…would you rather have abortion access or a family doctor?

I spent last week in Prince Edward Island. Never having been there before, I was eager to see what it was like and why it was such a tourist hot spot. Crossing the long and scenic Confederation Bridge, I found myself remembering all the cries for abortion access for these tiny rural communities. And as the island came into view, I tried to imagine seeing a clinic somewhere in this landscape.

Where would you put it? On that farm? On this waterfront park? How about across from the Green Gable house? Or maybe just down from this amusement park? I couldn’t see it. In fact, when you get into PEI, you don’t see much of what you see in a bigger city, and that’s exactly why tourists go there. Many of the people, just opening up their businesses for the season over the long weekend, told us they did so much business with tourists in July and August, that they didn’t need to operate the rest of the year. One woman, who ran an in-home restaurant and gift shop, told me her daughter was in Halifax for over two months when she gave birth to her premature granddaughter as the island didn’t have the facilities to care for them.

So then there are the priorities, what services does PEI really need? The Atlantic regions, with their higher median age, will inevitably have different concerns. So it’s a shame to hear abortion advocates crying for access, while clinics who offer the services Islanders really need, like this one, have to close their doors.

Dr. Robbie Coull’s decision to leave the province and close the Phoenix Medical Practice will leave 4,500 people without a doctor. The practice employed 14 people.

“This is a disaster for health care in P.E.I.,” Coull said in a news release Friday. […]

“We lost $10,000 over the last month, and that was without me taking any salary,” he said in a release.

“Unfortunately, they’ve confirmed for us this week that that money will not be forth coming and we will not be getting negotiations for a pilot. We therefore have no option but to let go of all of our staff and to close the practice,” Coull said to CBC News.

The Phoenix Medical Practice had proposed an expansion of its current model. The three-year pilot project would have provided funding for three doctors and cared for 7,500 patients. Coull said part of the project would have been to demonstrate cheaper per-patient per-year cost than what the province is currently paying out to salaried doctors.

“We made it very clear to them that without this funding we would be forced to close our doors,” he said.

Coull said he was very concerned about what will happen to his patients. In looking at the diabetics on his patient roster, he suggested that five of them could die over the next five years if they can’t find another doctor to provide adequate care.

Dr.Richard Wedge, with Health PEI, said the affected patients will automatically be added to the patient registry of people waiting for a family doctor.

4,500 is roughly 3% of the total population of Charlottetown now without a family physician.

Please raise your thoughts to the very many mothers who are in distress today.

I write this post because one specific mother is scheduled to have an abortion tomorrow, but it doesn’t seem clear she really wants to go through with it. We all know abortions happen every single day. But when someone steps into your field of vision even peripherally, through someone you know, it becomes all the more pressing, upsetting and personal.

I don’t know the young mother in question. I merely forwarded on what I hope are helpful suggestions to the person who does know her. If you are a praying person, you might spend some time in prayer today for her and her unborn child.

Here we have a pro-choice woman arguing that pro-life voices should be included around the table at a government-advisory sexual health forum in the UK:

I’m struggling to understand quite why it is so terrible that the anti-abortion charity, Life, has been invited to join a government- advisory sexual health forum. Former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris reckons that the presence of the group, which promotes sexual abstinence, could prevent the advisory panel from having “frank and open discussions”. I’d say that open discussions are the last thing being sought when groups of people are convened because they all share similar views. It’s not hard to be “frank” either, when addressing a circle of nodding heads.

Hats off to her for expressing this view. But she goes on to say that the pro-choice position will always win out because it is the more logical and rational one. Naturally, I disagree, and I think those who try to ban the pro-life groups from being around such tables do as well. It’s precisely because the pro-life position is very rationally compelling that some believe it shouldn’t be heard. Indeed, the ardent pro-choicers best bet in winning on this question is to make sure pro-lifers remain silent.

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Jennifer adds: The group, Life, has done amazing work. Founded in a spa house in 1970, the group now runs charity shops, residential centers, offers counseling and support for new mothers and their babies. It’s a £4 million operation and provides a great template for other groups to follow.

I’ll be on Byline with Brian Lilley (Sun TV) today to discuss this:

While there’s nothing ambiguous about Storm’s genitalia, they aren’t telling anyone whether their third child is a boy or a girl.The only people who know are Storm’s brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2, a close family friend and the two midwives who helped deliver the baby in a birthing pool at their Toronto home on New Year’s Day.“When the baby comes out, even the people who love you the most and know you so intimately, the first question they ask is, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’” says Witterick, bouncing Storm, dressed in a red-fleece jumper, on her lap at the kitchen table.“If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says Stocker.

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Véronique adds: Believe it or not, I don’t have a strong opinion on that one. I don’t know much about the philosophy , politics or ethics of gender identity. There are a few things I know for sure and others that I suspect. Of the few things I know for sure is that social expectations of gender – girls in pink, boys in blue, dolls and trucks etc. – are at best nice tries. I have a son who likes ballet and nail polish, along with Nerf guns and fire trucks. I have a daughter who is mesmerized by big trucks and sparkly high heels. They were raised in a house with equal numbers of Thomas the Tank Engine and Polly Pockets. I hate shopping. My husband likes a clean house. People can try raising a gender-free baby and at best, they’ll get a boy who likes long hair or a girl who likes motorbikes. They’ll still have a boy or a girl. Unless their child develops/ was born with a gender identity issue in which case no amount of dressing in blue or watching High School Musical was going to make a difference anyway. I say this as someone with a transgendered relative: these things run deeper than your childhood toys.

One of the things I suspect is that people with gender issues – real ones that require treatment, surgery and therapy – see studies explaining why they are all mixed-up with the same disdain I feel when I listen to world population experts quote studies proving that mothers of big families all secretly wish they had 2 kids: with eyes rolling way, way back. My point is, we’re all wierd to someone else. Storm’s parents are wierd. I’m wierd to  most of my kids’ classmates’ parents. I had three babies at home. Some people consider this tantamount to child endangerment. I never had an epidural. Some people consider this downward crazy.

Another thing I suspect is that Storm’s parents love him (or her) very much as they love their older sons and it seems that they are well cared for. There’s a lot more to worry about and get scandalized over in child welfare than parents who appear a bit nutty. I mean, seriously. Some people manage to starve their kids to death. In Canada. Under the watch of child welfare authorities.

In the end, isn’t it ironic that parents who want to deny the importance of gender will give more importance to their child’s genitals than any of my colour-coded babies will ever get? Ironic but sad for the kid who never asked for the scrutiny. But he or she won’t be the first child to pay for his parents 15 minutes of fame.

Pro-choicers (the ones who campaign for abortion access, not the mushy middle) aren’t very concerned with the idea of missing people the result of abortion. They look at a woman’s situation, consider a myriad different factors and identify that she could do nothing else. The person done away with gets lost in the other factors.

That is (fairly) easy to do in individual circumstances, because the person who is missing is, well, not there, but the woman who remains can tell you about the difficulty of her circumstance.

Not so when nations are faltering because of missing girls. The sheer numbers make it impossible to ignore, made more evident because of the gender imbalance.

Click here to read this fairly in-depth report from the BBC about India’s aborted females.

We’ve heard this story before but I’ll continue to draw attention to it. Because at the end of the day, those of us who are pro-life are saying whether it’s here in Canada or in India, those missing people matter. Not more than the woman who bears them, but in concert with her, they both matter.

We ought to work hard to stop female foeticide, as the article calls it, but in general we ought to work to stop all foeticide. These are the hidden societal ramifications of abortion, and if they don’t show up in the gender imbalance, those ramifications show up in other places.

…has moved into the womb:

Dr. Hassan Shehata wants to keep potentially pudgy babies from tipping the scales too high at birth, which can expose them — and their moms — to serious complications and lifelong problems. The solution, he believes, is to give the pregnant, obese women the popular diabetes drug metformin — even though the expectant mothers don’t actually have the disease.

This is the story of a couple undergoing infertility treatments at great cost, first in Montreal, then in New York, only to get pregnant “the old-fashioned way.” So it’s a success story, in the end. I suppose I read it somewhat fearfully, thinking of all the broken relationships the result of the strain and cost of trying to conceive so desperately. Only to end up wondering whether you needed to do any of that in the first place.

Each woman is on her own journey. I don’t think mine will ever include invasive fertility treatments. It follows with my “some things are not a choice” philosophy. If it were to come to pass that I couldn’t have biological children I’d be forced to consider that there’s a reason for that. From time to time, when sadness hits because I don’t have any kids yet, I consider that maybe, just maybe, there might be even one child out there who was not aborted thanks to something I said or did. And then I consider all the great things I can do precisely because I don’t have my own kids. And then I call a friend with kids and listen to how she hasn’t slept since early January 2010 and the sadness pretty much dissapates.

Where was I? Fertility treatments. I have hesitated to comment too much on this precisely because it is so very emotional and personal, and I don’t want to hurt anyone experiencing infertility and going about solutions in their own way. But I do harbour some concerns about the manner in which we try to conceive, and this article highlights some of those.

I came across this article, an interview with sociologist Mark Regnerus (who spoke at my workplace’s conference in early May) and thought, this is interesting. He discusses marrying young, building a life together, and the conundrum many Christians face when they are told both to wait to marry until they are “ready” and to wait til marriage to have sex–not a winning advice combo. In any event, I clicked over to Yahoo to send this article to a friend, where I got distracted by another relationship type column with the headline “Is this the recipe for a happy relationship?” Their advice? Drink cocktails together. No really. So there you have it: Two drastically different worldviews in close proximity.

This article is about how more and more kids clothes are made to be “sexy”–for as young as seven-year-olds. That’s a story in itself but I found this quote intriguing:

It’s important to realize that these clothes are ubiquitous and they are hard to avoid,” [said] Mackey. “But when young girls wear these clothes they send the message that they are sexually available. And the more they are exposed to clothes that suggest they should be attractive to the opposite sex, they could put themselves into risky situations.”

Seems to me this comes awfully close to saying that how we dress matters, because it sends certain signals. But that’s taboo, and I believe the genesis of the “Slutwalk” came about to protest a cop who implied that women should be careful about how they dress. Just wanted to highlight the discrepancy.

Signal Hill in British Columbia does great work and they’ve come out with a couple of pro-life ads. I like the first one; I’m not such a big fan of the second one. Terribly hard to get “abortion ironies” right in tone and I’m not sure they 100% get it here…Still, I’ve always wanted to do short YouTube segments like this, so hats off to them for actually getting it done!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJE5gEMTLF0&NR=1″>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJE5gEMTLF0&NR=1]

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOm41wZN9C4&NR=1″>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOm41wZN9C4&NR=1]