A woman is sexually assaulted on the NCC bike paths and people discuss why women can’t choose where they go and when. In fact, women are free to wander at dusk on secluded pathways. Only, they might be violently attacked and raped as a consequence for that choice. Some choice. Now I feel liberated.
In August 2003, Ardeth Wood disappeared while biking on the National Capital Commission (NCC) bike path where I did my daily jogging. When she was found forcibly drowned in a creek off the pathway, I stopped jogging on NCC paths. Aside from being devastated by her death, I was also annoyed to be confined to residential streets for my exercise. The NCC’s stretch of land bordering the Ottawa River in Ottawa/Orleans is a gorgeous and inspiring place to run. As a taxpayer, shouldn’t I be entitled to the same enjoyment of crown land as my male counterparts? Maybe, but as long as some freak will think himself entitled to the use of my body for sexual gratification, my entitlement to run alone on a secluded pathway is tainted by some serious “what if’s?”
Earlier this summer, I went jogging along the river with my son in the jogging stroller. The path ran behind a row of houses and I felt relatively safe until the path veered away from the residential area and into the deeper wooded area where Ardeth Wood met her killer. I tried to reassure myself that this was the afternoon, that the paths were well-traveled, that I was aware of my surroundings and able to defend myself but I couldn’t shake a deep feeling of fear for my safety and that of my son. I returned to the inhabited area and later learned of Pamela Kosmack’s murder on a west-Ottawa bike path. I have now reluctantly accepted that in this crazy world, single women should always be within line-of-sight and earshot of someone else. Violence against women makes us all victims.
Interesting how we don’t hear cries to protect sexual assaulters’ reproductive freedoms, or their ability to do what pleases them with their reproductive organs. No calls for women’s groups and crime-fighting organizations to get their noses out of assaulters’ crotches (you think I’m vulgar? I’m just quoting pro-choice writers who link to our website). Quite obviously I might add, since it’s been long accepted that freedoms cannot be exercised violently over other people’s bodies. Or your reproductive freedom stops where my body begins. But this short foray into the nature and limits of freedom illustrates once again to what extent the acceptability of abortion hinges on dehumanizing the fetus. Because if the fetus is even remotely human abortion becomes the violent exercise of one’s freedom over the body of another. At this point, we can clearly see why abortion advocates must oppose any effort to assign any value to any fetus – as in bill C-484 – lest it opens people’s eyes to what abortion really is. As for me, it is obvious that if the fetus wasn’t human, women wouldn’t need to abort it. Really. The reason why women feel the need to dispatch their unborn babies and the reason why others oppose abortion are one and the same: because it is a baby. And I have yet to understand why women’s reproductive freedom extends over the bodies of their infants.
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Andrea hesitates to add this: but men are also attacked–so the question is not of “a woman’s right to use the NCC paths” but one of understanding that this is indeed a dangerous world we live in… She trails off and vows not to run with headphones on again. Sad.
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Véronique begs to differ: Men are also attacked, granted. And I think that if we look at crime stats, we would quickly find out that it is generally riskier to be a guy than a girl. But I don’t think that we can simply compare statistics on violent attacks and say “there, it is more dangerous to be a guy” — we also need to look at the reasons underlying violent attacks. I am no criminologist but I would venture that women are violently attacked because they are women. Ardeth Wood would not have died had she been a guy. The latest victim of sexual assault on NCC property would not have been assaulted had she been a guy. In fact, how many guys probably passed by unfeathered on both occasions before these women were assaulted? The criminals who thought themselves entitled to the use of both women were specifically and anonymously looking for women. Any woman. And that what makes a woman’s right to use public spaces more qualified than a guy’s.
Abortion is best approved of in the dark, not in the light of day, where full and open debate might turn the public against it.
This article discusses Democrats versus Republicans–Barack Obama and Catholics–on abortion. Abortion is not like war, or capital punishment, says the author. He also highlights Obama’s position:
In the particular case of Barack Obama, their case is an even greater mess. Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, frustrated the will of the U.S. Congress by refusing to sign legislation outlawing partial-birth abortion. Even though this procedure means — just before a full delivery — puncturing the head of the infant so that the brains may be suctioned out, Obama, as an assemblyman in Illinois, took the same position here as the Clintons did: in favor of this grim procedure. Worse still, Obama strongly spoke out in opposition to legislation to disallow abortionists from putting to death infants who survived a first attempt at abortion.
How do you soften that position–make it more palatable? You can’t.
In case no one has noticed, I haven’t been blogging as much lately. The photo biz is partly to blame for it all.
I capture milestones people want to remember. That’s my self-imposed day-job (besides raising my daughter full-time, that is). I get called on mainly to shoot engagements, weddings, pregnancies, babies, children, and families.
Analyzing stats like these ones here makes me realize: people know what their best memories are – their moments worth capturing in time – yet we insist on having less and less of them.
Funny how that works.
‘Supermom’ increasingly considered unrealistic:
LONDON — The enthusiasm for juggling high-powered careers and motherhood is on the slide in Britain and the United States as support for stay-at-home moms appears to be growing, a major study showed yesterday.
The study, by Jacqueline Scott from the University of Cambridge, suggests that growing numbers of people are concerned about the impact of working moms on family life.
[…]
“It is conceivable that opinions are shifting as the shine of the ‘supermom’ syndrome wears off, and the idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking cookies and reading bedtime stories is increasingly seen to be unrealizable by ordinary mortals,” Prof. Scott said.
It’s not like saying one should not, or could not, work outside the home and raise a family. But you can’t do both full-time, at least not for very long, and trying to do so anyway has a cost. The key is to have goals and ambitions that are reasonable and achievable, and that’s something each family has to figure out for themselves.
We are really awfully close to Newspeak around here, where government agencies claim you won even when you have, in fact, lost something. Talk about doubleplusungood.
Ezra Levant:
Some 900 days after I became the only person in the Western world charged with the “offence” of republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the government has finally acquitted me of illegal “discrimination.” Taxpayers are out more than $500,000 for an investigation that involved fifteen bureaucrats at the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The legal cost to me and the now-defunct Western Standard magazine is $100,000.
[…]
And if I had been a defendant in a civil court, the judge would now order the losing parties to pay my legal bills. Instead, the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities won’t have to pay me a dime. Neither will Syed Soharwardy, the Calgary imam who abandoned his identical complaint against me this spring.
Both managed to hijack a secular government agency to prosecute their radical Islamic fatwa against me — the first blasphemy case in Canada in over 80 years. Their complaints were dismissed, but it is inaccurate to say that they lost: They got the government to rough me up for nearly three years, at no cost to them. The process I was put through was a punishment in itself — and a warning to any other journalists who would defy radical Islam.
[…]
Of course I’m glad to be done with this malicious prosecution — though my antagonists can still appeal my acquittal.
But two years ago, the HRC told me if I paid a few thousand dollars to my accusers and gave them a page in our magazine, I’d be set free. Most victims of the HRCs accept deals like that, and it’s certainly cheaper than a 900-day fight. But getting the approval of the HRC’s censor is morally no better than their shake-down attempt. Whether I have to pay off a radical imam or appease a meddling bureaucrat, it’s still an infringement on our Canadian liberties.
Not my cause, and not my chosen form of protest. In what has to be a Case of Gravely Mistaken Priorities, an American swimmer appears not to know that Chinese people are imprisoned, abused, voiceless in Communist China. But no mind:
American swimmer Amanda Beard staged the first athlete protest of the Beijing Olympics, unveiling a nude photo of herself Wednesday outside the Athlete’s Village to back an anti-animal cruelty cause. “I’m not trying to be in everybody’s face and be harsh or negative. I want to be calm and yet get my voice out there. I’m doing it for all those animals who don’t have a voice.“
A voice for the voiceless: Truly inspirational.
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Brigitte rolls her eyes all the way to her shoulder blades: Oh wow. A nude picture. How truly original…
A new website aims to collect credible information about the risks associated with abortion. It would feel like a bit of a luxury to have this readily available.
Seems they’re looking for everyone to contribute.
This week’s comments are up. Sorry they are late. It’s summer, and I’m working on diminishing the amount of time I spend in front of the computer. This weekend I was very successful.
This is what I’m talking about: exercising your choices in favour of doing the right thing.
Women, empowered to choose life, in spite of obstacles, in spite of inconvenience, in spite of it all. In spite of knowing that your baby won’t make it, after carrying him for nine months. Is there not something heroic and honourable there? This is the substance of the choice that Somerville refers to in this article. And that’s the very same substance that ardent pro-abortion types won’t discuss, preferring instead to focus on how very different women’s “personal, individual realities” are.
I prefer to focus on what I can see, and what is true. Like the fact that disabled or not, this baby is still kicking in the womb.