Take that!

We mean it’s all over the place and not given the respect it deserves. But try as I might, I could *never* have come up with such a ridiculous ad. Voting is as good as orgasm? Puhhhh-leeaze!

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDGXMsmjYcE]

[h/t]

There’s a new website sponsored by Students for Life of America (US), National Campus Life Network (Canada), Law Students for Life (US), Students for Life of Illinois (US), Rock for Life (US), and LifeNews.com (US). It’s called Stand With Carleton. Find out more about it, here.

This dude has been voted “sexiest man alive”.

I protest!!! Where’s Gerard?

______________________

Véronique most sensibly agrees: Gerard, by a mile! The other guy looks weak. I mean, just putting the pictures side-by-side says it all. Dude looks like he still lives with his mother.

Apparently, not much:

We were quick to discover, as pro-life students at Carleton University are learning all too well, that power to the people and all that jazz is a courtesy rarely extended to the pro-life community on university campuses.

At Carleton today, it’s about graphic images. In Halifax, 25 years ago, it was about Feminists for Life pamphlets saying “Peace begins in the womb.” The problem then, isn’t how the message is conveyed. The problem is that the pro-life message is conveyed at all.

Ah, the youth of today. So open-minded. So tolerant.

There may be more to this story than what I can read here, but still. What on earth is going on? How do people get from disagreeing with your pro-life position to threatening violence for expressing it?

Lifesite news report that Mariska Orbán de Haas,  a Dutch Catholic pro-life journalist, has‘received hundreds of death threats and more than ten threats of torture. Her ‘crime’ against Dutch sensibilities was to write an open letter to pro-abortion parliamentarian Representative Jeannine Hennis-Plasschaert.

Lifesite news report:

‘The letter, published on October 27, sparked outrage in the largely liberal, pro-abortion Netherlands.  Orbán soon offered a public apology, but that has not prevented her from receiving an avalanche of angry responses. French journalist Jeanne Smits reports that the letter has generated 350,000 tweets on Twitter, and various sites have created distorted pictures of her face, portraying her as a devil.’

Mariska Orbán had written an open letter to Hennis-Plasschaert because she had called a letter from Bishop Everard de Jong ‘disgusting’ for asking ‘representatives to stop the killing of the unborn in the face of impending budget restrictions, pointing out that defunding “bloody abortion clinics” would save money and help preserve future generations who could care for the elderly.’ Along with the letter the Bishop had also sent a plastic model of a fetal humanbeing.

Orbán wrote to the representive publicly, pointing out that both she and Hennis-Plasschaert have experienced the suffering of miscarriages, and that the fetal model she received from Bishop De Jong would resemble their lost children at the time of their deaths.

“In that light,” asked Orbán, “is it not ‘disgusting’ that our society permits us to abort more than thirty thousand babies in the Netherlands every year?” She noted that children who die by abortion are “exactly the same as the mysterious little lives that we expectantly carried within us.”

Yesterday at the dinner table, we asked our children a very dangerous question. We said “If you were the parents of six children, what would you do differently?” Suckers for punishment, I know. “I wouldn’t have six children” was the first (half) joking reply, followed by “make more money.” Then the conversation turned more serious: “I would do more things with my children, fun things” said one, “I would better protect the older children from the younger ones” said another. It was humbling, if entertaining.

Which is why I was so excited to see this morning’s feature in the Ottawa Citizen: Family 101 with Angelina. Help is at hand, thought I, she also has six children and she’s a celebrity, so she must know what she’s doing. Right?

So how does Angelina do it, with six kids, including toddler twins, a full-time job and a hot husband partner? As it turns out, the answer is that she lets her seven- year-old do the cooking. That’s it! Despite the best assurances of the journalist, I have an inkling that childcare and household staff *may* be involved.

So for the rest of us, I have created a hair child-raising assignment that Angelina will need to successfully complete before claiming a seat among the parenting experts:

1. Your teenage daughter, who rides horses and knows how to keep them alive, tearfully demands a horse. Lovingly shoot her down. Lose points for laughing. Absolute failure if you purchase a horse farm and/or a groom.

2. Your toddler’s life mission is to trash everything that is not bolted down. Your life feels like an endless game of whack-a-mole. Your challenge is to cook a healthy meal for eight and clean the toilets. Fail if the toddler ingests cleaning products or climbs in the oven.

3. School lunch challenge: your daughter is sick of homemade cookies. While looking for snack options, you learn that your son is selling his homemade cookies at school to buy chips from the vending machine. He is concerned about his clientele’s reaction to the change in menu. Mediate. Loose points for referring to personal Chef.

Email results to Véronique at keeping it real dot nut.

Forgive the topic, here, but if this is happening, I suppose it’s something to blog about: Australian women having surgery to obtain “designer vaginas” so they can, apparently, compete with the porn industry:

He said the young women he treated often felt pressured into surgery because they feared men would not find them attractive if their labia did not conform to a standard seen in pornography, in which the labia are often airbrushed out.

Another articles highlights a tripling of demand in Australia. Sounds like a self-imposed form of genital mutilation to me.

I don’t know what to think of Saturday morning’s feature on older mothers in the Ottawa Citizen. What I found in equal parts troubling and interesting was to see the feature in the Life section, alongside maternity fashion and the comics. One article reported on “midlife mom” and blogger Angel La Liberté whose website heralds midlife pregnancies as so many fashion statements. You too can have children after 40… look at Céline!! As thrilled as Céline must be with her newborn twin boys, I’m not sure she considers years of fertility struggles and failed IVF attempts, briefly carrying triplets and losing one before finally giving birth prematurely to the remaining two babies on par with choosing the best maternity fashion to fit her midlife curves (not that Céline is particularly well-endowed in that department, which may or may not explain a lot). I don’t know Céline but I’m guessing.

I have no doubt that the particular challenges of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing after 40 make La Liberté’s blog timely and relevant, still I was struck by the “us against them” tone of the gig. Happy as I am to no longer qualify as a SMUT — well-toned Stepford Moms Under Thirty-five — being neither well-toned or under 35; I did not buy it. Truth is, having children late in life is not so much a choice as the culmination of previous choices not to have children before. Women have children in their late-thirties or early forties for many reasons: some married late,  others were unable to conceive right away, other wanted to get a head-start on their careers, sometimes all of the above.  Their choice not to have children at any given time morphed into a choice to have their children late.

Nobody argues that delaying motherhood is not the healthiest option for mother and baby. And I have yet to meet women who delayed childbearing because it was a bad health choice. We shouldn’t  transform midlife childbearing into a lifestyle choice but wonder why women are not having their children earlier in life. As someone who had two children in her early 20s, I do not recommend it. When my young friends get married and start having children at 21 (usually in the reversed order), I cringe. As a society, it is much easier to look at pictures of Céline, Kelly Preston and Mariah Carey and attribute it to lifestyle than to wonder where we took a wrong turn.