Finally, the United Nations is placing special interest personnel in the DR Congo, but is it too little too late?

WALIKALE, DR Congo — Suspected rebels have raped at least 242 women within a few days in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s Nord-Kivu province, according to an American medical charity.

Rapes and beatings took place at the end of July and the beginning of August and “242 women have been taken into medical care,” Cris Baguma, a local Congolese doctor with the International Medical Corps (IMC) at Walikale, told AFP on Thursday.

[…]

On Tuesday, UN Special representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Margot Wallstrom threatened to have people suspected of these rapes prosecuted for war crimes.

Wallström began her two year term on March 1, 2010 as the U.N. representative on ending conflict-zone sexual violence. With a well-documented reputation for rape , it is no surprise that her first destination is the DRC. But will her threats have any influence in the territory?

In response to the planned attacks:

“Sexual violence is all too common in the DRC,” said Amnesty International’s Country Specialist Tom Turner. “But this was a large scale, systematic event and the people who carried it out may well have calculated that they could count on U.N. troops not being able to intervene.”

“It makes the U.N. look bad and it’s sending a strong message right back,” Turner added.

More than 9,000 Congolese women were raped in 2009, according to the U.N. Population Fund.

In recent months, the U.N. has withdrawn 1,770 peacekeepers from a force that formerly numbered around 20,000, responding to demands from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s federal government, which wants a full withdrawal by next summer before its presidential elections.

While the U.N.’s failure to protect the women is coming under fire, Mosely, of the International Rescue Committee, is quick to commend Wallstrom’s plans to visit the area soon.

“There was a delay and there are reasons for the lack of response and that will become clear, but sending Wallstrom out here sends a message saying, ‘We are taking this seriously and we have to figure out what the obstacles are here,'” said Mosely.

The task is overwhelming, but I am hopeful that Wallström’s call for action will be taken seriously by local and world leaders.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FWgejxI4bg]

Amazing that we need to keep saying things like this, but apparently we do. And here’s Andrea saying it very well indeed, in today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Maryland ranks highly with NARAL.

Since 1992, Maryland law has:

• Permitted abortion on demand, even late in pregnancy;
• Protected abortionists from legal action;
• Allowed abortionists to perform abortions on minors without notifying a parent; and
• Left health care workers who refuse to make abortion referrals as a matter of conscience vulnerable to civil liability and disciplinary action.

Maryland’s abortion law is recognized as one of the most permissive in the country by NARAL Pro-Choice America (NARAL), formerly known as the National Abortion Rights Action League. In its evaluation of state abortion laws, NARAL gives Maryland a grade of “A,” and ranks it 5th in the nation for “reproductive rights”.

This story shows just how safe abortions can be, even in the most permissive of places.

BALTIMORE — Maryland health officials have ordered two doctors to stop performing abortions after a woman was critically injured during a procedure last month.

The state Board of Physicians ordered Dr. Steven Brigham to stop practicing medicine without a license in Maryland and suspended the license of Dr. Nicola Riley. Police raided one of Brigham’s offices in Elkton looking for medical records, and found dozens of late-term fetuses in a freezer at a clinic.

Riley and Brigham brought an injured 18-year-old woman in a personal vehicle to Union Hospital in Elkton after a failed abortion Aug. 13, according to the board’s orders. The woman was then taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where she was found to have a uterine perforation.

[…]

Brigham is licensed in New Jersey, but not Maryland. Riley has a license in Maryland, but “poses a threat to her patients’ safety and well-being and thereby represents a danger to the public,” according to the board’s order.

Happily, not every doctor or physician is in favour of abortion, but what challenges are those who oppose it faced with in Canada? Sean Murphy, Administrator for the Protection of Conscience Project, is an advocate for the exercise of freedom of conscience in health care who was kind enough to answer my inquiries into the situation for physicians.

1) What (if any) discrimination exists for physicians whose religion/beliefs restricts them from performing an abortion?

Many physicians decline to provide abortions, especially those done after about 14 to 16 weeks gestation. The Canadian Medical Association prohibits discrimination against physicians who refuse to provide or assist in abortions. The CMA sates: “Respect for the right of personal decision in this area must be stressed, particularly for doctors training in obstetrics and gynecology, and anesthesia.”

Generally speaking, abortion activists do not believe that objecting physicians should be compelled to provide abortions themselves. Henry Morgentaler, for example, opposes such coercion because “doctors should not be obliged to do things which they don’t approve of themselves” and “a doctor who doesn’t believe in it is more likely not to do a good job.”

Thus, open and direct discrimination against physicians who refuse to participate in surgical abortions has not been evident in Canada, though it has occurred elsewhere. Anecdotal reports indicate that physicians may occasionally encounter pressure to participate in abortions and that objecting physicians may sometimes experience adverse reactions among colleagues. The more common problem is a demand that objecting physicians dispense potentially abortifacient or embryocidal drugs or devices, or facilitate abortion by referral or by some other means.

Medical students, junior practitioners, nurses and other health care workers are more vulnerable to coercion and have experienced discrimination in Canada, including denial of employment and dismissal.

2) What (if any) legal obligations does a doctor have when a women requests an abortion that they themselves will not perform?

In Canada, if a woman who is pregnant requests an abortion or seems adverse to having a child, her physician is obliged to disclose and discuss all legal options, including adoption and abortion, so that she is aware of legal choices available to her and the benefits and harms associated with them. The physician is obliged to tell her if he is unwilling to provide an abortion for reasons of conscience or for other reasons, so that she can seek the assistance of another physician who is willing to assist.

Except in Quebec, a physician is currently under no obligation to facilitate a procedure to which he objects by providing referrals or other assistance in locating a service provider. Some physicians would object to providing such assistance because of concern that it makes them morally complicit in the procedure. The Project’s view is that the demand for referral for abortion that is made by the Collège des médecins du Québec is unacceptable. Like all standards of practice and codes of ethics developed by provincial regulatory authorities, it is subject to a challenge under human rights legislation.

Over the last number of years, abortion activists have been making increasingly strident demands that objecting health care workers facilitate abortion by referral. To this end, they are attempting to use human rights theory and legislation as weapons to attack freedom of conscience in health care.

I am grateful to Mr. Murphy and the Protection of Conscience Project for their work and continued support for physicians, because not every doctor is on the side of Dr. Garson Romalis whose delivery of this message at the University of Toronto leaves me speechless (the medical student’s choice of words is remarkable).

I want to tell you one last story that I think epitomizes the satisfaction I get from my privileged work. Some years ago I spoke to a class of University of British Columbia medical students. As I left the classroom, a student followed me out. She said: “Dr. Romalis, you won’t remember me, but you did an abortion on me in 1992. I am a second year medical student now, and if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be here now.”

Thinking aloud can be dangerous. I’m going to do it anyway. (Oh yes, living on the edge!)

Why the snide tone for social conservatives, Paul Wells (and Chris Selley)?

As the inimitable Chris Selley put it, “Attention social conservatives: You’ve been had. Again.” But of course, social conservatives like being had and, now that they’ve been informed they’ve been had, will get mad at the Citizen and probably Selley and me for pointing it out. Not at the prime minister of Canada for playing them like a cheap fiddle.

After all, at what point has a voter not been had by an elected official? Aren’t we all cheap fiddles? Has any party fulfilled their promises in recent memory? Are we not all faced with a pretty sad specter of look-alike parties that say one thing and then do another?

If they’re going to come down so hard on so-cons I’d like some concrete action items on how to approach this.

I questioned my initial reaction to Chris Selley’s commentary after a white-haired savvy so-con wrote me to say she never had any trust in Prime Minister Harper on abortion.

And I realized, I’ve been on the record saying the same thing. As have others.

It didn’t mean that when the Conservative government did the right thing by refusing to fund abortions overseas, that I didn’t support that. I did, and I did so publicly. Of course I would. I am a woman of principle and if that were Jack Layton’s new policy, I would have supported him publicly.

I call myself a robust and very much small c conservative, for the record. I’m pro-life. I’m in favour of smaller government, lower taxes (we live in Canada, for the love of the saints!) and the right of families to have fun events on their own property.

Other people call me so-con, and since that tends to annoy all the right people, I go with it.

The people we ought to be challenging are the politicians, not a group of voters who have no representation anywhere, but do get a better hearing with the Conservatives. I’ve known long time Liberals to leave the Liberal fold over the life issue. There’s no pro-life party in Canada by a long shot, but you go where you get the better hearing, and that just makes sense. How is it that they are supposed to change? By voting for the Marxist-Leninists? Spoiling ballots?

So-cons make an easy target. The media enjoy holding them in derision. For the most part, they avoid so-cons scrupulously, the nice, normal ones and focus on the dull windbags, subsequently making commentary that either doesn’t ring true or is blatantly false, all because they couldn’t bring themselves to stretch out a hand across the aisle.

That said, I’m pretty sure many so-cons will indeed stay home come the next federal election. Perhaps we’re having successive minority governments precisely because of that.

Here ends the rant.

Can’t say Chris Selley isn’t absolutely right on this one. Though it might have been reasonable for pro-life social conservatives to hope the Conservatives wouldn’t bungle the issue so thoroughly.

What, just by the by, was the communications strategy here? We shall take the heat when it is really hard to do so, and when the issue has died down and all but disappeared, we shall raise it again in such manner so as to infuriate our supporters?

Lying politicians!
Well, well, well. As the Ottawa Citizen’s Elizabeth Payne reports, Canada’s Minister for International Co-operation now has no problem with funding abortion infrastructure in Third World countries where abortion is legal. But … but … what about all that vote-courting “no Canadian money for abortions” bluster back in April? Aren’t we now risking a terrible “divide [in] the Canadian population,” as Stephen Harper warned? Well, no. Of course not. It was just a ruse. Attention, social conservatives: You’ve been had. Again. And to borrow a line, it’s not going to stop until you wise up.

Please excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall. Not just because politicians lie, no. I’m at least somewhat used to that. But because of all the misinformation flying around about what it means to be pro-life and the wanton disregard we have for human life, while couching it in terms of sympathy and compassion for women.

____________________

Update: Should Minister Bev Oda be fired?

Hey, remember all the people who had the vapours over the Harper government’s decision not to fund abortion as part of its maternal health initiative? It was all for nothing.

Despite its refusal to consider abortion in its maternal-health plan, the Harper government has given financial support to an international agency that provides abortion illegally in some African countries.

Words suddenly fail…

Does justice depend on the topic at hand? Brian Lilley takes a look at the treatment given G8/G20 protestors versus Linda Gibbons, still serving time for protesting outside an abortion clinic.

Ontario has no bubble-zone law that restricts free speech outside of abortion clinics. There is no permanent injunction in place for this particular clinic either. The one put in place by long-ago attorney-general Marion Boyd was supposed to be a short-term measure. It has stuck and been enforced by police ever since.

If a similar attempt to shut down free speech outside of a legislature or city hall or even a gathering of world leaders had taken place, there would be an uproar. The civil liberties groups would demand the law be overturned. There would be daily warnings about Canada turning into a police state. Opposition politicians at the federal and provincial level would demand answers.

All of that did happen when there was an attempt to shut down free speech at the G20 summits. Why the silence in the case of Linda Gibbons?

No no no, not the Mel Gibson movie (does anybody even remember that one?). I think that if someone were to ask me what I as a woman want, I think it would be simple (aside from ice cream, puppies, and a hot tub in my living room of course). I’d like “professional women” to stop telling me what I want. I don’t mean women who are professionals – I mean those who make a profession out of being a woman.

I suppose this article does try to tell us what we want, but I think it hits closer than anything else:

Many in the media and academy think working women are one way, and that stay-at-home wives and mothers are another way. This overlooks the fact that many women who work outside the home would like to work less or not at all. That is, they are working because they feel they have to, not because they want to.

. . .

Wilcox bases his analysis on the 2000 National Survey of Marriage and Family Life, which, he explains, “indicates that, among married mothers with children in the home under 18, only 18 percent of married mothers would prefer to work full-time; by contrast, 46 percent would prefer to work part-time, and 36 percent would prefer to stay at home.”

Which brings us to what women want:

Will this authentic view of womanhood usurp the old political archetypes of what women want? The conversation has begun to rise above self-identified feminists’ assertions as to women’s desires. May it continue and bear fruit. And, whoever wins or loses, this is a whole new playing field in politics, one that more accurately reflects who American women actually are and, yes, what they really want. The American woman wants to annihilate this idea that career is everything. She wants a life. She wants life. And she wants help in being adaptive, not pressure to be something she’s not.

I’m think even a hardcore professional career woman would have a tough time arguing with that.

Read the whole article here.

An article from The New York Times about women, their differences and how they vote, contrasting Sarah Palin with Emily’s List (a political action group that aims to get pro-abortion women into office). I like this part:

Women are divided but not by gender — the old saw that women must stick together doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did — nor necessarily split by party. They are polarized, like the nation, between the growing conservative-independent camp and the liberal-progressive bloc led by the political classes — or more simply, between insiders and outsiders. And this is the time for the outsiders.

I’m also keenly interested in the California election:

But it is the marquee race in California between Senator Barbara Boxer, a three-term Democrat and longtime feminist, and Carly Fiorina, the anti-abortion former Hewlett-Packard executive endorsed by Ms. Palin, that will most rigidly test who holds sway: Sarah Palin or Emily’s List.

In all this, it’s intriguing to me that a Sarah Palin endorsement still holds sway. Works for me, particularly when we are talking about life issues.