ProWomanProLife received an email from Marie Stopes International Australia, an abortion provider, recently. They were concerned from across the oceans about a post where I wondered whether they might be affiliated with a particular polling company, Crosby/Textor.

I wondered this because Crosby/Textor released a poll saying that (to paraphrase) Australians favour abortion at any stage of pregnancy on the same day as Marie Stopes International Australia launched a public relations campaign.

You can read my original post in full, here.

Here’s their letter in full now:

Dear Sir/Madam,

A blog post written by Jennifer Derwey (The debate down under, 6 July 2010) has been brought to our attention.

The writer implies that Marie Stopes International hired Crosby/Textor to conduct research recently published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

The writer states:

“So who hired Crosby/Textor and employed their ‘results driven approach’? I’m not pointing fingers, but I will say that it comes as a striking coincidence that Marie Stopes International Australia, the countries leading abortion provider, launched it’s new awareness campaign promoting their services and focusing on contraception the day this article was published (after a six month lull in their Australian news department).”

Marie Stopes International has never hired Crosby/Textor for any services, nor is it involved in any way with the conduct and publication of this research. A review of the Medical Journal of Australia article and author listing can also confirm this.

Marie Stopes International also undertakes regular media activity, issuing media releases on a monthly basis where appropriate and assisting media with requests. It is therefore also inaccurate to state that there has been a “six month lull” in our Australian news department.

We request that you advise the author of the above and amend these incorrect statements as a matter of urgency.

Regards,

Marie Deveson Crabbe, CEO

Marie Stopes International – Australia

That’s entrepreneur Marie Deveson Crabbe, Chief Executive Officer, because selling family planning is big business. Coincidentally, this email was received on September 13, two days before I suddenly lost all access to the MSIA site for seven days (at least from all of my home computers).

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From the BBC:

Chen Guangcheng accused officials in Shandong province of forcing 7,000 women into abortions or sterilisations.

Chinese Human Rights Defenders said he was released from jail in the city of Linyi, where he had helped people sue over the injustices.

Mr Chen, 39, is a contender for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr Chen, who lost his sight in childhood, has no formal legal training as the blind were not permitted to attend college.

He has also advised farmers in land disputes and campaigned for improved treatment of the disabled.

The view from Quebec. Where, apparently, misinformation guides a woman’s “right” to choose. Let’s start at the top:

For a long time, the province has been at the forefront of the freedom of choice fight. It is here that Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a Quebecker, started his lonely crusade before being vindicated by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988.

The Supreme Court of Canada did not vindicate Morgentaler. They threw it back to Parliament, where such debates belong. We haven’t had that debate since an attempt in 1989.

If someone thinks human life starts at conception, then of course he will see abortion as murder whatever the circumstances.

Human life, according to medical textbooks across the continent does start at conception. It’s personhood that provides the debate, and that’s where pro-abortion folks hide. Sure it’s human life, but is it a person? We can’t say? It’s all so confusing (to them, not me).

On the day after the National Assembly’s motion supporting abortion rights, Prime Minister Stephen Harper let it be known that he would force his MPs to vote against any private member’s bill aimed at recriminalizing abortion in Canada. This is a sharp break with tradition – normally, MPs are not bound by party lines on matters of conscience. But this shows how far Mr. Harper is ready to go to reassure the partisans of free choice – if only because they are the majority of voters.

As the maternal health motion in Parliament showed, you can whip your MPs and still find they vote against you (see the Liberal dissent). On matters of conscience, like abortion, many MPs simply won’t follow this. As for the “majority of voters” being pro-choice, the majority of voters don’t actually know that Canada has no abortion law. Ignorance is the pro-abortion lobby’s bliss.

The foreign women to whom the Harper government is refusing to fund access to safe abortions don’t vote here, so there is no political cost in denying them a right granted to Canadian women two decades ago.

Again, abortion is not a right. I’d like to see her evidence for saying that. Because merely saying it, on repeat, doesn’t make it so!

Abortion has often been defined as a ‘necessary evil’, and for those in the immense grey zone of attitudes towards abortion, this powerful phrase tends to push them towards acceptance of the procedure. It allows one to support abortion, while still retaining a recognition that it is not ideal, a sort of moral give and take that softens the callousness of being pro-abortion. But those who are adamantly and unapologetically pro-abotion desire a procedure that is quick, painless (both emotionally and physically for the women), and accessible with as little emotivism as possible, rendering the term ‘necessary evil’ itself unnecessary.

So the pro-choice side is celebrating the latest study from Oregon:

Teenagers who have abortions do not appear to be at increased risk for depression or low self-esteem, according to the first nationally representative study to examine the issue.

Jocelyn T. Warren of Oregon State University and her colleagues analyzed data collected from 289 teenage girls who reported having at least one pregnancy when interviewed as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health between 1994 and 1996. Sixty-nine reported having had an abortion. They were also interviewed again five years later. The analysis found no association between having had an abortion and depression or low self-esteem within either a year of the pregnancy or five years later, the researchers report in apaper being published in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

In their minds, they must see this as an achievement. Women will be less likely to require counselling as part of the abortion process (which will speed up things in the waiting room), and women will feel (similarly to postpartum depression) an ever increasing pressure not to ‘feel bad’. So while some women are suppressing their thoughts and emotions, others still will feel nothing, and the effect of these states of mind are not only possibly detrimental to the individual, but to the society as a whole.

Remember, these teenagers will one day be deciding what to do with all of us when we’re seniors.

Took a while, but they did it. The UN begrudgingly accepts that fewer women are dying abroad than they had hoped. (Funding depends on the problem being very, very bad, so that comment is actually less sarcastic than you might think.)

This is the sort of abortion that doesn’t happen, we are told. Late term for lifestyle reasons. (“I couldn’t possibly have an unperfect child.”) Wonder if the Canadian taxpayer paid for it. Probably.

BALTIMORE – A New Jersey abortion doctor accused of shuttling his patients to Maryland for late-term abortions is now accused of mistreating two additional patients, including a woman from Canada who received an abortion of a nearly full-term fetus. The new accusations against Dr. Steven Brigham are contained in documents filed by the New Jersey attorney general’s office, which is seeking to have Brigham’s license suspended or revoked. Brigham has agreed to stop practicing medicine until a hearing next month.

The documents show that in early August, Brigham performed an abortion for a 35-year-old Canadian who was 33 weeks pregnant. The fetus had Down syndrome. 

The baby had Down syndrome. Summary execution for falling below our very high standards of what it means to be perfect.

(If you’re getting an angry tone from this post that’s because I am.)

…has a new web site. The videos (under Strategy and Training) are particularly helpful, I find. Check it out.

(Yes, this is the group that does controversial things, like the Genocide Awareness Project and showing photos of aborted fetuses. It won’t suit all of us, but that’s the point, it will suit some of us and help jar our complacent culture, which is why I support them. And actually, the videos, featuring Jojo Ruba and Stephanie Gray are just very…what’s the word I’m looking for…logical. Can’t argue with that. Well, you can, but I don’t and most pro-abortion types don’t either. I don’t argue because I agree. They don’t argue because they’re missing the intellectual capital. It might be added at this point that the whole abortion debate won’t be won on arguing anything–the debate resides almost entirely in the realm of the emotional. If it were up to facts, figures, and statistics, we’d have a pro-life culture by now. That’s why videos showing faces and people, sympathetic people, will be so important.)

There’s a conference being put on this Saturday by the Work & Family Foundation, a group focussed on the intersection between work and family life, with the understanding that one can’t be strong without the other. More details, here. And you can check their web site, here.

There’s money in this! Imagine how many more people would buy a minivan if they were sexier…

We wrote about the drop-off window for newborns at a Vancouver hospital. It was inaugurated today. I’m glad there is a place for those babies – where they will be taken care of. But I’m terribly sorry there is a need for it.