Women, especially mothers, may need a boost to re-enter the workforce. Read about it here. I do have to register an objection to one of the solutions and that would be more government involvement in childcare. As a woman who stayed home for a number of years, I am for choice where it matters. Women who decide to stay home to raise their children should be able to benefit from the same government support and fiscal policies as women who join the paid workforce. That being said, I agree that one of the keys to female employment is the availability of good, affordable childcare. I’m just not convinced that government is the key to good, affordable childcare. Let’s not forget that when the state decides what is good, it also decides what isn’t. Given our government’s stance on abortion, I’m not sure I want it involved in telling me what is good parenting.
Kids these days
My children Liesl and Kurt are in the same split 5/6 class in school. Liesl and Kurt are pseudonyms: since they sing a mean Sound of Music, I decided to dub my children with their singing part which is more or less age-appropriate and also reflects their birth order and personalities. Because they are my oldest children, Liesl and Kurt are the family’s guinea pigs. Age-appropriate parenting is not the only thing my husband and I experiment on Liesl and Kurt, we also discover new realms of peer interactions at every turn. Enter dating, crushes, flirtation and match-making… Did I mention this was a grade 5/6 class?
Since we shamelessly monitor our family email account, we already had an inkling of the underage equivalent of “Merlot and email don’t mix.” But I have to ask you what I asked Kurt and Liesl – who, I should mention, don’t have mates but associate with people who do – “What on earth are grade 5 kids doing with a boyfriend/girlfriend?” And this I mean both conceptually and practically.
What troubles me, above and beyond wondering how kids get such ideas, is the effect of these pint-sized soap operas on class dynamic. Liesl was up late yesterday evening worrying about recess. She told me: “Nobody plays anymore. Instead, they huddle in their little corners commiserating about their broken hearts and bad-mouthing whoever dumped them.” She concluded: “Playing tag is no fun with 2 players.” So there you have it: little cliques of broken-hearted 10-year-olds who can’t play tag if that other clique is also playing ‘cuz that would be disloyal. The drama has somehow percolated to the younger grades, meaning that Martha and Brigetta are also acquainted with such delicious morsels as whether or not Nick kissed Jen on the bus ride back from ski club. Supper time conversations at my place sound increasingly like a clip from Entertainment Tonight and I don’t mean this as a compliment.
With apologies to Brigitte for yanking the Crusty-Ol’Goat crown so abruptly, I am wondering if I am the only one who sees a problem? Let me be quite blunt here: physical and emotional attraction between these kids is not likely to decrease as they reach adolescence. And by adolescence, I mean the real, medical, adolescence, not the silly state of mind these kids think themselves in. When you start dating and hugging at 10, what do you do at 12 when you meet that “really-really-nice-guy-you-totally-crush-on”? And when you start kissing and fondling at 12, what do you do at 14 when you meet “the-real-love-of-your-life”? And when you start kissing and fondling at 14, what do you do at 16 when your hormones are raging for real and “the-most-adorable-guy” asks you on a date? You become a statistic. A teen sex, teen pregnancy, teen STD, teen abortion statistic. Parents, wake-up! This is not cute!
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Brigitte is: Quite horrified by these stories and does not mind sharing the goat crown.
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Rebecca goes off to reread Wendy Shalit, but first adds: I’m going to enter the bidding for the Crusty Old Goat crown this week, too! Seriously, I’ve seen all too many examples of this, and it makes me contemplate homeschooling and/or single sex schools.
But really, what do we expect when we wallow in today’s popular culture? When 5-year-olds watch prime time television (which they don’t in my house) and see the sexual behaviour that is now considered unworthy of comment, it’s so common, why is it surprising that they think that normal behaviour includes sexual innuendo, kissing, hand holding, and, especially for little girls, the kind of hip-wiggling walk and coquettish behaviour that was in the 19th century literally the province of prostitutes?
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Tanya wonders: Can I send my daughter to school in the 19th century? Do they do that?
Spring rant
It must be spring. Calls for nominations of women of influence for various awards seem to be blooming in all my ladies’ magazines. Calls for applications for various fellowships and other Gold Medals awarded to “outstanding graduating students” are raining down at McGill. I seem to stumble on “most influential woman under 30” and “young person of the year” awards everywhere. Maybe this is just a reflection of my own insecurities. Maybe this is one of the reasons women are delaying childbirth and having fewer children: Our society burns the fuel of external recognition and motherhood provides very little of that. At this point, I’m not quite sure which of the two needs fixing: my insecurities or the world. Likely both.
At the risk of being offered some cheese with my whine, seeing a beautiful, single, 30-year-old career woman receive an achievement award makes me in equal part depressed, envious and somewhat bitter. All the more if she fits in size four pants, but I digress. This is in no small part due to the fact that I am a married, 34-year-old mother of five who will never again fit into size four designer pants unless I get morbidly sick.
Newly minted with a Master’s degree, I am looking for a job with a resume that is, well, very similar to what it was when I graduated from high school in 1992. Odd jobs, volunteer work, you know what I mean? I resent the fact that I have to remind myself that the subtext of my threadbare resume is “five children.” I have to remind myself that getting a Master’s degree while caring for a household of seven is worth a Gold Medal even though I will never get one. I have to remind myself that my utter lack of professional experience and connections is the cost of committing the last 12 years of my life to carrying, delivering and raising five little persons. And finally, I have to remind myself that if I never get an achievement award but if my children grow into “competent, responsible, considerate, and generous men and women who are committed to live by principles of integrity” (to quote writer James Stenson ) , I will have been successful beyond measure.
But today, I resent having to remind myself. Because it should be obvious and it is not. I don’t think that putting professional aspirations on hold while children are very young is a bad thing. However, women should be able to reintegrate into the workplace post-bambino without feeling like 5, 10, 15 years of their lives have gone the way of the dodo. If we want women to go forth and reproduce, we have our work cut out convincing them that they will not just disappear under a pile of housework. That’s just one of the ways in which being pro-life starts by being pro-woman.
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Andrea adds some spring flowers to accompany the spring rant, a very fine rant, Véronique, and I do agree–it ought to be obvious that what you are doing is worthy of a gold medal. In the interim, before attitudes change, some flowers.
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Tanya adds: A woman has such a peculiar role to attempt to fill in today’s western society. Stay-at-home mothers are sacrificing their dreams and financial security for the sake of family. (Oh! what noble martyrs we are.) Career women sacrifice their families for their own personal goals. (Images of a briefcase wielding woman who missed her child’s soccer game come to mind?) For the most part we are either pitied or scorned by others (and sometimes ourselves). I suppose we should start by fixing our own insecurities if we want the world to view us any differently. (We can’t fix the world if we’re broken.) I’d say we need to reasonably adopt the mantra, “If mom is happy, then everyone’s happy.”
I object!
I received this link from a good friend who is, incidentally, a pro-life physician.
I am always puzzled by statements that uphold freedom of conscience while denying the ability to act upon it. What worries me is not that our freedoms and liberties would be limited, but the absence of discussion as to why this particular freedom (conscience) should be limited and how.
In the case of pro-life physicians, they think that abortion is wrong and this thought is expressed by their refusal to have anything to do with it. This is socially relevant because abortion is legal in Canada and women are free to request one.
Many pro-life physicians don’t only believe that abortion is wrong for them but wrong period. Morally wrong, yes. But also medically wrong and this is where the issue gets really sticky: Physicians are never forced to perform procedures that would go against their patient’s best medical interest. If I suffer from arthritis and want my arm amputated and my physician thinks it can be controlled with acetaminophen, she is under no obligation to cut my arm off. If I want to treat my clinical depression with high doses of morphine, no physician has to give it to me. Yet, amputation and morphine are legal in Canada, and women are free to request them until the burly men in white come to escort them out of the building.
Now, what if a physician thought abortion was not in the best medical interest of a woman? The more I reflect on this question, the more the ACOG’s position starts looking like a pro-life doctor witch hunt. If you oppose abortion on medical grounds and are pro-choice, you are acting within the parameters of ethical medical practice. But if you oppose abortion on medical grounds and are pro-life, we will get your license. Troubling.
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Rebecca adds:
Quite right. Roy Eappen at torydrroy.blogspot.com frequently writes on abortion, freedom of conscience, and doctors and has discussed this in the past.
Look, the whole point of doctors is to evaluate what treatments are medically necessary or appropriate. One reason antibiotics aren’t sold OTC is that most laymen without access to a lab don’t know if they actually need them. If you walk into a doctor’s office with a cold, whether or not you want antibiotics, the doctor shouldn’t give them to you. And if birth control pills, which are ethically and medically much less problematic than abortion, are subject to a doctor’s prescription to ensure that they’re medically appropriate for the woman who wants them, how on earth can abortion not be?
Or, we can dispense with the fiction that abortion on demand has anything to do with medical necessity. Even if terminating a pregnancy had the same moral status as getting breast implants or a nose job, we would have no business forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for it. Since it is on a different moral plane, to all but the most die-hard Pete Singer types, it is increasingly barmy that we ask medical professionals and taxpayers to treat abortion as if it were as neutral and necessary as a tonsilectomy.
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Tanya is reminded: Dr. Chris Kempling has been on this bandwagon for several years. He’s quite adamant that the Canada Health Act is violated when abortion is covered by our tax dollars.
“The Canada Health Act says that to qualify for public funding, a health procedure must
1) be medically necessary,
2) be beneficial,
3) have benefits that outweigh the risks, and
4) be the result of informed consent.
Abortion, as it is currently practiced in Canada, meets none of the four requirements of the Canada Health Act. http://www.chp.ca/forum/Kempling/Abortion.htm
I rather tend to agree.
Physicians and conscientious objections
According to a recent document published by the U.K.’s General Medical Council, physicians will be required to post any ethical objections they may have toward morally charged medical interventions such as abortion, sex reassignment surgery, artificial procreation and certain cosmetic surgeries.
While I oppose any attempt to obligate physicians to refer for these procedures, I agree that objections should be advertised. It is an essential part of informed choice and a recognition of women’s ability to choose their care providers. A refusal to refer to an abortion provider or to prescribe the birth control pill should never come as a surprise to a patient, particularly if that patient is facing a personal crisis. There are no winners when personal values end up in court and a little choice in one’s caregiver spares imposing an arbitrator’s choice on whose values are more right than other’s.
In cases such as these, it is always helpful to turn the tables around and wonder what would happen if we were denied a medical procedure based on our physician’s religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Say, if my physician was opposed to blood transfusions or organ transplant. Like abortion, these procedures can be inadvisable for a variety of medical reasons. But what if my physician’s only basis for refusal was a religious position I didn’t share? Wouldn’t I want to know? Say, before I was exsanguinating?
Let me be clear. As Andrea wrote so eloquently, I don’t think that opposing abortion is exclusively a religious view. But if a physician is to oppose abortion systematically for religious reasons her patients should be aware of it.
Going ape
You can accuse me of seeing abortion parallels everywhere. In all seriousness, I get Goodall’s point. However, I couldn’t help but think “Frivolous subhumans… where have I heard that before?” When abortion defenders tag human fetuses with labels of similar substance, it doesn’t cause righteous indignation. Or does it?
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Andrea adds: At first I wasn’t really sure what the issue here was. Were my pro-life spidey senses failing me? But now I see–we pull ads where they might offend chimps. But no such indignation for the unborn.
In any event, let me use this opportunity to post a very funny ad. It might be demeaning to chimps–or people–I’m not sure–but it’s been a long winter and we all need a good laugh.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRrMu7B1L2I&feature=related]
When choice doesn’t involve choosing
I have issues with “a woman’s right to choose.” Particularly when the said “right to choose” becomes the only yardstick of morality, that is, the standard against which we measure whether things are right or wrong. As we wave “the right to choose” furiously nobody seems too concerned about what the choice is about. As a result, we – that would be the royal “we” – become righteously indignant when our “right to choose” is threatened rather than when the options that substantiate that right are threatened.
Don’t understand what I am referring to? Go and read the Ottawa Citizen’s ongoing coverage of Catholic Archbishop Terrence Prendergast’s statement that pro-choice Catholic politicians should be denied communion in the Catholic Church. Today’s front page article present reactions from Catholic politicians although to what extent these politicians are “in communion with church’s teaching” is highly questionable. Regardless, reactions fall into two categories: those who recognize that the Archbishop is giving Catholic politicians a choice and those who think he is attacking choice, be it in their political careers or in women’s lives.
Members of Parliament who accuse the Archbishop of blackmail and bullying don’t realize that they do have choices. Plenty of them. They can support abortion laws – or lack thereof – on the Hill. They can also walk from their offices to the nearest abortion clinic if they want to. They can get four selective abortions if they need to. In fact, they have more choices than pro-life activists in just about any setting . To that long list of choices, Archbishop Pendergast has added one more: they can receive Catholic communion or not. What these self-proclaimed pro-choice Catholics want is not so much choice as choice without strings attached. But that can hardly be called choice, can it?
Conscience in politics
Reactions from readers and columnists to Ottawa’s Archbishop’s stance on pro-abortion politicians are causing me to pause and reflect on the place of moral principles in a politician’s public life.
Most of all, I am trying to find a way out of saying “I want politicians to follow their conscience when in accordance with mine but not otherwise.” Because let’s be honest with ourselves here: as much as I want pro-life politicians to “vote their conscience,” I would as soon withhold that opportunity to Francine Lalonde and her ilk.
I have to come to terms, somehow, with the inescapable fact that Members of Parliament are voted into office to represent their constituents, not themselves. This is the cornerstone of our system of democratic representation and the only way we can argue, with a straight face, that we all have a hand in the legislative process. Accordingly, there are two ways in which my MP can adequately represent my conscience on Parliament Hill. The first one is for me to elect a candidate whose moral compass more or less matches mine. Failing that, it is also my MP’s duty to make an honest effort at finding out where his or her constituents’ moral views lie. And I am not talking about sending a few emails to trusted supporters.
Either way, the ability to represent one’s constituents in a morally-charged vote demands that moral issues be brought to the forefront of electoral campaigning. In these days of religious, cultural and social pluralism, I want my moral interests represented as well as my political and economic ones.
Where does that leave Catholic politicians who want to be in communion with their church’s teachings while sitting in Parliament? They should be elected as such.
Knowing exactly who and what we are voting for? There’s an idea.
Abstinence is not a dirty word
Heard a news item on the CBC about rising rates of sexually transmitted infections among young teens. (You can read about it, here.) And what would be the cause of this rise? They don’t get tested.
I would have laughed if it wasn’t so sad. How about young teens are having sex? On goes the CBC reporter: “While abstinence will prevent 100% of sexually transmitted infections…” — I never thought I would live to hear the CBC talk about teen sex and abstinence in the same segment — “… it isn’t for everybody.”
Abstinence may not be for everybody but if I had to take a wild guess at a likely population for abstinence education, 13-year-olds would be my second choice… right after 12-year-olds.
Are you high end?
Anyone still questioning whether prostitution is demeaning to women or just another way to pay the bills ought to reflect on Washington’s latest sex scandal. How many times have you heard/read “high end prostitutes” in today’s news? Like high end condos, high end neighborhoods, now we can also buy high end women. Don’t you feel valued?
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