Poor women are delivered a message in this country, that rather than deliver their baby, their baby would be “better off” having never been born at all. A message we can see at work here.

Among poor women, the abortion rate increased 17.5 percent, rising from 44.4 to 52.2 per 1,000 women […]

… when confronted with an unintended pregnancy, poor women who might have felt equipped to support a child, or another child, when not in the midst of a recession may have decided that they were unable to do so during a time of economic turmoil.

The message that if you don’t have a house with a white picket fence, then you might not be able to support your baby the way we, the nation, deem fit, is sinister enough. But now in South Africa, poor immigrant women, rather than getting the help they need, are actually facing a battle for custody because they had their children and aren’t able to meet the states criteria for “good parenting”.

Simon Zwane, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Development, confirms that women must have jobs and housing before they can recover their babies, to prove they are capable of caring for them.

“We have taken babies into places of safety until parents can prove they can look after their babies, they have fixed places of abode and they have partners or they have found employment and they will not be on the streets with babies,” he says.

Konjiwa, 26, spends her days remembering. Her 2-year-old son, Joe, is growing up fast without her in an institution far from the squalid building where she lives. She too carried her child across the Limpopo River.

“I can’t survive without my baby,” she croaks miserably. “I miss him more than anything.”

Zwane says some women use their babies to beg. But Konjiwa and Chibura say they cannot feed their children without begging, let along afford child care while they seek money.

As many as 2 million Zimbabweans have flooded into South Africa in recent years looking for work after fleeing their country’s economic collapse and political violence. They find they are not especially welcome, particularly in townships where xenophobic violence in 2008 saw machete-wielding mobs storm through, beating up Zimbabweans and other migrants, burning some to death.

…comes this.

Global population numbers having just passed the 7 billion mark (twice what it was when I opened a vasectomy clinic in Texas), it is overwhelming to contemplate the world struggling with this flood and its inevitable threats (including starvation, drought, pollution — and what leading scientists predicted long ago would be the main danger to civilization: war).

Unless we act (this legislation, along with China’s “one child” policy, is a start), the world is doomed to strangle among coils of pitiless exponential growth. 

Norman Fleishman / Yountville

Emphasis added.

As much as I dislike hearing that women ought to have children for the sake of their country, I also dislike hearing that women ought not have children for the sake of their country. Both statements treat women as commodities, and both are false claims.

For a start, Germany just announced that Europe still doesn’t have “enough children for the future”. So while Europe and the developed world don’t have enough children to support economic growth and therefor no one suggests that these countries and wealthier demographics are overpopulated, it seems that overpopulation is an issue for “those” countries and “those” classes.

To use overpopulation as a ridiculous claim that women shouldn’t be having that many children and it needs legislating, really seems to be saying that certain women shouldn’t be having children, women who might use resources, women who might already live in a populated country.

But if overpopulation isn’t a global issue, then is it really an issue at all?

If we judge success by what we achieve for our goal and our cause, then I think the most successful pro-life people have been “kinder, gentler”.  Gone are the days of soap box fire and brimstone, and if you’ve ever seen Andrea on the news you know how soft spoken and concise she is. This goes for Stephanie Gray, Serrin Foster, and many others as well.

I think when you’re delivering a message so steeped in tension and emotional dynamite, it’s important to keep your calm. That method has been paying off for many of us, including Charmaine Yoest.

With an easy laugh and ample charm, Charmaine Yoest doesn’t at all appear to be Public EnemyNo. 1 for the pro-abortion rights community. But the foundation of her rising influence – the accessibility of her approach – becomes clear when she settles in for an unexpectedly frank conversation about the stunning 2011 antiabortion legislative juggernaut that she has helped orchestrate.

Well done,  ladies.

__________________________

Andrea adds: That’s very kind, Jennifer, thanks. What I strive for is to always be reasonable. Which strictly speaking, given how reasonable it is to be pro-life, shouldn’t be all that hard.

From Gallup,

PRINCETON, NJ — Self-described “pro-choice” and “pro-life” Americans agree about nine major areas of abortion policy, while disagreeing on eight others. Among the areas of consensus, in which a majority of both groups hold the same opinion, especially large percentages are in favor of requiring informed consent for women (86% of pro-choice adults and 87% who are pro-life) and making abortion illegal in the third trimester (79% and 94%).

I’m currently in the first stages of putting together a community event.

When I first came to Nova Scotia from Colorado 4 years ago, I was surprisingly pregnant, again, with a nursing seven month old in tow. Needless to say, I didn’t get out much and that first year was pretty lonely. Mom groups did help, but as a new parent, I felt a lot of pressure to “measure up” to other moms and not show my seams. Since that trying time, I’ve been looking for a way to integrate marginalized populations for their mutual benefit in order to curb some of the depression these groups feel from simply being isolated (try wheeling a double stroller around a city and you’ll see just how restrictive urban life can be!).

Right now, I’m looking to organize single or new moms with young children, particularly those who find themselves feeling lonely, for community interaction with senior citizens.

 In 1987, 8.5 million elderly lived alone; by 2020, 13.3 million elderly will live alone.

The concept? Take two lonely groups and pair them together for their mutual benefit. Ideally, this would be a weekly event taking place in a senior home facility. As I said, we’re in beginning stages, and the details have yet to be ironed out, but if there is anyone in the HRM area who would like to get involved, participate, offer advice, offer transportation etc. please contact me. I am currently working with a location, the home is for ladies only, so at this time the project participants are restricted to mothers and their children (hopefully in the future fathers can participate as well!).

_________________________

Andrea adds: Sounds like a great idea to me. Our communities today are very, very weak, to our detriment. Best wishes, Jennifer!

British politician David Alton, Baron Alton of Liverpool, and founder of the children’s charity Jubilee Action, delivered this speech in July. It’s worth reading in full, and you can do that here.

There have been around seven million abortions in this country since 1967. Last year there were 189,574 abortions. In the same year, 48,348 women had more than one abortion, Tragically, 383 women had five or more abortions; some as many as eight –  all in the same year.

When I sent these statistics on to the author of the 1967 Abortion Act, David Steel, who remains a colleague in the House of Lords, I had an email back simply asking: “abortion being used as contraception?”.  A good question.

I’m thrilled about these new plans. Japan is taking steps to care for its elderly and ensure they aren’t alone during the last moments of their lives. What are some of their ideas?

One realtor has started to promote the idea of house sharing by single mothers and senior citizens, bringing together senior citizens who are interested in renting space in their house after their own families are gone with single mothers in search of affordable housing and also, perhaps, a live-in babysitter.

[…]

In the end, the simplest solution may just be trying to reach out, Inukai said.

Their are organizations, such as L’Arche, that have been integrating marginalized populations for years now. It’s about time we started to do this with the elderly and single/new mothers as well. I can’t think of any groups that would benefit more from each others’ company.

If you are a single/new mother in the Halifax area and would like to get involved, please contact me. I’d like to pair up with a local senior community for regular “coffee breaks.”

Socioeconomic factors, not your “wantedness”, will play a big factor in how successful you are in life. This article from The Telegraph shows that the educational success of a child has very little to do with being planned or unplanned, and everything to do with being rich or poor.

A study has found that pupils whose parents did not intend to have a baby lagged five months behind planned babies at age five, when their vocabulary was tested, and a further three to four months behind those born after IVF.

However experts say the findings are just down to the developmental gap between rich and poor in Britain. The differences in scores “almost entirely disappear” when family background is taken into account, since children born following assisted reproduction tend to have older, better educated and richer parents. […]

Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, said: “This study shows how important it is to take social factors into account when looking at child outcomes. Children from unplanned pregnancies have lower scores on cognitive tests than those from planned pregnancies, but they are also much more likely to come from single parent, low income households. Once this is taken into account, there is no impact of an unplanned pregnancy on children’s development.”

preventative – remedy that prevents or slows the course of an illness or disease; “the doctor recommended several preventatives”

Pregnancy, is not an illness. But the Obama administration has just classified what your body does naturally as something that needs prevention. More from The Associated Press,

WASHINGTON (AP) — A half-century after the advent of the pill, the Obama administration on Monday ushered in a change in women’s health care potentially as transformative: coverage of birth control as prevention, with no copays.

Services ranging from breast pumps for new mothers to counseling on domestic violence were also included in the broad expansion of women’s preventive care under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Since birth control is the most common drug prescribed to women, health plans should make sure it’s readily available, said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Not doing it would be like not covering flu shots,” she said.

Of course breast pumps and counseling are wonderful things, but comparing birth control with flu shots? When you get influenza, your body is a host for a virus. This is not what your body was made to do. When you get pregnant, your body hosts a baby. Something the female body has been doing since the beginning of humankind (our mammalian ancestors did it that way too).

I wrote the following for the March for Life this year, so I’ll say it again…

Does not reigning in and restricting the feminine functions of our bodies, namely the ability to become pregnant and carry a child, in order to succeed by some predetermined standard devalue the very thing that is “womanhood”?

Can we imagine, if in any other civil rights movement, that the group fighting for those rights would be told that in order to achieve the freedoms they desire, they must first put in check the very things that make them different from the ruling majority?

It’s unthinkable, and yet this is what women across the globe are being led to believe and reiterate day after day.

Abortion proponents and providers keep reiterating their claim that more legislation and inspections of facilities will be putting up road blocks and that in the end it’s the women who want abortions that will suffer. But the gruesome story of Dr. Kermit Gosnell exposes just what happens when facilities go unchecked, and it’s not simply a shorter wait time.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania abortion provider, was charged with murder and infanticide. Gosnell is accused of breaking state laws by performing late-term abortions, killing children born alive as the result of botched abortions and using unsterilized medical instruments. At least one patient died while under Dr. Gosnell’s care and many others have been infected with venereal diseases.

For 17 years, these practices went undiscovered because Gov. Ridge felt that forcing abortion clinics to undergo a yearly health inspection would be “putting up a barrier to women.”

On June 20 of this year, Planned Parenthood of Kansas filed a lawsuit against the state of Kansas in order to prevent the implementation of new laws passed by Gov. Sam Brownback aimed at expanding health requirements and inspections of abortion providers. Planned Parenthood is, thus far, the only one of three abortion providers in Kansas to receive a license to continue performing abortions. The license was given after the clinic, at the last minute, purchased a “neo-natal crash unit” required under the new provisions. Planned Parenthood has since dropped its lawsuit but is still fighting the new regulations.

Planned Parenthood sells itself as “America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.” Trusted? Planned Parenthood is fighting health regulations aimed at ensuring women’s health and safety. These regulations are modeled after similar ones in South Carolina, and specific provisions in the law have been taken from the “industry standards” set by the National Abortion Federation. Yet Planned Parenthood is seeking and claiming to have the “trust” of women?

After the tragic discovery of the practices of Dr. Gosnell in Pennsylvania, one would expect that an organization that claims to be “pro-women” would be embracing measures aimed at keeping them safe. Sadly, this is not the first time Planned Parenthood has fought against common-sense laws to protect women, despite its supposed commitment to “protect women’s rights and health.”