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Keep cutting, Harper, keep cutting

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Women are equal, but give us special treatment. That’s what I got out of this assessment of the Harper government re.: “women’s issues”–second one in recent weeks.

The Conservatives’ legislative enthusiasms are almost guaranteed to repel women voters: Wars, tougher criminal treatment of children, funding cuts to women’s groups, lack of interest in universal daycare and access to abortion.

The only problem with cuts to “women’s groups” is that they have not been sweeping enough and they still retain funding so they can lobby the government for partisan purposes using my tax dollars.

It’s enough to make a girl cry.

We’re all pro-choice now: discuss

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That’s what they seem to claim here:

An overwhelming majority of Canadians continue to support women’s right to abort pregnancies, but a recent national survey found the country is split when asked who should foot the bill.

The online Angus-Reid poll — conducted June 4 and 5 of 1,000 adult Canadians — found 91% of respondents supported abortions under certain circumstances, and only 5% would outlaw it altogether.

There are more details on the way poll results are distributed if you follow the link. You decide whether support for abortion is somewhat inflated in the story. (Hello? I’m anti-abortion but would not count myself in the 5% who “would outlaw it altogether”, am I to be tabulated as “pro-choice” regardless of what I believe simply because I wouldn’t outlaw abortion altogether?) What I find particularly interesting is the comment by Carolyn Egan, of the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics:

Canada is very solidly a pro-choice country. There is no doubt about that,” she told the Sun yesterday. “I think there is a minority in this country who feel abortion is wrong … but I think we’re moving beyond (the debate).”

If that were as true as she claims, why would so many pro-choice activists be so shrill so much of the time?

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Tanya adds:

Also, denying those women publicly funded abortions would force them to either go through a pregnancy they aren’t prepared for, or look for illegal abortion sources, she said.”

 

The US has a similar per-capita abortion rate as Canada does, and last time I checked, they don’t have publicly funded abortions. They do, however, have privately funded abortions, which would likely happen here through collective insurance.

 

All that aside, I’m amazed at how often pro-choice advocates like Egan bring up the issue of illegal abortions. They’re all about keeping visions of coat hangers dancing in everyone’s head. I dare say this is a ridiculous argument, and I’m calling it out as a scare tactic. There, I said it.

 

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Andrea adds: Well then. That does it. This here debate is clearly closed. Over. An Old Question, one not worth discussing. We’ve moved on. Everyone thinks abortion is OK. (Sometimes when people have to repeat themselves over and over, and strenuously, one wonders if they are protesting too much.)

You say tomato…

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When pro-choicers want to make fun of pro-lifers, natural family planning is referred to as ridiculously anachronistic, associated with the “rhythm method,” and as if that were not bad enough, with “religion.” Apologies for this link, but it serves to highlight my point.  

 

But when they agree that women’s health is not well-served by shots of hormones and surgery, natural family planning is called body literacy and fertility awareness.

 

I don’t care what you call it (and am not an expert in either). But let me personally applaud those pro-choicers who truly support women’s health by being against those regularly-timed shots of hormones.

 

There’s a conference about this in Alberta, May 14 – 17, 2009 that some may like to be aware of (scroll way down…)

 

This comes up because a friend attending a government-funded Mom and Baby health session was treated to an exegesis on birth control. (Odd choice, that. Is the line of thinking “you have a baby–you couldn’t possibly want another? But I digress.) It included no information on body literacy/NFP/fertility awareness.

 

I support pro-choicers who support body literacy. Because the ultimate in body literacy is knowing that the fetus growing inside you is not a blob of tissue that is easily disposable. They aren’t of the same opinion. I know that. But these are the pro-choicers with whom I share some common ground even if we have not come to the same conclusions.

Just legal, not safe or rare

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Freedom of speech on abortion is so low and apathy so high that I am commonly asked–there are repercussions to having one? Women simply are not made aware. Yes there are, and documented by peer-reviewed medical analysis, not basement research operations.

 

Now those medical repercussions are not the main reason to avoid abortion; I would very much prefer to keep medical repercussions separate from the metaphysical issues of when life begins and why we should care.

 

That said, we should never conceal when women die after abortion. Remember Emma Beck, and now turn your thoughts toward Manon Jones, too. That’s her picture, above, with her dad. She died two weeks after her abortion. She was 18.

I liked Juno too

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But this is ridiculous:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.

I’ve heard about this before; girls so desperate for real love they are ready to do just about anything, including jeopardizing their future by having a child WAY too early. Yes, I said jeopardizing.

Look: I’m pro-life (or at least, anti-abortion), which means I prefer women and girls keep their babies even if it means giving them up for adoption. It’s not the babies’ fault their moms goofed, and once they’re conceived and growing, they’re human and as such they deserve a chance. But I would NEVER go so far as suggest a woman or a girl have a baby before she’s ready for that kind of commitment. That’s just crazy.

And here as in so many other cases, I blame the parents. What a wretched job some of them do – come on, people, can’t you see your children are crying for love and attention? Are you too wrapped up in your own selfish concerns to notice?

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Tanya adds: One thing that left me torn here was how the high school was handling the rising teen pregnancy rate.

The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. “We’re proud to help the mothers stay in school,” says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.”

I’m all for these programs, and yet maybe not. Not to the degree where it would encourage young girls to get pregnant, facing single motherhood, and while still in high school no less.

The flip side of this scenario is kicking girls out of high school if they are pregnant. That’s how poorly they handled it in my day, not so long ago.

Some balance in this area would be essential. Maybe we could start at the University level, since very little is done to accommodate motherhood on Canadian campuses. There’s a great pro-active project for all the campus pro-life groups out there.

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Rebecca adds: I share your reservations, Tanya. On the one hand, kicking pregnant girls out of school, or otherwise making it less likely that they’ll finish high school and move on, hardly serves their children, who are already a reality by the time schools find out teens are pregnant. On the other, lessening a taboo lowers the social cost of an act, and the lower the cost, the more people engage in it.

How about a separate school for teenage mothers (and fathers, for that matter, if they are still school age and involved with raising their children)? Such a school could provide daycare on site, to help get young mothers to finish high school (and keep nursing if they do, which is pretty much impossible if the children spend the workweek far from their mothers), and could also provide some guidance about parenting, infant nutrition, and so on. But it would differentiate these young mothers from their classmates, which isn’t entirely a bad thing: like it or not, by becoming mothers, they have left a portion of their childhood behind, and it serves nobody to pretend this isn’t so. And it would perhaps lead fewer of their peers to think that teen motherhood is easy or desireable.

You knew she didn’t do it alone

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When I was mad at my parents back in the day, I’d threaten running away. A twelve-year-old just doesn’t initiate court cases without help.

After discovering that, the father told his daughter she couldn’t go on the three-day school trip, which ended yesterday. According to Ms. Beaudoin, the daughter “slammed the door” and went to live with her mother, who was willing to let her take the trip.

However, the school wouldn’t allow the girl to go unless both parents consented or she obtained a court order. That prompted the girl, with her mother’s support, to take legal action against her father, culminating in the ruling.

Oh the joys of modern society: Behind every man is a woman seeking to undermine his efforts.

England’s abortion rate rises

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Abortion rates are rising in the UK for teens. Pro-life or pro-choice, I’m not sure anyone sees this kind of thing as a grand success. Unless you are Dawn Primaloo, Health Minister, whose priority is decreasing wait times:

Our priority is to reduce the time women have to wait for an abortion at what is already a very difficult time for them. These statistics show that we have made considerable progress in this, with over two-thirds of women having their abortion at under ten weeks in 2007, up from half in 2002.

Bravo, Dawn, bravo.

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Rebecca adds: If only she were as eager to decrease waits for surgeries or to see specialists. You know, actually providing health care.

The Broad Street pump

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I’ve just finished reading Ghost Map–the story of Dr. John Snow, father of epidimiology. It was he who discovered cholera to be a water-borne disease in England in the mid 1800s. The Broad Street pump was a critical part of this equation–there was cholera in that well, however it took years and years to figure this out, and actually Dr. Snow went to his grave with no one listening to him. So many dead, and years later, it was agreed that he was right–and today we live (largely) cholera-free due to modern sewage systems and a greater understanding of disease.

I bring this up because in the child care debate in Canada, there are a couple of key figures. Dr. Fraser Mustard is one of them. In listening to him talk at an IRPP conference back in April, he said instituting better early learning and child care programs across Canada would be something akin to discovering the problems with the Broad Street Pump. I’m paraphrasing, but the idea was that if we would only create better early learning and child care systems–we would avoid those thousands of “dying children.” The death in this day and age is mostly figurative, but if we had those child care programs–we would avoid billions of dollars wasted in our criminal system, in other societal costs. Just as discovering cholera in the water of the Broad Street pump could have avoided the thousands upon thousands who died.

Whether you are for or against universal child care systems in Canada, I think we can all reasonably see that a universal and publicly-funded child care system could not possibly be such a panacea. I rarely write about such things for PWPL because that belongs to the dayjob realm.

But our own Rebecca writes about this in the Edmonton Sun today and given that I like to show off for the PWPL team–I must highlight her work. And from New Zealand also today, some critical commentary on a child care report which suggests Broad Street implications the result “early learning and child care” programs.

Honestly–I understand we can agree to disagree on elements of child care, but Broad Street pump comparisons are unconscionably dishonest.

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Tanya touts Rebecca’s article: As the article points out, this $7/ day daycare (called CPE or ‘centres de la petite enfance’) is not reserved for those who could not otherwise afford childcare. There are also limited spaces. The result: those families with no financial option but to have both parents return to work often don’t get a space in a CPE.

Private daycare in this province is comparatively cheaper, still, than in Ontario. I’ve gaged the average here to be about $20/ day. Services are essentially the same as CPE’s. One difference: you must bring your child to a CPE 5 days a week.

Regardless what you pay for childcare in Quebec, it’s all a deduction on your year end, provincial income tax return (yes, we have one of those here). That tax deduction applies to daycares, babysitters, nannies, summer/holiday camps, and preschools. It also applies to ‘wraparound’ care offered by elementary schools. You can get up to 75% of childcare fees back. Add the $100/ month Universal Child Care Benefit to the mix, and some parents have turned sending their children to daycare a profitable business.

This explains the many families where dad goes to work, Junior goes to daycare, and mom goes to the grocery store, or the spa, or what have you.

Our daycare system is part of our cultural fiber. Ever hear how mentalities in Quebec are so very different from the rest of Canada? On the ‘having a family’ front, we definitely have a different flavour in this province. When I lived in Ontario, the question, “Will you be staying home with her?” was posed. In Quebec they don’t ask that. They ask, “Have you put her name on a CPE waiting list yet?” We’d get to watch this mentality projected on the entire Nation, were it to adopt Quebec’s model as a federal child-care policy.

If you didn’t like C-484…

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You sure won’t like this:

OTTAWA, June 17, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As the Quebec government prepares to present a bill to the National Assembly that seeks to end the practice of hospitals treating fetuses under 500 grams as biomedical waste, Ontario is, according to an as-yet unconfirmed report, gearing up for a newly instituted “Pregnancy & Infant Loss Awareness Day”, which will take place annually on October 15. The October 15 Awareness Day is already recognized nationally in the United States, but will be a new innovation for Canada if the tip received by LifeSiteNews.com is well-founded.

As reported by Cyberpresse.ca, Quebec’s Department of Health and Social Services intends on tabling a bill before the National Assembly as early as September.  The department’s action will amend the law concerning hospital funeral practices for fetuses under 500 grams.

Currently, most hospitals dispose of such fetuses by incinerating them along with other waste tissues. The government initiative, however, seeks to propagate a practice that is becoming more popular in several Quebec Hospitals.

The hospital-Pierre Boucher in Longueuil, has a funeral director incinerate all fetuses, including embryos, and place them in an urn in a columbarium.

Likewise, the Hospital Sainte-Justine, pending ratification by its board of director, has recently revised its policy on the matter, electing to direct all “identifiable fetuses” to the Mont-Royal cemetery, regardless of weight or length of life.

Losing a child before he or she is born is traumatic enough without finding out weeks or months later that the remains of said child had been thrown out with the trash without the parents’ knowledge or permission. I don’t know how anybody could object to proposals that would put an end to such a harsh practice without sounding extraordinary callous, but I’m sure some will try anyway.

The next domestic terror threat

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Terry O’Neill blogs about the next terrorism threat at the Western Standard today. If you tried to guess what it might be–Islamic fundamentalists, North Korean missiles–go crazy and you probably won’t guess this. (This hypothesis comes courtesy of Stephane Dion’s wife, Janine Krieber. Those two are meant for each other.)

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Tanya adds: “The real definition of terrorism, she said, is “an action that is bringing terror.”

Terrorism, in her opinion, is relative. If it scares you, it’s terrorism. Even if your fear is unfounded.

Ms. Krieber, the real definition of ‘terrorism’ is a far less subjective, and it goes a little something like this:

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

 

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Andrea has just realized: Krieber’s take on this makes me into a Counter-Terrorism Expert, which is a somewhat “cooler” title than “pro-lifer” or “pro-life activist.” Bring it on, Janine. I’m with ya.

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