Good commentary on “The War on Women” over at Dumb Old Housewives.

For me, this poster marks another “count the euphemisms” moment. I got six, which is a lot for a short poster. My count starts with the phrase “protecting women’s health” and ends with “women are watching” which seems to me to mean “if you don’t do what we, a small group of extreme activists who happen to be women, want, we will hunt you down in your sleep.” Women are watching, indeed.

If you find yourself in the GTA, check this out tomorrow. I am going to the Ottawa event. But I wish I could go to the Toronto event, not least of the reasons being that I see it’s being held in Roncesvalles, and that is a fun area. You could go and pick up some Polish doughnuts while you are at it.

Come hear this free presentation by the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform’s Stephanie Gray and Jonathon Van Maren.  Having spoken internationally and had writings published internationally, respectively, these two engaging and young speakers promise to inspire you with hope that abortion will end.  With the abortion crisis seemingly getting worse as society sees a move towards female-feticide and infanticide, what is the pro-life movement to do?  Is it possible to transform the Culture of Death to a Culture of Life?  Will hearts and minds be won for the pro-life cause?  What can you do in your everyday life to make a difference? Stephanie and Jonathon will answer these questions and give you practical tools to EndtheKilling in your community.  Please come out, and bring friends.

The Canadian Autoworkers Union only entered into the abortion debate because of The New Abortion Caravan. Not that you’d know it from this article.

I like Melinda Gates, I really do. Though I don’t know her personally, I feel like she’s a very genuine person who truly cares about her fellow human beings, even if she is wrong about how to help them. It is true that she’s giving an awful lot of money and support to groups and causes that, beneath the veneer of pretty rhetoric, probably care more about economics than they do about people. This on-line petition is for Melinda Gates to reassess the upcoming Family Planning Summit which her foundation is co-hosting and to consider the concerns and agendas of organizations that promote healthy child-birth rather than population control. You can read the petition and sign it for yourself here.

He has a way with words:

We live or die by the health of the physical environment which we struggle to conserve. Just as crucially, we are nourished by an ethical environment, the moral oxygen of our human world.

In the beautiful words of Dr. Margaret Cottle, a colleague of mine, we have been standing among ancient trees, an old-growth forest of noble principle. It has been growing organically for 2,400 years, since Hippocrates, a “delicate social ecology of mutual support and protection” which forbids the killing of a patient.

Carter v. Canada , the judge-decreed legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in Canada, tries to take a chainsaw to that old-growth forest. Once it is gone, it will be gone forever. Plant some seedlings, but it will never be the same. Whether the prior Supreme Court of Canada ruling against this, and the clearly voted will of Parliament can be dismissed by a provincial court judge is now a topic of outrage.

I wanted to run this article from the Atlantic Monthly by some of my working mom friends, but realized at 20 pages long (I know, I printed it) none of them would have time to read it.

To summarize: in this article, a very successful working mother comments on whether or not women can “have it all.”

I found the article dissatisfying. It attempts to get at some of these very real problems around working, kids and balance, but addresses those questions from within a feminist framework, concluding that if the States had a female president, somehow things would be different. Simultaneously, however, she argues that work/life balance is getting better, thanks to men asking for changes…

I think I may have the book idea I’m always looking for: The end of the feminist era is upon us, through a combination of factors. It was always economically unsustainable and feminism, however it started, is ending by reflecting only the most extreme ideologues in the movement, women who didn’t actually have a solid concept of women’s freedom in mind. As a result, today, I think we are watching the crumbling of feminism all around us. The question I suppose is: what does this mean and what does the future hold?

Good article, but check out the comments too, for a taste of the kind of opposition they encounter.

You might read this article about women being forced to have abortions in China and feel a sense of anger and frustration. But it might remain a more distant issue, until you consider that we as Canadians have been (and likely continue to be, though I still have to research it) complicit.

The New Abortion Caravan hits my home town today. I wish them well. Toronto is a place where pro-lifers are banished outside the city limits, as I recall, growing up at my high school and at uni.

I am genuinely horrified by female circumcision. So this article about Liberia attempting to correct this barbaric practice is good. Reading here:

In the meantime, the ritual continues to kill. Girls perish from prolonged bleeding or from the dangerous use of unsterilized blades in the ritual ceremony. “Sometimes it’s unsafe because they use the same instrument for other women, and they keep it for years,” said Kulah Borbor, a 46-year-old woman who underwent the procedure as an adolescent. “Sometimes they make a mistake and they cut where they shouldn’t cut. You bleed and bleed, and sometimes you die because no medical person is there. You see women running around and looking for help, but there is no help.” … In Liberia’s rural villages, female circumcision is rarely questioned. Leaders of the secret society become angry when they are asked about it. “It’s our culture,” said Yamah Augustine, leader of the Sande Society in a village called Nimba Point. “Our grandparents did it,” she said. “Even if the president says we should abandon it, we won’t abandon it. Nobody can ask me about my culture.”

I picture some advocating for making the practice safe. Where else have we heard the argument that if women are certainly going to do it anyway, it should at least be safe?