Read about it here:

A trio of backbench Conservative MPs have written to the Mounties to ask for investigations of possible homicides “that appear to have started out as attempted abortions.”

In the Jan. 23 letter, Saskatchewan MP Maurice Vellacott tells RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson that between 2000 and 2009 there were 491 infant deaths in Canada following abortions at 20 weeks gestation or greater that resulted in live births.

“They evacuated out of the womb, so under the Criminal Code definition in Canada, that is a person,” Vellacott told QMI Agency.

Following up on my post of earlier this week, this is a good read on why women in combat are a bad idea. Not words you hear very often. I’d say she is very brave, for more reasons than one.

This week, Angus Reid released the results of a new abortion poll. It contains some interesting data.

Rather discouragingly, a large number of Canadians still aren’t aware that abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy in Canada. Only 23% knew that a woman “can have an abortion at any time during her pregnancy, with no restrictions whatsoever.”

A whopping 45% thought that a woman “can have an abortion only during the first three months of her pregnancy, with no other restrictions.” My guess is that it is hard for many Canadians to believe that woman in her eighth month of pregnancy can abort her child for any reason.

Respondents were then informed of the legal status quo and asked for their opinions. Here’s where it gets really interesting: 43% of men want the status quo as is – abortions available at any time with no restrictions. Only 27% of women – not even a third – feel the same way.

So how would women prefer to see abortion regulated in Canada?

24% – Women being able to have an abortion only during the first three months of their pregnancy, with no other restrictions

17% – Women being able to have an abortion during the first three months with no restrictions and then during the last six months but only if their life is in danger, if they have been the victim of rape, or if the fetus has serious defects

11% – Women being able to have an abortion during the first three months of their pregnancy, and only if their life is in danger, if they have been the victim of rape, or if the fetus has serious defects

9% – Women being able to have an abortion at any time during their pregnancy, but only if their life is in danger, if they have been the victim of rape, or if the fetus has serious defects

6% – Not sure

5% -Women being forbidden from having an abortion under any circumstances

Most women want to see restrictions on abortion. Two thirds of women, exactly 66%, do not “prefer” to have abortion on demand available to them.

It’s interesting that a larger percentage of men than women prefer our “any time for any reason” reality. Why is that? And why do women want more restrictions placed on abortion? This result seems to run contrary to our cultural narrative.

I don’t have the answers to these questions and I don’t think studies of this nature have ever been conducted in Canada, which is really unfortunate. I wish I had a money tree to fund more focused research.

______________________________________

Andrea adds: The money tree, oh the money tree. Yes. I need that one too.

Affirmative action refers to policies that aim to insure that all groups of individuals are represented in various environments (schools, governments, corporations, etc), policies that sometimes attempt to make up for past discrimination. A new proposal in Vietnam seeks to do just that. In an attempt to make up for the gender imbalance caused by sex selection, the proposal would give financial incentives to families with “only two baby girls.”

Under the plan, the Government will provide a number of benefits to those who have two daughters and comply with the policy that every family should have no more than two children.

The benefits include a payment when a family has a second daughter and support for school tuition and health insurance for both daughters when they grow up, Trong said.

According to an officer of the General Department of Population, in fact, a number of provinces have implemented this policy. For example, Thai Binh Province presents gifts for the families having two daughters while Hoa Binh Province encourages and supports women and girls, especially families that have only daughters.

Should women be involved in front-line combat? Let’s pretend, hypothetically, that physically women could do absolutely everything a man could. This would be rare, but possible. I tend to think that distinctions in service in the military are important for some of the reasons this author outlines. Still, it’s only a very slim minority of women who actually want to engage in this type of combat, so the question is, does it actually matter if one or two women are in armed combat because they desperately want to be?

“It’s a girl should not be a death sentence.” Indeed. A new website to speak out against sex selection abortion. Like it on Facebook, and follow it on Twitter.

Some good quotes here from some good women (myself included) on what Morgentaler means for Canada.

Andrea Mrozek believes that more and more women are beginning to distance themselves from abortion. “For every feminist out there who claims ‘abortion is a woman’s right’ I will rise up forcefully to declare they do not represent me.”

I really mean that.

Love this quote from Charmaine Yoest at Americans United for Life:

The abortion lobby today is a little like the old Soviet bloc, that looked invincible right up to the very day it collapsed under the weight of its own stagnation,” said Dr. Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, at a conference at the National Press Club Thursday afternoon. “The old guard of the Kremlin were on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of science and the truth in very much the same way that Big Abortion is today.”

It really speaks to me because prior to the Soviet Union falling, it wasn’t clear that it would. It appeared to be impenetrable, to almost the very end. And then it was gone. No one today wants to be the one still rooting for the Soviet Union, a repressive, totalitarian regime.

We can’t quite conceive right now of just how abortion will end, but end it will. Because it is a repressive, violent thing and love and life will win out!

(h/t)

Here in Canada, there isn’t much to add about the anniversary of the Morgentaler decision. What a tragic day.

However, this column by Father De Souza takes the tone I’d like to take. Obviously killing off our kids is a great, great tragedy but if we get bogged down and fail to see the sweet, small instances of grace and beauty, then we aren’t helping anyone.

Twenty-five and 40 years later the possibility of a legal future more favourable to life does not appear likely. Yet the great struggle for life is not primarily a legal one, and the work of cultural renewal proceeds by witness, not laws, and by grace.

Twenty-five and 40 years later, the witness has been given, and is being given increasingly today, particularly by the young.

Twenty-five and 40 years later, the contrast between the culture of death and the civilization of love is all the more evident.

Twenty-five and 40 years later, grace is still at work, as it was in the beginning, is and ever shall be.

The author of this Globe article argues that parents need to be far more thoughtful when they blog about their children. With the efficiency of archiving sites like the WayBackMachine, some things will never, ever disappear from the web.

Recently, The Atlantic ran an article by Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the plague of “parental overshare”: the reams of articles and blog posts by parents whose favourite, if not sole, subject is their kids. She cites a New York Times blog post by Beth Boyle Machlan about her daughter’s obsessive compulsive disorder in which she describes intimate details of a therapy session, and the recent controversy over “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” a post-Newtown piece by a blogger named Liza Long who pegs her own troubled 13-year-old son as a potential mass murderer, illustrated by his photo. […]

Without question, Weiss’s writing – her daughter’s body and eating habits are unpacked in agonizing detail – invades her kid’s privacy in a way that would be libellous if children had any rights. Bovy argues that charting a child’s issues, be they as banal as bedwetting or as serious as threatening one’s mother with a knife, also makes them susceptible to negative outcomes later on. A vivid description of a knife-wielding incident in adolescence forges an electronic footprint that can’t be scrubbed away. These tales of youthful indiscretions might pop up during a job interview or a college application. In giving away our kids’ present lives in public, we may be sabotaging their private futures.

I am so thankful that my mother, a writer, was not an “over-sharing” mommy blogger. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have details about my potty training, my teenage angst and that awkward incident with my first boyfriend posted online for all to see. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.

And sure, one could argue that these are rites of passage that everyone lives through and therefore there’s no need for concern. But when people are spending big money to create online personae and branding to promote messages or products that they believe are important, it’s hard to breezily dismiss the impact of an unwanted online biography.

Imagine if someone were to Google your name to then be faced with the opportunity to learn about either your perspective on tax law or your very awkward first kiss. I’d like to think that people are more interested in the exchange of ideas, but the tabloid industry reveals a very different side of our human nature. We really do need to careful when we post about ourselves and others.

(I think I might call my mother and thank her for choosing to write fiction rather than about me and my brother.)