died on Monday morning.

An interesting column on that whole sex-ed thing by Barbara Kay. I especially like this bit:

Human beings are the only creatures for whom shame, guilt and modesty (especially in girls) are instinctive. We are also the only creatures who assign certain behaviours to the realm of the private, and certain to the realm of the public.

Schools are by nature an artificial construct. They were designed to transmit objective knowledge about subjects that are amenable to collective learning: literacy, numeracy, history, scientific data and the arts.

Sexuality is different. When children of both sexes absorb information from a relative stranger about deeply private feelings and behaviours in a group environment — when the private is made public — they are being co-opted into a rudimentary form of collective voyeurism, which, even when earnestly accompanied by exhortations to responsibility (condoms!), is inherently titillating and a licence to breach natural modesty boundaries.