This from New Brunswick,

The New Brunswick Right to Life Association has filed a police report on yet another act of vandalism to its Mother and Child House on Brunswick Street.

“It happened on three successive nights, three different incidents,” said association executive director Peter Ryan. “One night they painted the word ‘Choice’ on one side of our building in large black letters and came back two other nights and ripped off our wooden flower boxes attached to the front of our building which dress it up nicely.

[…]

The property has been the target of different types of vandalism.

“We’ve had quite a few incidents in the last four or five years. I think it’s intensified,” he said.

The Right to Life Association opened its women’s care centre on Brunswick Street in 2000.

The pro-life facility provides support for women who are pregnant and encourages those pondering an abortion to consider keeping their baby.

“We’re appealing to whoever this is to please leave us alone and respect our choice to do what we do here, which is to help pregnant women in need. We don’t do it the way they want us to do it which is to give women abortions.

“We do help these women both before they’re considering abortion and after they’ve had abortions. We help these women just by offering compassion and support and information. We think that’s not a terrible thing,” Ryan said.

“There’s an alternative next to us and we’re the other choice.”

Up front: I’m musing here. I don’t think tattoos are an important matter of morality, or life and death.

However, I do find myself staring quizzically in moments. Take the lady I saw yesterday, who had a small ice cream cone with a heart next to it, tattoed on her leg. It was a cute small icon, just perfect if you worked at Hallmark and were designing a “Hope you beat the heat” card for someone who lives without AC. But as a permanent addition to your skin? Forever and ever?

I recall another friend who got a massive butterfly tattoed on her back. Again, is this because butterflies are just so pretty, that you ache inside without one permanently etched on your body? Or what about the guy who stayed over at my place, a friend of my then-rommate, who emerged from a night of partying to show off the exact replica of the CD case of his favourite band? He’ll carry that on his shoulder, even when the kids don’t know what CDs are, or that they used to come in cases.

I personally feel that if something is going to be engraved in my skin, I’d think a bit more about what that was going to be. There will be no pixies or leprechauns, no butterflies or ice cream cones or favourite bands. Here ends the rant.

Social norms go in and out of fashion like anything else. Some are explicit, others are implicit. Everything from the tip percentage for a waiter to how you raise your children is subject to the scrutiny of acceptability. Unfortunately, adoption too has fallen victim to the whims of social normality, and for many people “giving up” your baby for adoption is simply not a social norm. Martin Narey is looking to change all that.

Teenage girls and women pregnant with unwanted babies should be offered the ‘golden option’ of adoption alongside abortion or struggling on to raise the children, a Government adviser said yesterday.

The call from Martin Narey, the Coalition’s new adoption tsar, will pile fresh pressure on social workers to end three decades of hostility to adoption as a way of finding homes for children with troubled mothers.

Ministers have already tried to clear the way for thousands of children to find new families by ordering social workers and their managers to scrap race rules that have prevented white couples from adopting black children, and barred people in their 40s and older from adoption.

The suggestion by Mr Narey, a former chief executive of Barnardo’s, would mean a return to the practices of the 1970s, when mothers who could not keep their children often offered them for adoption. Since then, adoption has gone out of fashion with social workers, and the number of children adopted from state care has dropped from more than 20,000 a year to around 3,000.

In a report into the state of the adoption system, containing 19 suggestions for improvements, Mr Narey said social workers should no longer press pregnant women with personal difficulties to bring up their children.

And he suggested it was wrong to tell teenagers they would make good mothers.

‘For six months we are all over her telling her how well she is doing – and then she is on her own. What we are doing is cowardly,’ he said in the report, commissioned by The Times.

‘Adoption should be a third option to abortion or keeping the child. It is an attitude that must be allowed to grow.

‘In the U.S. mothers who give their children up for adoption believe they are giving them a great start.

‘Here it is viewed as a success if we talk them out of it..

Changing attitudes: Mr Narey said that pregnant women should follow the American example and believe that if their child is adopted it is being given a good start in life 

‘I am afraid some people just don’t like adoption. They think it is social engineering, allowing middle-class people to bring up working-class children. Where there are successes, professionals are apologetic about it, like it is some sort of tragedy.

It’s controversial to want to encourage young mothers to routinely consider adoption, but the alternative is that they routinely consider less positive options. Wouldn’t it be great if all young girls had it in the forefront of their minds that if they did get pregnant, they could always choose adoption?

Let’s just hope Planned Parenthood doesn’t feeling like suing anyone over it. I don’t know anything about Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, but after reading this article, he’s got my support.

The law requires that signs be posted around abortion facilities and include pertinent information about a woman’s rights, including the fact that it is illegal to coerce a woman into getting an abortion, that the child’s father must provide child support, that certain agencies can assist them during and after the pregnancy and that adoptive parents can pay some of the medical costs.
[…]
“Women deserve to know their legal rights and the protections already afforded to them under the law,” he said. “We are confident that the more they know, the more they’ll choose life and alternatives to abortion.”
[…]
Benjamin Clapper, executive director of Louisiana Right to Life, said a study conducted in 2004 indicated that 64 percent of women who have had an abortion felt they were coerced into making the decision.

“Our society promotes the idea that abortion is a free choice, and statistic show completely otherwise,” he said.

Jindal said the new law is a significant step, but that it wouldn’t be the last.

…and this is one of them:

Abortion ‘increases risk of premature birth’ Abortion appears to increase the chance of giving birth prematurely in a subsequent wanted pregnancy by a third, according to a British study.

So you’ll recall the heartwarming tale of my being complimented on the way to beach volleyball. I follow that up with something, er, less heartwarming. Similar story: walking down a road with a friend, having gotten off the bus this time, also on the way to play volleyball. This time we’re in the burbs though, and as we pass by what I think was a Lebanese restaurant a guy, way off in the shadowy distance, shouts “sluts.” Yes, at us. We keep walking. We are further away now, and he comes closer, but still remains hidden behind the restaurant’s wall. He hollers again. At this point, I shout, “Show yourself, you loser!!” (Perhaps a bit high school, but that’s what I did on the spur of the moment.) He runs away.

One man’s pretty girl is another man’s slut? (A variation on what our high school politics teacher taught us: “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”) This was likely some sort of minor cultural clash (if you can call it that). Hard not to see the Arabic on the restaurant’s sign, is all I’m saying, and I didn’t have a clean burka to put on this morning.

To conclude: We didn’t go there for food after the game.

The Real Housewives of the Bible. Coming soon on DVD.

I have only read the article I’m linking to here, but I think this could be interesting. Sometimes I feel hopeless that our culture is trapped in this 1970s time warp, teaching ridiculous notions on sex and relationships as if it was the wisdom of the ages. Goes without saying that part and parcel of this attitude is castigating religious values as misogynistic and backwards. But something tells me that a woman living in the Negev in exile was probably a whole heck of a lot stronger than any of us are today, whether or not we call ourselves “feminists.”

I found parts of this funny, other parts, not so much. But I think it’s worth posting anyway.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AGaufgGzC8&feature=player_embedded”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AGaufgGzC8&feature=player_embedded]

I plan on getting the scoop from my Polish cousin, but for now, we’ll rely on this web site for the news from Poland:

[L]awmakers in Poland have cast an initial vote in favor of legislation that would ban all abortions in that country…

In an open letter to the country’s lawmakers, a group of Polish “women journalists” said that the measure would help to restore moral order to the nation, adding that a vote for the bill “would be a vote for the protection of women, and the protection of their relationship with their children. It would also be a vote for the restoration of dignity and respect for motherhood. It would be in the interest not only of women and children, but also of fathers, families, and all of society.”

“More education and more contraception” has long been the rally cry of abortion advocates. In turn, they blame pro-lifers for increasing abortion numbers, as most pro-lifers disagree with contraception as a solution to ending abortion. Turns out that’s for good reason.

More than a thousand girls a year aged under 15 have an abortion [in the UK], figures revealed.

Terminations are being carried out on youngsters aged just 12 or 13 who have only just started secondary school. […]

Norman Wells, director of  the Family Education Trust charity, said: ‘Every abortion involves a personal tragedy for a mother and a child, and none more so than where the mother herself is a child.

‘But these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. For every child who has had an abortion under the age of 16, there will be many more who are engaging in illegal sexual activity and suffering physical and emotional harm as a result.’

Mr Wells pointed to research  showing it was not ignorance of contraception that leads to high rates of teenage abortions, and said instead the ‘contraceptive culture’ was to blame.

‘Those who imagine the answer lies in more sex education and more contraceptive schemes are sadly mistaken,’ he said. ‘As a result of the contraceptive culture we have tended to separate sexual activity from childbearing in our minds. There is always the possibility intimacy will result in the creation of a new life – that is not something to be done lightly.’

The Rev Joanna Jepson, who campaigned against terminations for minor deformities, warned abortions were being offered without any concern for the gravity of the procedure. She said: ‘The figures for underage girls suggests we have to have a debate about the kind of society we’re creating that leads to so many abortions on demand.