I don’t know what to say:

Girls as young as one are being forced into sex change operations in India by parents desperate for a son. Surgeons in the city of Indore are reported to be ‘converting’ hundreds of girls a year, who are subsequently pumped full of hormone drugs.

At least in Ireland, it’s still considered criminal.

A “CUNNING and manipulative” man who gave a teenager abortion drugs when she became pregnant has been jailed for seven years.

Handing down the sentence to Christopher Paul Buckham (33) at Belfast Crown Court, the recorder of Belfast, Judge Tom Burgess, said he had looked for a “scintilla of concern for her but no matter how hard one looks, finds none”.

He said that having groomed the 15-year-old girl through internet chat rooms and texting, Buckham lied to her about having fertility problems and then, when she became pregnant, he gave her abortion drugs and then left her to deal with the emotional and physical effects of the termination.

“His behaviour requires to be visited with condign punishment,” the judge said.

Buckham pleaded guilty to eight charges of sexual activity with a child and one of supplying a poison to procure a miscarriage, between June 19th, 2009, and May 22nd last year.

[…]

Using the internet, Buckham ordered abortion drugs and got the teenager to take them.

[…]

As Buckham stood in the dock with his head bowed and his victim being continually hugged by her father just feet away, Judge Burgess told him he had “taken advantage of the immaturity and vulnerability of a young girl half his age on a regular basis . . . for his own personal gratification, only too happy to subjugate her interests to his own pleasures”.

As well as the seven-year jail term, he ordered Buckham to sign the police sex offenders’ register for the rest of his life and, as part of a sexual offences prevention order, barred him from ever contacting his victim again. 

Here we go again. Seems to me that there truly is a double standard. President Obama was able to get away with getting the number of states in his own union wrong, as well as saying he was looking forward to meeting the president of Canada. His vice president is known for making factual errors.

But when Michele Bachmann gets John Wayne’s birthplace wrong, well then. This is news:

Bachmann officially launched her campaign Monday in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, but got a key fact about the city wrong during advance publicity for the event.

‘Just like John Wayne was from Waterloo, that’s the kind of spirit I have,’ Bachmann told a TV interviewer, referring to the iconic movie star.The only problem? John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa. Waterloo was once the home of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted of raping and murdering 33 boys and men in the 1970s.

I don’t know a lot about her. What I do know sounds impressive. She’s an attorney, with five kids, who also took in foster kids. It’s hard not to feel like there’s already a media campaign mounted against her.

What would it take for the media to be disinterested observers? Is that too much to ask? Or to do investigative reporting that doesn’t involve slamming Christians for being Christian? (I didn’t read too far into that last link. I did find it funny that apparently the author takes it as some sort of strange apocalyptic sign that Bachmann thinks God is calling her to run for the nomination. Newsflash, newsflash, pull out your notepads hostile journalists: Every practicing Christian out there thinks God is calling them to do something, and has placed them where they are for a reason. Believer or not, that’s the story of the Bible from start to finish: the idea that God uses people, aka us, to work in this world. So it’s not just crazy Republican candidates. I’d hazard to say Jimmy Carter thinks precisely the same thing.)

Anyway. I’ll reserve judgment until I know more but headlines indicating that Michele Bachmann doesn’t know where John Wayne was born do not disturb me. Sorry.

This is a lovely story. A woman has a child at 18, gives him up for adoption, and he contacts her some 36 years later on Facebook. Meanwhile, she’s had two other children, one of whom passes away, and feels like her first son coming back into her life is a comfort, especially considering the loss of her third son. 

Of course she might have chosen abortion, and that would have been the end of the story.

…Overrule ’em:

Planned Parenthood of Indiana expects to start offering services to Medicaid patients again Saturday after a federal judge ruled the state is not allowed to cut off the organization’s public funding for general health services solely because it also provides abortions.

A good article here on how being informed isn’t “anti” anything.

No one can call themselves “pro-choice” and “pro-woman” and stand in opposition to the Women’s Right to Know Act (House bill 854).  This piece of legislation requires that women receive a consultation with a doctor, are given information on alternatives to abortion, offered an ultrasound, and given a 24-hour waiting period before having an abortion. […]

Nevertheless, this bill has generated a series of protests from the pro-choice crowd with arguments that the legislation violates the doctor/patient relationship, it makes the decision to have an abortion more painful for the woman and it is just one more step towards making abortions more difficult to obtain.

But the arguments stem from a misunderstanding of the current situation for women seeking an abortion.  When all the facts are included, this bill is not polarized and does not seek a hidden agenda. […]

I was curious about how much doctor interaction was available to patients seeking an abortion so I called a Woman’s Choice center to schedule the procedure.  They informed me that I could come that same day and wouldn’t have to talk to anyone before my appointment; I could be “in and out.”

Regardless of your stance on abortion, this is not right.  No woman or young girl should be able to have an abortion without a doctor consult.  This is a decision and medical procedure that she will live with for the rest of her life; meanwhile abortion clinics treat patients as if they were customers at a drive-thru fast food restaurant.

This bill cannot violate the doctor/patient relationship because there is no doctor/patient relationship to speak of under the typical abortion procedure.

Emphasis added.

This could be another good reason to not go on birth control:

Women are more prejudiced toward male strangers when they are fertile, says a new U.S. study, which suggests bias is partly ingrained in human DNA.

Researchers at Michigan State University asked 252 female university students, both Caucasian and black, to look at photos of men’s faces, also both Caucasian and black. The women then had to link each face with either a physical adjective, such as muscular, or a mental one, such as brainy.

. . .

Their study found that fertile women were less accepting of the men they perceived as being muscular if the men were of different race than their own. And because that bias jumped when women were at the peak of their menstrual cycle, when they are most fertile, that prejudice appears to be partly innate, said lead study author Melissa McDonald said.

It’s nothing short of a miracle that I married and am having a baby with my husband. He’s a VERY strange man.

__________________

Andrea adds: Or, it could be a good reason to not fund studies such as these. That was my first thought.

__________________

Deborah adds: But THEN what would the government do with our money?

Big article in the National Post today, a book excerpt from Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada runs your life:

There were respectable legal arguments on both sides in the Morgentaler case. McIntyre and La Forest were no mean jurists, and they disagreed with the majority decision. There were three separate judgments from the justices in the majority, each significantly different from the other two. The conclusion may have been clear, but there was no clear reason for the conclusion. The decision was five to two. Richard Posner has written of the U.S. Supreme Court, “Many of the landmark decisions were decided by close votes and would have been decided the other way had the Court been differently but no less ably manned.”  The same is true of Morgentaler.

Parliament is where decisions of this sort should reside, not the Supreme Court.

I like this column about Toronto’s mayor not marching in the pride parade over Canada Day. But I’ll quibble with this point:

The knives that are out for Mr. Ford have nothing to do with this particular decision, though. The exaltation of homosexuality is second only to the reverence paid to unfettered abortion as a litmus test for political correctness amongst our cognitive and cultural elites. Rob Ford’s sin is that he does not believe in mixing politics with sexuality pride. Rob Ford is not a homophobe, but nor on the other hand does he think it is any particular honour to be homosexual. Many Canadians not schooled in the catechism of gender correctness agree with him.

You may remember that I grew up in Toronto and it’s the only city where I can find my way without a map. I further, for better or for worse, travelled in circles that included our cognitive and cultural elites. And while I’d probably rather not be the vocal pro-lifer at a downtown Toronto cocktail party, I am 100 per cent certain I would not want to speak in favour of Rob Ford on this one.

The exaltation of homosexuality in Toronto is second to absolutely nothing.

The “M” word (for morality) might even be slightly less popular than the “A” word. Nonetheless, we can’t escape it. More on the riots:

What Cacnio is telling us, then, is that, on a night in which she says she was so jumped up with adrenaline and booze that she found looting a store to be a perfectly rational thing to do, she was also morally aware and clear-headed enough to put her love of the natural world into action by saving some trees.

The same sort of morality is often on display in the abortion debate. I’ve met vegetarians/environmentalists who have had abortions. It’s a question of what you believe to be right and wrong, and I say that in a dispassionate tone. We teach today that the natural environment is sacred. We simultaneously teach that it is a choice to have an abortion.

It doesn’t matter that those two contradict each other or that our sense of morality is skewed. (People, not trees, anyone?) People respond to the teaching they have received. I don’t know anything about Cacnio, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she had also learned that capitalists are immoral, and if that didn’t inform her choice to steal from the “greedy bastards.”