Sources say it’s being considered. They also report that pro-lifers, apparently, oppose this. I don’t think I would; I think Condoleeza Rice could make for a great running mate.

In this article about global maternal health from the Globe and Mail, the author makes so many false assumptions and claims that it’s hard to respond in just one blog post, but I’ll try.

The author Erin Anderssen assumes a number of things, the first that all women are the same. Anderson claims to know what women want with statements like,

For women, having more reproductive choice means fewer children, spaced farther apart […]

Currently, the number of women who have an unmet need for modern contraception in 2012 is 222 million.

Obviously having more “choice” doesn’t produce a cookie-cutter outcome, and I can personally testify (along with other women from this site) that spacing children farther apart and having less of them is not a common goal all women share. In addition, there is the statement that all women who don’t have immediate access to contraception “need” it. I’m sure that many of the women the author is speaking on behalf of so willfully don’t, in fact, want birth control. What I have heard women from developed countries say time and time again is that they don’t want to continue to be pregnant. I hear this statement differently than Andersen probably does. When a woman says she doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore, I hear a woman saying she wants more control over her sex life, not over her ovaries. High rape statistics and social obligations to be subservient in the bedroom lead to women having sex when they don’t want to, and this in turn leads to being pregnant when she doesn’t want to be. Simply providing contraception to a woman will not make her more “free” when having sex is an obligation for her.

The second point I’d like to make is that social stigma ought not be a given. What I mean here is that we don’t need to accept that a girl can be kicked out of school or her home for being pregnant.

In a too-common story in her village of Kisiwa in Tanzania, Maria Mwaya found herself unexpectedly pregnant at the age of 16. When she tried to continue to attend school, she was ordered home: she was seen as a mother, and no longer a student. […]

Women are creatures who can get pregnant, and there shouldn’t need to be a separate set of rights for women and pregnant women. We’re all, pregnant or not, women. Being forced to leave school because you’re pregnant is not acceptable. Why anyone would say contraception is the solution when a woman’s right to an education is being violated?

We know that the majority of maternal deaths (over 90%) are from preventable causes that have nothing to do with contraception or abortion, and yet this article focuses on contraception as the holy grail, claiming that,

 If every woman seeking modern contraception methods in all developing countries were supplied, an additional 54 million unintended pregnancies would be prevented […]

The Cost Contraceptive care in 2012 will cost $4-billion in the developing world. To meet the need of all women in the developing world would cost $8.1-billion per year.

I know the pharmaceutical companies are drooling over those numbers, but contraception doesn’t prevent all pregnancies, it doesn’t give women the choice of having sex or not, and it doesn’t enforce women’s rights. The only solution for permanent change is to give women the freedom to have their children safely by providing health care, enforcing women’s rights to education, collapsing the stigma of pregnancy, and giving women control over when they do and don’t have sex by respecting women and their ability to become pregnant.

Every single person affiliated with this site has their real name and real picture up. The point being that whether you love or hate our views on abortion, you know we are real people. We want to tell the world that being pro-life is a perfectly reasonable stand for a strong woman to take, so we show you our real lives (to a degree, since I also believe in privacy).

I understand why anonymity is desirable in the abortion debate. You might lose your job. There are security issues. I have been to the police station in Ottawa to report highly disturbing emails sent to my site, for example. Overall, however, if you have chosen to be activist on this issue, you probably, like me, feel you have little to lose by going public. If an employer doesn’t want me because of my pro-life views, would I want to work there? Probably not.

I find many of the pro-choice blogs I follow from time to time do not follow the same ethos. These are people like Pedgehog working in a clinic (fuzzy photo, bare bones bio and I’m assuming she wasn’t christened “Pedgehog”) or ardent defenders of abortion like Fern Hill (clear photo–of a gorgeous German Shepherd, who I am assuming doesn’t do the typing).

Here we have another highly politicized abortion defence that remains unconvincing precisely because of the anonymity.

There are reasons to be anonymous when blogging about abortion. And I have not quantified the number of pro-life anonymous blogs versus pro-choice anonymous blogs. In my experience, however, the pro-life blogs are not (mostly) anonymous and the pro-choice ones (mostly) are. I wonder why, since very often the voices at the pro-choice blogs are testifying to the normalcy and neutrality of abortion.

It can be controversial to assert in public debate with pro-choicers that abortion is used as birth control. But then there are pro-choicers like this, who just come right out and say it:

Until mass abstinence is feasible or permanent pregnancy is desired, sustainable, or safe, though, the best options women have to control their reproductive health are contraception and abortion.”

Sales of abortion pills/kits in India have fallen between 65 and 78 percent in Mumbai, India. This is due to the FDA there cracking down on the drugs being pushed by pharmaceutical companies in the form of marketing schemes and “deals” on the product.

Following the decision of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to tighten the screws on the sale of abortion pills, sale of such drugs has dropped by a whopping 78% across the state.

[…] Commenting on the trend of pharmaceutical companies pushing sale of such drugs, he said companies through their medical representatives are luring doctors with schemes like ‘buy 1 get 5 free’. “This is a serious trend and we are going to take action against them,’’ he said.

Last night I watched Billy Wilder’s film Ace in the Hole (1951) about the relationship between the press and the people. In it, the main character Tatum, a “$250-a-week newsman,” manipulates a rescue effort to save a man trapped in a collapsed cave. Rather than pursue the 16-hour task of saving the man by building support beams, Tatum has the rescue team drill from the top of the mountain to save him instead, giving him six to seven days in which to milk the story. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but it doesn’t end well for the trapped man or Tatum’s tortured soul.

Applying the analogy of Ace in the Hole to yesterday’s article from NPR, you’ll notice that gendercide and forced abortions by the score weren’t quite enough to get everyone up in arms over China’s one-child policy. It took the human interest story of 23-year-old Feng Jianmei posting the image of her forcibly aborted 7 month gestation child to rock the boat. But now that everyone’s talking, they’re talking not about the heart of the matter (gender and abortion), they’re talking about demographics. NPR’s coverage of Feng Jianmei’s forced abortion took all that focused and devoted reader attention and offered up, for well over 60% of the article, the opinions of economists and demographers rather than covering the obvious human rights violations.

…opposition to the country’s one-child policy today goes well beyond human rights. Increasingly, Chinese scholars say birth restrictions are creating a demographic disaster that will leave China with far fewer workers to drive its economy and a disproportionately large number of elderly to care for. “In the field of population studies, everybody thinks the policy should be modified,” says Zheng Zhenzhen, a demographer with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

I’ve been told by reporters before that if I want to get more coverage I should go the demographics route, but I’m vehemently against that for a number of reasons. It doesn’t discuss what’s really wrong with abortion, and it gives the impression that having children is some sort of patriotic duty. It’s like using a drill to rescue a trapped man, and I’m not interested in what makes the “better story.” I didn’t think NPR was either, but my vision was probably blurred by my fondness for them. The good-guy news editor in Ace in the Hole had one motto: “Tell the Truth.“

I won’t bemoan the state of gender relations. I won’t, because others do it for me. You have more traditional/conservative/religious female bloggers complaining about men. You have traditional/conservative/religious men complaining about women. You have liberal feminist atheists doing the same. My personal relationships with the men in my life are great. Societally speaking, however, I’m aware that things are not on the up and up.

Anyway, here’s one of the many blog posts on this theme. And what it highlights is that men and women are different, which is simultaneously one of the most ridiculously self obvious things to say and one of the most controversial.

Here’s where I’ll tie this in to abortion. If we fail to acknowledge that men and women are different, we’ll never get over this idea that “abortion is a woman’s right.” Because this notion stems in part from the idea that when women have sex, the outcome should be exactly the same as it is for men. Men can’t get pregnant, ergo, neither should women. The “unpregnancy” of abortion is a mainstay of this flawed worldview.

(Please note: I’m not sure that I’ve used the word “ergo” properly, but gosh, doesn’t it just seem to fit in with the flow of that sentence?)

These results aren’t what I’d like to hear. That said, these results are not what extreme advocates for “abortion rights” would like to hear either.

Canadians generally support a woman’s right to have an abortion but many believe the medical procedure should only be allowed in “certain circumstances,” a new poll has found.

This “resignation” doesn’t make me sad and I’m not concerned about 16 dollar glasses of orange juice.

I am concerned when a minister can’t tell the difference between groups that do charitable work with people in need, and groups that push for “abortion rights” in countries that don’t want ’em.

That’s why I won’t miss Bev Oda.

Tonight after an exhausting weekend of carrying boxes up and down three flights of stairs, I made my way over to the New Abortion Caravan event here in Ottawa. Because I am currently semi-comatose my blog post will not be long or profound, but simply say Get Thee to Hear a CCBR presentation when you can, because they do good work. And you may feel conflicted over their use of graphic visuals, but their explanation for this is eloquent and thought-provoking.

What wasn’t eloquent or thought-provoking was walking out through a wall of protestors calling out “My body, my choice” in both official languages. I left early, too, and by myself, and they still kicked into high gear as they saw me coming. I smiled and waved. I do feel badly for these protestors, in a way, and it’s important to remember that those folks are not the target audience. They would be, if they would stop shouting for long enough to carry on a conversation, but until that point, I’ll leave them be.