It will come as no great surprise to regular readers that I am against forcing corporations to hire more women. This is the proposal of one Senator, Celine Hervieux-Payette. Meanwhile, Senator Linda Frum also opposes the measure.
What’s annoying is that Hervieux-Payette was in business for many years. One would think she’d have an idea about how business works as a result.
This long story is about surrogacy: After multiple rounds of failed fertility treatments, the woman decides to use two surrogate mothers at the same time, resulting in a son and a daughter. She calls them “twiblings,” I guess because they are not quite twins, and not just siblings.
How did we get here? Well, she explains:
When Michael’s [her husband’s] parents adopted his sister in the 1970s, there was an abundance of babies in the United States in need of homes, but the widespread use of birth control and abortion, among other factors, has caused the supply of infants available for adoption in the subsequent three decades to plummet to a fraction of what it was then.”
And for the rest of the article, I can’t shake the idea that surrogacy and desperate attempts to conceive are intimately connected to our abortion-friendly culture, which seems counter-intuitive, really. At one end you have someone who really wants life, and at the other, the person who kills. But in the end, it seems, control is the unifying factor: We don’t have babies when we don’t want to, but when we do–come hell or high water, we will have them. (Please note this is a statement about our culture at large, not individual women who really want children, or individual women who aborted. It’s a sense that we are, as a culture, on the wrong path when it comes to how we treat life.)
What better way to come back from a Christmas break than with a short article about what women want. This is a topic of great interest to many men, I’m sure, and possibly women, too. According to the author, a woman wants to be loved by a man she can admire. This is apparently controversial; alas, I don’t find his thesis offensive or politically incorrect in the slightest. Here’s my favourite part:
And what is it that women most admire in a man? From decades of talking to women on the radio and, of course, from simply living life, I have concluded that an admirable man is one who has three qualities: strength, integrity, ambition. All three are needed. Strength without integrity is machismo. Integrity without strength or without ambition makes a man a milquetoast. And ambition without integrity makes for a successful crook.
Well put. That said, what this woman wants right now is something much simpler: Otrivin, on tap, on the train alongside the complimentary wireless. Who knew a cold could change this much over the span of one relatively short train ride?
Last night I had dinner with a charitable group that helps support men who have been in jail, to ensure they stay on the straight and narrow. It was a church basement affair and my sister and I sat with four men we’d never met. It was almost impossible to tell who was a mentor and who was being mentored and amongst the four men I got to know, I wasn’t sure.
There is an element of internal tension for me in such gatherings. I don’t want to raise an awkward topic of discussion. So questions about work (if they don’t have any) and family (also if they don’t have any) are out.
I did at one point ask whether anyone had any nice Christmas memories from their childhood. Two of the men shook their head quite passionately, and another told how on St. Nicholas Day (December 6) he and his brother would leave their shoes outside their room and in the morning those shoes would be filled with a fruit and chocolate.
Later that evening, we sang some carols and concluded by standing in a big circle around the edge of the basement with candles. And one person lit the candle of the person standing next to them and so on, until it was a big, bright circle, while we sang Silent Night over and over. And then someone prayed for the whole group. It was quite moving, and this will now be part of a Christmas memory for me, as I hope it might be for those men who shook their heads in saying they didn’t have any Christmas memories from their youth.
Merry Christmas Eve.
Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals. It’s a book about how pharmaceutical companies are involved in identifying/creating diseases in order to cure them. I haven’t read the book and therefore can’t recommend it, but I’m intrigued. Here we learn of the process with “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD), apparently a new disease for women who don’t feel like having sex:
The difficulty with FSD was that no one was really certain exactly what the condition was, and some people even questioned whether it existed at all. So part of Vivus’s role, Darby Stephens explained, was to sit down with the experts, the ‘thought leaders’ in the field, and work with them directly on developing this new dysfunction in order to be clearer about what it was.
Of course, those of us in the know, know that another little product of Big Pharma causes women to lose their interest in having sex…The birth control pill. They couldn’t come out and say that, though, so instead they’ll identify a new disease, and brand a new line of pharmaceuticals to fix it. Fan.Tas.Tic.
If that were my only takeaway from this column, I wouldn’t blog about it. Still, I thought it was a catchy blog post title and I’m sticking with it. The column is actually a good assessment of the season–how we give, what we give and how our giving generally misses the point.
To this end, my family can look forward to the fact that come Christmas morning there will be no Volkswagens or diamonds, just a rendition of my favourite John Denver hits on guitar. Oh yes, I’ll sing along as well. What a treat.
It has become a grim Christmas ritual: hundreds of innocent civilians massacred in remote corners of Africa by the Lord’s Resistance Army, one of the world’s cruellest and bloodiest guerrilla forces.
Now, fearing a Christmas attack for the third consecutive year, the United Nations is mobilizing 900 peacekeepers to protect villages in Congo, and the United States has promised its own action against the LRA.
[…]
Women from the Great Lakes region on Wednesday held a peaceful walk in the Democratic Republic of Congo condemning the increase in mass rapes in the country.
The women drawn from Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda and Sierra Leone joined their female counterparts in Congo to urge the government to criminalise the culture of impunity and end the sexual violence.
Women in the region are mustering what little resources they have to draw attention to the continued threat of violence in the DRC. Without supplies, without the support of their government or judicial system, they stage marches abundant in courage.
Woah. It’s almost as if Justice Beverley McLachlin is saying what pro-lifers have said all along. I know, I know, this ruling on Assisted Reproduction is not about abortion. But I take this as an opportunity to remind Canadians that the Supreme Court of Canada never ruled there is a right to abortion. They said Parliament should decide.
Apparently that’s part of what Justice McLachlin thinks on assisted human reproduction:
Parliament has a strong interest in ensuring that basic moral standards govern the creation and destruction of life, as well as their impact on persons like donors and mothers,” wrote Justice Beverley McLachlin, whose group would have upheld the entire act as a federal power. “The act seeks to avert serious damage to the fabric of our society by prohibiting practices that tend to devalue human life and degrade participants.”
Sorry, but when I hear “moral standards,” “creation of life,” “devalue human life,” and particularly “degrade participants,” I can only but think of our current abortion on demand regime.
1. Don’t show up at the office Christmas party with a Marie Stopes “party purse”.
A total of 5,992 abortions were carried out at Marie Stopes International’s nine UK clinics in January – a rise of 13% on the 5,304 in January 2005.
“We may be seeing the consequences of the festive season, when partying excess and alcohol consumption combine to increase libido and lower inhibition, with the inevitable consequences of unprotected sex resulting in unplanned pregnancies.”
[…]
Last Christmas the charity offered festive “party purses” stocked with condoms and the morning after pill.
Liz Davies, MSI director of UK operations, said: “Despite our efforts we have still seen the biggest rise ever in abortion figures in the month after Christmas.
2. Do NOT use an unexpected pregnancy to exhibit your awesome powers of fertility.
Abortions usually peak at the end of long school holidays, according to newspaper reports in South China’s Guangdong Province. The past month – after the end of the school summer vacation – has seen more students having abortions, according to the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News.
A similar increase was reported a few months ago after the week-long May Day holidays when at least 1,000 students, most under age 20, visited hospitals in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, for abortions, according to the Xinkuai Bao newspaper.
And, the weeks after the Spring Festival – the Chinese Lunar New Year – and the week-long October 1 National Day holidays have also become peak seasons for student abortions, according to Doctor Yang Jin of the Gynecology and Obstetrics Department of Zhujiang Hospital in Guangzhou.
[…]
Many high school girls adopted a light attitude towards abortion and even considered it’s a way to show their ability to bear a child. Some even arrived at the hospital as a group in a festive mood.
3. Lastly, whatever you do, even if you put off shopping until midnight on Christmas Eve, do NOT, I repeat… DO NOT resort to buying your partner a Planned Parenthood gift card.
Indiana residents in need of a quick stocking stuffer this holiday season have an unusual option: Planned Parenthood gift certificates.
The group’s Hoosier State chapter on Wednesday began selling gift certificates redeemable at any of its 35 facilities for any service provided — from basic health screenings to birth control to abortions.
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Andrea adds: Too late on the Marie Stopes Party Purse, Jennifer! Our office Christmas party was weeks ago. Seriously, however, I’m trying to think of what my family would do if I gave a “Planned Parenthood gift card.” It would probably result in an immediate psychiatric assessment of some kind, hurried consultations and an intervention. That, or just lots of yelling.
A nice “video note” from Ms. Faye Sonier of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada highlighting how support for Roxanne’s Law did make a difference. I like her last line: “We will continue to raise our voices in support of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens.” Hear, hear.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JB91EzBFvM&feature=player_embedded”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JB91EzBFvM&feature=player_embedded]