An excellent Globe article by Margaret Wente:

Why are feminists and other progressive types so enthusiastic about legalizing prostitution? It baffles me. Prostitution is the most exploitative, degrading work on Earth. Despite those stories about high-class call girls, its practitioners are overwhelmingly the most wretched girls and women in society. Prostitution turns women into lumps of meat that are bought and sold for the sexual gratification of men. If you legalize it, you will probably get more. Please explain how that can be a good thing. […]

I admire Ms. Bedford. She is a sharp entrepreneur and a brilliant publicist. But she is no more typical of the sex trade than your Great-Aunt Dorothy.[…]

In Canada, some women’s groups do not support the case for legalization. Among them are the front-line sexual assault centres and the Native Women’s Association of Canada – groups that work with the worst-off, most damaged, most exploited girls and women of them all. They have no photogenic poster girls like Terri-Jean Bedford. They have no illusions that legalization means empowerment. They know it only means more degradation. Is that what we want? I think not.

The red light district in Amsterdam…

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

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Andrea adds: It’s a great piece. I’d quibble with parts (I do not admire Ms. Bedford. She is greedy, self-absorbed and eager to capitalize on the suffering of others because it makes her rich) but in general, a great piece. If only common sense were more common.

More to mull:

Matthew Wojciechowski, a pro-life activist at Campaign Life Coalition who attended the 57^th Session of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women in March, said one of the abortion lobby’s main tactics recently has been to push for a ‘right to abortion’ under the guise of protecting women from violence.

When he was there in March, “abortion advocates claimed that abortion access was the solution to ending violence against women,” he explained. “They aggressively pushed forward their pro-abortion tactics proclaiming that restricting access to abortion was in itself a form of violence and that ‘sexual and reproductive health service’s’ including ‘emergency contraception’ and legal abortion were a ‘human right’.”

“Focusing on the root causes and offering genuine health care and support to victims comes secondary to these pro-abortion organizations,” Wojciechowski added. “Their main goal is to establish a ‘right to abortion’ and they have resorted to doing so under the guise of ending violence against women.  They would have us believe that abortion will eradicate rape and sexual abuse, but in reality access to abortion does nothing to prevent and/or solve the underlying problems of this devastating form of violence.”

I just wrote a new blog post at ActivateCFPL in response to Joyce Arthur’s demand that the media shut out pro-life voices:

The accusation that the media was being too balanced in its coverage of Morgentaler’s death is a ridiculous claim. Even by Arthur’s own analysis of the media coverage, a significant number of stories – 37 per cent of those she reviewed – didn’t include interviews with pro-life Canadians. But if “extreme” or minority positions should be ignored by the media, than by her own standard, Arthur is the one who should be excluded from engaging with the media. Ever.  Again.

In Arthur’s attempt to exclude pro-life Canadians from the media and the public square, she condemns herself to the same fate with her irrational and ridiculous standards.

Assisted human reproduction is an area of law that I really need to beef up on when my calendar clears. I think the pro-life movement and others interested in ethical quandaries should be doing some additional thinking and writing on the issue. As noted in yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen:

“There is no ethical framework for assisted reproduction. There is no guidance for practitioners or for the public as to what should or shouldn’t be allowed, and how it should be conducted,” says Dr. Arthur Leader, a physician and co-founder of the Ottawa Fertility Clinic, the only place in Ottawa to offer third-party reproductive assistance services.

If you’re someone who has an expertise in this area and want to chat about it, please drop me a line. It can be done in confidence, if you’d like.

photo credit: Etolane via photopin cc

My fabulous EFC colleague Julia Beazley had a great op-ed piece run in today’s National Post:

Why is this? Because the violence experienced by women in prostitution is not rooted in the laws on paper, or in how they stand up to a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The violence directed at women in prostitution is rooted in the demand for paid access to women’s bodies — and the fundamental inequality that underlies this sense of entitlement. […]

The violence is rooted in the underlying view among the people, mostly men, that purchase them that women in prostitution are somehow fundamentally different from their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives and daughters. This misperception justifies treatment of women as objects to be bought and sold. The very existence of prostitution requires a subclass of people who are available to be bought, sold and rented; people understood to be somehow just a little less equal than everyone else. The Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia have discovered that legalizing prostitution does not change this.

photo credit: Hani Amir via photopin cc

Yesterday, Quebec introduced its euthanasia bill. Euthanasia is currently a criminal act, though Quebec is trying to work around the Criminal Code by declaring it health care. From Wesley Smith:

As I understand the Canadian system, all hospitals, nursing homes, etc., are publicly funded, part by the province and part by the federal government. This would appear to mean that every taxpayer in Canada will be underwriting euthanasia, and moreover, that the provincial government of Quebec will require the killing of patients to be allowed in all publicly funded hospitals, residential care facilities and nursing homes.

Assisted suicide and intentional homicide are crimes in Canada, under the federal criminal code. But the provinces are in charge of regulating medicine. So, Quebec seeks to get out from under the federal criminal laws by redefining euthanasia as health care, e.g., the medical treatment of “aid in dying.”

If this becomes law, it will be a disaster for our country of epic proportions, but I’ll save that rant for another day. However, the “safeguards” put in place to ensure that people aren’t euthanized against their will, etc, will surely be watered down in years to come, as has happened in other countries that have permitted the practice. Our friend Alex Schadenberg explains,

Some call it a “slippery slope” and others call it an incremental extension, nonetheless, doctors appear to be breaking the law by killing, by euthanasia, children with disabilities, such as spina bifida.

Smith states that if assisted suicide is accepted, the same will occur in the United States.

In Canada we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that recognizes that we are all equal under the law. Therefore, legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide in Canada will logically be extended, through the court, to all Canadians. You can’t have a little euthanasia.

Disabled babies are already being euthanized in the Netherlands are part of the Groningen Protocol. Let me tell you – the Netherlands’ euthanasia laws had plenty of safeguards in place when the country legalized the practice years ago. Then they were watered down as Alex explains above. Now babies are being euthanized. Like Fido, the family pet.

And children will be euthanized in Belgium as well, another country that has legalized euthanasia. The country debated the matter this past week.

In the wake of several months of testimony from doctors and experts in medical ethics, a Belgian Senate committee will on June 12 examine the possible extension of the country’s euthanasia law to include children.

“On both sides of the linguistic border, liberals and socialists appear to agree on the fact that age should not be regarded as a decisive criteria in the event of a request for euthanasia,” notes De Morgen. They want doctors to decide on a minor’s capacity for discernment on a case by case basis.

Not only do we need to worry about abortion taking our young, as well as rocking our families and societies, now we’ll need to worry about euthanasia doing the same.

Andrea referred to it last week. It’s now available online. His talk was both hilarious and challenging. And he discusses the abortion debate!

His introduction starts at about the 25 minute mark. He fails to note his website address during the talk, but if you want to visit it, it’s here.

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Andrea adds: Hurray!

From LifeSiteNews:

Ariel Castro could land on death row for beating and starving one of the women he kept chained in his basement as sex slaves in order to kill his own unborn children.

Prosecutors indicted 52-year-old Ariel Castro last Friday on 329 charges for kidnapping three women, chaining them to the basement of a Cleveland home, and raping them over the course of roughly a decade.

Among the charges is one count of aggravated murder for “the unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy.”

Under state law Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty, who indicated in May that Castro would face murder charges, could seek the death penalty.

One of his victims, Michelle Knight, said Castro caused her to miscarry five children by brutally punching her in the stomach and starving her.

If McGinty prosecutes the statute as a capital crime, Castro could become the first prisoner to be sentenced to death for killing an unborn child. […]

n May, Mark Harrington, director of the Ohio-based pro-life group Created Equal, said people on all side of the abortion issue should support the prosecutor. “Abortion supporters need to join with anti-abortion forces in calling for Castro to be charged with murder under the Ohio Fetal Homicide Law,” he said. “What happened to Ms. Knight is the worst kind of domestic violence. She and her unborn children deserve justice.”

Pro-life activist Keith Mason of Personhood USA also told LifeSiteNews.com the decision was “fantastic,” but he felt it embodied a widespread contradiction. Ohio law recognizes the crime of killing a wanted child, although not an unwanted one.

It does not make sense “that we would protect [preborn children] in one circumstance but not the other,” he said.

I’m linking to a challenging and encouraging talk by Peter Stockland, which was given at the Bridging the Secular Divide conference I attended a few weeks ago. Panels 3A, 3B and 3QA are well worth your time.

Within the pro-life movement, we frequently discuss media engagement and how we can better get our pro-woman, pro-life message out there. (I also yammer on about how I can persuade a journalist to label me pro-life rather than anti-abortion, but I digress.) Peter’s main message: the media is ours and it’s ours for the taking.

Both Peter and Douglas Todd comment on new media, whether ‘media’ as we know it is on its way out and how controversial topics (including religion) get played by the mainstream media.

The words of an abortionist. I am again spending a few hours digging through a legal database and came across another tragic abortion case. I’ll spare you the details. But this is how Justice MacLellan of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court summarized Dr. Piver’s testimony:

Dr. Julius Piver testified as an expert. He works in Bethesda, Maryland and has performed between 600 to 700 abortions all of which were done in a hospital setting on a Outpatient basis as opposed to a clinic similar to the Morgentaler Clinic. He said his patients normally are given a general anesthetic and they are asleep while the abortion is done. He said he was familiar with the clinic setup for abortions where a local anesthetic is used. Dr. Piver said that his rule of practice was that a patient would not be allowed to drive after having an abortion whether it was done under general or local anesthetic. He said that if he was aware that a patient intended to drive, he would not do the procedure because he felt that it would put the patient’s life in jeopardy.

He said that most women who have abortions are unhappy having the procedure. He said this is particularly true of women who have had a child or other children. He said the procedure is already emotionally charged and that the decision to drive or not to drive should not be left with the patient.

There are references to driving because the woman was in a car accident following her abortion.

So…if he is correct and most women are unhappy having the procedure…why are they having the procedure? Is it because they feel they have no other choice? And if that’s the case, is offering them only one choice, pro-choice? Offering one option, a terrible and unwanted option, doesn’t sound like much of a choice to me.

This woman did not want to have an abortion at all. She even asked the hospital if she could have the body of her aborted child in order to bury her little one, rather than have it disposed or incinerated. The hospital refused. (I’m sure there are regulations against such things.)

Not that we need it, but another indication that there is something seriously wrong with our abortion status quo.

(Case reference: MacPhail v. Desrosiers, 1997 CarswellNS 546)

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos via photopin cc