I was reading Canadian Business last night and was surprised to come across a story entitled How to raise an entrepreneur: More siblings equals economic success.

The study finds that relative to those born before, children born after the one-child policy was implemented were significantly less trustworthy, less competitive and more risk averse: all traits that suggest they are, generally, less entrepreneurial than those in bigger families.

Here’s another article from the International Business Times that addresses similar issues.

I wondered what was going to happen with this now that M-408 has been quashed:

Warawa’s point of privilege, which he raised with Speaker Andrew Scheer in March, is still active, however. Warawa says the Conservative whip denied him an opportunity to speak in the House about M-408 during a daily 15-minute time frame reserved for MPs because the topic was “not approved.” He has asked Scheer to rule on whether his rights were infringed.

Numerous MPs on both sides of the aisle have supported Warawa, warning that barring MPs from speaking on issues of concern to them and their constituents is a threat to parliamentary democracy. His supporters have argued that Parliament’s rules say the 60-second speeches are granted by the Speaker and it’s only by convention that party leaders have been assigning the slots.

CBC’s Kady O’Malley predicts that Warawa’s privilege question is “almost certainly at the top of the speaker’s priority list” given the number of interventions that have been made.

I’m anxious to see how it will be handled by the Speaker.

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Update: Hmmm…Kady O’Malley seems unsure what the introduction of Mr. Warawa’s new bill will mean for the point of privilege. Anyone know? I’ll ask around.

It’s the end of M-408. I’m fine with this, for a bunch of reasons I don’t have time to share at this current moment. More soon. Here’s the news item.

Read a short piece about it, here:

For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.”

As some of you know, I’ve had my share of health challenges over the last few years. Ann’s blog and her book, One Thousand Gifts, have blessed me as I walk through this period. I love her writing and her heart.

Yesterday she blogged on Gosnell, in a published note to her son. (She did the same when she commented on the Steubenville case, and that post went viral.)

That’s how you and I sort of began.

I had bent over the tiles of the doctor’s office like I might hurl.

Like I might lose everything and the leaves, they’d clung to the rain splattered window.

And it’s not like I saw the doctor spin her chair or saw her lean forward. I just heard the mechanics of her rotation, the spinning of everything.

Just will be forever razed with what she said next, the way she’d said it like you could simply snip off light and not long feel the dark:

“Have you considered an abortion?”

I had just blown out the candles on my 21st birthday cake. Married 90 days. Starting my third week of my third year of university. Terror can make people feel like all they have is terrible choices.

Here me, Son, and remember it every time you hear the word abortion: Abortion isn’t so much about a woman having choice — but a woman feeling like she has no choice.

For one lifelong moment, the atoms of everything split and spun and hung.

Her line that “abortion isn’t so much about a woman having a choice – but a woman feeling like she has no choice” reminded me of this quote:

No woman wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg. – Frederica Mathewes-Green

Isn’t that a vivid quote? When I heard it the first time, I knew it would stick with me.

Ann closes her post with a challenge to our communities and to the pro-life movement. It’s worth a read.

Some really interesting PWPL reader comments on this post. Check them out.

This relates to not much of anything, except that the author aptly describes how I feel about my reading abilities in our Google-friendly age. I skim so much that I find in the instances where reading deeply is actually critically necessary that I must stop and go back. Suddenly skimming has not saved but rather wasted my time, because I find myself at the end of difficult articles having no sweet clue what it is I actually read:

One of the ways we are adapting to the glut of information at our disposal is to skim, to glance at the thousands of pieces of information to look for the very few bits that are most urgent and relevant. It is a necessary skill if we are to avoid drowning. Yet there is a cost to our skimming. The more we skim, the more we become people who prefer to skim, people who would rather skim than read patiently and deeply.

Help! Help! I’m sure I’m growing dumb and dumber by the second. Tick, tick, tick.

After the phenomenal success of a TweetFest last Friday that finally convinced the mainstream media to cover the trial of abortionist and accused mass murderer Kermit Gosnell, organizers will take to Twitter again tomorrow to highlight exactly “Who Is #Gosnell?”

From 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, everyone with a Twitter account is invited to share their outrage that Gosnell was able to operate his “house of horrors” in Pennsylvania for 17 years with absolutely no oversight. Tweets should continue to use the hashtag #Gosnell and point the way to WhoIsGosnell.com, a website established by TweetFest co-organizer Bryan Kemper, Youth Outreach Director for Priests for Life.

More info here.

“As I said, the courtroom was mostly empty.”

What does everyone think?

Abortionist Kermit Gosnell is facing the death penalty if he is convicted of the murders for which he is being tried in Philadelphia. Surely, the heinous acts of which he stands accused are depraved. They probably meet the criteria for capital punishment under Pennsylvania law. However, in the event that Gosnell is convicted, which seems likely, I am asking my fellow pro-lifers around the country to join me in requesting that his life be spared.

Someone might make the case for mercy by pointing out that Gosnell merely carried out the logic of the abortion license that is enshrined and protected in our law. One might note that there is no moral difference between dismembering a child inside the womb (which our jurisprudence, alas, treats as a constitutional liberty) and snipping a child’s neck after he or she has emerged from the womb (potentially a capital offense). How can our legal system impose the death penalty on Gosnell, given the arbitrariness and irrationality of the underlying law?

But that is not the fundamental reason for our asking for Gosnell’s life to be spared…

Read the rest at First Things.