I find this story from the UK rather ironic, especially given its timing. Sarah Louise Catt of Sherburn-in-Elmet, North Yorkshire, used abortifacient drugs that she had obtained via the Internet to kill her unborn child. What is particularly interesting about this case is that her unborn child was 39 weeks gestation. Yes, you read that correctly.  Babies are born at 40 weeks gestation.

In a court case, she said that she had tried to have a legal abortion but discovered that she was over the legal gestational age limit of 24 weeks.

Here is what the judge said:

““What you did was end the life of a child that was capable of being born alive by inducing birth or miscarriage. What you have done is rob an apparently healthy child, vulnerable and defenseless, of the life which he was about to commence.”

Isn’t it incredible that in Canada, no such judgement could be rendered, because even a child at 40 weeks is not considered a human being.

He added that: ““The child in the womb was so near to birth, in my judgment all right-thinking people would think this offense more serious than unintentional manslaughter,” noting that she could have been charged with murder if she had only waited a few more days until after the baby was born.

Her sentence: 8 years in prison.

Despite the utterly tragic events that occurred recently in Colorado, the heroism of many of the victims gives one a sense that faith in humanity is still warranted.  It is especially heartwarming to see young men stepping up to the plate and fulfilling their roles as protectors, even though it cost them their lives.  This article in the National Post describes how, during the shooting, four men instinctively jumped on top of their girlfriends, taking fatal bullets to protect the lives of the women they loved – a beautiful testimony to the loving complementarity that has always existed between the sexes.

Here’s a nice cheery way to make an important point: the point being that we ought not to be spending BILLIONS on artificial contraception for women in developing nations, but rather teaching them how to understand their own reproductive cycles so that they can achieve or delay pregnancy NATURALLY.  Learning from Mother Nature – what a concept.

I take this from an earlier post I wrote on a similar subject.  Does Melinda Gates know that the Report from the 2009 Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS reported that 50% of all newly acquired HIV infections across the globe are occurring in women of reproductive age? Why? Because powerful steriod-based drugs (read DepoProvera – Melinda’s preferred method of contraception not for herself, but for poor women) alter their immunity and cervical flora, making them more susceptible to infection.  Once they have contracted HIV, these contraceptives have a debilitating effect, in that they lead to a deadly progression of the disease.

But back to this clever, perky little video – I especially like the line, “You’re targeting a lot of Islamic and Catholic countries with your plan, and the reality is a lot of women don’t want to choose between their religion and their method of family planning.”  Isn’t that so.

“Wow.”  One reads an article like this and really, all that comes to mind is, “wow.”  She’s got guts.

Today I write this past so that I may finally own up to what it is I have done and make the necessary reparations for my crimes so that others will know just how fundamentally soul-destroying abortion is.

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Andrea adds: That it took her 15 years to struggle through this is an indication of how traumatic abortion is. Also, beyond the emotional/spiritual struggle, this struck me:

These abortions directly caused a medical condition known asincompetent cervix which resulted in the premature birth of another son who died after a week long struggle in the NICU in 2001.

How can this be? Because abortion is such a simple, easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, run-of-the-mill procedure. It does not cause any side effects! for the sheer ease of it all. (Parroting the words of your average abortion advocate.)

Echoing Barbara Kay’s sentiments in Full Comment a few days ago, I wanted to chime in with my strong disapproval of the Tell-all Sex Exhibition opening on May 17th at the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa.  An e-mail is going around describing the various exhibits which is far too graphic and offensive to even mention on this blog, aimed at adults.  The Tell-all Sex Exhibition, which will be at the Museum until January, is aimed at children as young as 12.

Do we really need to have our children exposed to more sexually explicit material?  I was building forts and playing ‘capture the flag’ in the back yard when I was 12, not thinking about my ‘sexual orientation,’ creating new names for genitalia or having an abortion if I got pregnant from doing all the sexually explicit things that the exhibition promotes! Not surprisingly, the exhibition’s main objective is to push for acceptance of homosexuality and abortion.  Let children be children and stop the propagandizing!  Really.

As Barbara Kay puts it, “Please, Mr. Sophisticated Curator, don’t tell us this is “educational.” Where I come from, that’s soft porn.”

Addendum: I just had to include this quote from the formidable Michael Coren in his brilliantly written article, “Ottawa’s award-winning way of killing off childhood“:

The exhibition itself is a mixture of the clinical and the prurient. Juxtaposed with scientific depictions of eggs and sperm and explanations of procreation are tales of why abortion is so important and, hard to believe really, videos of boys and girls masturbating. Whatever we think of self-abuse, and I regard it as one of those mortal sin things, kids have been able to get the hang of it for quite a long time now. They don’t need instructional videos. But I’m sure that a few adults would like to take a look — it’s what is known as child pornography, and the police spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to stop it and incarcerate the perpetrators.

What the exhibition is actually about, of course, is normalization. There are no barriers, no right and wrong, no absolutes, and no “normal” in the brave new post-Kinsey world of sex studies and sexual freedom.

I think this is one of those occasions where we really should be contacting people like the Heritage Minister, the Public Affairs Director of the Museum and obviously the Curator.  I registered my disapproval last night.

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Andrea adds: My take on the museum exhibit in the Ottawa Citizen. We went on a field trip yesterday to check it out.

This is a very newsworthy subject, that I suspect few journalists will pick up on (with some exceptions). Never-the-less, it deserves all the attention in the world.

Blogger Patricia Maloney filed a freedom of information request about abortion statistics in the Province of Ontario and received the following response:

Please be advised that effective January 1, 2012, section 65 of the Act (Application of the Act) was amended to exclude records relating to the provision of abortion services. The effect of section 65 (5.7) of the Act is that individuals no longer have a right to make access requests under Part II of FIPPA to an institution for records in the custody or under the control of that institution relating to the provision of abortion services.

“Individuals no longer have a RIGHT to make access requests … relating to the provision of abortion services.”

This is a government agency talking about a tax funded (to the tune of $70 million a year) procedure and ‘they’ (apparently “Mr. Don Young, Assistant Deputy Minister, was responsible for this decision...”) refuse to release any information to the public.  As Patricia points out in her blog post, where was the public discussion about this decision?  There was no debate at Queen’s Park, no committee struck to assess how tax dollars are going to be tracked for a procedure that will now be done in total secrecy.

This hiding of facts is truly “Orwellian.”  I kind of liked this definition from Wikipedia:

“Orwellian” describes the situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free society. It connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth, and manipulation of the past… practiced by modern repressive governments.

Yup, sounds about right.

Kudos to Rebecca Richmond, a fine young woman heading up the National Campus Life Network.  Her response in a Toronto Star article really made National Post’s Chris Selley think. He writes:

[she] said something moderately interesting in explaining the movement’s supposed appeal to young people. “We grew up since the 1988 Morgentaler decision (when criminal laws regulating abortion were thrown out) and so I think that our generation is starting to question this,” she told the Star. “A quarter of our generation lost their lives to abortion.”

Indeed, Mr. Selley does his math and finds that she is “spot on.” According to Stats Canada, between 1991 and 2005,

1.6 million abortions [were] performed over that period. By my count, it’s fair to say that 23% of fetuses that came into being over that time were aborted.

“Is that a lot?” he asks.  Gee, 1.6 million of anything would be considered a lot – based on some definitions, I would consider it a verifiable genocide.

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Andrea adds: Funny. Selley makes fun of the pro-lifers quoted in that Toronto Star article. Meanwhile, last night when speaking at the National Campus Life Network dinner, I made a point which I’d like to reiterate here. It’s the mainstream media who came a calling, trying to identify “something new” in the pro-life movement. They called, they wrote the story. The people the reporter talked to simply answered the questions. There’s not a pro-lifer across the country who thinks these tactics are “new.” Media in this case are arriving at this movement having never examined it before. They are ill-informed. That’s partly the pro-life movement’s fault. In no small part it’s their own blinders. In any case, before making smart-ass comments, if I were media these days trying to write a story about abortion, I’d start by doing some solid research. Good old fashioned reading. From the time before Twitter, say. How about it, journalists?

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Andrea adds one more thing: All of the students I met at the dinner last night were incredibly articulate. Puts me to shame, actually. I feel someone else should have given the keynote address. Rebecca, in particular, did a great job. It was a lovely event.

Now THIS is a novel idea.  Melinda Gates has revealed in an exclusive interview with Newsweek that

she has decided to make family planning her signature issue … “My goal is to get this back on the global agenda,” she says.

I didn’t realize that it had gone off the “agenda.”  In fact, the Gates Foundation and the UN Population Fund have been pouring billions into contraception for decades.  And women around the world get to pump liquid contraceptives into their veins because of it.  (The preferred method in poorer nations is Depo Provera. Never mind the health consequences and the fact that we would not offer such forms of population control en mass to wealthy women in the developed world.)

Oh, and all of this comes from her “Catholic Faith.”

Perhaps more importantly, there’s her Catholic faith, which has always informed her work…. she went through a lot of soul-searching before she was ready to champion the issue publicly. “I had to wrestle with which pieces of religion do I use and believe in my life, what would I counsel my daughters to do,” she says. Defying church teachings was difficult, she adds, but also came to seem morally necessary.

I suppose being a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ must be hard.

I find this whole issue incredibly sad and misguided.  Instead of teaching women how to respect their natural fertility cycles (something that Mother Teresa did in the streets of Calcutta with remarkable success), or even focusing on providing these women with hospitals where they can receive pre- and post-natal care, she is towing the old population control line.

Self sacrifice.  Nature has imbedded a self-sacrifice mechanism into the cellular level.  Damaged embryonic stem cells will cease to threaten the growing embryo by self-destructing. Not really a lesson that you would want to take too literally, but just the general notion that nature works for the good of the growing embryo.  Perhaps it’s a worthy “take home” lesson for some of our politicians, and even our familiar feminists.

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a more developed line of reasoning within pro-abortion rhetoric?  I have come up against it a few times now and even seen it slightly baffle a TV talk show host.

It goes something like this:  women’s rights cannot be arbitrarily removed or even “balanced” with fetal rights. It is impossible for two beings in the same body to exercise competing rights and imposing a duty of care on a pregnant woman towards her fetus would result in extensive and unacceptable intrusions into her bodily integrity, privacy, and autonomy.  (paraphrasing Joyce Arthur from her Huffington Post debate.)

Obviously, this has been articulated many times before, in various ways and by various people including Supreme Court Justices. There is always a conflict of rights in these important social issues (slavery, for example).

But the crux of the abortion issue is this:  the woman stands to lose some of her rights to bodily integrity, privacy and autonomy to a lesser or greater extent during her pregnancy.  This loss is temporary.  However, the child stands to lose his or her ENTIRE LIFE.   It’s an absolute, complete, unmitigated loss of existence, including all of the rights that are predicated upon life, including bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy etc.

The argument needs to be made, often, that women do not have an absolute right over the lives of their children (as recognized in law by almost all of the countries in the Western World except Canada). A woman’s temporary claim of her right to autonomy cannot trump the absolute claim of life itself of the unborn child.

In fact, society can and should make demands upon the woman to bear her temporary loss for the sake of the very life of the child. Life is worth so much that we have no qualms about asking people to risk their lives daily for its protection from such things as the ravages of war, injustice, and crime.

Life is a precious. Period.