Now THIS is a novel idea.  Melinda Gates has revealed in an exclusive interview with Newsweek that

she has decided to make family planning her signature issue … “My goal is to get this back on the global agenda,” she says.

I didn’t realize that it had gone off the “agenda.”  In fact, the Gates Foundation and the UN Population Fund have been pouring billions into contraception for decades.  And women around the world get to pump liquid contraceptives into their veins because of it.  (The preferred method in poorer nations is Depo Provera. Never mind the health consequences and the fact that we would not offer such forms of population control en mass to wealthy women in the developed world.)

Oh, and all of this comes from her “Catholic Faith.”

Perhaps more importantly, there’s her Catholic faith, which has always informed her work…. she went through a lot of soul-searching before she was ready to champion the issue publicly. “I had to wrestle with which pieces of religion do I use and believe in my life, what would I counsel my daughters to do,” she says. Defying church teachings was difficult, she adds, but also came to seem morally necessary.

I suppose being a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ must be hard.

I find this whole issue incredibly sad and misguided.  Instead of teaching women how to respect their natural fertility cycles (something that Mother Teresa did in the streets of Calcutta with remarkable success), or even focusing on providing these women with hospitals where they can receive pre- and post-natal care, she is towing the old population control line.

Self sacrifice.  Nature has imbedded a self-sacrifice mechanism into the cellular level.  Damaged embryonic stem cells will cease to threaten the growing embryo by self-destructing. Not really a lesson that you would want to take too literally, but just the general notion that nature works for the good of the growing embryo.  Perhaps it’s a worthy “take home” lesson for some of our politicians, and even our familiar feminists.

I have not done a post about Chen Guangcheng yet, and this is only for a lack of time, not a lack of support for his cause. I am trying to follow along, and will be using this web site to help with that.

I liked this column, especially this:

But if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And even get a job. Good luck!

However, the advice contained therein is going against decades and decades of cumulative PR. For me, the BS PR started in high school. We were extra, extra special young women, forging new paths for an extraordinary, cancer-curing future. We were told this regularly. My alma mater still sends out fancy brochures to this effect, only it bothers me less ever since I gave them a gmail address I barely check. From time to time my sister will ask: Are you filling out said survey/answering said questionnaire/giving money to our dear alma mater? And my general response is “What survey/questionnaire/request for money?”

I’m generally a fan of increased knowledge, but in small instances like this, ignorance is truly bliss.

Here’s your “movie trailer” to feel enthused and get in on the action. Many thanks to André Schutten of ARPA (Association for Reformed Political Action) for creating a pro-life YouTube clip that actually feels somewhat fun!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0kdrTD6g6s]

More info on the day’s events, here.

I am not sure why this makes me cry,  but there you go. Something beautiful there. Perhaps in reading I’m keenly aware of my own shortcomings, my own very developed sense of entitlement. You may like to pull out a tissue before reading. My favourite part:

The eldest of four siblings, he has seen two brothers and a sister surpass him in size, and acquire cars and college educations. He, however, with an underdeveloped entitlement mentality, has been equable about life’s sometimes careless allocation of equity. Perhaps this is partly because, given the nature of Down syndrome, neither he nor his parents have any tormenting sense of what might have been. Down syndrome did not alter the trajectory of his life; Jon was Jon from conception on.

This year Jon will spend his birthday where every year he spends 81 spring, summer and autumn days and evenings, at Nationals Park, in his seat behind the home team’s dugout. The Phillies will be in town, and Jon will be wishing them ruination, just another man, beer in hand, among equals in the republic of baseball.

Is this how the story goes?

When supermodel Linda Evangelista told French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault in 2006 she was pregnant with his child, he asked her to get an abortion, her attorney charged Thursday on the first day of a child-support trial in Manhattan. Pinault, 49, who is currently married to actress Salma Hayek, denied that charge but testified he told Evangelista that “if she were to have a child (they) might not have a relationship.” With that a four-month relationship, in which he said the couple only actually saw each other seven days, came to an end.

Choices, choices. I’d say supermodel Linda Evangelista had a choice as to whether she’d sleep with someone she barely knew. So did Pinault. But once a baby came into the picture with the pregnancy, he did not have a choice to say she should kill it. Neither had a choice to terminate a life based on their own indiscretion. This is how these things play out for many folks, I’m well aware. And your friendly neighbourhood liberal would have you believe that control over one’s body starts after conception. Before that? No control whatsoever. Yes, I am now channeling my grandmother (who incidentally I’ve never heard say anything like this.)

Interesting post about why we say someone is a vegetable, post-debilitating injury or illness.

So by now we’ve all heard about the Nova Scotia teenager who was suspended for wearing a t-shirt that says, “Life is wasted without Jesus.”

If I were him, I’d comply and take the t-shirt off.

The next day I’d wear my pro-guns t-shirt. Followed up by an anti-Occupier t-shirt, followed up by a “Stop Global Whining” t-shirt. Then, of course, I’d be sure to find an anti-abortion t-shirt that was particularly strident, and put that on for good measure. Rinse, repeat.

There’s no limit to the offensive Ts that can be found on this here thing called the Internet.

Dear school administrator: Abortion stops a beating heart. Have a nice day.

What is it about these staff that demand perfect and total conformity? Oh wait, that’s their business: to make kids conform. To squash the really creative ones. To diagnose the really active ones with ADD. But let’s make sure we expand our school system to include toddlers.

Here ends the rant. (Sorry about that.)

Good commentary on these concepts in the Post today.

Our culture, which treasures freedom above any other value, is conflicted about what freedom means. Is it the raw assertion of my own will, in which any limitation of that will, whether imposed from without or embraced from within, makes me something less than what I should be? Or is freedom my capacity to choose to what great mission I will devote my energies, my talents, even my life? Does maximizing my freedom mean preserving only the capacity to choose, to keep my options open? Or is freedom noble precisely because it enables us to commit to a particular choice, one mission among a hundred options?

 

In this concept of autonomy, freedom and choice, what is being chosen matters as much as the fact that we have a choice. You might as well sit in a real prison if you are going to spiritually land yourself there anyway through bad choices.

While I’m at it, there was some good commentary on the same concepts published by my workplace, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, last week.