A quick follow-up on the woman who killed her boyfriend claiming he was threatening her life. She got pregnant and he wanted her to get an abortion. (We commented on this here.) She was convicted of manslaughter:

It’s that season for reviewing the year. This photo came across my desk and stands out to me, for so many reasons. (Looking good is not one of them.) Fortunately, most everyone seemed to be in agreement:

Venus Williams made headlines at the French Open this year when she apparently forgot to change from her lace nightie into her tennis outfit.

From The Irish Times:

Some day abortion will be universally recognised as harmful to women, writes BREDA O’BRIEN

None of the women who took a case to the European Court of Human Rights is a particularly wonderful advertisement for abortion. All three suffered medical complications resulting from the procedure.

One bled so much afterwards that an ambulance had to meet the train she was travelling on. Another passed clots for months. The third suffered complications of an incomplete abortion, including prolonged bleeding and infection.

So much for safe, legal and rare. And that is just the physical side of things. The counselling that they received in Britain was obviously lacking, too. One of the women, simply called “A”, wanted an abortion because she already had four children in care, but was getting her life together and recovering from alcoholism.

She was afraid that having the baby would jeopardise her chances of getting custody of her children again, by triggering a relapse into alcoholism and depression.

What kind of an indictment of our society is it that an impoverished, struggling woman thinks that the best possible option available to her is to end the life of her child in the womb? Obviously, no one in the clinic told her that while any woman can suffer from post-abortion depression, the risks are much higher for people with a previous history of depression.

She went on to have another child after the abortion, and while depression has been a factor, she still managed to regain custody of three of the children. How wonderful it would have been if someone had said to her that abortion was not the only way, that supports would be there to help her to cope.

The Irish Government’s position was that “her suggestions that a social worker would have denied or reduced her access to her children and that she did not consult her doctor as he or she might disapprove, were unsubstantiated and, indeed, such alleged acts would have been unlawful.”

However, the woman did not know that, and no one in the clinic seemed to think it worthwhile to explore her options. The clinic had no difficulty, though, in relieving her of the money she borrowed from a moneylender, or indeed, in carrying out an abortion in a way that left her needing an ambulance.

As a woman who still calls herself a feminist, it makes me furious that feminists seem to think that abortion is such a good thing for women, an absolutely necessary “right”, when so often it is a somewhat brutal substitute for what they really need.

[…]

Some day abortion will be universally recognised as harmful to women and lethal to the smallest members of the human race.

Until then, let us not add to the numbers of countries that have hardened their hearts and legislated for it.

You’ll be surprised (perhaps, or perhaps not! This is an abortion-related blog, after all) that this is not a post about the Pill or some other more acceptable form of birth control.

It’s a commentary on the recent “selective reduction” of twins article, which, if this reaction in the National Post today is any indication, was just too jarring for so many:

Another way my twin and I are identical is on the abortion issue,” Ms. Anderson continued. “One of us used to be staunchly ‘pro-choice.’ Now, after coverage of this selective reduction, we’re both staunchly ‘pro-life.’ It seems this sad story has actually made the ‘pro-life’ stance more fashionable. It’s about time.”

I suppose the problem is that abortion itself was never meant to be used as birth control. It was for the extreme circumstances, which today includes “I need to finish school,” or “I wasn’t expecting two.” I hate to be nonchalant about something as painful as this, but we use abortion as birth control every day, so “selective reduction” is but a logical extension. Recall from the earlier article that the mother didn’t feel bad. And I can’t make her, wouldn’t try. The rest of us, with consciences intact, should reject the notion of selective reduction alongside the whole miserable business of abortion for less jarring reasons. And apparently, if the quote above is any indication, that is starting to happen.

Apparently, 33 per cent of women and 18 per cent of men confide in their pets. But wait, there’s more. Canadians are using their dogs as “confidants, matchmakers and possibly even therapists.” Hmmm. I’m not disparaging this, I’m just wondering what kind of commentary these men and women receive in return for unburdening themselves of confidential matters. Woof.

Keeping good statistics is not a pro-life/pro-choice thing. I’m confident the majority of Canadians would be pleased if the number of abortions declined, but as it stands, we really have no sweet clue:

Government statistics on abortion for 2007 and 2008 released on Tuesday appear to indicate there were only 44,416 abortions in 2008, down from the reported 91,377 abortions in 2006.  However, a closer look reveals that this total leaves out abortions committed at private facilities. These are left as “unknown” because facilities in six out of the 13 provinces/territories failed to report.

What is the point of keeping abortion-related statistics if they are going to be this shoddy?

A news story about Quebec’s decision to fund IVF resulting in fewer multiple pregnancies:

The bill that would have made a crime of coercing abortion has been defeated in the House of Commons by 178 to 97. Alas.

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Update: The list of how MPs voted can be found here.

This from the mouths of MPs on both sides of the C-510 (Roxanne’s Law) debate.

One young female MP claims the bill is a “front to attack a women’s right to choose.” A spokesperson from the National Abortion Federation calls it a “bad bill” and “anti-choice.” Words designed to carry heavy negative associations but that essentially don’t say anything in relation to C-510.

Neither of these “arguments” point to specifics of the bill they disagree with, because opponents actually can’t find fault with bill itself. Instead, they elect to disagree on the basis of what it could potentially be rather than what it is. Which is interesting, because traditionally pro-abortionists don’t give any value to potentiality.

The spokesperson for the NAF does concede that violence against women increases during pregnancy, and it is this specific situation of violence during pregnancy that the bill sets out to criminalize. As the bill sponsor Rod Bruinooge points out, we have specified laws for sexual harassment because of its unique nature, and this bill seeks to do the same with domestic violence towards pregnant women. A similar bill has been passed in the US, without threatening a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion.

On the night of February 8, 1992, Glendale Black had a fight with his pregnant wife.  Tracy Marciniak, his wife, was nine months pregnant and due to deliver their son in only four days.  They had already given their son a name: Zachariah.  Tracy was eager to have her baby and anxious for the day to arrive.  Glendale, however, flew into a rage that night and decided that that day would never come.  He killed their child.

He punched Tracy in the stomach.  Hard.  And then he punched her again.

Tracy was severely injured, and Zachariah began to bleed to death in her womb.  She begged her husband to dial 911, but he refused.  When she reached for the phone herself, he kept it away from her.

Eventually, he relented.  Tracy was rushed to the hospital and delivered Zachariah by Caesarean section.  He was dead.  Tracy herself was on the verge of death, but was saved by her doctors.

Glendale Black was arrested. But in 1992 killing an unborn baby was not a crime.  Black was convicted of assault and nothing more.

On August 26, 1999, three men attacked Shiwona Pace in Little Rock, Arkansas.  She was due to deliver her baby the very next day.  Knowing her baby would be a girl, she named her Heaven Lashay.  But her former boyfriend, Erik Bullock, paid three men $400 to kill Heaven the day before she was to be born.

Shiwona lay sobbing and begging for mercy on the floor while the hit men brutally beat her, choked her, and clubbed her with a gun.  They kicked her in the abdomen repeatedly, killing her child who was to be delivered the very next day.  One of them shouted, “—- you!  Your baby is dying tonight!”

Unlike Tracy Marciniak, Shiwona Pace saw Bullock and her assailants go to prison for killing her daughter.  Only a month before, Arkansas had passed legislation making the killing of an unborn child a prosecutable offense.  If Erik Bullock had hired those killers only a month before, they would have gotten away with manslaughter.

The House of Representatives is voting this week to make the killing of an unborn baby a crime if it happens in a federal jurisdiction.  The measure, called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, has the support of the House, the Senate, and the President.  This is an uncontroversial bill that has passed the House before by wide margins.  Abortions, protected by Roe v. Wade, are specifically exempted.

I call this a similar bill, because coercing a women into an abortion essentially forces her into the role of a hired hit man.

Reading this piece, long on rhetoric, short on substance and reason, made me think of wispy clouds and how Heather Mallick’s words are like them. Or they could be like cumulus clouds, puffier, taking up even more space whilst lacking similarly in weight:

Abortion rights across Canada are like computer-generated word clouds, or to use a more old-fashioned analogy, ordinary sky clouds. Abortion availability is good and prominent in bigger cities in bigger provinces, wispy in small towns and the more backward provinces like New Brunswick. And in P.E.I., as always, it’s a heartless and empty sky.