…is not A for adulteress but rather C for Christian. Mary Eberstadt has written a new book called It’s Dangerous to Believe.

Mary Eberstadt’s powerful new book, It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, is filled with arresting formulations, like the idea that C for Christian has become the new scarlet letter. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter was about Puritans and sex, of course, but so is Eberstadt’s. It’s just that her Puritans are “secular.”

The bizarre turn in our culture wars that is America’s debate over transgenderism is nothing if not spectacular. The danger is that the dramatic and seemingly unprecedented nature of the transgenderism controversy is keeping us from making out the big picture. What actually is the position of Christianity in American society at this moment, and how is the Christian dilemma connected to changing views of sexuality? What can and should be done to preserve the freedom of religion that created this country? Eberstadt poses and answers these questions, and I don’t think the debate over religious freedom can rightly take place now without engaging her arguments.

This quick review gives you a sense of the book, as does this article by Mary Eberstadt herself. I look forward to reading it!

Mary Eberstadt, author of Adam and Eve after the Pill and newly It’s Dangerous to Believe

People, there’s a new blog for fathers. Papa Alpha is Paul Attia, a friend of mine who is driven to do more and more, such that just reading his blog makes me feel a bit tired.

That said, there is indeed a need for resources for fathers. So this Father’s Day, forward Papa Alpha to the dads in your life. It’s not a blog about life or abortion, though I suspect Papa Alpha won’t shy away from the tough topics as needed. I am linking here because good people doing good things should get attention. You can start reading with one of his first articles: Want to Be a Super Dad? Try Being More Selfish.

Papa Alpha may claim to give advice about being selfish, but I don’t think he really means it. Look, here he is playing with his child!

As reported by the CBC:

A pregnant woman in a car was shot and killed by gunfire from another vehicle in Toronto’s Rexdale neighbourhood Sunday night, and her baby is in critical condition after delivery by emergency caesarean section, Toronto police say…

…The baby remains in critical but stable condition, according to Toronto police. The gender of the child is not known.

In case anyone (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) wanted my thoughts on this piece:

1. Where abortion rates are falling–hurray! I (and many others, too) celebrate this. This is what we want.
2. It’s very hard to know in Canada what the abortion rate is doing. This is because we do not force compliance on submitting numbers from private clinics. So chunks of data are missing.
3. In the world, it is harder still to know what the abortion rate is doing. In countries where abortion is illegal, they are obviously not collecting the stats. They use, as stated in the article, modeling and extrapolation, published, and, wait for it, unpublished studies (what is that?)
   “The study was based on statistical modeling of information collected from national surveys, official government statistics and other published and unpublished studies and was funded by various countries as well as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the United Nations.”
4. Back when I looked at this more closely, they were taking the abortion rate in the one town where they knew what it was and extrapolating further… so it would be like taking the abortion rate in Orillia and saying that applies to the province of Ontario. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. We can’t say.
5. I am hereby concluding my cursory thoughts on abortion stats worldwide. I don’t know much–willing to learn more and be corrected. But whenever the A word comes up it comes with a lot of baggage and ideology that people (yes, pro-lifers too) cling to. So it is wise to view data, science and research on this topic with a salt mine of salt.
   

   This is the Wieliczka salt mine, a World Unesco Heritage site in Poland. Each crystal in the chandelier is salt. They carved a chapel down there, and some people get married there. Crazy. Anyway, this is how much salt you need to take abortion stats with.

Biking in to work today, I could see lots of brightly coloured t-shirts on folks walking around on Parliament Hill and on Sparks St. saying things like “I AM PRO-LIFE” –me too, young people, me too. Carry on.

Today is a rare day when if you are pro-life you will be surrounded by hordes of others who feel similarly. That is to say, today is the March for Life on Parliament Hill. The rally starts at noon, the marching starts at 1:30 pm.

It is a beautiful day–the best we’ve seen yet this Spring. See some of you on the Hill!

13 Days. This is the new length of time that scientists have been able to grow an embryo outside the womb.

On the one hand, this is very cool. It shows the miracle of the embryo, which the scientist comments on herself:

It had been “absolutely unbelievable”, she said, to see the “amazing, self-organising ability” of the cells. “They have to talk to themselves and together they make something more beautiful,” Zernicka-Goetz said.

On the other hand, we were all embryos once, so any experimentation is taking place at cost of someone’s life. I do realize that IVF isn’t terribly successful and that 70 percent of embryos once implanted in a womb don’t make it. That said, 30 percent do, and all of us were once embyros, so this is not something to take lightly.