British politician David Alton, Baron Alton of Liverpool, and founder of the children’s charity Jubilee Action, delivered this speech in July. It’s worth reading in full, and you can do that here.

There have been around seven million abortions in this country since 1967. Last year there were 189,574 abortions. In the same year, 48,348 women had more than one abortion, Tragically, 383 women had five or more abortions; some as many as eight –  all in the same year.

When I sent these statistics on to the author of the 1967 Abortion Act, David Steel, who remains a colleague in the House of Lords, I had an email back simply asking: “abortion being used as contraception?”.  A good question.

I’m thrilled about these new plans. Japan is taking steps to care for its elderly and ensure they aren’t alone during the last moments of their lives. What are some of their ideas?

One realtor has started to promote the idea of house sharing by single mothers and senior citizens, bringing together senior citizens who are interested in renting space in their house after their own families are gone with single mothers in search of affordable housing and also, perhaps, a live-in babysitter.

[…]

In the end, the simplest solution may just be trying to reach out, Inukai said.

Their are organizations, such as L’Arche, that have been integrating marginalized populations for years now. It’s about time we started to do this with the elderly and single/new mothers as well. I can’t think of any groups that would benefit more from each others’ company.

If you are a single/new mother in the Halifax area and would like to get involved, please contact me. I’d like to pair up with a local senior community for regular “coffee breaks.”

Socioeconomic factors, not your “wantedness”, will play a big factor in how successful you are in life. This article from The Telegraph shows that the educational success of a child has very little to do with being planned or unplanned, and everything to do with being rich or poor.

A study has found that pupils whose parents did not intend to have a baby lagged five months behind planned babies at age five, when their vocabulary was tested, and a further three to four months behind those born after IVF.

However experts say the findings are just down to the developmental gap between rich and poor in Britain. The differences in scores “almost entirely disappear” when family background is taken into account, since children born following assisted reproduction tend to have older, better educated and richer parents. […]

Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, said: “This study shows how important it is to take social factors into account when looking at child outcomes. Children from unplanned pregnancies have lower scores on cognitive tests than those from planned pregnancies, but they are also much more likely to come from single parent, low income households. Once this is taken into account, there is no impact of an unplanned pregnancy on children’s development.”

preventative – remedy that prevents or slows the course of an illness or disease; “the doctor recommended several preventatives”

Pregnancy, is not an illness. But the Obama administration has just classified what your body does naturally as something that needs prevention. More from The Associated Press,

WASHINGTON (AP) — A half-century after the advent of the pill, the Obama administration on Monday ushered in a change in women’s health care potentially as transformative: coverage of birth control as prevention, with no copays.

Services ranging from breast pumps for new mothers to counseling on domestic violence were also included in the broad expansion of women’s preventive care under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Since birth control is the most common drug prescribed to women, health plans should make sure it’s readily available, said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Not doing it would be like not covering flu shots,” she said.

Of course breast pumps and counseling are wonderful things, but comparing birth control with flu shots? When you get influenza, your body is a host for a virus. This is not what your body was made to do. When you get pregnant, your body hosts a baby. Something the female body has been doing since the beginning of humankind (our mammalian ancestors did it that way too).

I wrote the following for the March for Life this year, so I’ll say it again…

Does not reigning in and restricting the feminine functions of our bodies, namely the ability to become pregnant and carry a child, in order to succeed by some predetermined standard devalue the very thing that is “womanhood”?

Can we imagine, if in any other civil rights movement, that the group fighting for those rights would be told that in order to achieve the freedoms they desire, they must first put in check the very things that make them different from the ruling majority?

It’s unthinkable, and yet this is what women across the globe are being led to believe and reiterate day after day.

Abortion proponents and providers keep reiterating their claim that more legislation and inspections of facilities will be putting up road blocks and that in the end it’s the women who want abortions that will suffer. But the gruesome story of Dr. Kermit Gosnell exposes just what happens when facilities go unchecked, and it’s not simply a shorter wait time.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a Pennsylvania abortion provider, was charged with murder and infanticide. Gosnell is accused of breaking state laws by performing late-term abortions, killing children born alive as the result of botched abortions and using unsterilized medical instruments. At least one patient died while under Dr. Gosnell’s care and many others have been infected with venereal diseases.

For 17 years, these practices went undiscovered because Gov. Ridge felt that forcing abortion clinics to undergo a yearly health inspection would be “putting up a barrier to women.”

On June 20 of this year, Planned Parenthood of Kansas filed a lawsuit against the state of Kansas in order to prevent the implementation of new laws passed by Gov. Sam Brownback aimed at expanding health requirements and inspections of abortion providers. Planned Parenthood is, thus far, the only one of three abortion providers in Kansas to receive a license to continue performing abortions. The license was given after the clinic, at the last minute, purchased a “neo-natal crash unit” required under the new provisions. Planned Parenthood has since dropped its lawsuit but is still fighting the new regulations.

Planned Parenthood sells itself as “America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.” Trusted? Planned Parenthood is fighting health regulations aimed at ensuring women’s health and safety. These regulations are modeled after similar ones in South Carolina, and specific provisions in the law have been taken from the “industry standards” set by the National Abortion Federation. Yet Planned Parenthood is seeking and claiming to have the “trust” of women?

After the tragic discovery of the practices of Dr. Gosnell in Pennsylvania, one would expect that an organization that claims to be “pro-women” would be embracing measures aimed at keeping them safe. Sadly, this is not the first time Planned Parenthood has fought against common-sense laws to protect women, despite its supposed commitment to “protect women’s rights and health.”

Worth reading every word of this one. The author, Kay Hymowitz, debunks myths about the gender pay gap (again) but takes the whole idea seriously, identifying and attempting explanations where real problems remain.

Should Canada reconsider the criminal prohibition on assisted suicide?

Vote in this CTV poll. Scroll down on the right hand side.

…I go to The Onion, America’s Finest News Source. (I love the fact that for a joke, satirical newspaper, you can pick it up on the street in boxes in Washington, D.C.)

The beauty is that they pick up on a strain of truth, so that the satire resonates:

During a press conference, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards told reporters that the new state-of-the-art fetus-killing facility located in the nation’s heartland offers quick, easy, in-and-out abortions to all women, and represents a bold reinvention of the group’s long-standing mission and values. Although we’ve traditionally dedicated 97 percent of our resources to other important services such as contraception distribution, cancer screening, and STD testing, this new complex allows us to devote our full attention to what has always been our true passion: abortion,” said Richards, standing under a banner emblazoned with Planned Parenthood’s new slogan, “No Life Is Sacred.” “And since Congress voted to retain our federal funding, it’s going to be that much easier for us to maximize the number of tiny, beating hearts we stop every day.”

Be sure to click on the map of the new enlarged facility. My fave there is the daycare space where “young children can play while their unborn siblings are being terminated elsewhere in the facility.”

This may well be old news by now. I’m on a longer than usual holiday weekend and it’s hard to take a computer with you on your windsurfer. Sorry about the slow posting days, but I think we all need a couple of those. Anyway, Facebook will now have a new “expecting” option:

The social networking site has added that option — “Expected: Child” — that users can add as part of their family members.

This is surely a sign that Facebook is quite far away from the coolio university network that Mark Zuckenberg first intended. It also does betray the idea that there is a child on the way in every pregnancy. Stating that is not quite as obvious as it may seem at first glance… plenty of people “on the other side” of this debate work pretty hard to pretend otherwise.

Is ignorance really bliss? On June 17 The Guardian ran this article,

In 1979 China signed a $50m four-year deal with a UN body designed to help it control its spiralling population through family planning. It was the largest foreign aid package Beijing had accepted in almost 20 years.

But the funds became entwined in China’s one-child policy that was just taking hold, and instead of sponsoring an education drive for small families, the money was used to pay for posters in Chinese villages proclaiming “You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it.”

The story of the complicity of the UNFPA, the UN’s main population agency, in the tyranny of China’s forced abortion policy is just one of the examples given in a book that explores western involvement in what has become a modern scourge: sex selection.

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.

While the article highlights some excellent points, Mara Hvistendahl was unhappy with her books misrepresentation. This is perhaps due to the fact that the UNFPA responded with their own letter refuting the claims of the original article. On July 20, Hvistendahl wrote the following:

I did not argue, furthermore, that the United Nations Population Fund was complicit in these abortions – rather that the agency provided $50m in funding ahead of the one-child policy’s unveiling, and then looked the other way when foreign press reports made clear that forced abortions were occurring. There is a difference between outright funding an injustice and ignoring injustice once it occurs.

UNFPA responded to the article with a letter contesting my supposed claims (Sex selection, China, and human rights, 25 June). The letter may not have been necessary had the article veered more closely to the message of my book.

Sex selection is an important issue, perhaps the most impacting issue on the female population to date, and I just hope that authors and reporters aren’t feeling intimidated because the agencies they’re reporting on are so well financed and multinational. It’s always frustrating to be misquoted, but especially when you just might get a letter from one of the largest agencies in the world.