Apparently, you can say the most appalling things, so long as you are pro-choice. A few days ago, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had this to say:

Reproductive choice has to be straightened out… Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.

And those ‘excuse-me-what-did-she-just-say?’ words only help underscore the recent release of the documentary film Mafaa 21.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLnNi_qb7nY]

As a sidebar, if you’re a minority woman in the US, you’re five times more likely than a white woman to terminate your pregnancy. (In Canada, we simply prefer not to keep statistics.)

(Irrefutably off) pro-life activist commits violent crime against abortion doctor, and it’s in the news for over a week.

However, a man tries to bowl over a pro-lifer with his ’91 GMC and the only place you can read about it is in an online newsource so credible that it insists on calling Chicago “Chico.”

A man who allegedly used an SUV in an attempted to run over an anti-abortion protester Wednesday outside of the Planned Parenthood office, has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

Matthew R. Haver, 40, was arrested by Chico police for allegedly trying to hit James Cantfield, 69, of Chico.

That’s right, friends, Chico.

I’d love to be wrong but I’m guessing we won’t read about this one in the Times.

Update: Oh, Chico, California. *blushes*  Well that does add some credibility, then. Mind you, the readership just significantly plummeted. Chico’s population isn’t quite 90,000. Chicago’s just shy of 3 million. Now we really won’t read about it in the Times.

It’s astounding the number of women who consider abortion in favour of their romantic relationship.  A woman is often put in a position where she feels she must choose between her boyfriend or her baby.  Some men may even be heard uttering, “What?  You’re choosing this baby over me?”

This recent — and very relevant — study published by the peer-reviewed journal Public Health suggests:

When a woman gets an abortion, the couple is more than twice as likely to argue when discussing future children, and nearly three times as likely to experience domestic violence, compared with women who carry the pregnancy to term and raise the child.

So, dude, it turns out that, if she’s choosing the baby, she is choosing you, too.  Suck it up.  You’ll make a great dad.

I knew adopting a newborn in North America was not for the impatient.  But I had no idea:

The latest federal data show about 6,800 babies a year are relinquished at birth for adoption, a minuscule number out of nearly 3 million unwed pregnancies. Moreover, only white women place their babies for adoption. Since 1989, the number of black babies relinquished at birth has been statistically zero…

Why is “Juno”-style adoption — an unwed mother places her newborn with a unrelated couple — so rare?

Legal abortion is part of the answer. Some 50 million pregnancies have been erased since the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling…

Adoption, meanwhile, has become unthinkable.

Infant adoption is a “barbaric” practice, said one of many anti-adoption Web sites. “With abortion, grief has closure. With adoption, the grief intensifies over time,” is a common warning.

Closure?  According to Webster’s dictionary, closure is “an often comforting or satisfying sense of finality; something (as a satisfying ending) that provides such a sense.”  I’ve heard abortion described in many ways over the last few years, but words like ‘comforting’ and ‘satisfying’ never made the cut until now.

It is not my intention to deny the full range of emotions associated with adoption.  Rather, I’d like to shout through a bullhorn (preferably while standing on a soap box) that there is no closure involved in the act of abortion.  It is disturbing to think that there are anti-adoption organizations out there that preach:

Adoption…is “an industry” in which “young, unwed (and thus powerless) parents are persuaded, through force, coercion or outright lies, to transfer parental rights of their children to older, more affluent couples.”

You know, feminist abortion advocates swear to us up and down that abortion is empowering, and that the idea of coercion is ferociously exaggerated.  But when faced with the option of adoption, suddenly women are weak, powerless victims who’s babies are being ripped from their arms.

Am I alone in sensing the cock-eyed perspective here?

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Andrea adds: I have heard pro-life advocates express concern about coercion in adoption, actually. I think coercion certainly exists in abortion, so I don’t think it goes entirely absent in adoption. The pro-life advocate I knew wanted to advocate for girls who are pregnant to become mothers, I think. (I should add that she is not a “barefoot and pregnant” type of woman–you’ll have to take my word on that…) These are tricky questions. I would again default to the notion that we don’t kill to solve our problems, and therefore the anquish of adoption is a lesser burden than the anguish of taking your child’s life.

I’ve been thinking about political correctness lately. A lot. And in this context: When, as a civilization, we finally understand that abortion is a violation of human rights, what will we call unborn children?

You know what I mean. There are many things we don’t call people anymore. If you’ve watched The Wizard of Oz lately, you’ve likely had to shield your child’s eyes as the credits rolled. Do you know how they referred to those actors who played the Munchkins?

I think fetus will be the new F-word. I also think I have too much time on my hands.

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Rebecca adds: Claude Lantzmann’s Shoah, a very long documentary about the Holocaust that included many interviews with perpetrators (not all of whom knew they were being filmed) contains many fascinating and frightening insights. One of the smaller, but telling, details is that the workers in death camps referred to their victims as figuren – my professor translated that as “mannequins” or “dolls”. It conveys the physical shape of a person, but ascribes no value, soul, or life to it. For all but the most evil Nazis, this sort of reification of humans was necessary if they were to carry out their grim tasks.

Unborn children don’t even get the courtesy of an acknowledgment of their basic nature. They’re called “products of conception,” or “a cluster of cells,” the latter as apt a description of a tumour, or an unsightly mole, and by implication something to be disposed of as readily as a tumour or mole. I don’t think “fetus” is necessarily problematic – my doctor calls it a “patella” even though almost everyone thinks of it as a “kneecap” – but there’s no question the word is often used to achieve distance. How about even referring to them as “human fetuses”? A fetus is a developing life; we use the same word for all mammals in utero. I’d settle for that small step towards taking an honest look at what it is that is being destroyed in an abortion.

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Andrea adds: I have heard someone else use the terms “embryonic child”, “fetal child”, etc. which I like. It’s scientific, accurate and personable–allows us to consider that’s how we all began… we’re all people in different stages of life. We evolve, so to speak.