Women! Settle down sooner! As someone who received this advice often enough, it’s worth mentioning why it’s unhelpful. Women certainly are not exempt from making wise relationship and life decisions, but there’s no point in gearing this advice exclusively to women when men need it too–along with just about every aspect of our culture. In this article, published in National Review, I touch on why it’s harder than many think to simply settle down.
Rachel’s Vineyard is having a retreat.
Rachel’s Vineyard is a safe place to renew, rebuild and redeem hearts broken by abortion. Weekend retreats offer you a supportive, confidential and non-judgmental environment where women and men can express, release and reconcile painful post-abortive emotions to begin the process of restoration, renewal and healing. Rachel’s Vineyard can help you experience God’s love and compassion on a profound level. It creates a place where men and women can share, often for the first time, their deepest feelings about their abortion. You are allowed to dismantle troubling secrets in an environment of emotional and spiritual safety.
Date – The next retreat in the Ottawa area is May 4-6
Cost – The 230$ cost covers all meals and lodging from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Financial assistance is available.
To register or get more information, email us at rvr_ottawa [at] yahoo.ca or call 613-806-5522 (Lynda or Terry).
Life is a journey. Thankfully, we can move on and recover from past mistakes and keep on travelling down the road.
Interesting review of a book on surrogacy by feminist Dr. Renate Klein. From the book’s promo materials:
Central to the project of cross-border surrogacy is the ideology that legalised commercial surrogacy is a legitimate means to provide infertile couples and gay men with children who share all or part of their genes. Women, without whose bodies this project is not possible are reduced to incubators, to ovens, to suitcases. And the ‘product child’ is a tradable commodity who has never consented to being a ‘take away baby’: removed from their birth mother and given to strangers aka ‘intended parents’.”
An important read as Canada considers opening up our assisted human reproduction laws. I’d differ from Klein on some things; I would certainly categorize abortion as violence against women, which Klein does not, but I’d agree that all surrogacy (paid, unpaid) dehumanizes and commercializes human life. (The review also mentions some negative aspects of adoption, too, which I have to look into before commenting. Complex stuff.)
Does abortion support women’s rights or detract from them? Here, I put forward some questions and reasons why access to abortion detracts from women’s rights. Please forward to your friends who are pro-choice and feel free to tell me whether any of these arguments resonate.
Those of us who are against abortion understand that abortion attempts to equalize men and women in a manner that is both impossible and undesirable.
Does access to abortion make women the strongest they can be?
My friend Veronique Bergeron’s blog, Fearless Family Life has a new look, which caused me to re-read some of her old stuff. It’s pretty great, starting with her description of her family and how the family got started:
I was 21 and unmarried when I got pregnant with my oldest daughter, right out of my first year of Law School. The doctor who confirmed the pregnancy told me that mothers in my situation ended up poor, uneducated and single. My peers told me: “You’re not going to keep it right?” She was born with the sunrise on a Wednesday morning. I didn’t believe in God back then but when they placed her on my chest, I knew I had touched eternity. She was more than a birth control flub, more than an “it”, she was a person who had been meant from all times to be placed in my arms. A unique and timely mix of the right chromosomes, meeting at the right time, never made before, never to be made again. Clara opened my heart to a love that defied every other kind of love: a love devoid of self-interest, a love of the other for the other’s sake. She gave me a new heart and new eyes. And so I was made a mother and never looked back.
Looking forward, not back.
By this point, everyone has a take on Rachael Harder-gate. Lots of folks have written well on the topic, and let me just say, I’m grateful for the very reasonable pro-choice people out there, who get why walking out of a Parliament Hill committee like some high school clique is the wrong direction for democracy. This is my pro-life-and-proud-of-it take on the topic. Being pro-life doesn’t mean being weak. It doesn’t mean being subservient to men or anyone else. It doesn’t mean denying choices. It means one recognizes the beauty of women, including her reproductive capacity. Being pro-life says it is not right, just or equal to ask women to make a choice that involves getting rid of her children.
Read more here. And feel free to leave a comment at Huffington Post. I know countless pro-life women–countless!–and now is the time for our voices to be heard.
Being pro-life is, in reality, a feminist position. A woman-friendly world should be able to accommodate women’s fertility, with things like flex work time for mothers, different work rules for pregnant women and having much higher expectations of fathers. (Incidentally, Planned Parenthood used to understand this, running an ad campaign in the ’80s that showed a man with a pregnant belly. The caption read, “When your girlfriend gets pregnant, so do you.”)
In the feminist pro-life world, pregnancy and children should not be a threat or an inconvenience — indeed, “women deserve better than abortion” is the slogan of Feminists for Life. It’s a twisted definition of equality that asks women to give up their children by undergoing invasive surgery. Men don’t have to do that, and neither should women.
If I were a betting woman, I’d bet Rosie the Riveter was pro-life.
Oftentimes, in life-related debates, it can feel like there is no common ground. This article highlights the problems with surrogacy, something many feminists are against, whether those feminists are pro-life or pro-choice. The author’s bio shows that on some issues at least, there can be common ground. Read her article–it describes the pitfalls of surrogacy very well.
Kathleen Sloan is a former member of the board of directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Executive Director of Connecticut NOW, a consultant on third-party reproduction issues, and co-author of the book Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth and Culture. She has a master’s degree in International Relations and has traveled the world advocating women’s rights, including at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York. She co-authored a brief for fifteen feminist academics and advocates as amici curiae in support of the petitioner (the surrogate) in the case discussed above.
On rare occasion, the World Wide Web does something positive by bringing people together. I got an email from Jennifer Rose (not her real name) who was asking for places to go for healing after an abortion 28 years ago. Something about Jennifer’s story really resonated with me. She doesn’t have other children–her aborted child was it. Could this not be any one of us? I consider how life goes in our “modern” world and I really feel her story could be me. Suddenly, you are 40 or 50 or 60 and you look back on your life and realize so many things you thought were difficult could have been coped with. We are all compelled to make our own mistakes and suffer the consequences, as if there were no older, wiser women to learn from. Must it be this way? Here’s one older, wiser woman, who would like to tell her story so that others can read it, hear it and change course if they are in her situation of 28 years ago.
Here’s Jennifer’s story:
I regret my abortion. It was 28 years ago and this is the first time I am writing about it. It is time to leave my head—to get my story out. There are many reasons why I made the mistake to end my pregnancy; fear, self-hate and ignorance top the list.
I was 28 years old and missed one day of my birth control pills. I was in a serious relationship. I believe I had the abortion at eight weeks. It was an unsettling and exciting time in my life. I had just uprooted the only life I had ever known and moved from one coast to the other, to be with the love of my life. He was starting a new job and we wanted to start a new life together. He was not happy for us when he heard the news. He had two older children from a previous marriage and our finances at the time were a shambles. He said he would leave if I had the baby. (He denies he said this.) I was too afraid to tell my parents back home. I wish I was happy with the news regardless of how my partner felt and whether he wanted another child. I felt so scared and very alone. I felt I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have a baby. Me? Having a baby? Being a mother? I panicked.
As a young, introverted girl, I rarely thought of growing up and having a family like a lot of my friends. I tended to talk about “deeper” things like why the universe is the way it is, or what the purpose of life is. Then when I was eight, my childhood came to an abrupt end and my family was fragmented forever when my oldest sister, just 18 years old, dropped dead from a heart attack. When sudden tragedy strikes I believe it depends on your age, stage in life and temperament as to how and in what forms you process the event. I lay in bed that night listening to the horrific wails of grief coming from my mother downstairs. That memory will always be with me. I was good at internalizing and over-thinking events even then and created the thought that having children must feel terrible because they die and you cry and hurt.
What if my baby died like my sister did?
I wish I could go back to my 28-year-old self and tell her not to make the biggest mistake of her life. If I could, I would have told her she didn’t need to feel scared or alone and to reach out to a supportive minister or counsellor for guidance and support—someone who would show her that her life was going to change for the better. I would have told her this was not entirely about her, that she must be brave, that this baby deserves a chance at life and even if she felt that she couldn’t raise the child, there is always adoption. If the baby was born with physical or medical problems that she would be able to cope with strength, love and courage.
I wish I loved and believed in myself more back then. I wish I knew then what I know now that everything will always be okay. Everything. I wish I had had my strong personal faith in God like I do now. I kept everything to myself. Thinking I knew best, I guess, I let my ego rule over my heart. I still remember as if it were yesterday when they put the oxygen mask over my face; I had tears pouring down my face. So, so sorry I was so selfish and stupid!
Now, I am 56 and childless. My partner at the time and I have since married and have stayed together. Through the years since my abortion, I’ve been angry at myself. I tried to cope by numbing everything with booze, but the pain and regret never really seemed to go away. I have been treating myself as an invisible visitor on this earthly plane. I tried propping my self-esteem up with pro-choice and feminist beliefs for many years after that because I was too afraid to face the ugly truth of what I had done. But my soul always knew and it has weighed on me.
My self-esteem was demolished—the day my sister died. I work every day with meditation, my faith and journal writing to save any innocent essence I have left. I pray daily, repentant, and I know I am forgiven. I am back on the path and walk in His grace and mercy every day.
We are women and we can bring new life into this bizarre and beautiful place. I want my story to be comfort and inspiration for some scared young woman who perhaps, like me, fears being a mother. I want to tell her to go for it: Jump into the unknown with love and know that there are people out there who care about you. Whether you intend to keep your baby or not, know that you are bringing a new life into the world who deserves to be here.
And to tell her that everything will always turn out okay. Everything.
We don’t have a problem in Canada with women accessing abortions. We have a problem with women waiting to conceive, and then needing to cope with media reports of how tragic it is when women get abortions–just slower than they would have preferred.
Here’s my take on this in Convivium.
The Liberals are giving a close to $100 million to Congo. This includes “sexual and reproductive rights”–which I put in quotation marks because that is a meaningless phrase that generally includes abortion. What I note in this Globe and Mail article is the Minister for International Development talking about how they will offer abortion, which is illegal in Congo:
Ms. Bibeau said the DRC is a prime example of a country where Canada’s new feminist foreign-aid agenda – particularly its support for legal abortion services – will have to be handled carefully. Abortion is illegal in the DRC, unless it is necessary to save a woman’s life, creating stigma around the service.
“In Canada, you are very interested in the abortion part, but if we want to be effective here, the idea is not to put the light specifically on that. We have to be more subtle,” Ms. Bibeau said.
“More subtle” means they will be breaking Congo’s laws but they don’t want people to know that. And on “creating stigma”–who knows why it’s illegal? Maybe African women understand killing their children isn’t a solution for rape. Maybe the stigma preceded the law. Maybe a western outlook on African life isn’t the right lens through which to view this. This seems a whole lot like a western, wealthy power coming in and telling a poorer country what they want/need before asking.
