This article claims that:

If a man commits a rape, then he has, on average, a less than 1% chance of being convicted.

If that’s true, then I hope this new app launched in New Delhi helps not only deter acts of rape but lead to convictions for crimes committed.

The phone app “Fight Back” will be launched in November by a local charity and will function as an SOS alert device – sending out a text message with a GPS location to up to five people, including police, and as a post on Facebook and Twitter.

“Safety for women has become such a huge issue here and we felt that citizens of Delhi, where possibly the problem exists the most, could use this type of technological intervention,” said Hindol Sengupta, co-founder of Whypoll, which created the application.

“Women are harassed and molested everywhere on buses, at metro stations, in markets . . . We believe this is Asia’s first phone application aimed at making women safer.” 

I tend to think of lobbyists as well-suited men sporting slicked-back Pompadours working for some hungry tobacco giant, but today’s lobbyist can come in many forms; an advocate group, a bloc of voters, even a non-profit organization. But the familiar ghost of the Pompadoured lobbyist can still linger in the background. The Pompadour is aware that his image needs work, so sometimes he simply steps back and acts as a puppeteer wearing a kinder, gentler, more philanthropic face.

The documentary Empty Handed aims to get people in the west behind initiatives that would supply contraception to women in Africa, a documentary funded in part by the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition. This super-team is comprised of members like  Bayer Pharma and Pregna, both suppliers of contraceptives, as well as other industry giants who supply the chemicals that make up their products.

Africa is home to over 1 billion people, and if a fraction of those people started taking contraceptives on a regular basis… well, I don’t have to tell you what that would do for the industry. So whenever you watch a documentary, claiming to want what is best for any group of people by offering them a product, just remember that every corporation has a board of directors elected by its shareholders.

During this holiday weekend, I’m thankful for my single parenting mother and all the “universe rearranging” she did for my sister and I. This article reinforced my faith in the adaptability of women who happen to become single parents. From SLATE,

When I was pregnant with my second child, I was aware that there were ways in which I was not prepared to take care of a baby on my own, but that awareness didn’t unduly influence or affect me. What I thought to myself was, “The universe will rearrange itself for this baby.” […]

Someone who was trying to persuade me not have the baby said that I should wait and have a “regular baby.” His exact words were, “You should wait and have a regular baby!” What he meant, of course, was that I should wait and have a baby in more regular circumstances. But I had already seen the feet of the baby on a sonogram, and while he was pacing through my living room making his point, I was thinking: This is a regular baby. His comment stayed with me, though. It evoked the word bastard: “something that is spurious, irregular, inferior or of questionable origin.”

Someone said, similarly, to a single friend of mine who was pregnant that she should wait and have a “real baby.” As if her baby were unreal, a figment of her imagination, as if she could wish him away.

Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort that we create a cultural climate; it’s in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to. Hawthorne called it “the alchemy of quiet malice by which [we] concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) acts primarily an advisory council to the European Union, and their recommendations often carry a lot of weight. However, the recent warning from the PACE on the dangers of sex selection may be contrasting to the EU’s very pro-abortion tradition, a tradition the EU may want to reconsider as it negotiates membership for countries like Armenia.

  On October 3, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted the “Prenatal sex selection” resolution, which says that the disproportion in sex selection is “alarming” in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Albania. […]

The PACE resolution appeals to “investigate the causes and reasons behind skewed sex ratios at birth; to step up efforts to raise the status of women in society” throughout the whole territory of Armenia. […]

Doctor-gynecologist at the Armenian-American Mammography Wellness Center Nelly Avagyan’s experience showed that majority of abortions is because of a child’s sex.

“This is an Armenian way of thinking – to have sons by all means, even though abortions of boys are also registered, but the number of aborted girls prevails,” Avagyan says.

On a Halifax sidewalk a spray-painted stencil reads “40 Days of Bullshit” and “It’s your body, it’s your choice”, in response to the 40 Days for Life vigil being held in town. When I walked over this stencil, I had to cringe, because there’s no argument there. It’s just an insult, a crowd chant, but there’s no reasoning behind it. Women who find themselves pregnant and considering abortion feel they have to choose between a life of poverty, or abortion. They feel they have to choose between losing their partner, or abortion. They feel they have to choose between not finishing school, or abortion. Think I’m wrong? Read these testimonies:

my baby was disabled

–and my husband could not bear to raise a child with special needs. He was suicidal. I felt I owed it to my two older children to keep their father in their life. I terminated my pregnancy at 17 weeks and I’m grateful that it was legal to do so (even though it was extremely difficult, both emotionally or logistically). I wanted that baby very much and I miss him every day.

—Guest simone

Matter of who’s life ?

It was 1972 in January, just after Roe and Wade.It was a time when single mothers were shunned. They wasn’t any form of help for single women. Because of my pregnancy, I became homeless, I’d been staying with a widow who had rooms for single girls, I was kicked out my church (they said I could come back when the situation was taken care of). My family turned their backs on me. My boyfriend was getting a divorce. I was desperate, suicidal! It came down to making the final decison of TAKING MY BABY’S LIFE OR MY OWN! I’ve been able to cope and deal with this decision. Since then I’ve gone through much counseling although on the anniversary date,I break down. The pain will never go away. When looking back, I know that I did the only thing I could back then. Today I”m doing well and I have helped many girls who find themselves where I was. I am so grateful for the women of today. There are so many services, especially counseling available for them . FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS VITAL FOR WOMEN.

—Guest Vicki

A reader recently quoted that Joyce Arthur herself admitted that “all of our decisions are constrained”. Personally, I think that having to choose between poverty/losing your partner/dropping out of school/homelessness or abortion isn’t a choice (even a “constrained” choice) at all, it’s a threatening ultimatum.  

_____________________

Andrea adds: The testimonies you posted are of the most dire variety. Or are they? I can only think that when abortion was not an option so readily taken, some of these people would not have manipulated their partners or themselves into this positioning of “my life or the baby’s.” It is very, very hard to move forward with a pregnancy in certain cases. But in those testimonies we are presented with “if” scenarios that we simply don’t know would have played out. (Historians are taught not to play the “if” game. As in “if the Allies had bombed the rail lines, there would have been no Holocaust” etc.)

These women tell us after the fact that they would have killed themselves if they had not had an abortion, or their husbands would have killed themselves, but if there is one thing I learned from reading Giving Sorrow Words it’s that men–and women–can come around to their own “unwanted” children. I believe to a certain extent, their guilt over their actions forces them to create an extreme box so that we could begin to understand why it was ok to kill a defenceless (disabled as in the example above) child. One last thing: at the debate, a young woman came to me afterwards, and asked me (kindly) about my positioning on rape. Wasn’t it OK to have an abortion then? I talked to her at some length and I ended up challenging her to watch an abortion, since she hadn’t. We forget how vicious the act of abortion is. I don’t want women to forget that and then delude themselves into thinking abortion was an act of compassion–too much pro-choice rhetoric in our media and the culture at large will do that.

Many women in the west believe that choice is their right; they’ve the right to choose abortion. But we live in a world of commodity, a world of economics, where being part of the communal economic stream, those same women also think things like “abortion is good because there are too many children living in poverty.” Women in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad don’t live in this world, and I’m getting pretty frustrated that people keep thinking they do.

…according to Newsweek, “Women have no legal rights in Chad and most marriages are arranged when women are 11 to 12 years old.” […]

In the aftermath of its devastating civil war, certain parts of Congo continue to be terrorised by militias and rebel armies. Rape, sexual abuse and brutal violence have become common forms of oppression. In a bone-chilling indictment, Newsweek states that “more than 1,100 women are raped in Congo every day”.

So when I read this from the NY Times, I was of course angry that people still don’t realize that in a country where rape is normal, where it occurs regularly, committed by spouses, soldiers, and boyfriends, that abortion for these women could never be a choice. If you live in a country where you have little or no control over your sexual acts, you will certainly have little or no control over your sexual health. To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.

_________________

Andrea adds: I thought Jennifer’s words at the end there were worth repeating, emphasizing. “To introduce abortion into such a country, without elevating the state of womanhood to bona fide personhood, would only result in further victimization. Abortion does not miraculously create some unique space where a woman suddenly stops being abused if all around her is violence.”

We also fail to pay attention to the fact that for many women living in DRC, while rape is horrible, so too is abortion. Women there may not see it as the “solution” it is presented as in the West.

This article from China actually has a Planned Parenthood director admitting that there is such a thing as “too many” abortions, and that the procedures carry a physical and mental risk to the mother. Read more here.

Among the 8 to 10 million induced abortions performed on the mainland each year, nearly 47 percent involve unmarried women younger than 25, according to Cheng Linan, director of the center for clinical research and training of the Shanghai Institute of Planned Parenthood Research. […]

A 2008 survey involving more than 50,000 induced abortions in Beijing showed that roughly 70 percent of the women undergoing the procedure were migrants. For many, it was not their first abortion.

According to a nationwide study by the Chinese Medical Association (CMA), of all women having received induced abortions, nearly 56 percent had two operations and 13.5 percent had three or more.

“That not only causes the women certain physical or mental problems, but it also gives the country a huge economic burden of more than 3 billion Yuan” or about $470 million, she said.

Among Chinese women who became infertile, more than 88 percent previously had an induced abortion, a study conducted in 2007 showed.

Other potential health hazards include haemorrhage, uterine or pelvic infection, uterine perforation and cervical laceration.

Though this article argues that more contraception is the answer, another option is of course to educate unmarried young women (especially those that are migrants with distinct socioeconomic burdens) that they aren’t socially obligated to have sex.

That’s every month, but I’m trying to make this October a time when I commit to making an extra effort to do something I don’t normally do or usually have time for.

October is a month when there are several life respecting events taking place. Among these are Life 2011, 40 Days for Life and Life Chain, but if these public events aren’t for you, there are many other ways to promote life and show your support for our seniors, women and children. Try donating to your local women’s shelter (clothing and toiletries are always needed), make a food donation (Feed Nova Scotia is my local program), or volunteer your time to senior facilities, parent centres, and crisis pregnancy centres. Whatever you decide to do to participate this October, do it remembering that your contribution is a statement. It says that Canadians value life from conception to natural death, and these statements, if we make them regularly and often enough, will permeate the culture.

People say, ‘What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.

–Dorothy Day

I’m not adopted. Well, I don’t think of myself as being adopted. My father adopted me shortly after marrying my mother when I was very young. Regular readers might know that I had never known my birth father, so when at the age of six my parents told me of my heritage I was confused and frightened. It was a lot to take in at that age, but I do remember that after the initial shock had subsided, I felt  a swell of acceptance, inheritance and love.

Now, I know I’m not “adopted”, but I can perhaps imagine what kind of emotion comes with being fully adopted. I’ve held onto my father’s name, even through marriage, in part because of that sense of inheritance that bound me to him. Reading this beautifully written piece in The Guardian, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of the proud rebellious love that comes with being adopted (even if you’re not really adopted).

Shortly before I left home, my mum told me she was adopted. Although this news was a shock, adoption was not unfamiliar to me: my great-grandfather was adopted, so was my great-aunt. Now my mother’s made a third in the family.

Recently, when I told someone of this history, they gasped and said: “You’ve got no past.” The more I talk about the adoptions, the more I realise how hard it is for other people to get their heads around the idea. […]

The more I think about the three adoptions in my own family, the more I realise that what they mean to me cuts across other people’s expectations of strain and discord. The adoptions have given me a tremendous sense of inheritance, and of luck. I feel lucky to be part of this extraordinary family.

______________________

Andrea adds: For Facebook readers, let me add here that I am not adopted. (This is Jennifer Derwey’s post.) Truly, not in any sense of the word. If I am, the likeness my mother and I share is all the more uncanny. Heading to the Czech Republic soon for my grandmother’s 90th birthday, where I expect to be called “mala Hana” for the week. (Czech for “small Hana.”)

I used to think I had a good idea of what went on inside the human body, and with the advent of Google, there was no symptom I couldn’t diagnose or home remedy I haven’t tried. Doctors, of course, were there to provide second options. But recently I’ve been reading about Natural Family Planning, and can I just say…there is A LOT I didn’t know.

You might think the goings on of the female body would be important information for women, but really there isn’t much emphasis placed on that kind of knowledge, not in our education systems, not in the media, and sadly not even by a woman’s doctor. So what is emphasized? Contraception, hygiene, and generally anything that conceals what a woman’s body does, naturally. Young girls then grow to be women who are left in the dark. They aren’t aware of what is normal and what is abnormal, even though detecting abnormality is exactly what leads to successful early diagnosis for things like cancer and infertility.

Dr. Diane Woodford, a fertility specialist at CRE, said that many women are often unaware they even have PCOS until they try to get pregnant and cannot.

“While PCOS is a leading cause of infertility, it is also associated with many other serious, long term health issues such as diabetes, heart disease and endometrial cancer,” […]

“If over the last 12 months, a woman has had six or fewer periods, she should see a physician and be evaluated for PCOS,” Dr. Susan Trout of CRE said. “An earlier diagnosis means complications like diabetes, heart disease, infertility, and hypertension are more easily managed.”

With the contraceptive Seasonale, you’ll only have one. With newer pills like Lybrel, you may never have one again. Are there so many products designed to keep our bodily functions concealed (and sometimes altered altogether) that we’re out of touch with ourselves? Have women conceded to the expectation of physically manipulating ourselves, even if it puts us at higher risk for disease?