How times have changed. The essence of what a child needs hasn’t changed, but the expectations surrounding parenting sure have.

I am struck by the sheer beauty found in these black and white shots taken 50 years ago, and re-discovered just recently.

I love the close physical contact between the mothers and their children. I love the nakedness of the children. I love the warm hugs, that eternally nurturing posture. I love the ordinariness of their affection.

But most of all, I LOVE that these photos were taken in a time before the concept of the Yummy Mommy or the Hot Mama, in a time before the perpetually sexualized woman. These images have a carefreeness about them that betrays today’s misunderstanding of love, of womanhood and of motherhood.

Some progress.

Hey all, just a reminder of this opportunity.

If you want to give a gift card for a restaurant so they can order in or for diapers or anything else, I can bring them when I drop off food on the 26th. Just get in touch with me.

You can also do e-gift cards with a number of stores, like Baby R Us. (It’s what I do for baby showers that I cannot attend.)

Our democracy has a rich tradition of allowing conscientious objection, be it for pacifists or pro-lifers. Not so, argues Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition. Blogger Pat Maloney explains the issue.

I think I feel an op-ed coming on, about why this issue is not about the Pill or abortion at all, but rather a basic issue of the right to free speech, which stems from free thought, which is at risk of being curtailed here. Achtung: No thinking allowed in dogmatic pro-abortion ranks.

Jonathan Van Maren writes about how people doing abortions experience it. Not pretty. I must confess, I’ve had nightmares featuring dead babies. Interesting to know others have too.

It is called “We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story.” In it, she calls abortion a “sweet brutality,” and attempts to justify what she sees as a necessary evil:

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside. The girl asks to see it, sitting up. “It’s not allowed,” I told her sternly.

I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. ‘Let’s do an abortion,’ they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden.

When was the last time you stumbled upon a memorial site for extracted wisdom teeth? Or  kidneys?

You haven’t. Because there is no need. We don’t mourn extracted teeth.

But families sometimes (perhaps often?) mourn aborted children.

Online for Life created an abortion memorial site. I just spent some time reading through the tributes for the lost children. They are heartbreaking. Here is some info from Online for Life about the site:

A website is being launched this week to allow individuals who have had their babies aborted a chance to acknowledge and grieve their loss, as well as memorialize the unborn child, without guilt or politics.

Located at www.abortionmemorial.com, the website provides a wall where individuals can post thoughts, poems, images or video – whatever they consider a fitting tribute – to honor the life of the child that could have been. Not only for parents who’ve experienced abortion, but grandparents, siblings and extended family and friends are also invited to post in the baby’s honor, acknowledging the loss that they, too, may feel because of the relationship they would have had with the child.

Abortion isn’t just some other medical procedure. It’s the taking of a life.

“What makes you different, makes you beautiful.” Yay. So nice to hear someone say that and mean it. And a billboard at Bay and Bloor!! Wow! A major,  busy intersection in downtown Toronto. I hope the bad traffic causes people to sit and ponder it. It looms over a strip of pretty fancy pants shops, with fancy pants people buying expensive stuff.

The blog is Happy Soul Project. And I came to all this through a lovely article in Today’s Parent.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQA27trhfYA]

This news story   brought to mind Amanda Marcotte . She is the writer who is famous for her incendiary comments on abortion in The Raw Story.

Given the choice between living my life how I please and having my body within my control and the fate of a lentil-sized, brainless embryo that has half a chance of dying on its own anyway, I choose me….Either way, what she ( a mother) wants trumps the non-existent desires of a mindless pre-person that is so small it can be removed in about two minutes during an outpatient procedure. Your cavities fight harder to stay in place,” says Marcotte.

I am relieved to read that these British MPs are outraged. There is enough outrage to go around on this one. It is particularly applicable in Canada should physicians in Ontario loose their protection of conscience rights. The options will be dictated to them, no matter how barbaric.

But in this UK story, as in Marcotte’s piece, it is the utter failure of these responses to crisis and to fear that also shape a culture. Pure ugliness vs the beauty of compassion. And whether in word or in deed, brutality  causes people to seek truth. It is ultimately in their humanity to do so, though some I fear, may have lost part of their humanity.

A few thoughts from Sheila Wray Gregoire:

And so I think there’s something else going on. If you’re a young adult surveying the parental scene, you see harried parents chronically short on cash because hockey costs so much this year. You see them tying themselves in knots because their toddler won’t sleep through the night, their seven-year-old can’t read, or their teenager has gotten into the wrong crowd. It looks like a recipe for an ulcer.

The one thing you can’t see is what’s going on inside those parents. […]

At one point parenthood was one of the experiences that we all had in common.

We had all gone through labour in some form or another, or stayed up all night with a child with croup, or kissed a boo-boo. Even if language or religion or culture or class separated us, we were all parents. When we lose these shared experiences we lose a shared culture. Parenting is hard work, and it requires more sacrifice today, perhaps, than it did a century ago. But it is still worth it. I know some will always choose to remain childless, and that’s okay. But I hope our country as a whole does not turn its back on parenthood. Babies are our future, and they really are irreplaceable.

Ruth Shaw of Ottawa Against Abortion brought this to our attention:

Dear Ottawa pro-life community, we ask that you would consider showing support for a friend of ours, Vanesa Chipi, who just gave birth to her son, Malcom.

Vanesa is a former member of Carleton Lifeline, the pro-life club at Carleton University formerly run by Ruth Shaw. When she found out she was pregnant, Vanesa was preassured to abort but resisted. She and her fiance, Matt, chose life for their little babe and just this past week, they celebrated Malcom’s birth!

We as an Ottawa pro-life community have an opportunity to show Vanesa and Mat support- to be their village. Please consider signing up to take them a meal on this Meal Train that has been created.

LINK: http://www.mealtrain.com/view/?id=Q7l5s2ugeSk%3D

*NOTE please read the instructions in the right hand side of the page.

Sincerely, the Ottawa Against Abortion Team

I’m linking to this piece, which I suggest you be careful about before you read. It’s very disturbing. I’m disturbed having read it. I possibly should have stopped, since I didn’t need to be convinced of the brutality and dehumanizing nature of prostitution.

But since so many media outlets seem happy to re-print the happy-go-lucky, “men just want to be held” version of prostitution, I’m going to link to this anyway. It is my tiny protest of the skewed nature of the debate.

And it’s a wake-up call in a bigger sense. Many people have views on prostitution–it’s wrong, but ought not be made criminal–seems to be a standard one. I can discuss that. In fact, I have time for it. There are a range of legitimate views on the extreme version of sexual deviancy found in prostituting oneself or in purchasing sex. But we all need to look inward at our own lives and the ways in which we are guilty. Looking at porn, having sex with a person you have no intentions of committing to, and possibly never did, the delusion that sex is purely physical and nothing more… all of these attitudes need to be reconsidered.

Last week I read about an educator, a public school high school educator who was on a committee to discipline other teachers (!) who wrote a soft porn book. He defends his right to do so. And never forget the high level educator, friends with Ontario’s current premier, who was charged with creating child porn. I’m guessing these guys are “sex positive” to use the parlance of the day. Who knows what will happen to them; I do know the mean girls in the twitter verse will accuse me of being a pearl-wearing prude.

Bring it on; I can take it. We need to change and I will not be shamed into silence on what is important for the sake of little people growing up who have a chance at living differently.