If you want to know if you’ll be treated any differently once you’re pregnant, the short answer is yes. I imagine this goes for all women, but it is especially true for the young and unmarried ladies out there. Things will be different, but a new autobiographical book entitled The Pregnancy Project concludes that the baby bump doesn’t push a successful life out of reach.

Gaby Rodriguez, of Toppenish, Wash., got headlines last April when she announced at a high school assembly that she had worn a faux baby bump for months to explore stereotypes about teen pregnancy. […]

“Being a Hispanic girl from a family full of teen pregnancies meant that my odds of also becoming a teen mom were way higher than average,” she wrote. “If I gave people what they predicted, how would they react?”

Rodriguez believes the biggest message from her experience is: Things will be OK.

“It’s not the end of the road for them,” she said. “It’s going to be harder, but it’s not the end of the road.”

I’ve been asked difficult questions while speaking to groups, difficult in that the answers seem complex and don’t always readily pop into my mind. These get easier to answer with experience, but I can tell you that the most difficult questions to field often come from my fellow women who, like me, love and want to support womankind as best we can.

I’m talking about feminists.

I don’t mind the “f” word, in fact, I use it regularly in lots of positive ways. I’ll always understand some of the frustrations of being a woman (limited though it may be to my western experience), the desire to overcome obstacles, and the hope that my own daughters will have positive non-violent options in their lives. I get feminism, even if it doesn’t always get me.

I also get that conversations with women who feel abortion is “necessary” are often the most emotionally charged. Why? Because women mean so much to us. To keep your reason, it helps to think ahead about the kinds of questions a woman might ask and to lend their input Feminists for Life of America have prepared a Q&A of “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions“.  They’re worth looking at. I like this one in particular:

Don’t you respect women enough to allow them to make a choice?

Most women do not have abortions as a matter of “choice,” but because they feel they have no resources to support a different choice. A coerced decision is not a free choice—it’s a last resort.

We support nonviolent choices—single motherhood, fatherhood, grandparenthood, marriage and various adoption options—along with practical resources and support.

A society that promotes abortion as a “necessity” or “necessary evil” underestimates women and the violence of abortion and disregards what women really want.

…to sex selective abortions delivered by Australian/Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville.

So why is there this huge fuss about sex selection abortion? If one can have an abortion for any reason or none, why not because a baby of the opposite sex is strongly preferred?

The reason is, as sex selection abortion most clearly demonstrates, that abortion is not just a private matter. The issue involves shared societal values, cultural norms and clashes of cultural values and shows that the cumulative impact of abortion has societal consequences.

Just in case you needed another reason to forego breast implants, serious health risks are being reported for PIP implants.

All women with faulty breast implants should have them removed given the ‘uncertainty and lack of knowledge’ about the extent of the problems, a leading surgeon warned today.

Tim Goodacre, a member of the Government-commissioned panel investigating the scandal, said the latest estimate of rupture rates was “very much higher” than he would consider acceptable.

About 50,000 British women are thought to have received the silicone implants made by Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) filled with gel meant for mattresses.

While sex selection isn’t the only bad reason to have an abortion, it’s one that many people have an opinion on. What the issue of sex selective abortion does is create a space to discuss abortion in the social and political realm that might not have existed otherwise. For a lot of people, sex selection is their line in the sand.

This article refers to sex selection as an “abuse” of rights. In my opinion, that’s a good place to begin discussions about what is currently an unrestrained use of legality (ie. abortion anytime, anyplace, for any reason).

While it is a woman’s right in Canada to continue only wanted pregnancies, exercising rights and abusing them are two very different things. Making an inherently sexist decision based on the fact that it’s your right as a woman is definitely an abuse of that freedom.

Compared to China and India, where millions of female fetuses are aborted, and many girls who are born are told they are unwanted, the problem may seem small—but that doesn’t make it less important.

While I disagree that immigration is responsible for Canada’s abortion rate, and while any abortion because a child is “unwanted” is an abuse of rights, articles like this give me hope that the nation is beginning to publicly question what’s been happening behind closed hospital doors. The number of comments these articles get is also an indicator that people want to discuss the current legislation.

It’s hard to think that women and children would be military targets, but for militias and rebel groups operating in the DRC, that’s exactly what they are.

The killings of the civilians took place on Monday and Tuesday in remote villages in the territory of Shabunda, in South Kivu Province, an area still troubled by armed groups more than eight years after the end of a war there. An army spokesman said the 45 victims were mainly women and children, including one pregnant woman, and a leader of a village was decapitated.

There’s a petition to President Obama you can sign here to send an envoy to the region. If you know of something similar in Canada, please let us know.

In 2009 the NY Times reported,

Christine Schuler-DeSchryver, a well-known anti-rape activist, vented about all the empty promises from the stream of high-ranking visitors who have recently come to eastern Congo, “one more important than the next.”

“In the end, all we got was a pile of business cards,” she said.

The Congolese women have been waiting too long for action.

This week a couple in Alberta welcomed into the world their second New Year’s baby in a row, their fourth child in total. The annual New Year’s baby story is usually a feel-good tale reflecting on the limitless possibility in the coming days, but in true Canadian journalistic fashion, this tale has been twisted into a warning for prospective parents and fertile citizens alike. These parents’ lives have been painted as living nightmares of drudgery that can only be fixed in the form of permanent birth control.

From the Toronto Sun,

CALGARY – Look at the pile of laundry, mounds of dirty diapers and a sleep schedule where actual sleep is only a rumour — then tell Bobbi Jo Ketcheson just how lucky she is. […]

Ketcheson says she plans to get herself and her husband a gift too, in the form of more certain birth control. […]

Give the sheer volume of work raising and caring for four babies, finding the time for number five will be almost impossible.

And this from CBC,

Lightning shouldn’t strike in the same place twice, the same person shouldn’t win two lotteries and people really shouldn’t have back-to-back New Year’s babies. […]

Ketcheson said all four of her pregnancies came in spite of some form of birth control, and noted she was only hours away from signing a consent form to have her tubes tied when she found out she was pregnant with Grace.

Happily, this CTV article with video properly refers to baby Grace as a “bundle of joy” and closes,

…the family is enjoying their latest New Year’s baby, clipping out the articles about their amazing story from local newspapers and pasting them into what will be a very interesting baby book for little Grace Olivia Ketcheson.

Having back to back babies is difficult. I often refer to my first year with our newborn and 1 year old as “the toughest year of my life,” but it’s easier if you have the rest of the world in your corner telling you to stay positive.

Here’s an interesting article about body modifications and whether or not they should be made/kept legal. The arguments in favor of keeping them legal are along the lines of…

“It’s here to stay regardless of whether the medical community wants it to be here,” he said. “Now it’s a case of how do we make it safe, because kids are dumb and they’re going to do it themselves if they don’t have a professional they can go to.”

I’m not against body modifications, people who want them can get them, but is this heading in the direction of funding professionals for every “dumb” thing kids do?

______________________

Andrea adds: I am against body modifications:

Public health authorities across Canada are struggling to address the growing popularity of body modifications such as splitting one’s tongue like a snake’s and surgically altering ears to make them elf-like and pointy, fearing the spread of infection in an unregulated industry.

I’m not “against them” the same way I’m against abortion, to be sure. I would not, for example, start up a web site to protest them, but if you asked me, I’d say I think it’s wrong to mess around surgically with your body for kicks. The sad truth for the extreme Lord of the Rings fan is that humans don’t have pointy ears… And elves aren’t real… The Shire is fictitious… I could go on…

_______________________

Jennifer adds: You’re too funny!

I also wouldn’t advocate for body modifications. I think of them in the same terms as breast implants and similar forms of plastic surgery. People probably do it for various reasons, self-esteem, attention, etc, but for me the problem is in understanding the self as something that needs to be represented by your physical appearance. What a person who gets a “body mod” doesn’t see is that it stems from the same desire for someone else to get breast implants, it’s all about the perception other people have of you. It’s not rebellious, it’s an enslavement to whatever group you’re trying to appeal to. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” -Virginia Woolf

…are contagious.

The sun-drenched common room at the south end of Columbia Garden Village retirement home in Invermere, B.C., is quiet most days. The shuffle of slippers on linoleum, the clink of a coffee mug in the sink, or the click of knitting needles are often the only sounds.

But every Tuesday and Friday, 18 kindergartners from Eileen Madson Primary School arrive in a yellow school bus and take over, turning the home’s common room into a classroom, and the home’s residents into active participants. The kindergartners go about their lessons, crafts and play time surrounded by the seniors who live there. Some elders watch from the sidelines, others roll up their sleeves and build block towers or indulge in a reading of a Scooby-Doo storybook.

If you’re in the Halifax area, the next PAIR meet-up is January 21st.

Today’s story from Maryland,

ELKTON, Md. (AP) — Authorities say two doctors accused of performing late-term abortions in Maryland have been arrested and charged with murder.

At least one case involved a woman who was critically injured during the procedure.