A friend of a friend is looking for some help caring for a two-year-old. If you or someone you know is interested, email us here and I’ll forward it on to the right person:

Large family in rural Ottawa looking for a full-time nanny or mother’s helper to look after 2 year-old. Live-in or live-out. Area is not serviced by public transit. Has pets.

What kind of thing gets you on “The List”? Forced marriage, human trafficking, not providing your women with a hospital to give birth in, rape, female foeticide, and frighteningly, female infanticide. Afghanistan, Congo and Pakistan are at the top. Read all about it, here.

Pharmaceutical companies are first and foremost companies. It’s not in their best interest to make one-shot wonder drugs that get you sorted out for life, so they aren’t on the market. Contraceptives are no different. With over 50% of women in the US using “The Pill”, that is big business. Multiply that by their average length of usage, which from the women I’ve spoken to can be anywhere from 5 to 35 years, and you’ve got yourself a money making scheme with serious longevity. So will this new male contraceptive see the light of day?

After a more than 30-year struggle, an unassuming Indian engineer named Sujoy K. Guha is on the brink of what could well be the most revolutionary contraceptive technology since the pill — and this time it’s for men. […]

So what you get is a one-time, hormone-free sperm blocker that you can turn off whenever you want. […]

“We had no support from industry,” Guha said. “And basically neither I nor my colleagues were really knowledgeable and experienced with respect to new drug development.”

Part of the problem was the elegance of Guha’s design, which from a marketing perspective was, frankly, too effective.

“To men, an ideal method would be cheap and long-lasting. To company shareholders, an ideal method would be expensive and temporary,” Lissner explained by email.

“Pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to develop a cheap long-lasting method, and we can’t expect them to take the lead. Men will get one if, and only if, they demand it of their governments,” she said.

I’m not in favour of this drug, but this article exposes the problem with pharmaceutical companies not wanting to make anything “too effective”. What’s worse is that they tie themselves to social issues in a way that has sway on public opinion (throwing a few million to advertising for Marie Stopes is going to have big impact). They simply won’t manufacture a product or support an organization that won’t make them serious bank, social impact be damned. And this is a problem, because the consumer/patient ends up with a product that they’re told is in their best interest when it’s really in the best interest of the company. I’m not sure we can have it both ways.

I’m reviewing Unnatural Selection, the recent book by Mara Hvistendahl about female sex selection resulting in 160 million missing women. It’s equal parts fascinating and depressing. I could easily cut and paste the whole book into a blog post. But here’s just one part in the section about how the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were enthusiastic promoters of population control in India, alongside the Population Council, staffed by an American, Sheldon Segal, who likewise supported sex determination “as an effective method of population control.” (Segal is also the inventor of Norplant, the contraceptive implant.)

The Emergency [started on June 25, 1975] as the period came to be known, affected all areas of life in India, crippling the economy and scaling back civil liberties. But it was an especially blean era for reproductive rights. Health officials in Indira Gandhi’s administration saw an opportunity to force drastic measures on Indians who had previously resisted birth control. The task of overseeing the gruesome campaign fell to Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi, who held no official political title. He wasted little time in announcing a massive effort to sterilize poor men. Widespread sterilization was an idea that had been introduced to India by Western advisers, but Sanjay Gandhi ratcheted it up to an unprecedented scale. At first his mother’s government rewarded men who consented to vasectomies. Before long, however, Sanjay Gandhi was issuing quotas so high that local officials could meet them only by dragging men to the operating room—typically a makeshift camp that had sprung up practically overnight. (Nearly two thousand men died from botched operations.) In some areas, police surrounded villages in the middle of the night and apprehended all the men. In others, they combined sterilization with slum clearance, razing whole neighborhoods and robbing men of both their reproductive ability and their homes at the same time. Protestors were killed. The scale of the campaign, which was memorialized by Salman Rushdie in the novel Midnight’s Children, is striking, given that many Americans today remain unaware of its existence. By the time democratic rule was restored, 6.2 million Indian men had been sterilized in just one year—fifteen times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis.  (pp. 87-88)

Many Americans remain unaware of this, and many Canadians too, including me.

The review will follow when it’s published. Getting into the realm of massive understatements, suffice to say that “population control” has wreaked a lot of havoc in nations across the globe, including as one outcome, missing women at a devastating scale.

When I learned about a local charity and support group for young mothers, SHYM, I was astonished that no one had thought of this before. While SHYM does wonderful work here in Nova Scotia, there is another group in the US. What’s astonishing about this article is that in the whole of a country nicknamed by Michael Moore as “The Big One” they’re the only one.

Americans enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Swaddled within those precious rights is the freedom to be born. Debate rages about a woman’s right to choose, yet many would choose to have their babies if only they had a place to live. For 27 years, Friends of the Unborn in Quincy has given pregnant, homeless women the freedom to keep their children.

Marilyn Birnie, FOTU founder and executive director of the pregnancy crisis center and shelter, has helped more than 2,000 women with this choice. Up to 16 pregnant women, ages 18 and older, can stay for about two years, rent-free, to develop self-supporting skills at the multiroomed Victorian in Quincy. Getting a GED is mandatory. Also offered are additional educational classes and resource assistance. […]

For close to three decades, FOTU has stayed open through private donations that average $25. Each month is a miracle since the annual expenses exceed $350,000.

“We are never ahead. It’s always month-to-month,” said Penny Romano, a 20-year employee at Friends of the Unborn, the only such private organization in the United States.

[…]

The women are here because of an ultimatum from their families, “Get an abortion or get out.”

Boyfriends abandoned them. A logical option loomed – get an abortion – but they didn’t want to. They found FOTU through hospital or agency referrals, or word of mouth.

[…] Some women endure a long, fierce journey. “Esther,” a married woman with three children, was brutally gang raped by soldiers in the Congo. She and her husband were taken to two separate prisons and her children were lost. She escaped alone and after arriving in the US, she eventually found her way to Birnie’s door.

“Esther came to us with nothing more than the wrinkled yellow dress she was wearing. She didn’t know if the baby was her husband’s or the three men who raped her, but she didn’t want to abort her husband’s child. We took care of her. Later a Congolese priest was able to locate her mother in the Congo who was caring for her three children. Esther was able to talk to them, but we were never able to find her husband.”

Now Esther has a daughter and has moved to Lynn.

This from the NY Times,

In three new rulings, federal judges in different states have acted to block immediate enforcement of measures that restrict abortion rights and women’s access to affordable contraception, lifesaving cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These rulings are important victories for women’s health and reproductive rights. […]

On July 1, Judge Carlos Murguia, a federal district judge in Kansas, blocked immediate enforcement of a new Kansas licensing law and health department regulations imposing extensive, medically unnecessary requirements on the state’s three remaining abortion providers — like mandating 50 square feet of storage space for janitorial supplies — with the obvious goal of shutting them down.

While these rulings are preliminary, each is a determination that enforcing the law would cause irreparable harm and that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail at trial. They do not, however, address other threats to women’s health. Those include the slashing of state support for family-planning services by governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey, and attacks from Congress like the bill Republicans pushed through the House in May that would use the nation’s tax system as a weapon to end abortion insurance coverage in the private market.

Still, these rulings serve as a reminder that courts have a vital role to play in blocking the extreme anti-abortion, anti-family-planning movement accelerating in the states and in Washington.

Why am I advertising a book about relationships here on PWPL? A couple of reasons:

1) it’s a good book

2) the blog that aims to help sell the book is likewise, chockablock full of great advice on how to get on in relationships but more importantly, how to conduct oneself with integrity when not in a relationship and enjoy the life you have

3) “Auntie Seraphic’s” advice is very counter-cultural, and that, my friends, is to be respected. She doesn’t fall into mainstream traps around relationships, neither does she fall into religious traps about relationships (The author, Dorothy Cummings is a practicing Catholic of the conservative variety. But I’m not Catholic and I still like it, so there you go.)

4) someday I will write a book and I will want help promoting it

So there you have it. Buy Seraphic Singles if you are single, and for a friend if you are not.

Here’s an interesting Q&A about the thinking behind an ad campaign designed, to, well I’m not exactly sure what the point is.

Stepping Stones, the group behind the ads, denies that it’s normalizing prostitution, and wants to draw attention to violent crimes against prostitutes.  That’s a worthy goal; killing or raping a prostitute is not less of a crime than killing or raping anybody else, and police and the courts should behave accordingly.

But by portraying prostitutes as daughters, sisters and mothers, which to be sure many of them are, it seems to me that the ads try to paint prostitution as a wacky, unorthodox but entirely fine vocation for a woman – like becoming a monster truck driver, or working on an oil rig.  Not for me, but who am I to judge, right?

The problem is that prostitution isn’t like other unusual jobs, and pretending that prostitutes have made this their life’s work and that we should respect that only makes things worse.  For one thing, it turns a blind eye to the abuse, violence and misogyny that are integral to the business of selling women’s bodies, not unfortunate side effects.  For another, it’s redolent of Anatole France’s biting observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges.”  The libertarian take on the flesh trade would have us believe that, if only we got rid of outdated beliefs and gave people more autonomy, we would permit both strong women in thriving communities, as well as marginalized, victimized and frequently badly abused women, to sell themselves on the street.

This would be a victory neither for women, nor for Canadian society.  Compassion and kindness towards prostitutes doesn’t mean destigmatizing what they do, and what is done to them.  On the contrary: prostitutes are people too, as the ad campaign wants to remind us, and people should never be allowed by their families, communities or social safety nets to be so degraded.

Why do I feel a sense of sweet vindication in reading this? I get called crazy for saying the same thing (albeit in a decidedly different way). Maybe Margaret Wente gets called crazy too. I’ll never know. But it’s nice to see these thoughts in print in the Globe:

 Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy sexual liberation as much as I’d hoped. Eventually, it occurred to me that it seemed to be working better for guys than it was for me. Men, I noticed, tended to agree that sex without meaning was pretty swell. Women tended to agree that sex without meaning was impossible. Although we approved of it in theory, we were all too susceptible to messy emotional entanglements. …

If men and women were equal in their sexual desires, we’d have a different conversation. But as that famous piece of doggerel goes, Hogamus higamus/ Men are polygamous;/ Higamus hogamus/ Women monogamous. The long history of civilization is in many ways a progressive effort to rein in the indiscriminate (and frequently destructive) sexual desires of men. This effort, no doubt, frustrates men, but it’s good for women and children, and also for society.

Besides, there’s something about monogamy that some long-married people have discovered (much to their surprise). It’s the same thing Dan Savage tells gay kids: It gets better.

To summarize: “Sexual liberation” liberates men and hurts women. That’s my view and I’m sticking to it. (I might add I also think it hurts men in a long term, societal sort of way, when men find themselves to be 40 and living wholly unfulfilling lives in the fast lane, or in the not-so-fast lane as the stats showing men living in mama’s basement will attest, but this is a short blog post and I won’t get into that here.)