…before there is an emergency.

On the surface, ‘Be Prepared’ seems like an infallible motto of expecting the unexpected. Championed by organizations like the Red Cross and Scouts, it’s a battle call of readiness. So when the National Health Service promoted access to the morning-after pill today under this banner, the save-the-day heroes of preparedness that marched in my mind came to a screeching halt.

Released just after the airing of the Marie Slopes advertisements on abortion services on UK television, the draft guidance feels like the second blow to an already crumbling attempt in Britain to support the alternatives to abortion.

It recommends that pharmacies should offer the morning-after pill in advance, particularly for those under 25.

They should be “advised that emergency contraception is more effective the sooner it is used” and that an intra-uterine device is more effective in an emergency but can also be used long term, NICE said.

The results of this ‘be prepared’ strategy are yet to be projected, but I’d bet my Girl Scout sash it’s going to be an increase in chemical abortions and unknown physical and emotional toll on the young women who regularly undergo them.

A large part of the recent initiative from pro-life groups founded by women is to make pregnancy, giving birth, and raising children as comfortable and lifestyle-friendly as possible. This initiative requires tackling the basics needs of new moms. The most noted need on that list?

You’ve guessed it… money.

Thanks to small armies of stay-at-home-moms and women in the blogosphere, there is now a hefty selection of resources ranging from how to make your own laundry detergent to tailored information on seeking a raise for mothers in the workforce.

Feminists For Life unveiled its newest, and largest ever, magazine entitled ‘Raising Kids on a Shoestring’, a pro-active publication designed to give pregnant and new parents more economic freedom by providing them with money-saving and earning tools, while The Globe and Mail is offering maternity clothes shopping advice in its investment blogs.

Though every blogger and columnist may not consider themselves pro-life, they’re all part of a community serving new and soon-to-be parents, and this, in effect, helps to alleviate some of the economic factors associated with abortion by spreading the wealth of money-saving information. As a parent myself, who lives a long distance from the typical support group of family and friends, I welcome this make-shift community of penny pinchers with open arms.

Help save a dollar, help save a life.

How exactly is this not promoting abortion?

The advert from Marie Stopes will be screened on Monday, offering what the organisation says will be “clear, non-judgmental information” on unplanned pregnancies and abortion services.

Marie Stopes said it took the decision to screen the commercial after a study found fewer than half of UK adults knew where to go for specialist advice about an unplanned pregnancy other than their GP.

Asking your family doctor seems like a good place to turn when you want personalized health advice. At least your GP will understand your medical history and family background. Something tells me a ‘specialist clinic’ will want less information.

…as one columnist sees it.

The rejection earlier this spring of a Liberal motion instructing the Prime Minister to include contraception (including abortion) in his G8 maternal health initiative did not offer an accurate reading of the mood of the current House on the issue of domestic access to abortion.

This just supports the statements Andrea made earlier about consensus and the status quo. The motion did represent the ‘mood’ of the country, it simply didn’t uphold the status quo the small but powerful pro-abortion extremists have been championing over the past 20 years. Canada’s statistics have continuously demonstrated a strong moral divide and a public lacking information when it comes to the actual legislation. This discussion is long overdue.

While gender barriers are being broken in Canada today, other countries are failing to meet the basic standards of maternal health care because of inequality and poverty.

“Inequality in decision-making, limited access to health services in rural areas and lack of information on healthy pregnancy are among the factors that contribute to maternal deaths,” said Masruchah, secretary-general of the National Commission on Violence against Women.

This story from Indonesia is further evidence that poverty and the gender divide, not lack of access to abortions, is a leading factor in the maternal mortality rates abroad.

“The maternity hospital suggested a C-section, but I didn’t have the money,” Juhri, a motorcycle taxi driver in Depok, a Jakarta suburb, said of the US$1,000-$1,500 procedure. “I took her to a midwife, but she could not handle the delivery.”

An emergency caesarian, if she’d had the power to demand/afford one, would have saved her life.

The first thing I ever saw in 3D was Ghostbusters. I was six years old at the time, and I couldn’t get over just how real Slimer looked as he flew past my face. It was all I talked about for days, weeks, years afterward. Slowly, my interest in 3D waned and once again found myself content with the world of 2D entertainment.

3D cinema has come a long way since then, Pixar films, Avatar… but it’s still appealing to the younger audience. So when I read this article from The Chronicle Herald about Playboy going 3D, I was a little confused. Maybe their marketing department got the demographics all wrong.

Hefner makes no secret of hoping to capitalize on the popularity of 3D movies such as Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon, even as he makes no secret of not quite getting what all the fuss is about.

“I’m not a huge enthusiast of 3D,” he said in a telephone interview. “I leave real life to go to the movies and 2D is fine with me.”

Because you’re a grown-up, and isn’t Playboy for grown-ups?

So this Mother’s Day, The Chronicle Herald celebrated a little early by wishing a happy ann’y to the pill. I thought I had missed the boat on posting, but the articles celebrating the pill and its ‘achievements’ just keep coming. They’re all in the same vein, promoting the pill, painting the naysayers as backwards, unsuccessful hillbillies. The Herald was particularly strong on that, finding references so obscure they couldn’t even name the individual.

One Montreal psychiatrist concluded in 1965 that the pill made women unfeminine and that some patients complained “they were no longer interested in their homes, in their children, even in their husbands.”

Or this gentleman, and his defunct magazine.

“What we need is not birth-control, but self-control,” Ralph Cowan told the now-defunct Weekend Magazine. “If things go on this way, in 20 years we’ll have so many old people there won’t be enough young people to pay for their welfare programs.”

They finally conclude…

“Some doctors felt it was an abortifactant, that it provoked abortion,” she [Christabelle Sethna] explains. “They were confused how it worked because it was so new.”

Confused, or well informed?

This morning, Forbes released this little number, praising the pill. This quote from the CEO of Dermalogica is my favorite.

The birth control pill gave me the opportunity to delay having children and start my own company.

Amazing folks! Step right up, take this pill and you too can be an entrepreneur!

Pharmaceutical companies have gone a long way to promote the pill, it’s big business. What I would like to see, is a little less blind faith in it.

Today’s Globe and Mail offered this piece on abortion in the continent.

Legalizing abortion would be a simple way to reduce the maternal death rate. In South Africa, the number of abortion-related deaths fell by 91 per cent after the procedure was legalized in 1997, according to a Lancet study.

Though, if you highlight the South African maternal mortality rates provided by the map in the article itself, you can see that in 2008 the rate was at its highest since 1980. Since the author York focuses so much on South Africa in the article, it might be important to note that in 2002 South Africa reported over 52,000 rapes.

The fact checks continue to turn up surprising results…

…virtually all of the estimated 5.6 million abortions performed annually in Africa are unsafe. Only about 100,000 are done by properly trained professionals in a safe environment, according to a report last year by the Guttmacher Institute, an advocacy organization for sexual and reproductive health.

Oh, an ‘advocacy organization for sexual and reproductive health’, well that makes me feel better. Here’s a line from their Wikipedia entry…

The Guttmacher Institute in 1968 was founded as the “Center for Family Planning Program Development”, a semi-autonomous division of The Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Perfect.

Promoting abortion to a victimized populace seems to ignore the socioeconomic reasons for their crisis pregnancies in the first place. It may even be a little grotesque, but that could just be me.