Chatelaine magazine has taken on the question of whether to show graphic photos to high school kids. The comments are the most interesting part. Plenty of women still think you can’t be pro-woman and pro-life. We have our work cut out for us.

A friend has written in with this request:

Dear Andrea: my elder daughter is trying to find good resources to help her think about start- and end-of-life issues (recently having to think about the Groningen Protocol). Do you have any suggestions for her?

What might your suggestions to this student in university be? Please write in with any resources you think are helpful.

The EU is up in arms because they gave money to Hungary but are now upset with just how that money has been used: on pro-life billboards. Love it.

I love this story because the EU is constantly clashing with the former Eastern Block, and I love it when these upstart fledgling democracies show up the old, staid west on life as on other topics. And it goes without saying that I love it that Hungary is running a pro-life campaign.

Busy day here, no time to think, for which I am eternally grateful. Ruminating is, my friends, highly overrated. Anyhoo, not sure how I feel about “womb transplants” from mother to daughter. I wouldn’t do it, but that alone probably isn’t quite the logical treatment people are looking for. Read about it, here:

Eva Ottosson, 56, has agreed to take part in a groundbreaking new medical procedure, which if successful could see her donate her uterus to her 25-year-old daughter Sara.

Doctors hope if the transplant is successful Sara, who was born without reproductive organs, could become pregnant and carry a child in the same womb from which she herself was born.

Funding questions don’t only apply to which money is or isn’t being used for abortions. If you happen to live in an EU member country like Hungary, you also can’t use funds to promote abortion alternatives, because that’s not in keeping with “EU values”. This imposing of values can go even further, as Ireland learn back in December.

The European Commission requested Hungary to stop its anti-abortion campaign because it was financed mainly using EU money allotted to gender equality projects.

The Hungarian government earlier this year chose against an outright ban on abortion, but started an ad campaign hoping to reduce the numbers of legal abortions. The campaign is set to run for two months and show a picture of a fetus with the words, “I understand it if you aren’t ready for me, but rather put me up for adoption, let me live!”

Through the Progress Fund, the EU subsidizes projects aimed at gender equality. Some members of the European Parliament asked the European Commission in May whether the Commission was aware that the fund, designed to support the implementation of the EU’s social agenda, was being used to finance an anti-abortion campaign.

In response, commission vice-president Viviane Reding urged Hungarian authorities to immediately stop the campaign, saying its funding using EU money was improper.

 

…everywhere.

(Reuters) – A man convicted of attempted murder under Ohio’s fetal homicide law after he tried to force his girlfriend to get an abortion at gunpoint was sentenced on Thursday to 13 years in prison.

Dominic L. Holt-Reid, 28, was charged last October under the 1996 statute, which defines the unlawful termination of a pregnancy as murder. He pleaded guilty to the charge in April.

According to prosecutors, Yolanda Burgess, Holt-Reid’s 26-year-old girlfriend and the mother of one of his six children, had initially agreed to terminate the pregnancy.

But when Burgess changed her mind on the day the procedure was scheduled, Holt-Reid, a felon out on parole for a federal drug conviction, allegedly pulled a handgun and forced her to drive to the abortion clinic, where he accompanied her inside, the gun hidden in his waistband.

Burgess was able to pass a note, however, to clinic employees, alerting them to her plight. They called police, who arrested Holt-Reid and charged him with attempted murder, abduction and several weapons offenses.

Burgess has since given birth to the child.

An article about a woman who takes beautiful pictures of babies who have died just as soon as they are born, as a memory for the grieving family:

Many people find the idea of photographing deceased children morbid, and I respect this view. But these grief-stricken parents must, for the most part, leave the hospital empty-handed. This life they dreamed of and hoped for stays behind – in the morgue. While other parents leave clutching a treasured bundle, the families I photograph take only a baby hat, footprints and handprints, and a tiny hospital bracelet. My photos are powerful. My photos are proof. They say to one and all: This life was lived, even if only in utero. This life mattered. This baby was our baby and we love him.

Pro-choice folks make fun of pro-lifers. They call us “fetus fetishists” and other odd assorted names. But is it so funny to consider these fetuses as lives lived, even if only in utero? Is it so risible to envision that those lives matter? It’s simply consistent when pro-life people step back and say these lives matter, wanted or unwanted. It’s not so strange to think of the fetus in the womb as a life lived. This article shows that really well.

I do support the use of graphic visuals in the abortion debate:

But Andrea Mrozek, of the Ottawa-based group Pro Woman Pro Life, said she supports the Calgary demonstrations because they shed light on an issue few want to discuss in Canada. “Abortion is very hidden and concealed in our culture and [this tactic] brings it out into the open in a way that can’t be avoided. I think that’s very important.”

Ron Paul, a libertarian politician and once presidential candidate in the United States discusses abortion:

Morality has a lot to do with legislation,” explained Paul. “We don’t have abortions today because the law permits it – that’s made it worse – but the law accommodated the social changes that had occurred. It was the breakdown in our social system at the time…We would like to think that all we have to do is elect the right politicians and everything is going to be okay. But the government is a reflection of the people and their values,” he continued. “That is why the burden is on people like you to make sure we have those values.”

That’s my burden, so to speak, to make sure we have pro-life values; to change hearts and minds, not necessarily legislation.

When I was a preteen, the Cat Who… books accompanied me everywhere. They were fun, intriguing, and a great escape. If they were full of “sex and violence”, at that age I may never even have gotten the chance to read them.

Lilian Jackson Braun – the author of 29 The Cat Who… books about a crime-solving journalist and cat owner called Jim Qwilleran – has died aged 97.

After her first book, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, was published in 1966, the New York Times called her “the new detective writer of the year”.

[…]
Her husband, Earl Bettinger, told the AP news agency she had parted company with her first publisher in the 1960s because she had refused to add sex and violence to her fourth book.

[…]
“A woman from Germany called and said she was coming to America and said she would like to meet Jim Qwilleran,” said Mr Bettinger.

“That’s how real her characters were.”