What does celebrating International Women’s Day (March 8th) look like from the perspective of Marie Stopes International?  Sign up for their e-newsletters and find out.

Today, they are celebrating Sofia (age 17) who

lives in a rural village in Tanzania. She’s determined to complete her education and find a job that serves her community. She’s seen the ambitions of girls her age broken because of unplanned pregnancies. And she doesn’t want that to happen to her.

Sophia knows that a Marie Stopes Tanzania outreach team visits her village regularly to provide contraception. So, when she is ready to have sex she’ll be able to make choices to plan for her future.

You can read more about Sophia and her friends here.

In other words, they are celebrating the fact that sweet, young Sophia is going to get put on drugs, not to treat a disease, but to fool her body into “thinking” it is already pregnant, so that when she begins to have promiscuous sex  (a likely scenario when you become sexually active at a young age) she won’t have THE most terrible of all things happen to her: PREGNANCY.

Does the Marie Stopes ‘outreach team’ warn these girls that 50% of all newly acquired HIV infections across the globe are occurring in women of reproductive age? Do they warn these girls that this is due to the powerful steriod-based drugs that alter their immunity and their cervical flora, making them more susceptible to infection?  Do they warn them that once they have contracted HIV, these contraceptives have a debilitating effect, in that they lead to a deadly progression of the disease? (Report from the 2009 Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS)

And what about young Sofia’s heart when she becomes bonded to the men she is having sex with?  What about the fact that none of these young people are being prepared for the long term commitment of a stable marriage?

Setting these young women on this course of broken hearts and dreams, not to mention the terrible risk of disease they will now face, is a crime against humanity.

Incidentally, the article mentions that the work of the “outreach team” is funded by USAID,

and is crucial in making sure that women in the village have choices: choices about whether to use contraception and – should they decide to – a choice of family planning methods.

Hmm…  I wonder what those “family planning methods” might be?

Here’s a group that doesn’t get a lot of recognition The National Campus Life Network (NCLN).  This bunch of dedicated, organized students have campus pro-life clubs at universities and colleges across Canada.  They receive the brunt of censorship and discrimination by their agenda-driven student unions, but despite the injustices routinely faced, they continue to hold events and displays, all in an effort to bring awareness to the plight of Canada’s unborn, and the needs of mothers in crisis.

Over the next week, six university campus clubs in BC will be holding simultaneous events on their campuses.  Their press release states:

Events include academic debates, resource distribution, information tables, and abortion imagery projects, all aimed at educating and engaging students in dialogue on the abortion issue. These clubs are also calling on their local politicians, asking them to bring the abortion debate to parliament.

Having staged such events on university campuses myself, I know how much courage it takes.  Kudos to NCLN in their efforts!

Here’s a new and innovative initiative:  Helping women with ultrasound imaging, free pregnancy testing, and a free cab ride to the nearest CPC right before they walk into the abortion clinic!  Apparently it’s having a huge impact.

Save the Storks is the brain child of David Pomerantz, 23, described as a “vegan hipster with emo hair.”  He’s also a practicing Christian and has worked with a team of people to develop a portable Save the Stork ultrasound clinic, that parks outside of abortion clinics.

I wonder if Save the Stork clinics would escape our infamous ‘Bubble-Zone Laws’ here in Canada?

Read more here.

Interested in hearing a discussion about Rick Santorum, abortion, contraception and evangelicals? You can listen to my two-cents on Stephanie Domet’s Mainstreet show today on CBC Radio around 4:40PM (Atlantic).

This week the UN is holding the 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW56), a parallel event is also taking place to respond with positive options to the needs of rural women. The event takes place 6 March 2012 at 6:15pm at the Boss Room, 8th Floor at the CCUN building and is being organized by the Institute for Family Policy (IPF).

On the subject of after-birth abortion, the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics not only makes a defense for publishing it, but whines about the nasty responses it received.

As Editor of the Journal, I would like to defend its publication. The arguments presented, are [from] the most eminent philosophers and bioethicists in the world, including Peter Singer, Michael Tooley and John Harris in defense of infanticide, which the authors call after-birth abortion.”

Is that so! “In defense of infanticide…” If this is not a fine example of how post-modern, liberal academics lose their grip on reality, I don’t know what is.

The “most popular” comment by one Eric_Dunham in the blog comment section is not to be missed:

…You attacked the deepest held beliefs of the majority of humanity. You allowed an article to be published that advocates dispassionate violence against the most helpless of all human beings.
Yet, somehow, all you’re worried about is the “deep opposition” … “to liberal values and fanatical opposition to” … “reasoned engagement.”

I do like it when “liberal values” get exposed, and real reasoning gets a chance to stand up.

Another great column about the “ethicists” who wrote an article about after-birth abortion.

I chatted with Brian Lilley about this on his show last night. (This is not online, sorry, so I can’t post it. When Sun TV chooses not to post my clips I always wonder if it’s because I was so god-awful that they can’t bring themselves to. Andrea: it’s not all about you.)

Anyhoo, Brian’s first question for me was “Does this shock you?”

Not tremendously, is my answer. Because this idea is as old as the hills. Older, in fact, depending on what hills you are referring to.

Brian also worried that after-birth abortion would take hold in society.

I said I thought not. Then I went on to say how defending life is a Judeo-Christian value and one we should be proud of.

But Canada is post-Judeo-Christian. We’re so far beyond that.

So if I could do the interview again, I think I’d share Brian’s concern. Leaving our Judeo-Christian heritage behind also means leaving behind such quaint notions as “it’s wrong to throw your baby off a cliff.”

A culture that can create sanitary clinics where pregnant mothers can go to have the “products of conception” vacuumed out of their uterus ain’t too far removed from one where babies are left exposed to die on hilltops. Sorry.

Something to think about.

I feel like there must be other news going on in the whole world other than the robo-calls scandal that is dominating so much of the Canadian media’s attention.

Then I learn that’s very much true.

Jonas Himmelstrand, a soft-spoken Swede, has been forced into exile in Finland for homeschooling his children.

This was a real wake-up call/a shock for me this week. I’m used to hearing about persecution. I’m used to hearing about stupid government decisions. I’ve heard of Germans and Swedes being bureaucratically pushed around and persecuted for homeschooling. But there’s nothing like having a personal connection to drive the point home, and I had the honour of meeting Jonas Himmelstrand at my work’s conference last year.

There’s a very unfortunate mentality that can develop in people, even people like me, who were raised with a suspicion of government. (When your parents are forced to flee their own homeland because of the government, that pretty much seals the deal.)

Many Canadians still think that when someone is pushed around by government officials they may have actually done something wrong.

Lately, Canada has been giving me ample opportunity to rediscover that this isn’t true.

There was Derek Hoare in British Columbia whose daughter was taken away from him for no reason. There’s the Sansone family, where the father was arrested when his five-year-old daughter drew a picture of a gun. There’s Linda Gibbons, who has spent more time in jail than Karla Homolka for standing on a sidewalk with a sign. I could go on (and on).

Now Sweden is giving me more opportunity to rediscover why this isn’t true. I’m a little surprised there hasn’t been more attention paid to this.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

We need to be keenly aware of this.

You can learn more about Jonas Himmelstrand and his work by watching this clip from the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada’s conference last year. At the very end in the question and answer session, he explains how it is that he is able to homeschool in Sweden when it is illegal. There he says “You have to be prepared to leave the country on short notice,” which is what has subsequently happened to him.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEED4yFltCE]

I ran into a friend yesterday on my way to do the Sun TV hit on “after-birth abortion.” His comment was that we should never trust the experts. At the time, I agreed, but now I realize, I do not. This headline reads “Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say.” That’s cuz abortion is killing babies, which is something some of us have been saying for quite some time.

Trust the experts, after all! (I hasten to add that their conclusions from this statement of fact are something else entirely.)