On a Halifax sidewalk a spray-painted stencil reads “40 Days of Bullshit” and “It’s your body, it’s your choice”, in response to the 40 Days for Life vigil being held in town. When I walked over this stencil, I had to cringe, because there’s no argument there. It’s just an insult, a crowd chant, but there’s no reasoning behind it. Women who find themselves pregnant and considering abortion feel they have to choose between a life of poverty, or abortion. They feel they have to choose between losing their partner, or abortion. They feel they have to choose between not finishing school, or abortion. Think I’m wrong? Read these testimonies:

my baby was disabled

–and my husband could not bear to raise a child with special needs. He was suicidal. I felt I owed it to my two older children to keep their father in their life. I terminated my pregnancy at 17 weeks and I’m grateful that it was legal to do so (even though it was extremely difficult, both emotionally or logistically). I wanted that baby very much and I miss him every day.

—Guest simone

Matter of who’s life ?

It was 1972 in January, just after Roe and Wade.It was a time when single mothers were shunned. They wasn’t any form of help for single women. Because of my pregnancy, I became homeless, I’d been staying with a widow who had rooms for single girls, I was kicked out my church (they said I could come back when the situation was taken care of). My family turned their backs on me. My boyfriend was getting a divorce. I was desperate, suicidal! It came down to making the final decison of TAKING MY BABY’S LIFE OR MY OWN! I’ve been able to cope and deal with this decision. Since then I’ve gone through much counseling although on the anniversary date,I break down. The pain will never go away. When looking back, I know that I did the only thing I could back then. Today I”m doing well and I have helped many girls who find themselves where I was. I am so grateful for the women of today. There are so many services, especially counseling available for them . FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS VITAL FOR WOMEN.

—Guest Vicki

A reader recently quoted that Joyce Arthur herself admitted that “all of our decisions are constrained”. Personally, I think that having to choose between poverty/losing your partner/dropping out of school/homelessness or abortion isn’t a choice (even a “constrained” choice) at all, it’s a threatening ultimatum.  

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Andrea adds: The testimonies you posted are of the most dire variety. Or are they? I can only think that when abortion was not an option so readily taken, some of these people would not have manipulated their partners or themselves into this positioning of “my life or the baby’s.” It is very, very hard to move forward with a pregnancy in certain cases. But in those testimonies we are presented with “if” scenarios that we simply don’t know would have played out. (Historians are taught not to play the “if” game. As in “if the Allies had bombed the rail lines, there would have been no Holocaust” etc.)

These women tell us after the fact that they would have killed themselves if they had not had an abortion, or their husbands would have killed themselves, but if there is one thing I learned from reading Giving Sorrow Words it’s that men–and women–can come around to their own “unwanted” children. I believe to a certain extent, their guilt over their actions forces them to create an extreme box so that we could begin to understand why it was ok to kill a defenceless (disabled as in the example above) child. One last thing: at the debate, a young woman came to me afterwards, and asked me (kindly) about my positioning on rape. Wasn’t it OK to have an abortion then? I talked to her at some length and I ended up challenging her to watch an abortion, since she hadn’t. We forget how vicious the act of abortion is. I don’t want women to forget that and then delude themselves into thinking abortion was an act of compassion–too much pro-choice rhetoric in our media and the culture at large will do that.

I posted about Steve Jobs and the fact that he was adopted earlier, here.

Here’s a video of him introducing the Macintosh in 1984 for the first time.

Rest in peace.

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Andrea adds: This is worth watching too.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA&feature=player_embedded]

In order to comment on a movie, one typically watches it. I started watching 180, the new and popular pro-life movie, but only got through the first five minutes. This is not because it was bad, but because I ran out of time.

(In those first five minutes the host asks random people on the street if they have heard of Hitler. To be frank, I was amazed that so few people had.)

Anyways, seeing as I have not seen the movie, I am linking to Stephanie Gray’s blog on the topic, a trustworthy source. Hopefully I get to see the movie myself soon, in which case I’ll add my own thoughts.

A Lancet study reveals that where a common contraceptive is used in eastern and southern Africa, HIV rates have gone up:

The reasons behind this association are as yet unclear, and may be biological. But to those who have not been blinded by the leftist global health consensus, another explanation seems quite possible: the aggressive promotion of contraception may increase the rates of sex, both protected and unprotected (especially with multiple partners, the main cause of the HIV pandemic).

Such a dynamic has been seen in previous research on why condom promotion in Africa has also not slowed, and may have even increased, the rates of HIV infection. Edward C. Green, formerly of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard (and a proud liberal), summarized the undeniable evidence in a Washington Posteditorial two years ago.

Those not blinded by the leftist global health consensus will have no problem understanding this. Those who have? Consider opening at least one eye.

If you are interested, you can listen to the debate audio by clicking here. The question: Can Canada have a maternal health policy in the developing world that excludes abortion? Yours truly for the Yes We Can side and Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada in opposition. Enjoy.

If you live in the Ottawa area, consider coming to First Place Options’ Festa and Concerto Italiana, a fundraiser for a great local charity that helps women, men and families through unplanned pregnancies. It’s on October 28; click here for more info.

In Saturday’s debate at Queen’s, much was made by my opponent of women being the ones to decide in abortion. Keep in mind we were debating maternal health and abortion in the developing world. My point was that where women don’t have autonomy in the first place, they certainly won’t have the ability to freely choose an abortion. (Furthermore, I believe this “free” choice is highly exaggerated here in Canada, just the same.)

Anyway, this article from India on a young mother forced to abort twice, who hung herself with the third pregnancy after her in-laws ordered another abortion…because the baby was a girl. Just so long as they have access to abortion though. So she can make a choice as to whether to end just her baby’s life and/or her own, too.

Many people fall prey to this idea of putting second things first, not just pro-lifers. (BTW, this is not to say that every pro-lifer is a Christian. But so many are that this is worth posting.) 

I love this C.S. Lewis quote which essentially says the same thing: “When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now…When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.”

As some of you are aware, I debated Joyce Arthur at Queen’s University yesterday afternoon. Behold: my short report.

There were about 150 students there, though I am bad at estimating crowds. It was peaceful, with the exception of some guffaws of laughter at me from a very limited group of possibly 5 to 7 anti-Andreas. (I am working with the language here, since I got called anti-choice all night. Incidentally, this suits me just fine since I am anti-this-one-“choice”. Those kids were certainly Anti-Andrea. Probably anti-life, too, if I were to guess. Oh yes, I have a keen sense of discernment.)

Joyce was respectful and pleasant in her demeanor, and wore her trademark flower as well as a lovely black skirt. She wore a shirt too, I might add, but I didn’t notice it in particular.

The question: Can Canada have a maternal health policy that excludes funding for abortion?

As expected, I said Yes We Can! My arguments came down to 1) describing that the unborn are human like you and me therefore abortion means taking a life and 2) highlighting the way in which abortion is irrelevant for saving women’s lives. I showed (if I do say so myself) a great graph showing how Canada’s maternal mortality declined well prior to 1969.

I found Joyce’s arguments (not surprisingly, let’s remember whose web site we are on) less than compelling. To address the humanity of the unborn she said simply it doesn’t matter, because the woman still decides. She is very set on legalization of abortion western-style for the developing world, so much so that she failed to wholly address the fact that maternal mortality declines with good medical care, sans abortion. She made the point that abortion is a mainstay of every woman’s life: normal and routine, nothing to see here. So where my main point was to ask the question that if we can decrease maternal mortality without abortion, and the data clearly shows we can, why wouldn’t we do it? However, she doesn’t view abortion as negative, so she sees no point in trying to avoid it.

That was jarring for me, as I suspect it was also jarring for those girls in the audience who have had abortions. There’s no amount of saying something is super easy that will make it so, when it’s not.

My other points: abortion in the developing world has been used to get rid of girls, legal abortion does not equal safe abortion, limited funding from government means we ought to use measures that garner the biggest bang for your buck (things like providing antibiotics and oxytocin).

I believe the only video recording is on my iPhone, so I’ll try to get that up. It’s not the greatest quality, sorry. I also have an audio recording of dubious quality, but I’ll transfer it to my laptop and see if I can improve it there.

Many thanks to the University of Ottawa pro-lifers who came out to support me! I think the bulk of the audience, however, was neither strongly pro-life nor strongly pro-choice and therefore this was a great event to introduce your average student to both sides of the story.

Maclean’s on Brad Trost speaking out against his own party’s funding of International Planned Parenthood:

Indisputably, politics parties serve an important purpose. But so should Members of Parliament. And publicly that should involve something more than reading cue cards, repeating party lines, filling out TV camera frames and providing the sufficient number of warm bodies required to pass legislation. They should be something more than representatives of a brand.

If Members of Parliament don’t represent constituents, then I have no idea why we bother voting in the first place. Hats off to Brad Trost for doing just that.