Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea.
They forgot to get into the part about socially ostracizing, raising eyebrows, looking askew and docking grades for those students who discuss an idea other than the one idea everyone already agrees on. But that story could be for another day.
Get your Kleenex out. This is really a lovely testimony to life – and honestly, it’s not that hard, nor is it that expensive, and it will be the best thing that could ever happen to you.
[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p27Hi8QoHoo]
Parenting advice.
We might be inclined to think that human trafficking, namely the trafficking of young women for the purpose of prostitution, is a rather “new” phenomenon. Given the influx of films like The Whistleblower (2010) and Robert Bilheimer’s Not My Life (also 2010), in which he asks “What kind of society cannibalizes its own children? […] Can we do these sorts of things on such a large scale and still call ourselves human in any meaningful sense of the term?”
But sadly, grotesquely, it is not new but perhaps is more universal. The CBC reported yesterday on a human trafficking bust in Toronto where many of the victims were from my province of Nova Scotia.
The arrests came as no surprise to Hailey Thomas, a Grade 12 student at Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth.
“So many young girls are recruited from schools, group homes, things like that,” she said. “If we could give this information to young women, they could identify, ‘I think I am in this situation’ or ‘I think one of my friends might be in this situation.'”
Nova Scotia is fertile ground for trafficking for a number of reasons, but I would argue that the largest reason is the vulnerability of our children. A 2014 report exposed that “not only have we broken the promise to end child poverty for the children who were living it in 1989, but a higher percentage of our children now live in poverty than was the case in 1989.”
This socioeconomic vulnerability, paired with the degenerating state of young women’s confidence and self-worth (source: Nearly every high-school aged girl’s Facebook page) alongside a loosening on the legislation of prostitution is creating a supply and demand for trafficking that Canada has perhaps never seen before. When Grade 12 students aren’t shocked to hear about their schoolmates being trafficked, it’s time to wake up to the reality of the situation and take the blinders off.
An old article, that I found myself pondering this morning. Name the author of this quote:
But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.
Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.
For today, the bold is what interests me.
Also, you can be libertarian and still protest abortion.
Moral inconsistencies are never better illustrated than in real life.
Check out these two stories, printed a day apart. In the one, we have Megan Huntsman charged with six counts of first degree murder and receiving a life sentence for each newborn child that she suffocated.
In the next story a day later, we have “Lisa” glibly discussing her four abortions thus;
With the first one, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You’re scared and anxious. But once you see all the other women there, it doesn’t make you feel that bad.
And it does get easier with the more you have. I know that sounds really bad, but that is just how it is.
Megan Huntsman killed her children because she had a drug addiction and didn’t want the responsibility of raising her children.
“Lisa” killed her children because each was fathered by a different man and she didn’t want the responsibility of raising her children.
One will go to jail and quite possibly never see the light of day again. Had she had her six children killed a few days earlier through an abortion procedure, FOR THE SAME REASONS we would never have known her name. Today she is a social pariah and a convicted felon.
Lisa on the other hand, will walk free. We will never know her real name because it has been protected, and she can carry on her life under the guise of anonymity, having more abortions if she so chooses.
The doctors who she had kill her four children will continue to dismember countless more and earn a great living doing so.
The only difference between these two mothers is that “Lisa” had the sense to have her children “terminated” through legal abortion. She played the game right.
There you have the great injustice and the horror of legal abortion, and the schizophrenia of a socially constructed “right” that is vehemently and aggressively defended, while violating everything that is decent about life.
The Association for Reform Political Action and Run with Life blogger Pat Maloney are taking legal action against the Ontario government by challenging the constitutionality of not allowing abortion to be subject to access to information requests.
Pat Maloney used to get aggregate abortion statistics by filing these access to information requests, but since the Broader Public Sector Accountability Act was passed in Ontario, she can’t.
She is not asking for private information, only the aggregate stats. The denial of this information is the opposite of Public Sector Accountability. Here are the notes from press conference held this afternoon at Queen’s Park in Toronto.
That’s because all abortion information is now excluded from FIPPA: Abortion numbers. Abortion complications. Abortion costs to the taxpayer. The demographic statistics of women who have abortions: their age, how many abortions they have, and the gestational age of the fetus at termination. Anything and everything about abortion is now being hidden by the Ontario government.
This is not about being pro-life. We need good statistics to see trends in our society and to know whether education programs are working.
Challenging the Ontario government for withholding abortion statistics.
Naomi Lakritz on egg freezing, so as to be able to have children later in life:
Save your money, ladies. …Not only is there never a moment when the stars are all perfectly aligned in anyone’s life, but you wouldn’t be able to recognize it, even if there were one. That’s because you have no power to see into the future, no ability to engage in hindsight ahead of time, to look back and assess the present moment while still living in it.
Naomi Lakritz
Quadruplets at age 65 sounds like a bit of a nightmare to me. Kids need parents, and if you are on the sunset side of life, it’s quite literally harder to be there for your family. But let me just say this, I don’t begrudge this woman her large family. Neither do I get particularly animated because she is a grandmother’s age. To me, the underlying problem is the ethos of “having children when we want them” through IVF. I understand that we mostly all have this idea that children are choices–and we get ’em when we want ’em, but the underlying principle of my worldview for absolutely everyone, 65, 35, gay or straight, etc. is that IVF is not the best option. I realize this is a painful thing to say for some. My reasons are as follows: There are risks associated with it; if the parts are not your own, it commercializes families and even when the parts are your own, there are still risks associated with it. I also confess I want to be consistent. If I’m not a fan of IVF for a 65 year old grandmother, what is the principle behind that if I’m OK with it for myself, or my friends? Who chooses the boundaries? Why this family and not that family? I prefer consistency, so I rule it out for everyone, including myself. The reality is that without IVF, this grandmother would not be having quadruplets. And then we wouldn’t need to worry about all the other associated risks.
What does love look like?
Australian student Tommy Connolly, 23, worked extra shifts in order to adopt his 17 year old homeless cousin. She was pregnant, and he wanted to help her and her child have a better life.
Tommy Connolly, an aspiring athlete at the University of the Sunshine Coast, said he hadn’t seen his 17-year-old cousin for more than a decade when he moved to resume his studies and decided to get in touch.
He found out that his cousin had been sleeping rough on the Gold Coast, was 32 weeks pregnant, had no shoes or phone and was almost illiterate.
With the baby’s father in jail and her parents not on the scene, Mr Connolly said he took his cousin in “to make sure she’d keep the baby, stay off the streets and have a better life”. […]
Mr Connolly admitted he had taken on “the father role as you’d imagine,” but added: “[My cousin] does 90 per cent of the work – and if it’s one or two years of my life I have to put on hold to make sure two lives are going to be saved it’s nothing at all.”
Was it a sacrifice? Yes. Will his immediate life be harder and more challenging? Yes. In fifty years, is he likely to look back on this period of his life and regret giving of himself to help a girl and her baby make it in this hard world? I doubt it.
Love and support for women facing unexpected pregnancies can take all kinds of forms. Connolly proved that self-sacrifice and love, even from someone without extraordinary means, can and will change lives. It might even save them.
Pat Maloney, Canada’s pro-life investigator, uncovered another interesting fact:
Remember when Fake Person complained to Trillium, and then Trillium revoked funding to Pregnancy Options and Support Centre in Sarnia?
Guess who the CEO is of the Ontario Trillium Foundation? Andrea Cohen Barrack
And guess who the Chairperson is of International Planned Parenthood for Canada? Andrea Cohen Barrack
The one and the same person.
Read the rest here. I’d like to know what kind of policies they have in place to manage conflicts of interest on these matters. How did Trillium decide to revoke funding from the pregnancy care centre? Who was involved in the decision making process? Perhaps Cohen Barrack had nothing to do with this decision. But perhaps she did.
Trillium is a government agency and I’m a very curious tax payer.
