In this country, a baby isn’t a baby until it emerges fully from the birth canal. So what happens here? Do we have a murder, or not? The mother is in stable condition. The legal non-entity in her womb, however, is not.

A newborn who was delivered by emergency C-section after its mother was stabbed multiple times died in hospital Monday, police said.

Police were called to a home in the city’s Montreal North borough around 2:30 a.m. and found the woman, 33, stabbed multiple times in the upper and lower body.

The suspect was not at home when police arrived and the victim, who was eight months pregnant, was transported to hospital.

“The woman is in stable condition,” Brabant said. “Unfortunately the baby did not survive its wounds and was pronounced dead in hospital.”

My friend André Schutten highlighted a delightful little piece of government propaganda for me today. An ad ran before he could watch a news item and it was the Government of Ontario advertising, wait for it, birth control.

You can read his blog post about it and watch the ad, here.

Meanwhile, let me add my own remarks to his. How out of touch is this? While hard stats are difficult to come by some estimate near 90% of North American women use the birth control pill at some point in their lives. I’ve said this before, how every woman/girl is indoctrinated in the fine art of avoiding pregnancy. Our birth rate is rock bottom low, far below replacement and somehow no one, apparently, in the Ontario Government has noticed that people are required to be in the province to pay taxes so they can fund ads telling us not to have children.

Courtesy of constantly being told to not get pregnant, by the time women do try, it’s often too late. This article relates the rising rates of infertility: “In 1984, the estimated percentage of couples with fertility problems was 5.4%. In 1992, this number increased to 8.5%. And today, the estimated prevalence (total number of couples with infertility) is up to 15.7%.”

So many women, apparently getting towards 20%, so one in five, have struggles getting pregnant. And under these conditions what do we get but chirpy ads making kids out to be demons to be avoided. It’s because we make children out as a burden that women wait longer and longer. And then, wait for it, the government, having encouraged you to wait, wait, wait (or alternatively, they’ll fund your abortion) will pay for IVF, an expensive procedure that is difficult on women’s bodies with a low success rate.

But wait, there’s more I want to rant about here:

Ontario has a healthcare problem. If you want a simple procedure that might help you get pregnant, you’ll sit on a wait list for a good long time until an ob-gyn can see you. It could take six months, maybe more. Some people can’t find family doctors. So the province is utterly failing in the delivery of healthcare, which more than advertising birth control, is what this little ad was supposed to be about. People wait and wait and wait, oftentimes in pain for simple procedures. Yet via this government ad, they’d love for us to believe they actually offer anything approximating service in healthcare.

It’s amazing, the logical and moral inconsistency captured in one 15 second ad.

Little zen girl isn’t letting government propaganda bother her. No sireee.

Good news! Back in 2015 I blogged about this. Some of you may have donated to the cause, too:

The Association for Reform Political Action and Run with Life blogger Pat Maloney are taking legal action against the Ontario government by challenging the constitutionality of not allowing abortion to be subject to access to information requests. Pat Maloney used to get aggregate abortion statistics by filing these access to information requests, but since the Broader Public Sector Accountability Act was passed in Ontario, she can’t. She is not asking for private information, only the aggregate stats. The denial of this information is the opposite of Public Sector Accountability. Here are the notes from press conference held this afternoon at Queen’s Park in Toronto.

Today I learned she won! Hurray! The Government of Ontario can no longer conceal and hide abortion stats.

Pat Maloney of Run with Life blog, with her legal team

A little known fact is that women tend hold pro-life attitudes. A poll from the UK shows the following results:

• 70% of women would like the current time limit for abortion to be lowered
• 59% of women would like the abortion time limit lowered to 16 weeks or lower
• Only 1% want the abortion time limit raised to birth
• 93% of women want independent abortion counselling introduced
• 79% of general population want a five-day consideration period before abortion
• 84% of women want improved pregnancy support for women in crisis
• 70% of parents want introduction of parental consent for girls 15 and under to get abortions

Most interesting to me are these results:

• 93% of women want independent abortion counselling introduced
• 79% of general population want a five-day consideration period before abortion
• 84% of women want improved pregnancy support for women in crisis

This speaks to an internal conflict in women that happens in an unplanned pregnancy. Yes, women can be trusted to make their own decisions. But we’re not robots. Most women are susceptible to the environment and people around us. Independent counselling at a crisis moment could really help sift through anxiety and various pressures. The time lag makes sense too, though, by default, this can never be long enough. I very often consider in my own life how an abortion at age 20 might have made sense but by age 40, it would make no sense at all. Our own perspectives shift over time. This is the problem with abortion–we can’t go back on the decision. So yes to counselling, and yes to a waiting period–I can definitely see why women would believe these are important.