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2nd Annual GALA Dinner, Westin Hotel, Halifax, NS
FRIDAY, MARCH 18TH 6:30PM WESTIN HOTEL

“The Case Against Euthanasia”

The speaking engagement of Professor Margaret Somerville is, for CLC,
“once-in-a-lifetime event.”
Campaign Life sees this as an excellent opportunity to defend the case against Euthanasia.
If you are planning to attend this fundraising dinner, Please, order your ticket now.

If you are not able to attend, would you consider sponsoring a youth? We have several who are anxious to hear Dr. Somerville’s presentation.

Give me a call a.s.a.p. (902) 861-1982

INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED
ETHICIST MARGARET SOMERVILLE
REGARDED BY SOME AS HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL
BECAUSE OF HER DEBATES
ON TOUGH MORAL QUESTIONS IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE

DON’T BE DISAPPOINTED
RESERVE YOUR TICKET NOW
$100.00 per

Call: Ellen (902) 861-1982 or e-mail: [email protected]

CLC EXPECTS THIS TO BE A SELL-OUT EVENT!

 

I’m certainly concerned that this teen is very ill-adjusted:

Monique Smith, 19, of Brooklyn was arguing with a family member in June when she reached for the hamster, choked it and threw it outside the house, police said.

I actually think grabbing an animal and killing it just because you can is horrifying and is a sign of something desperately wrong. I also think taking yourself off to a clinic to kill your unborn child is a sign that something is desperately wrong. It’s just that we are more concerned about hamsters in our current cultural milieu. There’s no other way to put it.

That sexual revolution…what a hoot:

Dr. Eric Genden, head and neck surgeon at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, has seen his practice change dramatically over the past decade. “My waiting room used to be filled with smokers and drinkers, blue-collar workers,” recalls Genden. “Now it’s filled with professionals who were never smokers or drinkers.” This “new set of patients” is presenting with head and neck cancer, particularly in the tonsils and at the base of the tongue, at a younger age than the hard-living seniors. Genden was puzzled by the change. What could have triggered malignancy in these folks, he wondered, when in the past some 95 per cent of the head and neck tumours he saw grew out of a life dedicated to tobacco and booze?

He now knows the culprit: the human papillomavirus, or HPV. “What we’re seeing is almost an epidemic,” he says, referring to a growing acceptance by the medical community over the last several years that at least one strain of HPV (HPV-16, which also causes cervical cancer) is leading to what’s known as oropharyngeal cancer. “These patients are younger, in their 40s or 50s, mostly male, and they never smoked or drank.”

This is such a stupid thing to have done. I am very disappointed.

Back in January, I wrote a post about PlanB posters at my place of work. It’s about time I updated that post. After initially contacting the marketing director, I was informed there was an ad company that rented those locked poster spaces from us. The ad company was contacted and asked to change the posters because they weren’t cohesive with the facility’s “family oriented” identity (their words, not mine). The posters were changed by the ad company owner about a week after but then were changed back to PlanB posters again at the end of month (when the posters are usually changed) by the regular delivery person who does this job. Once again, management contacted the ad company and requested the posters be changed. They were, and no PlanB posters are currently in the building and should not be in the future.

The moral? This whole endeavor took a lot of time and effort on the part of management, there were phone calls and follow-ups. I’m the only person that had questioned the posters in a building with about sixty employees. I’m incredibly grateful to my co-workers for their support but also recognize that this is perhaps not an isolated event. I don’t work in a vacuum, it’s just a gym. So don’t be afraid to bring these things up, who knows what kind of change you might effect.

The debate last night at Dalhousie started off as expected. The posters on the doors had been torn down and crumpled, then were reattached. A small group of people on campus had littered the auditorium with helium filled balloons dangling signs that read: “Access to Safe Abortion On Demand IS NOT UP FOR DEBATE”

But the speakers weren’t discouraged.

For the pro-life side, Stephanie Gray, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, began the debate by describing the medical definitions of human being and illustrating how those differ from our current standards of ‘personhood’. Ms. Gray was thoughtful and concise, her points were clear and didn’t fall victim to emotionalizing the debate. Regardless of whether or not one agreed with the CCBR’s controversial methods, they couldn’t help but recognize Gray’s ability to give compelling arguments and coherently question what difference it made to be in the womb or outside it, a few seconds conceived or 20 years old. Was a person not a person regardless of their time spent on earth?

During her opening, a young gentleman had left stink-bombs, yes you read it right, stink-bombs, on a chair in the auditorium which temporarily interrupted the debate while the chair and its smelly protest were removed. Ms. Gray commented, “I thought we were at a university.”

When Dr. Mark Mercer took the podium for the pro-choice argument, he proceeded to follow a Peter Singer train of thought. Dr. Mercer had previously published an article entitled “A Fetus is not a Person” in The Ottawa Citizen, this article has been removed. He argued that ‘personhood’ did not actually occur until around 18 months to 2 years of age, that until a human being was able to rationalize, make plans, be a ‘locus’ of experience, and feel pain and joy, it was not in fact a person. As such, we should not be “morally troubled” by it. He conceded that though abortion was killing a human being it was not killing a ‘person’ and that there was no moral difference between killing a baby in the womb and killing a baby prior to its ‘personhood’. Dr. Mercer, unfortunately, lacked the ability to convey these beliefs coherently to the audience, many of whom actually laughed at some of his remarks.

During the question period, Ms. Gray continued to illustrate respect for her questioners and thoughtfulness in her answers, even though one young woman stormed out just when it was her turn to question yelling “This b*tch isn’t worth my time!”. Dr. Mercer, however, was questioned primarily about why he was even chosen to represent the pro-choice view, as none of the pro-choice audience members believed he was speaking on their behalf. Those audience members even went so far as to claim that Pro-Life at Dal (the group who put together the debate) had purposefully chosen a poor speaker for the pro-choice side, demanding to know who else was contacted about participating.

In my empathy for Dr. Mercer and his obvious confusion to his reception, I spoke to him afterward. He asked me,”What could I have done or said differently?” I offered my opinion that perhaps the pro-choice audience members expected a more ‘pro-woman’ argument to be made. He replied,”But I’ve written numerous times and shown how those ‘pro-woman’ arguments don’t work, they have no basis.” And at that, I was pleased.

Perhaps those who consider themselves pro-choice in the audience might have realized that evening that Dr. Mercer was arguing the morality of abortion without the usual ‘choice’ rhetoric, the rhetoric that abortion should be legal because women will acquire illegal abortions (which Dr. Mercer has shown is not a solid argument). That the pro-choice/pro-abortion philosopher kings, like Dr. Mercer and Peter Singer, aren’t people the general pro-choice population agrees with or even likes. And this is hopeful, because eventually everyone will have thrown off the shackles of ‘choice’ rhetoric and will have to look at abortion as starkly as Dr. Mercer, the man nobody agrees with and who represents no one, does.

David Warren writes in the Ottawa Citizen about Linda Gibbons as a modern-day hero:

Isn’t it ironic that I was not able to post anything on International Woman’s Day, me, the busy working mother of 6? So consider this my Woman’s Day well-wishes, symbolically one day late and rushed (I have 10 minutes, having finished lunches early this morning).

What did I do yesterday? I drove children around while listening to a CBC radio panel on the status of women (listen to it here)  The comments of the 25-year-old gave me hope. After the usual milk run of school and preschool drop-offs, I headed shortly into my part-time job on Parliament Hill, having recently downgraded from full-time work in a effort to bring more balance into my life. I say “shortly” because I was just picking-up a few work items to bring home: my toddler has been fighting a string of bugs since January and was feverish. Again.

So what did I, a highly educated female in my prime earning years, do on International Woman’s Day? I was living the dream! Caught between my work and family obligations, missing work to care for a sick child as I have done at least once a week for the last 6 weeks, happily sabotaging my professional ascension to better pay and more serious responsibilities. You may wonder what my husband was doing and why wasn’t he taking time off work to care for the sick child? The reason is simple: he makes, oh, about 10 times more money than I do. To use round numbers, if a day off for me costs our family $10, my husband’s days off cost us $100. And the nature of the beast is that as long as I keep missing work to tend to my family, I will keep making $10 while my husband’s earnings will keep increasing. It’s not rocket science home economics. It’s just cold hard reality. And no government policy, national daycare program or pity pay-outs will change it.

Here’s your International Woman’s Day wisdom from the trenches, one day late and rushed between making lunches and wiping runny noses with my power suit: children need taking care of. Bosses need taking care of. There are 24 hours in a day. Choices have consequences. They are either work-related or family-related. Sort it out. Then deal with it.

You’re welcome.

My take on it, in today’s Ottawa Citizen.

___________________

Update: Some other women I like on the same topic. Tasha Kheiriddin in the Post, here and Margaret Wente in the Globe, here. Could it be? There’s a nascent sisterhood of reasonable women out there?

Abortion Debate: Is it moral? Should it be illegal?

Tuesday, March 8 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm

Scotiabank Auditorium, Marion McCain Arts & Social Sciences Bldg 

6135 University Avenue

Halifax, NS

*On the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day*
Free event, open to the public. There will be opportunities for the audience to pose questions to each opponent. 

Stephanie Gray of the controversial Canadian Centre for Bio-ethical Reform will debate Dr. Mark Mercer of Saint Mary’s University on whether abortion is moral, and the legal implications of its morality. Stephanie Gray will argue that abortion is immoral, while Dr.Mercer will argue it is not immoral.