Remember when Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness“? “Truthiness is a “truth” that a person claims to know intuitively “from the gut” or because it “feels right” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.”

I now coin the word “choiciness.” Same idea. Choiciness is a choice that a person defends vehemently because it “feels right” and “sounds good” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

How did I come to coin this word? After discussing abortion with two Carleton University students on campus radio yesterday for an hour.

Upstanding young people of good will, I must hasten to add.

But the gist of the conversation was this: Abortion is bad. It should not be used as birth control. It can cause harm. But it must remain a choice.

I don’t actually disagree all too vehemently. It must not remain a choice in our minds and hearts, but people are certainly free to make their own monumental life errors.

They were truly hung up on the legislative side of things. But given how hung up they were on that, they couldn’t even come forward and say abortion is a terrible choice.

At the outset I explained that I believe in a “Canada without abortion. By choice.” And the host said, so how does that make you different from pro-choicers?

It makes me very different, because I can identify that abortion is a horrible, terrible, life-ending choice that is incompatible with human dignity and true concepts of freedom. Some things are not a choice. And whether or not the state tells me there is a law on this matter, I will always know it is wrong. It’s not confusing. There’s no debate about when life begins.

I was there with a Catholic chaplain on campus, who tried his darndest to explain concepts of what true freedom, true love and community mean from a Christian perspective. It all made sense to me, and I would have liked to hear more. But the worldview is so substantially different from the one that says FREE CHOICE IS OUR HIGHEST VALUE, that I fear it fell on deaf ears.They should interview him, one on one, about the worldview stuff. Would be interesting.

I remain optimistic, though. Because even these ardent supporters of choice were not ardent supports of abortion, and that came through loud and clear.

This is good news, and might even give our Canadian government some chutzpah when it comes to further cuts to Planned Parenthood here.

“Foreign Aid to Mining Firms”

The Harper government recently announced a publicly funded agreement between three of Canada’s mining giants and three of Canada’s leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs). […]

“The Canadian government is using aid to support the expansion of Canadian mining…[and] to determine development paths inside countries according to the logic of mining companies,” Yao Graham of Third World Network Africa […]

“CIDA has always worked government-to-government,” said Coumans. “Now what CIDA is doing is channeling Canadian taxpayer money directly to the mine site and basically paying for corporate social responsibility projects, and that is very bizarre.”

What does this mean? It means that mining companies have a bad track record of damaging regions, so now they’ve been paired with groups that usually focus on humanitarian issues/sustainable development and receive government funds. These are the groups we want to build hospitals and make good on the promises we make to foreign countries. Promises that matter so much to us we’re willing to give gobs of money towards them, like lowering maternal death rates and ending child poverty. However with this unusual pairing, these groups are now meant to keep “in check” the mining company, as well as clean up any further damage the mining causes to already needy regions at the taxpayer’s expense. The money moved like a game of three-card Monte, and we’ve taken our eyes off the lady.

Iris is an intelligent software assistant and knowledge navigator application (ask it something, and it will answer you). It’s the Android version of Apple’s Siri. My spouse recently got an Android phone, so I thought I would ask Iris a few questions. Here’s what she had to say about abortion. I apologize in advance for the blur, I’m know for being a poor camera operator!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JKCZiF62tA&feature=youtu.be]

When I asked her if she was pro-choice Iris answered, “I am against it.” When asked if she was Christian Iris said, “I am secular.”

If you want to know if you’ll be treated any differently once you’re pregnant, the short answer is yes. I imagine this goes for all women, but it is especially true for the young and unmarried ladies out there. Things will be different, but a new autobiographical book entitled The Pregnancy Project concludes that the baby bump doesn’t push a successful life out of reach.

Gaby Rodriguez, of Toppenish, Wash., got headlines last April when she announced at a high school assembly that she had worn a faux baby bump for months to explore stereotypes about teen pregnancy. […]

“Being a Hispanic girl from a family full of teen pregnancies meant that my odds of also becoming a teen mom were way higher than average,” she wrote. “If I gave people what they predicted, how would they react?”

Rodriguez believes the biggest message from her experience is: Things will be OK.

“It’s not the end of the road for them,” she said. “It’s going to be harder, but it’s not the end of the road.”

I’ve been asked difficult questions while speaking to groups, difficult in that the answers seem complex and don’t always readily pop into my mind. These get easier to answer with experience, but I can tell you that the most difficult questions to field often come from my fellow women who, like me, love and want to support womankind as best we can.

I’m talking about feminists.

I don’t mind the “f” word, in fact, I use it regularly in lots of positive ways. I’ll always understand some of the frustrations of being a woman (limited though it may be to my western experience), the desire to overcome obstacles, and the hope that my own daughters will have positive non-violent options in their lives. I get feminism, even if it doesn’t always get me.

I also get that conversations with women who feel abortion is “necessary” are often the most emotionally charged. Why? Because women mean so much to us. To keep your reason, it helps to think ahead about the kinds of questions a woman might ask and to lend their input Feminists for Life of America have prepared a Q&A of “Pro-Woman Answers to Pro-Choice Questions“.  They’re worth looking at. I like this one in particular:

Don’t you respect women enough to allow them to make a choice?

Most women do not have abortions as a matter of “choice,” but because they feel they have no resources to support a different choice. A coerced decision is not a free choice—it’s a last resort.

We support nonviolent choices—single motherhood, fatherhood, grandparenthood, marriage and various adoption options—along with practical resources and support.

A society that promotes abortion as a “necessity” or “necessary evil” underestimates women and the violence of abortion and disregards what women really want.

…to sex selective abortions delivered by Australian/Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville.

So why is there this huge fuss about sex selection abortion? If one can have an abortion for any reason or none, why not because a baby of the opposite sex is strongly preferred?

The reason is, as sex selection abortion most clearly demonstrates, that abortion is not just a private matter. The issue involves shared societal values, cultural norms and clashes of cultural values and shows that the cumulative impact of abortion has societal consequences.

The one thing you will never hear me say is that “I represent women.” No. You can choose for yourself whether ProWomanProLife represents you or not. And this site was started in opposition to the many pro-abortion feminists who were supposedly out there representing me.

This article by Karen Selick is about changing the law regarding marriage/cohabitation in Quebec. It’s a good article, but that is besides the point. This part caught my eye:

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) has intervened in the court proceedings to support Lola’s side. LEAF purports to represent Canadian women, but they certainly don’t represent me. I find their arguments illogical, demeaning and repugnant.

I do so wish that “women’s groups” would stop “representing” me in the public square. It would be such a relief.

WECARE for “World Expert Consortium for Abortion Research and Education” is going to be very useful, indeed.

Today, WECARE posts an assessment of the “abortion is safer than childbirth” study.

Excellent assessment, worth reading in full. It gives a sense of just how politicized the research around abortion is.

This site, WECARE, is going to be extraordinarily useful.

WECARE stands for World Expert Consortium for Abortion Research and Education.

In a world where it appears the Guttmacher is the only agency publishing or assessing abortion-related research, this is long overdue. (The Guttmacher is the research arm of Planned Parenthood. That doesn’t mean everything they do is flawed, but as they say, if you follow the money and it leads you to abortion providers, one certainly needs to be aware of that bias! That said, in my past life as a journalist, I once interviewed a psychologist, who, unprompted, said some of the Guttmacher’s work specifically to do with abortion is some of the shoddiest work he had ever seen. And this was no “pro-life” psychologist, and he did not think he was speaking to a “pro-life” journalist. I digress.)

Anyway, bookmark this site, because when it comes to getting great, up-to-date scientific information about abortion, it’s hard to find.