I don’t really know what to say about this article. It had to have taken a lot of bad decisions for doctors and scientists to have painted themselves into this corner, all starting with treating human beings as objects.

Tens of thousands of human embryos hang in cold storage in Canada’s fertility clinics, an unknown number of which are “orphans.”

Increasingly, however, clinics are preparing to match these embryos — which could survive for decades in suspended animation — with infertile couples who long for a child of their own. It’s a form of third-party procreation that experts predict will only become more common as the number of surplus embryos grows.

Embryo donation has been called the most humane answer to an sticky ethical situation: How to dispose of leftover embryos that are created by infertility treatments and then literally frozen in time?

Personally, I don’t have a problem with people adopting embryos. It’s better than them living in frozen stasis for 15 years until they can no longer survive, and I don’t see it as very much different from anonymous adoption of children who have already been born. If nothing else, it’s certainly better than the other two options: destruction or using them for science experiments. However, I think it’s incredibly sad that we’ve gotten ourselves into this position in the first place.

Well, it’s certainly a small step in the right direction:

Antiabortion activists scored a major victory in Virginia as the state’s General Assembly agreed Thursday that clinics where most of the state’s early-term abortions are performed should be regulated as hospitals instead of as doctors’ offices.

I’m not sure why the abortion rights advocates are complaining. If they were interested in women’s health I’d think they’d support this measure. Places in which only 50% of patients who go in get to come back out SHOULD have high standards… at least if they’re going to keep it at “only” 50% (a number which is questionable in and of itself).

The article compares the regulation to offices where colonoscopies are performed, a regulation which has been in place since the 80s. Is someone going to try to tell me that my rights to a colonoscopy are being denied just because those offices must also have high standards? I certainly haven’t heard my parents make that complaint…

A friend e-mailed this article to me today and asked what I thought of it:

Last week, the University of Victoria Students’ Society finally ruled that a pro-life club broke the school’s harassment policy by comparing abortion to the Holocaust in October 2010.

At a Feb. 7 meeting, the students’ society voted to censure Youth Protecting Youth over “Echoes of the Holocaust,” a talk led by a visiting representative of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform. The public disapproval of YPY’s actions follows recommendations made by the students’ society’s complaints committee, which was formed in 2008 after numerous students voiced concerns regarding the controversial club.

Simply put, I think that the university needs to educate itself on the definition of “harassment” and “holocaust”. According to the dictionary widget thing on my computer, to harass is to subject to aggressive pressure or intimidation and holocaust is destruction or slaughter on a mass scale. Since the event was held in a classroom, I’m not sure how anybody could possibly feel harassed, since in order to encounter it one would have to essentially bring it upon themselves and attend the event. I feel pretty safe in saying that abortion easily fits the definition of a holocaust.

Of course, the end of the article gives away the real reason people were complaining:

The complaints committee also recommended the UVSS board weigh mediation options with YPY and host a restorative justice (likely pro-choice) event, organized by the Political Action Committee.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I wanted to do a follow-up restorative justice event, it would be about the holocaust, not abortion. It looks like just another excuse to attack the pro-life club (business as usual).

______________________

Andrea adds: I do see what you are saying Deborah, and I do think this is just another example of open season on pro-life beliefs. That said, I think holocaust is a term that should be reserved for The Holocaust. It’s a word that was created uniquely for that, if I’m not mistaken. I support the Centre for Bio-ethical Reform, but in some ways, I wish they’d leave the term “Holocaust” out and go with “mass slaughter” or “genocide” to describe abortion. I think my feelings on this may deserve a whole post. But in the interim, I’d say you are absolutely right: no one was harrassed by the presentation and this is just an excuse to make pro-lifers on campus shut up.

If nothing else, I would hope that this bill would make more people realise that there is a little human being there:

An unborn child’s heartbeat can be detected as soon as 18 days after conception, and supporters of a bill slated to be unveiled in the Ohio Legislature Wednesday say that women should be prohibited from ending pregnancies beyond that milestone.

Of course, my husband proposed that instead of the heartbeat, unique DNA should be the factor considered  . . .

Someone please tell me why Iran is about to be a part of the board of the UN agency promoting equality for women?

It would be great if Iran was actually interested in promoting equality for women, but their track record says otherwise.

________________________

Brigitte, of course, has a smarty-pants answer ready: Easy. That’s because the UN is upside-down.

So this is what marriage is coming to?

Americans are taking a cautious approach to marriage and are seeking more prenuptial agreements before walking down the aisle.

[. . .]

More women and middle-class couples are opting for prenups, which can also include adultery clauses, protection of retirement benefits and even custody of the dog, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML), which represents more than 1600 lawyers.

“It’s a planning tool. Given that half of marriages end in divorce it makes sense to plan,” said Marlene Eskind Moses, the president of the AAML.

Sure, I can understand that a pre-nup makes sense from a legal standpoint, but from a relational standpoint? I don’t think beginning your marriage with, “Hey, I love you but I don’t think I can ever fully trust you” is a good way to start.

It’s also worth pointing out that the “half of marriages end in divorce” statement isn’t true. No wonder they’re so cynical, they’re getting bad facts. Not that it should matter, everybody else’s divorce rate holds no bearing on your own marriage.

And now these pre-nups include requirements for date nights, nights per week a spouse can go out without the other, and who gets the puppies if their dog gives birth (somebody please tell me when a divorce is really going to coincide with a litter of puppies being born?). Sounds like a recipe for a legalistic marriage if it’s just full of rules as to who can do what and when.

But I’m a traditional girl, my vows included, “I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honour you all the days of my life . . . to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poor, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” If that’s not good enough for people, then I don’t know what is!

First of all: who on earth is paying these researchers and why are they wasting their money on them?

Second: I knew their conclusion already. Why can’t someone pay me to tell everybody? I probably offer way better rates. Just sayin’ . . .

While the article is kind of all over the place (including defining love — at one moment it’s a flimsy emotion and paragraphs later it’s actually commitment and putting your partner above yourself? Make up your mind! Personally, I was raised with the latter definition, which is what works:

Lasting marriages combine commitment, passion: Researchers

No no no, not the Mel Gibson movie (does anybody even remember that one?). I think that if someone were to ask me what I as a woman want, I think it would be simple (aside from ice cream, puppies, and a hot tub in my living room of course). I’d like “professional women” to stop telling me what I want. I don’t mean women who are professionals – I mean those who make a profession out of being a woman.

I suppose this article does try to tell us what we want, but I think it hits closer than anything else:

Many in the media and academy think working women are one way, and that stay-at-home wives and mothers are another way. This overlooks the fact that many women who work outside the home would like to work less or not at all. That is, they are working because they feel they have to, not because they want to.

. . .

Wilcox bases his analysis on the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, which, he explains, “indicates that, among married mothers with children in the home under 18, only 18 percent of married mothers would prefer to work full-time; by contrast, 46 percent would prefer to work part-time, and 36 percent would prefer to stay at home.”

Which brings us to what women want:

Will this authentic view of womanhood usurp the old political archetypes of what women want? The conversation has begun to rise above self-identified feminists’ assertions as to women’s desires. May it continue and bear fruit. And, whoever wins or loses, this is a whole new playing field in politics, one that more accurately reflects who American women actually are and, yes, what they really want. The American woman wants to annihilate this idea that career is everything. She wants a life. She wants life. And she wants help in being adaptive, not pressure to be something she’s not.

I’m think even a hardcore professional career woman would have a tough time arguing with that.

Read the whole article here.

Wednesday morning I woke up and was getting ready to head in to my part-time job at the Victoria Right to Life Society office, but before I had a chance, my telephone rang. It was our president calling to tell me that our billboard had been vandalised. The society has spent about $3000 on the billboard and it was put up about a month ago on the highway between downtown Victoria and the ferries that go to Vancouver. I’m pretty sure it’s the only billboard that doesn’t advertise food, real estate, or tourist opportunities. A few years ago I was driving along that highway and saw a McDonald’s billboard that had been vandalised from “Treat your friends. Heck, treat them all” to “eat your friends. Heck, eat them all.” So vandalism isn’t unusual there; it gets very quiet late at night along that highway.

Our billboard is a relatively uncontroversial billboard. It simply had a large close-up photo of a mother with her baby and it said, “Love them both. Choose life.” and had contact information for Options Pregnancy Centre, a pro-life pregnancy Centre in downtown Victoria so that women who wanted to make that choice knew who to call or had a web address to look up. Overally, it’s pretty nice. Unfortunately, somebody (or some people) had painted over the word “life” and written above the word “Choice”, “the right to” so that the billboard effectively said “Love them both. the right to Choose.” They didn’t capitalise “the”. (I’m just saying, if you’re going to vandalise, at least use proper capitalisation.)

The funny thing is that the vandals completely missed the point. I don’t think I really need to explain that one, do I? Maybe so. It’s a beautiful image with a recommendation of a pretty darned good choice, one that so-called pro-choicers claim IS a choice . . . but they decided to (how do I put this?) exercise their choice to break the law, deface other people’s property, vandalise, and suppress freedom of speech. That speaks loud and clear that their cause isn’t pro-choice; it is pro-abortion.

If it was really about choice, they would have paid for their own billboard and let women choose between the two.

It almost made the news, but the vandalism was cleaned up too quickly for the news stations to get good footage. I was relieved, because they wanted to interview me in front of the billboard. Of course, interviews would have been good overall so that people could see the truth, but they required a pep-talk from Andrea. I just hope I’m not proven right and it’s not all swept under the rug because little things do matter.

_______________________

Update: It did make the news.