ProWomanProLife

You are here: Home / Archives for All Posts

Old myths die hard

by 1 Comment

Statistics Canada says we do late term abortions. The women at the decidedly pro-abortion conference at UofT law school in January said in 2003 there were 320 abortions done at over 20 weeks gestation, 401 in 2004.  (If that’s not late term enough for you, I suggest taking a look at some fetal development photos.) 

This comes up again–and will clearly come up again and again–this time because Carolyn McLeod, professor of women’s studies and philosophy at Western says the Life Canada billboards are false. She’s not telling the truth, and she must know it. So the question is why?

Perhaps she has seen the photos of what a 20 week old baby looks like and has problems justifying our collective, cultural decision that these babies are disposable. Easier to say it just doesn’t happen.

So in the end, I take heart from her denial. Because it means she can’t stomach the reality. And no one should be able to do that.

Late term abortion and imagination

by Leave a Comment

This link will take you to a commentary written by a CBC French service journalist on an investigative report he filed for TV show Enquêtes (French for “investigations”).

I caught the end of this report last week on Radio-Canada. They interviewed a Quebec-based abortion provider on the practice of late term abortions in the province. He told the camera that women needing abortion services (I dislike writing these two words together: I don’t think abortion is doing women any service) after 24 weeks are flown to American clinics all expenses paid by Quebec’s health insurance plan. At some point in the interview, journalist Alain Gravel asked Dr. Guimont about the ethics of ending the life of fetuses who are viable and who basically look like full term babies. The question went a little like this: “But here you have this baby … – catching himself – uh, fetus …” I said “Ah-Ha!” and my husband thought I was watching some kind of game show. The abortion doctor replied: “In Canada, to have a crime of murder, you need a person, a legal subject. The Supreme Court was clear: the fetus is not a person, therefore, there is no murder, no crime.” He added: “The dimension that is missing from your analysis is the dimension of the women. Whether late term abortion is right or wrong is irrelevant: women who want it need it and this is all that should matter. The woman has rights, the fetus doesn’t.” (I am translating quite freely here).

Dr. Guimont intervention made me reflect on imagination in the abortion debate. Dr. Guimont’s imagination forms reality according to its legal definition. His eyes may see a viable, fully-formed, human baby but he has trained his brain to see something else, something disposable, an infringement on women’s rights to life and security. My pro-life eyes see a zygote and imagine a baby. But my zygote will turn into a baby. No amount of magical legal thinking will turn a late-term unborn infant into a legal construct.

A terribly embarrassing oversight on the part of the media

by Leave a Comment

hairylegs2wi_468x657.jpg

Egad. Céline Dion hasn’t waxed her thighs. And it makes the news. Surprisingly, the reporter failed to notice the chanteuse’s hair was also a touch frizzy. I think I’ll write a letter to the editor to complain about this egregious oversight.

_______________________

Andrea adds: And no one noticed that she appears to be wearing a black bag of some sort? To me, her outfit is the stuff of nightmares: Only marginally better than forgetting to dress at all.    

_______________________

Rebecca adds: Judging by the facial expression, she’s also smelled something quite terrible.    

Can we talk? Honestly, I mean?

by Leave a Comment

Any time you mention late-term abortion pro-choicers tell you a) it doesn’t happen and b) even if it did it would be in extreme cases to save the life of the mother, or something similarly reasonable. I, for one, am not so anti-abortion as to sacrifice a mother for a fetus, especially not if she already has other young children to look after.

But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it:

The number of late abortions in Britain has reached a record level, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Almost 3,000 were carried out on women who were at least 20 weeks pregnant, according to the latest annual figures in England and Wales, representing a 44 per cent increase in less than a decade.

The vast majority were for “lifestyle” reasons; less than a quarter were because of a risk that the child would be born handicapped.

I wish we’d stop lying to ourselves. Late-term abortions do happen, and they shouldn’t. At least, not for “lifestyle” reasons.

________________________

Rebecca adds: I’d love to see the numbers on how many third trimester abortions are done to save the life, or health, of the mother. While it’s always better to go full term, in this day and age almost all babies born early, but in the third trimester, do alright – better than they’d fare if aborted, certainly. And any medical condition caused by the pregnancy that would threaten the mother’s life, that would be resolved by ending the pregnancy, would respond to delivery as well as to termination.

Watch your language

by Leave a Comment

Headline: “Girl Once Comatose and Scheduled for Euthanasia Will Testify against Attacker”

“Scheduled for euthanasia?” In Massachusetts, USA?  (Did I miss a news item on the legalization of euthanasia in Massachusetts?)

The story explains. Ventilator-dependant Haleigh Poutre was not “scheduled for euthanasia,” however, they were going to remove her from life support.

Haleigh was in fact scheduled to be left to die of her injuries by the child protection services who had authority over her medical care. In short, there is a lot to condemn in that decision without labeling it euthanasia.

LifeSiteNews reporter Thaddeus M. Baklinski’s use of the word “euthanasia” is wrong. To win the euthanasia debate we use terms correctly. If pro-life advocates call every questionable death “euthanasia” we will not meaningfully engage proponents of euthanasia.

We can debate whether Haleigh’s planned withdrawal of life support was premature, unjustified or motivated by administrative rather than medical imperatives. But it was not “the intentional killing of a person by another for compassionate motives,” which is the definition of euthanasia.

Calling removal of life-support “euthanasia” is a concern for critically ill patients and their families. In Canada for instance, euthanasia is not legally different from murder. Where life-support is often needed to help a patient survive a critical event, it was never meant to maintain life at all cost. Equating withdrawal of life-support – however unjustified it was in Haleigh’s case – with euthanasia may cause families to refuse life-support for their loved ones because of fears over over-treatment. On the flip side, families may request over-treatment for fear of “euthanizing/murdering” their loved ones.

The indiscriminate use of controversial words like euthanasia causes suffering. (See “Thad’s” comment on systemic concerns about addiction to pain killers in dying cancer patients.) Let’s be aware of it.

Cultural change is what counts

by Leave a Comment

Mark Steyn reviews Amazing Grace (the book, not the movie, although he discusses both), about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who essentially laid the framework for ending slavery. (After a sudden and dramatic religious conversion, but of course we must all keep religion out of politics these days, right?) The quote all of us who hope for a more humane future should remember:

[T]he life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising.

But the theme of the book is that Wilberforce accomplished more than a change to British laws, he transformed the culture of the western world to the point that, albeit it after several painful convulsions, no civilized person found the idea of slave-owning acceptable, or even palatable. The parallel between slavery and abortion isn’t perfect, although heaven knows it’s been belaboured enough already. But it does illustrate how changing minds is more important than changing laws. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, slavery is nominally illegal but in practice common. In Canada, the US and western Europe, though, I would venture to say that even if there were no laws against slavery, common decency would prevent it from occurring; we are hardly, after all, nations of people who quietly wish we could own slaves and chafe at the laws that forbid us from doing so.

Would that we see the day when it isn’t a law against abortion that stops people from seeking one, but a deep-seated repugnance, and a profound recognition of the barbarism of the practice. Who, I wonder, will be the William Wilberforce of the pro-life movement?

_________________________

Andrea asks: Anyone got the focus group numbers for the pro-life cause in Canada?

He doesn’t need to be perfect, he does need to be right

by Leave a Comment

marryhim.jpg 

When I’m not blogging for PWPL, I’m a social policy analyst on the marriage and family beat. So when a friend passed on this article by Lori Gottlieb in the Atlantic Monthly, I read it with interest and truthfully, an increasing sense of despair.

You’d think, being the pro-marriage kind of gal that I am (marriage, properly understood, is both liberating and offers protection; it allows families to flourish and in the two-person Mom and Dad form nurtures strong, healthy children) that I might just agree with the author. She suggests women ought to focus on marriage sooner, they ought “to settle.”

And if marriage is such a good thing, why wouldn’t this just make sense?

But marriage as she considers it is not always a good thing. Her understanding of marriage is limited to the “What’s in it for me?” variety. What’s in it for her is something slightly more elevated than the usual romantic pap. She now wants a father for her child. (Quite poignantly, she describes at one point how marriage offers a partner to watch your toddler so a mother can grab a bite of lunch.)

She as a single mom of one artificially conceived son (ie. fatherless) now sees how valuable marriage is.

I could forgive her for getting things backwards, on purpose, but I can’t quite forgive her for giving other women bad advice out of her own feelings of desperation. In the whole article, she never uncovers what marriage actually is.

This article does a lot better.  Referring to the Atlantic Monthly piece, she writes:

If only she had been brave enough to inquire into the nature of true love and not dismiss it in a throwaway line (“whatever that is”) she might have done her sisters a real service. Instead, she has tried to persuade us that love can be put in brackets while we persist in our twentieth century habit of getting what we want. Perhaps few people will be swayed by her argument; certainly, no-one will be helped…

And that’s the truth: Gottlieb’s article on first glance is a good read, and seems credible. And to be fair, she highlights quite a lot about marriage that is true. What’s more important, social liberals will listen because of the source. She’s not sitting pretty as a married mom of 2.2 children, with a white picket fence and a van in the suburbs.

But her piece does not help anyone get at the truth of what marriage is. Marriage is not a compromise, it’s not “infrastructure” (exclusively) for children and most importantly, marriage is not and never will be a contract, as so many libertarians are fond of saying. On the academic side, I know a whole lot about marriage; that’s not to say I know anything at all. But in considering marriage, we simply cannot do it from a selfish angle.

If you read the Atlantic Monthly piece, be absolutely sure to follow it up with Mercator Net’s piece; lest the single women in the crowd be pushed toward a sad state of depression and anxiety completely unnecessarily.

Meta