Walking through the pregnancy test and everything baby aisle, I looked up and saw these words. It made me smile, and I hope it does the same for you.

"Choose Me"

Nigeria is making significant progress in reducing their maternal death rate, and not surprisingly, it’s a back-to-basics approach that is making the difference.

Nigeria had the second highest burden of maternal mortality and was in the top five countries reporting a high number of child deaths.

“Ondo State reduced under-five mortality by 25 per cent and maternal mortality by 15 per cent in 2010, it stands to reason that if by 2010, it was 15 per cent, by 2015 it will reach 75 per cent.” […]

“We realised that only 16 per cent of the women who come for ante-natal return for delivery, meaning that 84 per cent of these women are giving birth elsewhere.”

Adeyanju said there was no way to ascertain the level of skills of the people that attended to such women or the safety of the equipment used.

He said that the first initiative of the programme was to keep track of the women by creating a register for pregnant women and assigning them to individual community health workers.

The commissioner said that the women were given prepaid mobile phones, with access to tricycle motorbikes, to help them to access their health care providers.

“The women were also directed to the nearest health care provider so that they would know the shortest distance to go when they need help.” […]

“…we are now looking at every pregnant Nigerian woman as flesh and blood and not statistics.”

Adeyanju called for aggressive sensitisation campaign on maternal issues and a clamp-down on hospital facilities that fall short of standards.

“The Ondo State’s mantra is that pregnancy will no longer be a death sentence and we won’t stop there.

“Looking beyond pregnancy, we realised that poverty also leads to the death of those who make it out of the hospital and that too should be addressed.”

Join us in Halifax on April 14 for a day-long conference hosted by Campaign Life Coalition (registration required).

A perfect storm is brewing in Canada right now to reopen the long-silenced debate on abortion and so now is the time to step up our efforts to fight for the unborn in the culture and the public square.

This conference is dedicated to inspiring, equipping, and mobilizing Nova Scotia’s pro-life supporters to foster a deeply engaged andeffective movement for life in this province.

com·pla·cen·cy: self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies. (Thanks, Merriam-Webster)

It means that you naively feel good about something but that maybe with a little more awareness you might not feel so good about it. I can think of quite a few abortion related uses for that word. How about not knowing what abortion really does (the unborn are just a “bunch of cells”)? Or how about not knowing Canada’s unrestricted law (or lack thereof)? I would say that there is a dangerous sense of complacency surrounding abortion and that abortion rights activists might like to keep it that way. What I wouldn’t say is this,

Pro-choice activist Rolanda Ryan said the head count might be misleading, as there is what she called “complacency” among many Canadians about existing laws that make abortion legal.

“I think we just need to counter the anti-choice protest, and let everybody know there is a lot of people who support women’s rights,” she told CBC News.

Amy Ryan, who described herself as a Catholic, said she felt compelled to stand with the pro-choice side.

“I fast for Good Friday,” she said. “He died so that we could have a choice …I respect their right to protest, but it’s Good Friday, and [they are] ruining my day.”

But of course there can’t be complacency about existing laws if so many Canadians still aren’t aware of them. It’s the reason we protest in broad daylight on busy streets, to spread the word. Yet once again, a peaceful abortion protest with over 100 participants is forced into the background for an article focusing on the minuscule but more boisterous group of pro-choice demonstrators.

Demonstrators, I might add, who are as wrong about complacency as they are about The Passion. I’d rant heartily about why He didn’t die “so that we could have a choice”, but I don’t want to let one silly protester ruin this incredibly important day in the Christian calendar.

Well over 100 people quietly marched outside the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's on Friday morning. (CBC )

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Andrea adds: Reading “He died so we can have a choice” actually made me grimace. However, I won’t let it ruin my day, since He died for my flaws, mistakes, sins–and hers too. And that’s good news.

I think all parents know that having kids has some economic impact on your life, but does this mean that we really need to think hard about the budget when we’re talking about our children? Of course we want our kids to one day go to college, eat healthy organic foods, and go to nice schools, but what does all this talk about how much a child “costs” ultimately do to how we perceive not only our offspring but every other human being in our lives?

I’m asking these questions because of this article today in the New York Times entitled “Mothers of Children With Autism Earn Less”. Well, duh, but how does this information effect our lives?

Mothers of children with an autism spectrum disorder are less likely to be employed than mothers of children with no health limitations. They work seven hours less per week, on average, and they earn less: 35 percent less than mothers of children with another health limitation, and 56 percent less than the mothers of children with no health limitations.

Figuring out the exact amount a child may or may not financially cost a family seems to be a morally responsible act on the surface, but putting these figures into practice, letting them effect our decisions, doesn’t reek of the kind of unconditional love I’d like to aspire to as a parent. Either you believe that your bundle of joy, not to mention the elderly and the sick and the generally unemployable, have a value and a dignity irrespective of how much they tap your paycheck, or you value something else entirely.

Interested in hearing a discussion about Rick Santorum, abortion, contraception and evangelicals? You can listen to my two-cents on Stephanie Domet’s Mainstreet show today on CBC Radio around 4:40PM (Atlantic).

This week the UN is holding the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW56), a parallel event is also taking place to respond with positive options to the needs of rural women. The event takes place 6 March 2012 at 6:15pm at the Boss Room, 8th Floor at the CCUN building and is being organized by the Institute for Family Policy (IPF).

I suppose in a country where there are no legal limitations to abortion, the abortion advocate must turn to other things. What can you ask for in a world where you’ve gotten all you want? More of the same, in the form of access, access, access. For Canada’s “abortion rights” community to continue being active in the political realm, they have to keep asking for things, “progressing”. But what more could you possibly want in Canada?

This is where we begin the argument for abortion access in teeny tiny Anne of Green Gables flaunting PEI, because if you’re an abortion rights advocate in Canada, you’re still running down the dream of “Wherever and whenever a women wants an abortion, she shall easily have one.” Yes, that’s the goal. That if a woman anywhere in this country wants an abortion, we ought give it to her there and then. No cost, no questions, no recourse. So I have to ask myself, what would this “utopia” look like? What exactly are they fighting for?

Immediately the sci-fi novels of my youth start to populate my imagination with images of women walking in the woods, at church, paddling in a canoe, at a shopping mall, and all with immediate access to abortion. How? Maybe there’s a red button, and every woman can get one on her arm, and each time she presses it… presto, abortion. But would it stop there? No, if you’re an abortion rights advocate, you’d say, “Those button providers are too far away!” Women might have to travel some distance to get a button, then what? Maybe they’d all be given one at birth? Would it stop there?

The more we try to envision what an abortion advocates “perfect world” looks like, the more crazy it seems. When Canadians start telling them just how crazy this scenario is, then we’ll be moving in the right direction.

Are children aborted because of their sex? Yes. Are they aborted because of their sex in Western countries? Yes, and now there’s proof.

In some countries (Canada isn’t one of them) it’s illegal to abort a baby simply because the parents prefer one sex over the other, but even in those countries it appears gender specific abortions are still taking place. Tomorrow’s headline for The Daily Telegraph will read, “Baby girls aborted, no questions asked“.

The video footage for this article can now be found here.

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Andrea adds: Worth watching the video footage. Very uncomfortable.