PEI Health Minister Doug Currie says abortion is not a service that PEI will offer any time soon. I have no idea (truly) where he stands on the life issue. However, if he were pro-life, simply stating that abortion is an additional burden on the system and not something they can add right now would be the right talking points.

This reader wrote in with her personal story in response to my post about Tiller. She has given me permission to post it, anonymously.

Just wanted to share my experience. At [the hospital] where I was a patient, they promote prenatal testing and abortion. Both are always options they mention. When I found I was unexpectedly pregnant with my second child I was highly distressed (to put it mildly) as was my husband. My first pregnancy ended with a beautiful daughter but a horrific birth that left me with post traumatic stress. I had severe postpartum depression for over a year. I was physically and psychologically in terrible shape and didn’t plan any more children.
When I went to my doctor to begin prenatal care I was sobbing saying how terrified I was of having the same experience again. Over a year after the first birth I was still waking at night from nightmares. The resident refused to refer me to an OB for a C-section saying “There is no medical reason” for a referral. How ironic given that I was in psychiatric care and literally suicidal at the thought of giving birth again. I had told my husband I would wait until the end of my pregnancy and then stab myself to force an emergency C-section if I couldn’t have a planned one. I was not being dramatic, I literally would have rather died than give birth again.
I did not for a minute consider abortion but that was the first thing I was offered since my pregnancy was unplanned. Since I didn’t want an abortion no one wanted to help me. I had to return to the doctor repeatedly until I saw someone different who gave me the referral. Ironically, the OB told me I did have a medical reason beyond the obvious psychiatric reason. If I had a similar birth experience I would have stand a high risk of not healing a second time and facing lifelong problems.
I want to make a complaint about the practice for refusing me the referral but haven’t yet. Once abortion is on the table as an alternative people stop considering other more nuanced, non-violent, patient-centred approaches.

“Once abortion is on the table as an alternative people stop considering other more nuanced, non-violent, patient-centred approaches.” How true. Thank you to this reader for sharing her story.

Well, hello there. I’m finally crawling out from under this rock I’ve been hiding under for a few months. Between experiencing life as a new mother (I gave birth to Edmund Charles at the end of July, he’s cute), my husband going to sea, visiting my parents in Seattle for extended periods of time while my husband is at sea, and other odds and ends, I haven’t had much time to follow the news, read blogs, or much anything else but walk the dogs and try to figure out what is possessing the evil baby swing (I need an old priest and a young priest . . . ). So here goes.

A friend of mine posted this article on Google+ today and it caught my attention. There is a proposed amendment to Mississippi’s state constitution to define personhood as beginning at the moment of conception.

Though the text of the amendment is simple, the implications if it passes couldn’t be more complex. If approved by Mississippi voters on Tuesday, it would make it impossible to get an abortion and hamper the ability to get some forms of birth control.

Because the amendment would define a fertilized egg as a person with full legal rights, it could have an impact on a woman’s ability to get the morning-after pill or birth control pills that destroy fertilized eggs, and it could make in vitro fertilization treatments more difficult because it could become illegal to dispose of unused fertilized eggs. This could lead to a nationwide debate about women’s rights and abortion while setting up a possible challenge to the landmark Roe v. Wade case, which makes abortion legal.

Outside of the whole debate of whether or not this should be enacted into law, the whole thing that has always baffled me is the idea of separating personhood from humanity. It has never made much sense to me. Why on earth would we arbitrarily decide that at some point a human is all of a sudden a person and at some point they are not, unless it’s to ease the guilt of killing them? Is there any time when it’s really okay to just go ahead and deliberately kill an innocent human being? Personally, I think that separating personhood from humanity is a very bad idea in the first place.

He’s the doctor in Kansas who did partial-birth abortions and was murdered in cold blood in his church.

Now we have a documentary that seeks to celebrate his life.

The article explains that Tiller’s patients fell into two categories: fetal abnormality or suicidal. Most patients fell into the latter category. And the way those patients were diagnosed as suicidal is suspect at best:

It is only recently that the Tiller legacy has begun to unravel, and I doubt if Alan Ball has gotten the memo.  The point of vulnerability has proved to be Tiller’s necessary second opinion provider, Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus. According to former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, Neuhaus would go to Tiller’s Wichita clinic twice a month on average.  There she would sign a form letter printed out by Tiller. The letter would verify Neuhaus’s finding that without a late-term abortion, the girl in question would suffer “substantial and irreversible damage to a major bodily function.”  Says Kline, “No diagnosis — every letter the same.  She received $300 a signature.”

It will be important to know the truth before Tiller is re-crafted as a martyr. Don’t get me wrong, the way he died is categorically wrong. But likewise what he did with his life was categorically wrong, and seeing both shouldn’t be so tricky for our establishment media.

Germany’s Der Spiegel does a better job of reporting on the world’s 7 billion people. (Article is in English.) In 2060, I’d be 84, so it’s fully possible that I could live to see this new demographic trend:

But,” says Wolfgang Lutz, “that shouldn’t distract us from the fact that an entirely different development has been underway for some time.” Lutz is the director of the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied System Analysis (IIASA) and one of the world’s most prominent demographers. As he sees it, it is “highly probable that mankind will begin to shrink by 2060 or 2070.”

It will be a global turning point. For the first time since the Black Death raged in the 14th century, the world’s death rate will be higher than its birth rate.

I had truly never thought this far ahead, but 2056–I’m gonna have a big birthday party. 80! Woo-hoo.

Three cheers for the We Want the Debate people! For they are provoking a reaction. Here “We Want the Debate” meets “We really, really don’t want the debate,” in the person of Joyce Arthur, who, ironically, I just debated on abortion in the developing world.

I’ve debated Joyce Arthur about why maternal health strategies in the developing world should not include abortion. But I’d love to see her debate someone like Stephanie Gray of the Centre for Bioethical Reform. I suspect Joyce wouldn’t, however, and it has everything to do with the weakness of her position, which would be sadly exposed in debate with the formidable Stephanie Gray. (I am not so formidable.) Otherwise, why wouldn’t she debate it? If a position is strong and defensible, I can hardly understand why you wouldn’t get out there and make sure people know it and learn about it. Look, pro-choice support is generally waning…it would be really wise if those who ardently support it got out there to beef up their numbers.

I appreciate people who are not apathetic. In that sense, I appreciate Joyce, though we would both agree that we have nothing in common on this issue. But pro-lifers are out there, making their views known, up and at ’em, and having lots o’ kids too (for the most part, myself not included). Where will the pro-choice consensus be in years to come if no one defends it publicly? It’s a sad statement on this tenuous “consensus” that the best my opponents can do is never whisper a public word about it, especially not in debate.

A surprisingly positive look at the feminine face of the pro-life movement in the U.S:

The most visible, entrepreneurial and passionate advocates for the rights of the unborn (as they would put it) are women. More to the point: They are youngish Christian working mothers with children at home.

A group of 12 nurses are suing the hospital where they work in New Jersey because the hospital is telling them to assist in abortions or lose their jobs. This is the dream of many a pro-choice fanatic, that all doctors and nurses would be forced to learn and participate in abortions. One hears whiffs of this in Canada every so often, too. Not altogether “pro-choice,” that view.

The birth control solution. That’s the headline on an article espousing the view that the planet truly does have too many people, by a dude who writes for the New York Times. Not too shabby, you think, he must have something important to say. “All the news that’s fit to print,” so we’re told. Or, in this case, all the propaganda that’s fit to regurgitate.

It’s amazing to me that the overpopulation myth refuses to die. But instead of my personal rant, I’ll quote at great length from Unnatural Selection, the recent book about sex selection abortion, which touches on overpopulation in more than one spot.  This particular quote is about Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb, a widely discredited book about how the globe could not support so many people, debating one Ben Wattenberg, who called Ehrlich “a prophet of doom” on The Tonight Show back in 1970.

As The Tonight Show episode wore on, Wattenberg vainly tried to point out that Ehrlich’s predictions were off base. “Sooner or later,” he said, “you suffer a credibility gap.” But this did little to abate the audience enthusiasm. The crowd applauded wildly every time Ehrlich made a new point. To Wattenberg, meanwhile, audience members were cold, bordering on derisive. When the demographer suggested the U.S. could remain a nice place to live with 300 million people–a number we reached in 2006–they broke into peals of mocking laughter.

We should welcome the 8 billionth human whenever he/she comes.

(Also on this: “Contraceptives no more cause sex than umbrellas cause rain.” I could write an entire op-ed from the perspective of a young woman living in North America to highlight why and how that is false. Kristof can’t be expected to understand the mindset of a young woman today, but it would be nice if he at least tried.)

From the Carleton Lifeline blog:

Trespassing charges that were filed against members of Carleton Lifeline, the pro-life student club at Carleton University, were withdrawn by the Crown yesterday.

This is good news, except I’m not sure why the students should pay for the school’s legal fees:

In a subsequent decision regarding costs of the motion to strike, Justice Toscano Roccamo ordered the students to pay Carleton University’s legal costs in the amount of $18,400.87 plus applicable taxes. Carleton University had asked that the students pay $21, 467.68 in legal fees.

They weren’t trespassing and should not have been charged. I assume they’ll wait to pay until the case Lobo et al. v. Carleton University et al. is resolved:

The Crown stated that the basis for withdrawing the trespass charges is that the issues dealing with the relationship between a university and its students was already being dealt with in Lobo et al. v. Carleton University et al., the civil action brought by two Carleton Lifeline members, Ruth (Lobo) Shaw and John McLeod, against Carleton University and members of its administration.

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