CBC reports on 23 young women who have died taking the Pill.

The lawyer on the class action suit explains:

Merchant said the number of deaths potentially associated with Yasmin or Yaz may be largely underreported because doctors may not realize there is a link between the cause of death and the risks of the pills.

Doctors prescribe the Pill at the drop of the hat. So yes, I’ll agree that they don’t realize the link. A good book to read is Barbara Seaman’s The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women if you are interested in understanding why the Pill is not terribly good for women’s health.

Andrea referred to it last week. It’s now available online. His talk was both hilarious and challenging. And he discusses the abortion debate!

His introduction starts at about the 25 minute mark. He fails to note his website address during the talk, but if you want to visit it, it’s here.

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Andrea adds: Hurray!

I can see from the other posts that Faye is in the business of providing some serious content for this blog. Thank you, Faye.

Enter Andrea for the fluff.

Let me just say that I no longer blast Pink in my car–it’s all Serena Ryder now. And in a rare, rare moment of pop culture, the lyrics are kosher. Really, this song is an adult version of “If you are happy and you know it, clappa your hands… stompa your feet.”

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz7jCY1cpHk]

From LifeSiteNews:

Ariel Castro could land on death row for beating and starving one of the women he kept chained in his basement as sex slaves in order to kill his own unborn children.

Prosecutors indicted 52-year-old Ariel Castro last Friday on 329 charges for kidnapping three women, chaining them to the basement of a Cleveland home, and raping them over the course of roughly a decade.

Among the charges is one count of aggravated murder for “the unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy.”

Under state law Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty, who indicated in May that Castro would face murder charges, could seek the death penalty.

One of his victims, Michelle Knight, said Castro caused her to miscarry five children by brutally punching her in the stomach and starving her.

If McGinty prosecutes the statute as a capital crime, Castro could become the first prisoner to be sentenced to death for killing an unborn child. […]

n May, Mark Harrington, director of the Ohio-based pro-life group Created Equal, said people on all side of the abortion issue should support the prosecutor. “Abortion supporters need to join with anti-abortion forces in calling for Castro to be charged with murder under the Ohio Fetal Homicide Law,” he said. “What happened to Ms. Knight is the worst kind of domestic violence. She and her unborn children deserve justice.”

Pro-life activist Keith Mason of Personhood USA also told LifeSiteNews.com the decision was “fantastic,” but he felt it embodied a widespread contradiction. Ohio law recognizes the crime of killing a wanted child, although not an unwanted one.

It does not make sense “that we would protect [preborn children] in one circumstance but not the other,” he said.

I’m linking to a challenging and encouraging talk by Peter Stockland, which was given at the Bridging the Secular Divide conference I attended a few weeks ago. Panels 3A, 3B and 3QA are well worth your time.

Within the pro-life movement, we frequently discuss media engagement and how we can better get our pro-woman, pro-life message out there. (I also yammer on about how I can persuade a journalist to label me pro-life rather than anti-abortion, but I digress.) Peter’s main message: the media is ours and it’s ours for the taking.

Both Peter and Douglas Todd comment on new media, whether ‘media’ as we know it is on its way out and how controversial topics (including religion) get played by the mainstream media.

The words of an abortionist. I am again spending a few hours digging through a legal database and came across another tragic abortion case. I’ll spare you the details. But this is how Justice MacLellan of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court summarized Dr. Piver’s testimony:

Dr. Julius Piver testified as an expert. He works in Bethesda, Maryland and has performed between 600 to 700 abortions all of which were done in a hospital setting on a Outpatient basis as opposed to a clinic similar to the Morgentaler Clinic. He said his patients normally are given a general anesthetic and they are asleep while the abortion is done. He said he was familiar with the clinic setup for abortions where a local anesthetic is used. Dr. Piver said that his rule of practice was that a patient would not be allowed to drive after having an abortion whether it was done under general or local anesthetic. He said that if he was aware that a patient intended to drive, he would not do the procedure because he felt that it would put the patient’s life in jeopardy.

He said that most women who have abortions are unhappy having the procedure. He said this is particularly true of women who have had a child or other children. He said the procedure is already emotionally charged and that the decision to drive or not to drive should not be left with the patient.

There are references to driving because the woman was in a car accident following her abortion.

So…if he is correct and most women are unhappy having the procedure…why are they having the procedure? Is it because they feel they have no other choice? And if that’s the case, is offering them only one choice, pro-choice? Offering one option, a terrible and unwanted option, doesn’t sound like much of a choice to me.

This woman did not want to have an abortion at all. She even asked the hospital if she could have the body of her aborted child in order to bury her little one, rather than have it disposed or incinerated. The hospital refused. (I’m sure there are regulations against such things.)

Not that we need it, but another indication that there is something seriously wrong with our abortion status quo.

(Case reference: MacPhail v. Desrosiers, 1997 CarswellNS 546)

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos via photopin cc

…keeping on. Despite the madness his motion elicited, and the controversy on the Hill, he continues to raise awareness of sex-selective abortions in Canada. His statement in the House of Commons yesterday, when introduced a petition on the matter:

 Mr. Speaker, the second petition I have from beautiful Langley is with regard to gendercide. The petitioners highlight that 92% of Canadians believe that sex-selective pregnancy termination should be illegal, and that there are over 200 million missing girls in the world right now. They ask for Parliament to condemn this worst form of discrimination against girls.

People should never forget that we allow gendercide to take place in our country. Oh, Parliament.

photo credit: Dominique Pelletier via photopin cc

Planned Parenthood used to have a slogan: “When she gets pregnant, so do you.” I appreciate that message and it seems to me this campaign is saying something similar.

Of course, Planned Parenthood said that before they made pregnancy a choice, sweeping responsibility quite off the table for both sexes.

If she can walk away from her pregnancy at any time, why shouldn’t he? It’s an irony entirely lost on feminists, who firmly believe that once a woman makes up her mind, the man ought to toe the line.

Then there’s the fact that “taking responsibility” used to mean the man would marry the woman and make a life of it, where now we awkwardly ask men to sort of stand by. Be involved. But not too involved. Because we are very, very busy pretending that marriage doesn’t matter.

Finally, the advice to avoid this situation of “pregnant men” is likely to amount to “use protection,” and/or “get on the Pill,” which is bad advice. And doesn’t work, furthermore, since all these kids have access and know how it use it and don’t, or use it improperly.

I’ll readily acknowledge this isn’t exactly amounting to standing ovation for this ad campaign. Yet, I support the idea of driving home that men are actors, not bystanders, alongside women in any pregnancy. “It’s her choice, I wouldn’t say anything,” was the recent comment of a cameraman filming one of my TV news hits about abortion. I cheerily replied that women don’t get pregnant on their own before leaving the studio, to which he nodded in agreement. (It was that easy, people. Just shake the tree and pick up the fruit.)

Another positive about this ad is that it serves to remind that men and women are different. Because men with pregnant bellies remain an impossibility and rather odd-looking, too. I think I’m still allowed to say that much out loud, right?

A half-hearted, thin cheer then; a one thumb up for this campaign.

I’m a  big fan of Anthony Bourdain, so when I saw he was going to the Democratic Republic of Congo on CNN last night I stayed up far later than a new mother of three is physically capable in order to watch. All I can say is, I’m really disappointed, and I could have used the sleep. CNN and Bourdain had a real opportunity here to show people, in a good full hour show, what is happening and has happened in Congo and how the West has pretty much been ignoring it for decades.

Countless Congelese women whose lives have been destroyed by assault, rape and murder remained in the political shadows, untouched by cameras, while Bourdain and his team (which included a heavy drinking so-called documentarian) journeyed overnight down the Congo River so he could make a painful DIY version of coq au vin at 2am then visit an abandoned Belgium research library the following day. Bourdain concluded that in Congo he met people still “waiting for something to be done”, and in the end, he too left them still waiting.

Interesting research.

In another study of baby names (see, love is indeed in the air), political scientists at the University of Chicago look at baby names from another perspective. In this conference paper, they argue that political ideology affects the names parents choose for their little bundles of joy.

They suggest that names serve as social signals that can indicate either cultural or economic “wealth,” in which liberals are more interested in signaling cultural wealth while conservatives prefer to signal economic wealth. In particular, they indicate that liberal parents are more likely to choose uncommon, culturally obscure names (e.g., “Namaste,” “Finnegan,” and “Archimedes”), possibly a reflection of liberals’ tendencies toward openness, while conservative parents are more likely to choose culturally traditional names (e.g., “John,” “Thomas,” and “Catherine”), possibly reflecting their tendencies toward conscientiousness. […]

photo credit: Sergiu Bacioiu via photopin cc