Funny. I had a very strong feeling the U.S. House of Representatives would vote down that huge complicated government-take-over health care bill. I was wrong, which goes to show what I know (hint: very little). But here’s a little bit of silver lining:

The bill will allow the government to sell insurance in competition with private companies and make insurers offer cover to those with pre-existing conditions.

However, the government-run healthcare programme – the so-called “public option” – was scaled back in the run-up to the vote.

One key concession to get the bill through was to anti-abortion legislators.

An amendment was passed that prohibits coverage for abortion in the government-run programme except for rape, incest or if the mother’s life is threatened. Private plans can still offer the cover.

Democrat Bart Stupak, who sponsored the amendment, said: “Let us stand together on principle – no public funding for abortions.”

Abortion rights supporters said the amendment was the biggest setback to their cause in decades.

See? If you deny public funding for elective abortion (i.e. those made for “choice” reasons), the pro-abortion crowd will see it as a big setback. Doesn’t that give you any ideas?

A woman after my own heart:

A female civilian police officer is being hailed as a hero in the aftermath of a gunman’s rampage at Fort Hood — an outbreak of violence that the officer is credited with ending by shooting the alleged gunman four times despite being shot herself.

The attack killed 13 people and wounded 30 others at the Texas military post, but the carnage ended there, thanks to the quick response of Fort Hood Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley.

Munley and her partner responded within three minutes of reports of gunfire on Thursday, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said Friday. Authorities say Munley, 34, exchanged fire with the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who remains comatose in a Texas hospital. Munley is in stable condition, officials said.

“It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” Cone said.

I wish her a full and speedy recovery.

Just saying, is all… Nominate your favourite blogs here.

Barbara Kay discusses Steven Fletcher’s earlier op-ed about euthanasia. Here’s where I think she hits the nail squarely on the head:

In short, Mr. Fletcher is living proof that a dedicated support circle and wholehearted commitment to healing within the medical community can lead to a life worth living, even for someone lacking control of his body or bodily functions.

“Bodily functions” is code for a bright line in EuthanasiaSpeak: Control equals “dignity”; no control equals no dignity. The complex caregiving and machinery that sustains Mr. Fletcher’s approximate workaday parity with his peers was designed with the understanding that no life is without value, which is why the attention he received was unconflictedly focused on recovery, however partial.

But through a social lens that sees a hierarchy of value in human life, such single-mindedness is impossible. Although they are too polite to say so out loud, many euthanasia militants, however admiring of Mr. Fletcher’s contribution to society, quietly assess the resources involved in meeting his physical needs and eye his unique mobility apparatus with calculating, even resentful speculation as to how many of their tax dollars are earmarked for someone who is, after all, not living with “dignity.”

Or, as one of our readers astutely put it, “To religious pro-lifers, human dignity has its origins in our being created in the image of God. To the secular, it seems to have been reduced to being able to wipe our own bottoms.”

Speaking as someone who enjoys full control over my bodily functions, I admit this is a part of what we might want to call “autonomous living” that is good. I don’t really want to think about how I would feel if suddenly I needed help in that department. But for crying out loud, is this really the yardstick we should use to measure whether someone’s life is valuable enough to avoid being dispatched for dignity’s sake?

May I bore you with karate stories? Thank you.

This is the time of year at our dojo when brown belts who are scheduled to test for their black belt in late spring start their intensive training. It’s a pretty daunting prospect for most people – unless you’re already an elite athlete used to testing your limits and performing under pressure, the thought of that famously scary black belt test is, well, famously scary. As it should be – we are not, after all, testing our knitting techniques, we are testing the fighting techniques and physical endurance of martial artists. (No disrespect to knitters; there are many challenges in knitting but most do not involve hours and hours of unrelenting physical pain and humiliation.)

I have gone through that long intensive training and scary test twice (once for my first-degree black belt in 2004 and once for my second-degree black belt in 2007). Now I do my best to guide brown belts through theirs. And one way to help them is to remind them, as they begin their intensive training, that what they should keep in mind after 2 or 3 hours of hard karate isn’t how wiped out they feel compared to when they’re fresh, but how great they look for someone who, technically speaking, ought to be face-flat-on-the-floor-dead from sheer exhaustion.

See, it’s all about perspective. If you compare yourself to when you’re fresh, you’ll be miserable and will not enjoy pushing your limits. You may even be tempted to give up (some do, every year) and never get a black belt. But if you compare yourself to someone who ought to be dead, and you’re still standing, then you immediately start feeling better.

Back to euthanasia. If we assume that our life now, as able-bodied adults who are in full control of our bodily functions, is the only kind worth living, we’ll be making a very terrible mistake. Ask Steven Fletcher whether his life as it is now is worth living or not. Maybe we ought to measure the value of “impaired” life (for lack of a better term) as compared to death, not as compared to completely autonomous life.

Gosh, that U.S. health care bill. What a complicated mess. But here’s something I like:

While House leaders are moving toward a vote on health-care legislation by the end of the week, enough Democrats are threatening to oppose the measure over the issue of abortion to create a question about its passage.

[…]

“I will continue whipping my colleagues to oppose bringing the bill to the floor for a vote until a clean vote against public funding for abortion is allowed,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said Monday in a statement. He said last week that 40 Democrats could vote with him to oppose the legislation — enough to derail the bill.

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, cast Stupak as “attempting to ban abortion coverage in the private insurance market.”

The abortion dispute centers both on federal subsidies that would be provided for people who cannot afford health-care coverage themselves and the much-debated government insurance alternative, which is included in the House version of the bill but is still being debated in the Senate. Under a 1976 law, federal funds are generally barred from being used for abortions, except in cases of rape or incest or to ensure the life of the mother.

To be perfectly honest, I get lost in the details, which are not exactly undisputed. But I get this much: There are enough lawmakers opposed to the use of federal funds to pay for abortion to derail Barak Obama’s major health-care reform. I’ll bet you he never saw that one coming.

Here’s an easy-peachy way to start your week: Consider why a disabled MP would abstain from voting on Bill C-384, Bloc MP Francine Lalonde’s private bill.

Yes, the bill would provide the terminally ill with more freedom to end their own lives with dignity,” writes Fletcher, 37, in an opinion piece appearing Monday in the National Post.

“But it may also worsen the plight of the severely injured and ill by relieving the pressure on Canadians to come to terms with the more important challenge of providing the level of support required to make living the first choice.”

[…]

“An easy thing to do would be to just say, ‘The bill is flawed and I’m going to vote against it.’ But in the larger context, I think what is being talked about is much more profound. It’s really about, what does it mean to be alive?” he said.

“At the end of the day, I think people should have the ability to choose. However, I also want to challenge Canadians to provide the resources so that people choose life over death.”

Mr. Fletcher’s opinion piece is here. It’s a challenging read, but I encourage you to give it a go. Here is where I think I stand: I don’t encourage suicide, but it’s not like you can stop it with carefully crafted legislation. Society can’t prevent it from happening, any more than it can prevent rape or murder. But contrary to rape or murder, you can’t prosecute and punish those who commit suicide. So to me, talk of bringing foward a “right to die” is just a silly false debate. We all have the “right to die”. Just stop breathing long enough and you’re there.

I oppose euthanasia because to me it suggests that the choice is made by another person than the one suffering. Yes, in some cases loved ones KNOW for sure that their relative would absolutely want to have their life ended. And yes, I realize how wrenching it is to watch someone you love in such a situation and not be able to do anything about it. But that’s life. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Where I disagree with Mr. Fletcher is when he says:

In sum, what I believe is this: I support the right of an individual to choose to die with dignity. However, for that choice to be genuinely free, and for society to have confidence in that choice, we must know that we are giving the severely injured and ill the support needed to prevent them from losing hope– through the health-care system, social workers, therapy, spiritual counselling, proper insurance coverage (including automobile, and workers compensation) and the like.

I agree with the sentiment, but I cannot possibly understand how such a perfect solution can be achieved. This, in the end, is what makes me oppose euthanasia.

It must be fitting somehow that our pumpkin should have half rotted before today (it’s been raining buckets around here). Not that it stopped squirrels from trying to eat the thing (ewww). Oh well. The chocolate bars and various candy things still look good, and that’s the main part, right?

I don’t mean to sound anti-science (no more than usual, I mean), but man oh man, I do find this stuff spooky. And isn’t it amazing to be surrounded by advice on how to have great amazing (yet sterile) sex every day of the month and by stories extolling the virtues of creating eggs and sperm in some lab in part to help understand infertility, all at the same time?

At the risk of sounding overly simplistic (more than usual, I mean), wouldn’t it be easier if we pretty much kept sex for procreative reasons and left it at that?

Oh, I know. We can’t do that. It’s not nearly as sophisticated as turning the inability to control basic hormonal urges into a science.

See here for more information. Nominate your favourite(s)!

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Andrea adds: Last year we were Best New Blog. This year: Best Feminist Blog? he he.

What a sad, horrible story.

A jury in Saguenay, Que., has found Cathie Gauthier guilty in the premeditated killings of her three children as part of a New Year’s Eve murder-suicide pact with her husband.

[…]

Gauthier was charged with three counts of first-degree murder after the bodies of her children and husband were found in the family’s rented bungalow last Jan. 2 in Saguenay, about 250 kilometres north of Quebec City.

The children — Joëlle, 12, Marc-Ange, 7, and Louis-Philippe, 4 — were poisoned by a mix of Gravol anti-nausea medication and a tranquillizer.

Their father, Marc Laliberté, died of blood loss due to a cut on his wrist, worsened by a heart condition.

The family was suffering from financial troubles and had filed for bankruptcy in October. Laliberté had not worked in months and Gauthier had lost a series of jobs at retail stores.

Financial troubles is never a good reason to kill your children.