I’ve recently fallen for this song, and frankly anything Clare Bowen sings. I love her voice. Here is When The Right One Comes Along, featuring Sam Palladio.
I’ve recently fallen for this song, and frankly anything Clare Bowen sings. I love her voice. Here is When The Right One Comes Along, featuring Sam Palladio.
Julie Burkhart was recently interviewed by Mother Jones on her efforts to re-open the infamous Tiller abortion clinic. This comment stopped me in my tracks:
This community has just been so embroiled in the abortion…I hate to say the abortion “debate,” but just the turmoil. Some people would say, “Just leave it alone and let it go.” However, we can’t really have true freedom in this country until everyone can access that right.
Is she arguing that women can’t be free if they’re pregnant or that pregnant women can’t fully participate in society?
Feminists for Life has a good response to this argument:
How can women ever lose second-class status as long as they are seen as requiring surgery to avoid it? This is the premise of male domination throughout the millennia – that it was nature which made men superior and women inferior. Medical technology is offered as a solution to achieve equality; but the premise is wrong…[I]t’s an insult to women to say women must change biology in order to fit into society.
I hope that’s not what Burkhart meant, but it’s an argument that pro-choicers have advanced for years, so I’m not optimistic.
If society is structured in such a way that pregnant women can’t fully participate, or are guaranteed fewer rights or freedoms than men or non-pregnant women, then society needs to change. Not women.
Kamal, a boy in the same year, says: “Say I got a girlfriend, I would ask her to write my name on her breast and then send it to me and then I would upload it on to Facebook or Bebo or something like that.” The profile picture on his phone, seen by everyone to whom he sends messages, is an image of his girlfriend’s cleavage. Some of the boys at his school have explicit images of up to 30 different girls on their phone. They swap them like we used to swap football cards. If they fancy a girl, they send her a picture of their genitals. As one teenage girl said after the report came out, sending pictures of your body parts is “the new flirting”. […]
What is the cause of all this? We need more research, the experts say. But to a dismayed parent, it seems like the horrific result of a massive experiment. Thanks to the internet, our boys and girls are the first children to grow up with free, round-the-clock access to hardcore pornography. Porn has become part of the adult mainstream, colouring everything from advertising to best-selling books like Fifty Shades of Grey. Of course our children are affected. […]
As for his sisters, I shudder. I don’t want them to live in a world in which romance means boy meets girl, boy sends a picture of his genitals. Lily and Rose are not their real names, by the way. I’m that afraid of their being drawn in. We clearly need to talk, awkward as it may be.
I’m all for research…but really? How much more do we need? How about some common sense?
A pro-life group in Abbotsford mounts a pro-life display in a farmer’s field each year. Crosses are arranged in the field, each one representing a life lost to abortion.
Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada is demanding that the display be removed:
It is inappropriate for the City to use its resources and authority to approve what is basically a sectarian religious message that is divisive and upsetting for the community. The sign reflects a common anti-abortion slogan used by the Christian Right against abortion. In addition, the sign is juxtaposed with a display of Christian crosses, making clear the religious meaning of the entire display, which encompasses both the sign and the crosses.
There are so many issues with this statement and with her letter as a whole, but thankfully, André Schutten has offered an apt response.
But what really caught my attention in Ms. Arthur’s letter is the following:
The sign and display are offensive to many people, particularly for many women in your community who have had or may be considering an abortion. This issue was brought to our attention by an Abbotsford resident who has become so upset and traumatized by the display year after year that she changes her route to avoid it and is considering moving out of the city.
A woman was traumatized by the display. I’ll assume from the context that this is a post-abortive woman. A post-abortive woman was traumatized by a display that communicates that an abortion ends a human life. She is so traumatized by the display that she changes her route and is considering leaving the city.
I’m both pro-woman and pro-life. I do not want to see women hurt, wounded or traumatized. My heart breaks for this woman and for the child or children that were aborted.
Why is she hurting? Did she not know that abortion ends a life? Was she told that there are no real side-effects, physical or emotional, to having an abortion and she is shocked by what she’s feeling?
Is it a row of wooden crosses that is so deeply affecting her? Or is it the reality of abortion?
If you’re post-abortive and hurting, there are people who can help.
This week, Angus Reid released the results of a new abortion poll. It contains some interesting data.
Rather discouragingly, a large number of Canadians still aren’t aware that abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy in Canada. Only 23% knew that a woman “can have an abortion at any time during her pregnancy, with no restrictions whatsoever.”
A whopping 45% thought that a woman “can have an abortion only during the first three months of her pregnancy, with no other restrictions.” My guess is that it is hard for many Canadians to believe that woman in her eighth month of pregnancy can abort her child for any reason.
Respondents were then informed of the legal status quo and asked for their opinions. Here’s where it gets really interesting: 43% of men want the status quo as is – abortions available at any time with no restrictions. Only 27% of women – not even a third – feel the same way.
So how would women prefer to see abortion regulated in Canada?
24% – Women being able to have an abortion only during the first three months of their pregnancy, with no other restrictions
17% – Women being able to have an abortion during the first three months with no restrictions and then during the last six months but only if their life is in danger, if they have been the victim of rape, or if the fetus has serious defects
11% – Women being able to have an abortion during the first three months of their pregnancy, and only if their life is in danger, if they have been the victim of rape, or if the fetus has serious defects
9% – Women being able to have an abortion at any time during their pregnancy, but only if their life is in danger, if they have been the victim of rape, or if the fetus has serious defects
6% – Not sure
5% -Women being forbidden from having an abortion under any circumstances
Most women want to see restrictions on abortion. Two thirds of women, exactly 66%, do not “prefer” to have abortion on demand available to them.
It’s interesting that a larger percentage of men than women prefer our “any time for any reason” reality. Why is that? And why do women want more restrictions placed on abortion? This result seems to run contrary to our cultural narrative.
I don’t have the answers to these questions and I don’t think studies of this nature have ever been conducted in Canada, which is really unfortunate. I wish I had a money tree to fund more focused research.
______________________________________
Andrea adds: The money tree, oh the money tree. Yes. I need that one too.
The author of this Globe article argues that parents need to be far more thoughtful when they blog about their children. With the efficiency of archiving sites like the WayBackMachine, some things will never, ever disappear from the web.
Recently, The Atlantic ran an article by Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the plague of “parental overshare”: the reams of articles and blog posts by parents whose favourite, if not sole, subject is their kids. She cites a New York Times blog post by Beth Boyle Machlan about her daughter’s obsessive compulsive disorder in which she describes intimate details of a therapy session, and the recent controversy over “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” a post-Newtown piece by a blogger named Liza Long who pegs her own troubled 13-year-old son as a potential mass murderer, illustrated by his photo. […]
Without question, Weiss’s writing – her daughter’s body and eating habits are unpacked in agonizing detail – invades her kid’s privacy in a way that would be libellous if children had any rights. Bovy argues that charting a child’s issues, be they as banal as bedwetting or as serious as threatening one’s mother with a knife, also makes them susceptible to negative outcomes later on. A vivid description of a knife-wielding incident in adolescence forges an electronic footprint that can’t be scrubbed away. These tales of youthful indiscretions might pop up during a job interview or a college application. In giving away our kids’ present lives in public, we may be sabotaging their private futures.
I am so thankful that my mother, a writer, was not an “over-sharing” mommy blogger. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have details about my potty training, my teenage angst and that awkward incident with my first boyfriend posted online for all to see. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
And sure, one could argue that these are rites of passage that everyone lives through and therefore there’s no need for concern. But when people are spending big money to create online personae and branding to promote messages or products that they believe are important, it’s hard to breezily dismiss the impact of an unwanted online biography.
Imagine if someone were to Google your name to then be faced with the opportunity to learn about either your perspective on tax law or your very awkward first kiss. I’d like to think that people are more interested in the exchange of ideas, but the tabloid industry reveals a very different side of our human nature. We really do need to careful when we post about ourselves and others.
(I think I might call my mother and thank her for choosing to write fiction rather than about me and my brother.)
In a recent interview, Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life commented on the pro-life movement’s successes. Josh Brahm of Life Report prefaced his question to Father Pavone by noting that some pro-lifers are discouraged and questioning if the American movement has accomplished anything since Roe v. Wade.
As the 25 year anniversary of the Canadian Morgentaler decision approaches, and we are reminded of what the decriminalization of abortion has wrought in our country, we should consider Father Pavone’s words.
In response to Josh’s question, “What has been the pro-life movement’s greatest victory or victories?” Father Pavone shares the following:
Well, it’s always in the lives that we save. We know that there have been over 53 million children killed by surgical abortion since Roe v. Wade. But the numbers would be astronomically higher were it not for the work of the pro-life movement because we can count many of the lives that we have saved.
For example, the pregnancy centres are the best at doing this. They know the women they have served, the babies that have come back in their arms… [the mothers] saying “Hey, I would have aborted this child if it weren’t for you.” We know those numbers. Millions upon millions of children that were saved. But also the countless others that we cannot count because we do not know.
So the first, and most important accomplishment, is that. And as I always say, all the effort, all the activity of the entire pro-life movement would be worth it even if just one single human life were saved as a result. Or even more – even if just one single life we tried to save – and even if we hadn’t succeeded.
This is what we mean by the incalculable value of even a single life.
January 22nd and 28th may be the anniversaries of Roe v. Wade and Morgentaler. However every day is the anniversary of a life saved. Every day of the year, millions of children, teens and adults celebrate their birthdays because someone in the pro-life movement shared with their parents that life is precious and offered them care and support.
Let’s not lose heart. We are making a difference. We are saving lives. Let’s celebrate that fact every day.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UZewkaqQ5RY#!]