Further evidence of a “life” outside this blog?
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Tanya adds: I’m happy to report from personal experience that there is still a negative stigma attached to unmarried couples having children. Though no one dare ask a single mother what her ‘problem’ is, unmarried couples (especially with children) unabashedly have that question thrust at them.
When I’m asked, I graciously heed the floor to my very own live-in boyfriend and father of my daughter. He loves it!
American Life League is organizing Protest the Pill Day ’08: The Pill Kills Babies. They are clearly referring to its abortifacient capabilities.
The pill also has a long list of admitted health risks to women (heart conditions, circulatory illness, and eye disease, to name a few). Then there’s the kooky idea that it contributes to breast and cervical cancer. I’ve also recently come across an unverified statistic that a teenage girl who uses the pill (or other hormonal contraception) is five times more likely to contract an STD than one who does not.
My humble suggestion is that they sensibilize everyone to the fact that the pill kills women, too, lest we overlook all the spoken (but mostly unspoken) side effects.
In local Ottawa news yesterday, 2 broken water pipes caused traffic nightmares. But if you were driving through Ottawa’s downtown core, as I was, in the afternoon, you could not miss the 8,000 marchers who paralyzed circulation around Parliament Hill. CBC radio was probably caught in some “ethical” dilemma, having to choose between reporting what goes on in Ottawa – 4 main downtown arteries filled by 8,000 people – and having to acknowledge pro-life demonstrators. Because driving down Metcalfe around 2 pm, I was shocked by the size of the March for Life. Up came the 2 o’clock local newscast and I was thinking “For sure, they’ll have to mention the march, if only to accuse it of clogging up downtown!” But no! Not a word! Not a word at 3 pm either. Not a word. The broken water pipes got the royal treatment.
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Tanya adds: The Ottawa Citizen didn’t have a problem accepting money to advertise for the March for Life, though. Ahh, scruples…
http://shopping.ottawacitizen.canada.com/ROP/ads.aspx?advid=836404
Abortion is a personal and private matter, unless you’re on a crusade to change the law, in which case writing the prime minister to highlight just who you’ve conducted abortions on is entirely appropriate. So desperate was Dr. Henry Morgentaler to legalize the practice that he wrote a personal letter to Dear Pierre detailing how he had done abortions on members of Trudeau’s family and other politicians…
The letter, reported on in Maclean’s and by Terry O’Neill, was written in August 1973.
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Brigitte is flabbergasted: How come everybody is so shy about using the term blackmail to describe, well, blackmail? He writes:
Do you know that in my clinic, I have helped wives, daughters, mistresses and relatives of members of the Federal and Provincial Cabinet, including some relatives of yours?
And then he says:
I also want to assure you that if I refer to prominent people having had safe abortions in my clinic it is not with the intention of embarrassing anyone but only to bring into stronger focus the hypocrisy and absurdity of the law.
I’m not buying it. Had I been in Trudeau’s shoes I certainly would have felt threatened by that letter. Which, as Terry O’Neil notes in his piece, “is perhaps a testament to the strength of Trudeau’s character that he refused to budge from his position, even though Morgentaler’s letter could be viewed as a none-too-thinly-veiled threat that, failing to amend the law, names would be named and alleged hypocrites exposed.” Indeed. You can say a lot of unflattering things about Trudeau (I have done so myself, more than once), but he was no pushover.
There’s an interesting review out this morning by our very own Andrea Mrozek (yes, Andrea has a life outside PWPL) on a British childcare report Canadians ought to know about. So many aspects of the childcare debate are neglected – including this one, which I had never thought about before reading Maggie Gallagher’s most excellent Enemies of Eros:
This is a perfectly obvious question and yet it is one we seldom ask. Where are the warmhearted substitute caregivers going to come from in a society which increasingly declines to celebrate children, child rearing, and mothering? Values are funny things. We cannot insistently warn women that childbearing is a potential trap and childraising a degrading preoccupation, and then expect the day care industry to be flooded with eager, commited, emotionally-giving workers.
Indeed. If we keep telling girls and young women that only social retards think staying home (or in a home-like setting) to care for snotty toddlers all day is a fun and worthwhile activity, where are we going to get the high-quality “educators” we need to make a national day care system be more than just a reasonably safe-ish place to park your kids?
The quote above is on page 102 of Enemies of Eros. The book was published in 1989, and it rings terrifyingly true in 2008. I only read it recently and if you haven’t read it yet I heartily encourage you to do so.
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Andrea adds: It’s not much of a life, but I’ll concede your point. Anyway, I felt encouraged reading that British childcare study… Because it says women want to care for their kids. And cost is not a factor inhibiting them from using daycare: It’s values and ideology, as per the report.
The other takeaway from that UK childcare report is this: DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT trust executive summaries. I was shocked to see how the UK government had concealed valuable results of their own surveys.
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Tanya adds: Hmm… warmhearted substitute caregivers are more likely to come from a society that celebrates children. To celebrate them, a society needs to be having children, I’d say. Is this why, every time I meet an actual super-nanny (by super-nanny, I’m referring to one who hugs and kisses, dotes on and teaches), she’s actually not a Westerner? She’s from a country with a healthy population pyramid, like the Philippines.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/rp-philippines/Age-_distribution
Has anyone looked at our population pyramid lately?
http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbpyrs.pl?cty=CA&out=s&ymax=250
Pointing out the obvious, it does NOT look like a pyramid.
Every year, the Parliamentary Pro-life Caucus does a press conference in conjunction with the March for Life, which is today. I’d be interested in hearing what this year’s speaker, Alveda King, has to say. She’s the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and brings the uncomfortable message that abortion is a civil rights issue. From the PPLC press release:
Dr. Alveda King, daughter of civil rights activist Rev. A. D. King, and niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is in Ottawa this week to take part in the 2008 March for Life events. She knows only too well the injustice of denying the most basic civil right, the right to life, to any innocent person and sees abortion as the civil rights issue of the 21st Century
Where we deny human rights, where we don’t support them for others, we become less human. Not good times, this message, not good times. Because we look elsewhere, to other tyrannical regimes–Mugabe, or Communist China–for human rights abuses. But then our own hands are not clean. Everyone has their cause–and I don’t aim to be like the boring environmentalist who pops up at conferences on the fiscal imbalance to ask politicians what they are doing about global warming. But human life, human rights–that’s my big issue, so in a way, I guess today is my day, all day, as my old camp director used to tell kids on their birthday.
Ok, so one blogger links to another and so it goes. Blaise drew my attention to Feministing, who both in turn drew my attention to Pam Stenzel.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ezYNWIDB0]
Now Feministing can say she’s lying and dangerous as much as she wants–but young girls are going to like her. Why? Because she can relate to them. A while ago, I admitted that as a teen or even university student, I’d have rather been dead than pregnant. First time now, I’m hearing an experienced counsellor say she sees this mentality all the time. But she doesn’t go on to say what I might: That it’s not the end of the world to be pregnant, let’s gain some long term perspective and help each other out… She says for a girl that age, unmarried, not done school, the options once pregnant are bad, worse and terrible. What she’s doing is conveying the notion that there is no “undo” button, something our friends at the condom companies understand, but our feminist friends do not.
Pam Stenzel will do well because she’s telling the truth. And Feministing can’t change that, even if she doesn’t like it.
P.S. Stenzel is bang on about the cause of poverty in America–and Canada–today.
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Tanya adds: This is absolutely a video every woman (mother or not) should watch the whole hour through. (YouTube provides it in 10 minute segments.)
Starbucks has these little inspiration quotes on their paper cups. Some of them are odd, some of them are worth a moment’s thought. Newt Gingrich, for instance, is quoted as saying that “in the battle of ideas, winning requires marching toward the sound of cannons” (from memory – can’t find it online.) That’s good advice for anybody on the side of traditional families, these days – criticism means you’re goring sacred cows, which is in our case a good thing.
On cup #256, we have a gem from Gloria Steinem, and this is a direct quote since I’m holding a macchiato in my hand:
Women’s bodies are valued as ornaments. Men’s bodies are valued as instruments.
This is one of the more ridiculous things I’ve seen attributed to her, and there is plenty of competition for that title. Could anyone who has given birth seriously think this way? Feminism, with its championing of risky birth control, unlimited abortion, and the proposition that women should be as promiscuous and callous as men at their historical worst, places far less value on women’s bodies, never mind their hearts and souls, than the good old patriarchy ever did.
Interesting confrontation at Louisiana State University. I find this dude’s reason to dismantle the pro-life (or anti-abortion, your pick) display very illuminating.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5NeLyMZUYM]
[h/t Michelle Malkin]
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Véronique is shaking her head in disbelief: What about the bit where he complains about not being allowed to exercise his freedom of speech? You mean the freedom of speech you are denying to the pro-life protesters?
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Andrea’s comment was going to be: that he is not offended by the display, or the crosses row on row, but rather, he is offended by what they stand for. Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words, however, so this from today’s National Post should do nicely. Any reports of someone tearing down this display? Didn’t think so. (They were placed in support of British Columbia’s supervised drug injection site.)
Rose Rock, mom to comedian Chris Rock is interviewed in Maclean’s. She had ten kids, fostered seven and says this:
Q: You must have liked being pregnant.
A: I did. When I say that to people, they go, “What?!” But I loved the fact that God gave me that gift. I’ve never gotten over the feeling that I’m the first person that ever gave birth, because I’m so in awe of the fact that I have the ability to carry life. And everybody was so happy waiting for the baby, even the older children.
Sounds like a strong woman to me. Compare and contrast then, because I have to be a bitter pill somewhere, with those pro-choice activists who declare that “women are not incubators.” True enough… To them–women are not incubators, merely robots, capable of having sex, who then use their God-given gifts to sit at very important desk jobs.
I have to go push some paper now. Important paper, though.