We often hear in Canada that we don’t want to debate those pesky moral issues. Morality is viewed as a bad word in political debate.

Here’s what happens without it though:

Press release here:

According to an Abacus Data poll, 40 per cent of respondents think abortion should be available but only funded in medical emergencies, while 11 per cent think abortion should be available but never funded, and 10 per cent do not think abortion should be available at all. In contrast, 30 per cent think abortion should be available and always funded. Another 8 per cent said none of those positions match their view…

The poll also found that 48 per cent want all abortion information – statistics about the number of abortions and how much they cost – to be publicly disclosed, while just 21 per cent do not think these figures need to be released. Furthermore, a whopping 91 per cent of respondents had no idea that the province spends at least $30 million on abortion. This is no doubt tied to the fact that Ontario does not release these numbers. “The abortion industry does not want Ontarians to know that abortion is the most common surgery in Canada. People would be shocked if they knew how many abortions are committed in Canada.” added Golob.

From The Washington Post,

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday returned to an abortion issue that nearly sank President Barack Obama’s health care law last year with legislation that bars an insurance plan regulated under the new law from covering abortion if any of its customers receive federal subsidies.

Providers that offer abortion coverage would have to set up identical plans without abortion coverage to participate in the health insurance exchanges to be set up under the new law.

This article claims that:

If a man commits a rape, then he has, on average, a less than 1% chance of being convicted.

If that’s true, then I hope this new app launched in New Delhi helps not only deter acts of rape but lead to convictions for crimes committed.

The phone app “Fight Back” will be launched in November by a local charity and will function as an SOS alert device – sending out a text message with a GPS location to up to five people, including police, and as a post on Facebook and Twitter.

“Safety for women has become such a huge issue here and we felt that citizens of Delhi, where possibly the problem exists the most, could use this type of technological intervention,” said Hindol Sengupta, co-founder of Whypoll, which created the application.

“Women are harassed and molested everywhere on buses, at metro stations, in markets . . . We believe this is Asia’s first phone application aimed at making women safer.” 

Margaret Somerville weighs in on why the “Win a Baby” competition is unethical.

Just one of the many things I’m thankful for: The Hills of Gatineau. 

I tend to think of lobbyists as well-suited men sporting slicked-back Pompadours working for some hungry tobacco giant, but today’s lobbyist can come in many forms; an advocate group, a bloc of voters, even a non-profit organization. But the familiar ghost of the Pompadoured lobbyist can still linger in the background. The Pompadour is aware that his image needs work, so sometimes he simply steps back and acts as a puppeteer wearing a kinder, gentler, more philanthropic face.

The documentary Empty Handed aims to get people in the west behind initiatives that would supply contraception to women in Africa, a documentary funded in part by the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition. This super-team is comprised of members like  Bayer Pharma and Pregna, both suppliers of contraceptives, as well as other industry giants who supply the chemicals that make up their products.

Africa is home to over 1 billion people, and if a fraction of those people started taking contraceptives on a regular basis… well, I don’t have to tell you what that would do for the industry. So whenever you watch a documentary, claiming to want what is best for any group of people by offering them a product, just remember that every corporation has a board of directors elected by its shareholders.

During this holiday weekend, I’m thankful for my single parenting mother and all the “universe rearranging” she did for my sister and I. This article reinforced my faith in the adaptability of women who happen to become single parents. From SLATE,

When I was pregnant with my second child, I was aware that there were ways in which I was not prepared to take care of a baby on my own, but that awareness didn’t unduly influence or affect me. What I thought to myself was, “The universe will rearrange itself for this baby.” […]

Someone who was trying to persuade me not have the baby said that I should wait and have a “regular baby.” His exact words were, “You should wait and have a regular baby!” What he meant, of course, was that I should wait and have a baby in more regular circumstances. But I had already seen the feet of the baby on a sonogram, and while he was pacing through my living room making his point, I was thinking: This is a regular baby. His comment stayed with me, though. It evoked the word bastard: “something that is spurious, irregular, inferior or of questionable origin.”

Someone said, similarly, to a single friend of mine who was pregnant that she should wait and have a “real baby.” As if her baby were unreal, a figment of her imagination, as if she could wish him away.

Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort that we create a cultural climate; it’s in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to. Hawthorne called it “the alchemy of quiet malice by which [we] concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”

Talk about decreasing abortions, not by law but because that is what women choose. This clip is evidence that 40 Days for Life is working. (Watch the video at the top of the page.)

And while PWPL is a big proponent of the fact that you need not be religious to be pro-life, the fact is that lots of religious folks get involved in the struggle. 40 Days for Life is another valuable approach to decreasing the desire for abortion, alongside the Show the Truth style campaigns. It’s all very encouraging to see.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) acts primarily an advisory council to the European Union, and their recommendations often carry a lot of weight. However, the recent warning from the PACE on the dangers of sex selection may be contrasting to the EU’s very pro-abortion tradition, a tradition the EU may want to reconsider as it negotiates membership for countries like Armenia.

  On October 3, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted the “Prenatal sex selection” resolution, which says that the disproportion in sex selection is “alarming” in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Albania. […]

The PACE resolution appeals to “investigate the causes and reasons behind skewed sex ratios at birth; to step up efforts to raise the status of women in society” throughout the whole territory of Armenia. […]

Doctor-gynecologist at the Armenian-American Mammography Wellness Center Nelly Avagyan’s experience showed that majority of abortions is because of a child’s sex.

“This is an Armenian way of thinking – to have sons by all means, even though abortions of boys are also registered, but the number of aborted girls prevails,” Avagyan says.