A recent comment from a reader about regret and abortion led me to question the link between regret and our current cultural climate. Studies vary on the percentage of women who do and do not regret their decision, some quoting 70% do not regret it, others quoting 80% (pregnant from sexual assault) regretted their decision. Assuming for the sake of argument the 70% for absolutely no regrets is accurate, one wonders how this high percentage is possible.

In a growing “Culture of Me”, perhaps instead of thinking these figures are high we should be asking ourselves why women who undergo abortions should be any more remorseful than the rest of the population. In fact, narcissism, a primary trait of which is lack of empathy, has become so prevalent in our society it may no longer be considered a disorder.

The American Psychiatric Association recently announced it’s considering lifting narcissistic personality disorder — along with four other personality disorders — from its highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

[…]

…the diagnosis may be dropped for the manual’s 2013 edition, Campbell says, essentially because it’s a manifestation of normal personality.

So, he says, the same patient would be told he or she has “a combination of traits that maybe lie on a continuum or a spectrum. You have high levels of traits that are associated with narcissism.”

A New Normal?

But the way narcissism is treated — in the majority of cases, with therapy — wouldn’t change much.

“There’s no treatment for extreme narcissism that’s somehow different than moderate narcissism,” Campbell says.

And while things won’t change much for those on the couch, he says, the way we talk about narcissism in culture might.

“When this happened I went and looked at Twitter just to see what people were saying about it,” Campbell says.  “The most common response was, ‘It must be so normal now, it’s no longer a disorder.'”

And the second-most?

“‘Gee, I guess I’m OK, then’,” Campbell says. “People see there’s narcissism everywhere, and they’re just shocked … that they’re considering getting rid of it. It’s such a perfect term for so much of what we see in society.”

It’s easy to laugh at the amount of “Me” promoting we all participate in on a daily basis, the status updates of our every thought and a general sense of entitlement to whatever we desire. We should have it, we deserve it, and dag nabbit we want it now. Quite a disconnect from Mother Teresa’s “A life not lived for others is not a life.” to Snooki’s “I think I’m fascinating.” But what effect will a narcissistic society have on our children?

The Narcissist turns other people from people into objects and they relate to other people primarily in terms of what the other can do to enhance their self esteem.   This is what I mean by my title, “objectifying the object.”

In our culture, one of the worst outcomes of such objectification concerns the way in which we treat our children.  We give lip service to the idea that our children are the most important people in our country and then turn around and make cultural and legal decisions that enhance the desires and pleasures of adults, often at the expense of children.

A growing body of literature supports the idea that children do best when raised by two, married parents.  (There is not enough data yet to know how children of same-sex couples fare.)  Yet our culture has consistently made it easier for people to have children without marriage and easier to divorce once children are in the picture. In the weighting of what is best for the parents versus what is best for the children, the children’s needs come in a distant second.

Another place where this is an issue is in abortion. At one time there was no question among people that life began at conception. Whether or not you believe that holds, it is certainly true that for a wanted pregnancy, the child begins to become a real person, invested with the love, hopes, and dream of its mother, fairly early in pregnancy. By the time of quickening, when the baby’s first movements are felt, no prospective mother would call her baby anything but a human being. On the other hand, in order to make it psychologically possible to abort an unwanted baby, the prospective child has to be turned into a devalued object, a mere “fetus” or a “choice”.

[…]

In a Narcissistic culture, children are increasingly seen as objects, possessions, if you will. Abortion fits into this paradigm because a possession can be easily disposed of while a child is a person who may have other desires.

If NPD is removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will it simply be the norm? Currently, there is no treatment for narcissism, but the first step, as always, is to recognize that there is a problem.

Ross Douthat writing in the New York Times about the paradox of North America’s unborn:

No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.

Sad but true.

Neil Reynolds has a fun piece on why good old Mother Earth is quite capable of sustaining many more people, here.

For that matter, though, it was once said – most famously, back in the 1970s – that the world’s population could fit comfortably into Texas. As it happens, this apparently idiotic assertion has been fact-checked once again. Here (from the Simply Shrug website) is the methodology and the math.

The global population is roughly 6.8 billion people. For this exercise, say seven billion. Use Metropolitan New York (population: 8.3 million) as a guide to tolerable density. With an area of 790 square kilometres, the Big Apple population density is 10,500 people per square kilometre.

How much land would be required to accommodate seven billion people with the same density of population that New York already has? Answer: 666,265 square kilometres. But New York City is already taken. Where could you find space for the rest of the world’s people? As it happens, Texas fits the bill perfectly: The Lone Star State has 678,051 square kilometres of land – or roughly 10,000 square kilometres more than needed.

He also has numbers for food and water needs, if you’re the nitpicky type. If you’re not getting the reference in the headline, please go here for the explanation.

…so why didn’t the G8?

At the end of last month President Obama recognised the threat the LRA is having on this underdeveloped area of central Africa when he launched a plan to tackle the notorious fighters and the shattering impact they have on communities. The African Union (AU) is also taking welcome steps to find solutions.

But despite commitments and political initiatives, the LRA has been allowed to operate for more than 20 years. It’s impossible to calculate how many lives have been ruined but in the last two years alone the group has become the deadliest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo killing more than 2,300 and abducting more than 3,000 people across the region.

[…]

Seventy-two-year-old Papa Peleke runs an upholstery business in Dungu town in north-east Congo, where he lives with his wife of 44 years, their nine children and their “many grandchildren”. He and four of his teenage granddaughters were abducted by the LRA in November 2008 and taken deep into the forest. His youngest granddaughter recently escaped after 15 months in captivity. The others remain missing.

“The world must end this war and this suffering,” he told Oxfam. “I don’t want to have to hear the name LRA in Congo any more. The Congolese army aren’t able to do much – on the day we were abducted there were 10 soldiers nearby but they didn’t do anything.”

The UN and the international community are asking what can be done for people like Papa Pekele and his family. The answer is simple: they must finally make sure there is peace, security and development.

What bothered me most about the G8 Maternal Health Initiative was that it was ignoring pressing urgent issues effecting the lives of women in the regions it was covering while focusing on issues that, at this stage, the women in countries like Sudan and Congo simply aren’t able to debate for themselves due to lack of status, lack of education, and lack of infrastructure. What is it these women want and need? They want to be protected from self-proclaimed prophets turned military leaders like Joseph Kony.

Mr. Kony, who has been wanted by the International Criminal Court since 2005, has engaged since the late 1980s in the mass abductions of children from villages and government-run camps in the Ugandan countryside. His hostages, seized in ambushes along roads and in raids on settlements, became the living fuel for a grim, millennial war.

Mr. Kony did not ransom his captives. He had another design. He indoctrinated the boys as foot soldiers in a guerrilla campaign against the Ugandan government and, when directed by his sponsors in Sudan, against villages and rebel groups in Southern Sudan. Abducted girls were put to work, too — as labor, as soldiers, and, once they reached puberty, as sexual chattel for Mr. Kony and his coterie of commanders, who called them their wives.

This quick article identifies four of them. And these, incidentally, are the main arguments you hear in support of abortion.

Which raises a point: is the pro-choice status quo based on any arguments at all? Arguably not. It’s based on emotion and feelings. Which is why an article like this won’t make a dent on how people think. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have good arguments. I’m not saying we shouldn’t shoot down bad arguments. But there’s something more than a good, well-argued debate to changing hearts and minds about abortion. Otherwise, pro-lifers would have won the day long ago.

Friends, Readers, lend me your ear:

It is the First Day of the New Year, and I, having largely overcome the dreaded common cold (three cheers), have decided I will write down some ProWomanProLife First Principles. Brass tacks. The neeeety greeeeety. (That’s “nitty gritty,” said with a Nacho Libre accent. If you haven’t seen the movie, go rent it. It can do you nothing but a world of good. Hmmm. Perhaps “good” is stretching it. But it can do no harm, and in our impoverished culture, you may at least get a few laughs, which can never be underestimated. Nachoooooooo!)

Where was I? Right. In January 2008, with the 20^th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision looming large, I started ProWomanProLife because I knew other women would celebrate Morgentaler as a hero and a protector of women’s rights.

This I could not stomach, and so, ProWomanProLife came into being, with five other ladies: Brigitte Pellerin, Teresa Fraser, Sheryl Alger (MD, an obstetrician-gynaecologist, no less), Raji Shankar and Rebecca Walberg. Later we were joined by Patricia Egan, Tanya Zaleski, Veronique Bergeron, Jennifer Derwey and Deborah Mullan. Today PWPL has a presence A Mare usque ad Mare—from sea to sea. From sea to shining sea, oh yes.

Unlike so many pro-abortion feminists who stand up and make claims to represent all of womankind, everywhere, ProWomanProLife makes no pretences to know what every woman across this great land is thinking. We only represent those we represent, with the hope of changing some hearts and minds along the way.

We are women who do not see Morgentaler as a hero, who know abortion is not a right. (And that the Supreme Court of Canada never said it was!) We abhor abortion as being contrary to anything approximating compassion.  We further know that many educated women feel this way, that oftentimes pro-choice folks obscure the debate by using euphemisms that make it easy for women to make a mistake and finally, that being pro-life is a rational and compassionate position to take.

ProWomanProLife is a forum for pro-life women to exchange ideas and to feel supported and to know they are not alone in an isolating culture, one that is, to a greater or lesser extent, pro-choice or apathetic to pro-life views. I need not tell you that there are many virulently pro-abortion online forums, and some of those (I count Planned Parenthood among them) are government funded. It is important to raise up reasonable pro-life voices in this atmosphere, and to be there for the stranger’s google search.

Being pro-life, one often faces the mainstream media’s misconception that pro-lifers couldn’t care less about women themselves. So this is also a forum that never overlooks the woman who walked herself into the abortion clinic. We believe that the fetus is a new and unique human being from conception, separate from, though dependent on, the woman and that the two can thrive together. We will continue to repeat this message, attempting to punch through the false idea that “choice” means freedom and a better life.

There are moments, when this blog wanders off the abortion track into other realms. This has been the point all along. For one, no one person can focus on abortion all the time. Secondly, there has always been a no-censorship rule for every blogger at PWPL; so if someone feels the need to blog about what man plays the best James Bond, or why Nacho Libre is a fine, comedic masterpiece, well then, so be it.

I cannot say what the future holds, this in spite of asking my Magic Eight Ball so many, many times. (And look, now a web site to mimick the Magic Eight Ball: “Will PWPL thrive?” “Ask again later.” Ah, such wisdom.)

So long as I (and the eight other bloggers) remain on the opinionated side of life, the blog too, shall continue and with it, the odd opinion piece and study. (Watch for the first ever PWPL study in 2011.) If need be, we’ll send out more press releases, as we did when Morgentaler became a member of the Order of Canada, so that women who are against abortion will continue to have a voice when others pretend to speak for them.  (And should the need arise, we can also convey information through Facebook, so feel free to join our group. And please continue to send in items of interest, as this is always welcome for the daily blogging routine.)

To every reader I say thank you, and wish you the very best in 2011.

Happy New Year!

Liza Frulla, a well-known Quebec politician and media personality, has good advice for her own younger self. I like this bit:

I am of the generation of women who put family life on the back burner to accommodate a career. The idea of work-family reconciliation didn’t exist when I was in my 20s. Today, without saying that everything is perfect, household responsibilities ‘are being shared more equitably. This means you can invest in your personal and family life now without fearing you will have to sacrifice all of your career ambitions.

Now there’s a resolution worth keeping. Happy New Year!

From The Guardian,

Isabelle Caro, a French actress and model whose emaciated image appeared in an Italian ad campaign and whose anorexia was followed by other sufferers of eating disorders, has died aged 28.

For at least the last decade, young girls in search of something to be a part of have been lulled into anorexic culture. I won’t link to any of the Pro-Ana/Pro-Mia websites, because medical studies have universally shown that simply viewing the sites can result in lower self-esteem.

They lure the impressionable and persuade them that the Pro-Ana community is providing caring and nurturing advice.

[…]

A study published in European Eating Disorders Review exposed healthy college girls with no history of eating disorders to 1.5 hours of pro-ED sites and they showed decreased caloric intake the week following their exposure.  Some participants admitted using techniques and tips they viewed on the sites and had “strong emotional reactions” up to three weeks after the study.

It’s easy to blame the fashion industry for these unhealthy ideals, promoting images of increasingly thin women, but we could just as easy blame the myth of “choice” for the epidemic, a product of a world view that sees the self as a decision one makes as an isolated individual.

What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity – and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour. (David Gauntlett, Media Gender and Identity, Routledge, 2002)

The Pro-Anorexic community claims the disease is a “lifestyle choice”, that this choice should be respected by the medical community and their family and friends.

Pro Anas who defend their anorexia not as a disorder or an affliction from which to recover, view it instead as an accomplishment of self control and a part of their identity and one that defines them to a very significant extent.

It’s difficult for me, as a women myself, to see others conned into the belief that something so terrible, menacing and deteriorating for them is something to be respected. Sound familiar?

Just had a listen to Joseph Ben-Ami on CFRA, here. If you have time, it’s worth listening to because Joseph correctly identifies that in the Morgentaler decision, the Supreme Court of Canada never said there is a right to abortion. They said it is up to Parliament to decide. (This came up again over the ruling on assisted human reproduction.)

One of the oft-repeated myths of the pro-choice camp is that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled there is a right to abortion. Since this is not true, I will take every opportunity to remind my fellow Canadians that they said no such thing!

Since abortion is currently socially acceptable, a “woman’s right,” an “easy, safe procedure,” bla bla bla, graphic photos are offensive, possibly doctored and must not be shown. But once there is a consensus that something is bad? Well then, bring on the graphics!

The federal government is announcing new, larger explicit warning photos on cigarette packages.

(This article wonders whether graphic photos might not decrease the number of abortions, something many who are pro-choice claim to want to do.)