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Tune in to Veronique’s YouTube channel

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Veronique Bergeron is one of my favourite people in all the land. She has a large family. She used to blog with us at PWPL. People were sad when she stopped. Good news: Now she has her own blog about her large family. She has a YouTube channel; it’s new! She also has a sense of humour, which isn’t new. Miraculously, even with nine children, she has kept that around. I look up to Ms. Bergeron and her whole clan. There’s no white picket fence around her property, she keeps it real. Tune in.

This one is interesting because I swear to you: Having given speeches to audiences in the hundreds, having testified before hostile committees, having talked to biased journalists about being pro-life, one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done was get both my nieces out the door for a walk on a fine summer day when I was the only adult. There were shoes on the wrong feet, there were water bottles and changes of clothes stuffed into the back of the stroller, there was general mayhem, there was a stressed out Auntie. It is no great surprise to me that this is one of Veronique’s first videos, as a result.

[youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHaqTxjO4Bw]

 

Shopping for that perfect Christmas gift

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Then check out these beautiful pendants:

pendant

I just received one as a gift, and I have already bought one for a co-worker. They start at $45 and feature a mother caressing her womb on one side and an unborn child on the other. A portion of the proceeds go to pro-life charities. They’re Canadian and a wonderful pro-life gift to give and receive at Christmas.

Redirecting pain and anger?

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It’s not uncommon for me to send Andrea a link to a news article with the  accompanying text: “I don’t even know how to blog about this. I don’t know where to start.”

This story about Nicky Windsor is one of those stories. Nicky is a 29 year old woman from England who chose to abort her child.

She became upset with the abortion provider, the Conifer House clinic, because it did not provide her with sufficient options regarding the disposal of her dead baby’s body.

In response to her complaint, the clinic sent a card of apology and “comfort” and two ultrasound pictures of her baby. Nicky’s statement to the media:

She said: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. It’s absolutely disgraceful.

‘I’ve never known anything like it. What were they trying to do to me? Why on earth would I want scan pictures?

‘Going through a procedure like that is traumatic enough so to have it all brought back to me in the way that they did was absolutely shocking.

‘When I first got the card I thought it was a nice gesture but when I opened it up and saw two baby scans it absolutely shattered me. It was just an awful feeling.

‘It felt as if I had to go through the loss all over again.’

The front of the card, though not noted in the article reads “Your little one is sleeping soundly. Your little one is sleeping on a cloud, drifting high above. And gently dreams of peaceful things surrounded by your love.”

Nicky is not angry because her child is dead. She’s not angry that she perhaps made the wrong decision. She’s not angry that women are frequently told that abortion is a simple and straightforward procedure with few side effects, when she suffered severe trauma.

She’s angry that she couldn’t do what she wanted with the corpse and she’s angry that she had to look at the child that she “terminated.” She’s so angry that she goes public with her story and speaks to the media.

This story is as maddening as it is tragic. But the article does reveal some of the tragedy of abortion, how it not only ends a baby’s life, but how it hurts women. Nicky herself said that choosing to have an abortion proved to be a traumatic experience. The abortion provider also admits, via the message on the card, that a child was alive and is now dead and that the mother may be concerned about her child’s eternal soul.

I have to wonder if that concern and pain may be part of the reason for Nicky’s anger directed at the clinic. Nicky’s baby is gone and Nicky herself is in a lot of emotional pain.

And those of us who are pro-life are told we can’t call ourselves pro-woman.

Baby feet

 

An “unwanted pregnancy” does NOT equal an “unwanted child”

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I love the honesty of this post. I’m not Catholic but there is much to appreciate in this blogger’s words:

Some of us may be tempted to feel like we are ‘bad Catholics’ if we aren’t feeling over the moon when we see those double pink lines of a new pregnancy. Then when we get around to announcing the baby, and people say “Congratulations!” we are thinking cynically: Yeah, really. But we can’t express our misgivings. We smile politely and make some joke about God’s sense of humor while inwardly feeling devastated. Our fears may be physical, mental, financial, emotional… whatever the case may be, we do NOT want to admit to our good, Catholic friends—much less to our hostile non-Catholic family— that the idea of more children is gut-wrenching.

So we all move along in this faux reality of a Catholicism where being open-to-life means everyone is giddy about being pregnant when it happens.

[…]

How can we testimony to women who are experiencing fear or doubt over an unwanted pregnancy if we are afraid to empathize with them? So often women just want to feel like they aren’t alone. They want to have hope that it will indeed be okay. How can they know that if we aren’t open about living it? As far as they can tell, if you aren’t thrilled about a pregnancy, you will never want your child. What pity! What a lie!

Woman facing sun

What a little honesty can do…assure us we are not alone…and hint that things may in fact get better.

This is why we’ll always have an abortion debate

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It’s so hard to truly conceal what abortion actually is and what it does:

Immediately, I was: ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to carry all three,’ because I didn’t want to kill a baby,” Smith recalled. “(But) as soon as I sent (the couple) the email that there were three heartbeats, he said ‘We need to find out about reduction right away’ … They absolutely didn’t want three babies.”

Bold is mine.

The Pill does not advance women’s rights

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Nonetheless, I still say it should be made over the counter:

All this said, yes, please do make the Pill over the counter. Perhaps when it sits beside Tylenol on a drugstore shelf, advocacy groups will stop yammering on about how the Pill is a major component of women’s rights. Or that it is patronizing when doctors show concern. Perhaps then we will stop targeting excellent doctors who won’t prescribe it for very good reasons.

Which gets interpreted by Huff Post commentators as meaning I want to reduce access to all contraception. If you are pro-woman and pro-life, please feel free to leave a reasonable comment, for or against the Pill (so that Huff Post folks can misinterpret and distort what you say, sigh.)

Pills_web

Liberal: My mom’s conservatism saved my life

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The abortion debate really need not be a battle between the right and the left. The lot of us agree on human rights, and a segment of the population believes human rights should begin when human life begins. Polls show that most Canadians, both those who situate themselves on the right and the left, want restrictions on abortion access in Canada. I think we have more in common than not.

This writer shares that her mother found herself pregnant in college and that…

Given the information she had at the time, given the fact that she was so close to finishing school, and given MY secular, liberal worldview… I have no doubt at all that if I had been my mother, there would have been no me.

Something to consider, isn’t it? Yet the writer seems to remain pro-choice.

Invitro

Children–or the lack thereof

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I am 39 and I have no children. I have never been asked why. I have never been asked whether I want children. I have frankly never been engaged in any discussion of my childless state unless it is with close friends.

That’s why this article is surprising to me. Magenta Baribeau, childless by choice, is clearly travelling in different, less sensitive circles. I don’t think “why don’t you want children” or the like are questions to be asking people you only know for 22 seconds, as she puts it.

Could it be that she is courting the questions by making her decision not to have children into an ideological movement?

Could it be that people intuitively know “some things are not a choice” (one of my most favourite pro-life slogans) and balk at a confident assertion that they are?

Some women have children. Others don’t. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that in our era of below-replacement fertility, it’s a brave and bold thing to not have children. Lots of people don’t.

Furthermore, we tend in life to regret the things we haven’t done, not the things we do, which either are positive or, if negative, we morph into learning experiences. Outside the contentious area of having children this remains true.

So strictly speaking, whoever is telling her she might regret it some day could be right. The same way you might regret not trying a new job, or not dating a particular guy who in hindsight seemed great, or not taking up an offer to try anything new.

It’s not terribly judgmental to say so, and I maybe I can say that with more moral authority than someone with six children in their family van.

Anyways, that’s not the point of this post. Here’s the point: She clearly identifies that abortion is her backup birth control, should she ever get pregnant. If she and her partners aren’t consistently careful, someone has to die to maintain her childless state.

Q. Do you think that if you got pregnant, your opinion might change? Is that possible?

A. If I do get pregnant I will have an abortion. I’ve never had an abortion in my life, I’m very careful. So if the hormones would change my mind, I don’t know how that would affect me. But nothing in the world could happen to make me change my mind.

This is a controversial thing to point out. That abortion is now and has been for a while used as birth control. That’s what she is saying.

In general, it seems she wants everyone to applaud her for something that is mundane. We applaud the people who climb Mount Everest, not the people who prefer, like Hobbits, to eat tasty food in our warm living rooms, where it is perfectly safe. Don’t get me wrong. I love Bilbo Baggins with the best of them. Yet, I refuse to applaud her “movement.” No one must have children but there are limitations on that as a “right”–the limitation being that in seeking out a childless life, she can’t harm someone else (ie. in abortion). That’s the hard limitation on her worldview. If you are childless, no one has a problem. But when you make it into a lifestyle movement, you run up against common sense.

Barbie

What do women’s rights mean when asserting them means denying our fertility/biology to the point of death?

 

Get with the times

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If you think the Pill is the end all and be all of contraception, you need to get with the times. Check in with some of the groups that are teaching women about their bodies without requiring them to take a hormone every day.

The Red Tent Sisters are doing good work. The Creighton Model offers really great, cohesive fertility awareness that works with your body, not against it. There’s more info here, too.

Left wing, right wing, Christian, atheist, there are better options than the Pill.

Ditch the Pill

RedTentSisters.com are asking you to ditch the Pill. And wear a fabulous, fun dress in a field.

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