ProWomanProLife

You are here: Home / Archives for All Posts

Making decisions in the midst of the storm

by 4 Comments

Rather, the title of this post should be “making life-changing decisions in the midst of the storm”, but Andrea prefers short titles over long ones, so there we have it.

We may occasionally find ourselves in the middle of a crisis or in turmoil, and we have to make a decision that will likely alter the course of our life. The decision needs to be made and it needs to be made now, for whatever reasons, and there is no other option.

But I’ve found in many cases, the decision can wait, and it’s often best to sit on things for a time to really consider all possibilities. Being someone who hates uncertainty, I have a near primal need to make a decision to just get over with it. Thankfully, I’ve learned from a few mistakes, and now force myself to step away from my laptop and put down my phone in order to wait for the crisis to pass, and to gain a bit of perspective.

Other times, if waiting for the immediate storm to pass isn’t an option, we can gain perspective from others  who have faced what we are currently facing, and who have come out the other side.

And that’s what Veronique Bergeron, a fellow PWPL blogger, offers in this post at her family/motherhood blog.

In her most recent blog, she writes about how many of us make decisions about our family size when we’re in the trenches of parenting young ones. We’re exhausted from sleepless nights, diaper changes, and wondering if we’ll ever eat a hot meal again. Here’s what she has to say about that:

These two conversations had a profound impact on me. On my perspective on having children and making family-centered decisions. It taught me that (1) none of us gets another kick at the can once our fertile years are behind us and once our kids are grown; and (2) that raising young children is the grunt work of parenting, the tiling of the field from which the harvest will later come forth. It’s a use-it-or-lose-it proposition: we don’t get to pour the time, care and affection we didn’t pour into our children once they are grown and we don’t get to have more children once we are older and lonelier. The blessings of children are not the sleepless nights, the bum-wipings and the ear-piercing shrieks. No. Those are the latrines of parenting. The blessings come later, once the field has been tended and nurtured, early in the morning, late at night, in the cold, in the rain, back-broken and exhausted, when you felt like it and when you did not. […]

That said, assuming I live as long or longer than my grandparents, who died between the ages of 80 and 100, I have another 42 years — probably more like 50 — of life without small-kid-insanity on the horizon. Fifty year. I haven’t even been alive that long! That’s what I mean by “another lifetime”: 40-50 years of friendship and support and family meals and visits and help and whatever other amazing things will come out of having a large gang of properly attached people around me.

That’s it! And I love it. Veronique sees beyond the storm, and is choosing to make her decisions that way.

Let’s not forget that storms eventually pass, and there are brighter days on the other side of them. Especially when we make decisions that have permanent, life-changing ramifications.

veronique

(Veronique and her beautiful family.)

Debate night

by Leave a Comment

Trump and Clinton debate tonight.

My view of the US election is that this is a devastatingly tragic moment for America and this is true regardless of who wins.

So when I post this article about the woman behind Trump’s pro-life policies, it is not as an endorsement of Trump. It is simply to say this: On abortion, Trump chose one person to lead his policies well.

Read more about Marjorie Dannenfelser, here. She runs the Susan B. Anthony List. I’ve met her once or twice, because I thought of replicating that organization in Canada. It’s a women’s political pro-life voice. I like her.

Mrs Dannenfelser has just been named as the chair of Donald Trump’s new pro-life coalition, which will champion anti-abortion causes should he become US President. These include banning abortion after 20 weeks by signing the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act into law, and removing taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, should it continue to provide women with abortion services.

We will not get military/foreign/economic/environmental policy right unless and until we stop killing our children and turning a blind eye to it.

Our countries (USA and Canada) are filled with people who think abortion doesn’t matter. “Let’s talk about the real issues,” they say.

Abortion matters. It matters for our demographics, which matters for our economy. It matters for our compassion and our spirits. We cannot kill children and not become more hard-hearted.

Normal people don’t think abortion is a success story–it represents a necessary evil.

Ideologues, and Clinton is one, push for more and more “access” to this necessary evil. In so doing, they morph the evil into a good and preach it as such. People start to believe it. Witness the calls for “International Safe Abortion Day.” (Puh-lease. Could anything be more painful or contrived?)

So in this tragic election cycle, I’d hold my nose hard and vote Trump, hoping that on this one issue he will not throw pro-lifers or the millions of dead who never got to walk on earth under the bus. He may. But Clinton most certainly will. And abortion matters too much to ignore it.

At bottom, whoever wins, I acknowledge our culture is very, very far gone to have come to this tragic choice (for Americans–but we as Canadians are in much the same boat). I also acknowledge and stress, as I always have, that politics is not now, nor will it ever be, our saviour. I acknowledge that the culture is mimicking the church. The church is divided, distracted, and not acting as the beacon of hope it could be. Finally, I acknowledge my own hypocrisies and weakness, which contribute to the mess in the church, which contributes to the mess in the culture. If I by the grace of God get one issue right, I’m likely getting another issue terribly wrong.

Anyhoo. I’m glad to see Marjorie involved. May she get the opportunity to put her pro-life plans into action.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of Susan B. Anthony List

Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of Susan B. Anthony List

Mothers in a modern era

by 4 Comments

This is quite a thoughtful look at caring for children and the evolution of family. The author, Luma Simms, doesn’t get into the “mommy wars,” which is a relief. I’ve long been against national, state-funded daycare, not because I’m against daycare per se, but rather because I’m against this inequitable method of telling people how they ought to raise their kids (which is what happens in every jurisdiction where such programs are introduced, lest you want to tell me “but it’s just another choice!” We should be able to care for kids in communities and even when this is difficult, we should aspire to that, without government funding.

I also like how she touches on our prosperity as being part of the problem. Abundance is harder to manage than scarcity, as she puts it.

Finally, notions on family especially on the part of conservatives like myself, have been reduced to an individualistic model. This happens precisely because mom and dad and children as a model is under such profound attack, so it’s a natural reaction to defend the inherent good of just that: Mom and dad and children. That said, I agree with her when she talks about how this family ideal is itself a product of the sexual revolution, not the ideal we should aspire to. Parents need more help than that.

What many miss when talking about family and community is this: The two-parent, biologically intact natural family is itself a product of individualistic thinking. So we research and analyze but the whole time we’re missing something right under our nose, a variable we’ve assumed is immutable. Family breakdown didn’t happen exclusively as a direct result of radical feminism and the sexual revolution, although those accelerated it. The breakdown began when we reduced the idea of what a family is to the bare bones of two parents and their children—what came to be called the nuclear family. But from time immemorial family included many more people in its definition.

Anyway, an interesting read from a reasonable woman. I’m fond of posting the work of interesting women here. I’m willing to bet she’s pro-life too–as so many reasonable, smart women are!!

Luma Simms

Luma Simms

 

Clicking on crazy

by 3 Comments

When I see a teaser that says forced childbirth is responsible for global warming, I’m of two minds as to whether I should click on it or not.

But I did, and now I must share. This tidbit of wisdom comes from Gloria Steinem, who is living in a bygone era (as so many feminists are), one where people are falling off the globe due to overpopulation.

On the term “forced childbirth,” or it’s close cousin, “forced pregnancy”–this is a trope pro-abortion folks bring up as they completely disengage from any semblance of sanity or reason and ignore the fact that two people are involved in childbirth. A child is the result of childbirth. So where human life is involved, it’s not forced childbirth we need to worry about, but rather, killing people (read: abortion) because nine months of pregnancy is uncomfortable (which most assuredly, it is, even for a wanted pregnancy). Remember, no woman has to parent. I can find you five couples who will willingly adopt a child today if presented the opportunity. But once pregnant, even under terrible circumstances, there is no quick and easy way to undo that.

Oh Gloria.

(h/t)

Gloria thinks there are too many people on the globe.

Gloria thinks there are too many people on the globe.

A21 Walk for Freedom

by 2 Comments

This will be the first post of many advertising this upcoming event organized by a friend.

There is an upcoming walk to abolish modern-day slavery coming up in Ottawa.

Grab a friend on October 15 and come down to the starting point at 227 Elgin Street at Lisgar. Time: 10:00 AM.

Please register at www.a21.org/ottawa

You can learn more about A21, the sponsoring organization, here, and how they hope to combat human trafficking.

These stories aren’t always about women from foreign lands. It can be someone local, who is separated from family and community, and falls in with the wrong group of “friends.” Reminds me, actually, of the importance and power of family and parents in protecting children. (A tie in with my day job.)

Here’s a little video clip, one girl’s story, from their web site.

So please come and support this walk come October 15!

slavery

 

A big picture look at IVF

by 1 Comment

It’s hard to write about IVF without sounding sanctimonious. When I say I don’t like IVF, I don’t say it lightly. Perhaps it helps that this isn’t a statement easily made from the comfort of 2.1 children behind a white picket fence.

That said, I’ve always had a hard time articulating why I don’t like IVF. This article gets at some of those reasons, looking at the big picture.

embryo-1514192__180

On taking life

by 3 Comments

This morning while waiting at the blood clinic I saw a Chatelaine magazine from a while back on the table. An article on the front cover was advertised as something like “the baby I didn’t have.”

Turns out it was an article about a young mom facing a terrible diagnosis of anencephaly at 17 weeks. A little girl. They wanted her, cherished her, named her and induced labour so she was born at about 18 weeks and died the same moment she was born.

Why do I post here?

First of all, I do so without linking to the article because I do not want the mother to be linking in and reading this. There is no way this post would not appear judgmental to her. I do not think that the written word from a stranger, the blogosphere, Facebook or Twitter are what she needs to break through her mentality that inducing early labour was not actually an abortion, that it wasn’t taking life.

But it was, wasn’t it? How did she know this baby wouldn’t be miraculously healed? A woman in my peripheral circle recently also tragically lost her child after carrying to term due to a different pre-natal condition. She didn’t try to beat the judge to the verdict. Is that not fairer to yourself and the baby?

The woman in Chatelaine is surrounded by all things pro-choice, all the time. There is no doubt she knew this is a baby–she held her daughter and they took pictures. So I’d argue what we need to overcome is not necessarily the pro-choice culture, though it is that too. It’s a culture that cannot cope with the unexpected, that needs to know exactly how the story will end. When we don’t know or are unsure or it is scary, we bring about an end just to make the insecurity stop.

In short, pro-life or pro-choice–we need to be more zen and go with the flow.

I also write this blog post because it is an outlet. It pains me to hear about “early inductions” that are abortions but called something else so we feel better about it. It pains me because we, all of us pro-life readers, unlike the bulk of the western world, think that child’s life mattered even if it was intended to be only nine months in utero.

I’m not saying it’s not hard all round.

I’m simply saying I read those stories and I mourn, right there in the blood clinic.

rose

 

Good news? Abortion facilities fail to meet standards

by 11 Comments

The UK’s Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator of medical services, ran surprise inspections of Marie Stopes abortion facilities. No great surprise to many pro-life readers, the abortion facilities failed to meet medical standards,

The concerns CQC raised with Marie Stopes International relate to poor governance arrangements which have given rise to specific immediate concerns relating to the lack of assurance in MSI, in areas such as consent and safeguarding and the lack of assurance in relation to training and competence in conscious sedation and general anaesthesia.

Marie Stopes international suspended its services in order to correct the problems. So (*sigh*) the NHI shipped the 250 pregnant women who would be affected elsewhere so they could abort their children.

I was kind of surprised at MSI’s measured response. Texas tried to raise the standards for abortion clinics so they’d be comparable to other medical facilities, and it seemed the world collectively lost its mind, with many arguing that ensuring medical standards for clinics violated a woman’s “right to choose” and then SCOTUS overturned the Texan law. Well then.

In Kristen Walker Hatten’s words,

Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt concerned a 2013 Texas law known as House Bill 2, which required two new regulations for abortion clinics: first, abortion doctors would have to obtain admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinic; and second, clinics would need to meet specifications required to become ambulatory surgical centers.

Their objection to HB2 demonstrates that abortion advocates care more about protecting the abortion industry than protecting women. This decision proves what pro-life feminists have been saying for years: the pro-choice position is misogyny in action. Striking down this law will harm women.

So the “good” news? Abortion facilities are being held to higher standards. Bad news? Babies continue to be killed and more women are hurt by abortion.

Woman in Prayer

I appreciate the way the author of the Telegraph article wrapped up his piece:

There were 185,824 abortions in 2015. Some 38 per cent of those who had an abortion last year had undergone a similar procedure before. These figures are enormous, staggering. For the individual involved they represent a very personal choice, and pro-lifers are sensitive to that, but it’s impossible to separate that choice from the social conditions that shape it. This is not a society that encourages the formation of families, either culturally or materially. And if society is not open to the possibilities of life, it is hardly a surprise that some choose to terminate it.

And so the fight continues.

(PS. Prolifers: Research what MSI is doing to meet the standards on “consent”. There’s likely something useful there.)

Elsie Wayne passes away

by 1 Comment

A pro-life woman and former Member of Parliament from New Brunswick, Elsie Wayne, has passed away. Elsie Wayne was known to be pro-life thereby proving, once again, that the pro-life cause has never been made up of exclusively or even predominantly of men. May she rest in peace.

Elsie Wayne

 

 

Meta