June 29, 2008
Frank Ruffolo, on Not my Canada, either:
Wasn’t the Charter of Rights in 1982 supposed to give Canadians all these new found rights to improve upon what the Fathers of Confederation put together in 1867 with the original founding constitution?
Andrea you are exactly right. What does this say about the state of democracy in Canada? Are we or aren’t we a true democracy?
The question you pose is the ultimate $64,000,000 question that begs to be answered hopefully before this century is over.
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Karen Krisfalusi, on Someone is getting the Order of Canada tomorrow…:
Disgusting. Did Paul Magder get the Order of Canada too? We can buy fur coats on Sunday’s thanks to him. We can buy everything on Sundays, thanks to Paul Magder. Who got raked through the Media as a Demon. He wasn’t a demon, and neither is Morgentaler. Morgantaler just wanted to break the law, and alot of people in government and academia helped him along to do it. If this government honours him while they parliament has failed to follow up on his “work”, then I think that this Order could be used to make our MP’s request a responsible Abortion Law. After, all, if the GG is saying his work was good, then why hasn’t she finished it? The GG should have stepped in in 1993 when the government’s abortion bill failed by Tie Votes. The Constitutional convention that states that she doesn’t interfere with Government is somewhat violated in this regard, don’t you think? I wrote to her, on the day the GG assumed office, advising her to remember me when she hangs a medal around his neck. That he doesn’t represent me, a Woman. That no Woman’s claim, of the unjustness of the TAC was heard. They made an abortion policy on the claims and petitions of an abortionist.
This government is corrupt.
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Canbuhay, on Someone is getting the Order of Canada tomorrow…:
I got an e-mail from a friend (and MP) - this is going to happen Monday.
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Mary Leland MacDonald, on Someone is getting the Order of Canada tomorrow…:
I heard the news that the abortionist Henry Morgentaler might be getting (and now is on the list to get) the Order of Canada. I was speaking to our MP Mr. Royal Galipeau Conservative for the Orleans-Ottawa riding and told him that if this happens we shall be saying,” No ” to every phone call and letter that comes into our house asking for money to support the Conservative government . My husband and I shall add each time, “Not since the abortionist Henry Morgentaler got the Order Of Canada.” (Do you have any idea how often we get these appeals?) Mr Galipeau who is pro-life was concerned about its effect on his party. I hope he called the Prime Minister with our “cheque book” vote as I encouraged him to do. Even if he got the talking points from the PMO’s office.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. May God have Mercy on Canada. But don’t be like Chicken Little who thought the sky was falling…. running around with your head half chopped off won’t help. We are still praying for Henry. Happy Canada Day.
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Jeremy Swanson, on Someone is getting the Order of Canada tomorrow…:
Sunday 29th June 2008
The Office of the Governor General
Ottawa
I am sure most Canadians say NO to the Order of Canada for Murderer Morgentaler. And equally Canadians say NO to the Governor General trying to award a Canadian Societal honour to a Murderer by subterfuge!
Evil is always best undertaken from the shadows and here is the Governor General doing just that and literally ‘aiding and abetting’ in perpetrating that evil by supporting the work of a mass killer of the unborn!
What a disgrace. Imagine giving national credibility to a man who has his hands covered in the blood of the defenceless unborn. And a man who worked to profit from it as well. Can we afford to have a Governor General who instead of acting for all the people, just acts for the liberal pro-abortion lobby? This Governor General has used her position to do nothing more than advance the causes of liberal feminism, the false domestic violence myth and all of its disgraceful manifestations.
NO to honours for Morgentaler. No to the Governor General and her pro-abortion agenda for special interests.
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Cynthia Millan, on Someone is getting the Order of Canada tomorrow…:
The newspapers bemoan the “low fertility rate” in our country, and that we are not reproducing at replacement levels. In actuality, we as a people ARE generally fertile enough to replace our citizens. Unfortunately, thanks to Dr. Morgentaler’s lobbying to give us unrestricted abortion, we have been able to kill off an entire generation (or 2).
If he receives the Order of Canada, it will cheapen and trivialize the bestowing of this award on any other person, past or present, who has or will receive it. They will no longer be in good company.
We can only hope the morning does not bring us confirmation of the rumours.
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Suzanne A., on Someone is getting the Order of Canada tomorrow…:
Ugh - if this is indeed true, and we will of course find out shortly, it almost makes me want to renounce my Canadian citizenship.
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Cynthia Millan, on Defend Rob Anders:
Ok. So if you are not comfortable with the statement, “Defend Life”, what would you counter with….”Promote death”???
Besides, is “Defend Life”, in and of itself, a political statement? *We* may interpret it to mean life, from conception to natural death (and we do). But by itself the phrase should not be taken as offensive. Could it not just as easily refer to what our forces are working so hard towards in Afghanistan? Aren’t our troops there, essentially, defending life? So…”Defend Life” could be an innately Canadian motto. Certainly, we are not known to be a people who are inherently in favour of death. We have laws against indiscriminate murder. We oppose the death penalty. We are horrified by genocide, both historical and current. And we routinely send troops to keep the peace in various countries around the world where the lives of people are threatened. I daresay that “Defend Life” should not be a motto that threatens the sensibilities of any visitors from around the world who might see such a statement in a parliamentary window. They should feel glad and comforted that we are a country that takes the defense of life seriously. After all - We have staked our Canadian peace-keeping reputation on this very premise.
Keep up the sign Mr. Anders. And shame on you Ms. Crosson.
Also, If my husband, in his government job, had sent a blanket e-mail of a personal nature to every member of his office, you can bet that the hammer would have come down hard on him.
But I wonder, since Ms. Crosson’s views represent so much of what is wrong with our government, whether she will receive any admonition whatsoever?
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Frank Ruffolo, on Defend Rob Anders:
With all due respect to this complaint I am quite certain if you go inside any Member of Parliament’s office in Ottawa there will be all kinds of posters supporting various types of causes that they consider to be important. One sign does not a frat house make.
I for one congratulate Mr. Anders for having the courage and integrity of putting this sign in support of the right to life of future unborn baby Canadians from conception to a natural death.
This importance of this issue to the future well being of Canada and the over 115, 000 unborn baby children that are arborted every year deserves the respect and dignity of a Member of Parliament to ensure that all other MP’s are fully aware of the serious implicactions and nature of the large number of abortions of unborn baby children right across this nation.
With all due respect to Ms. Crosson this is not some sort of frat house tactic or merely about politics as she suggest in her letter of complaint. This is about the right to life of future unborn baby Canadian children that if not aborted could very well be a future Member of Parliament or maybe even a future Canadian Prime Minister.
If there is one sign Mr. Anders and other MP’s should be putting up on Parliament hill this is the one that I would encourage our Canadian MP’s to have.
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Elena, on Defend Rob Anders:
I wonder what will happen if he doesn’t remove it. Will she haul him in front of the OHRC, perhaps CHRC and charge him under the now infamous Section 13? Seeing as how there’s a 100% conviction rate, he wouldn’t stand a chance! Perhaps I’m just projecting… 
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Michelle M., on Defend Rob Anders:
“If you believe, as I
do, that there is enough politics on Parliament Hill without putting
posters in windows…”
Ummm.. I though parliament was the place for politics. What else is it for?
” But if we all start to decorate the exterior of
our windows as you have done, in no time, our parliament buildings
will look like a collection of university frat houses.”
Okay– since when is a tasteful pro-life poster the same as trees that have been T. P.’d, or flyers advertising keggers? Please.
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Cynthia Millan, on Of rotten apples and illegitimate choices:
18 years ago I attended a Genetic Screening conference in Toronto where one of the pioneers of early pre-implantation diagnosis made a presentation. He was screening for an *extremely* rare disease that sees affected children go through multiple, costly treatments in their short lives (most die by 3-5 years). He stated that it costs millions of dollars to keep each of these children alive for just those few years.
Since there were less than 5 individuals born each year who were affected by this disease, one doctor in the audience asked how the researcher could justify the grossly excessive grant money he was awarded to spend on the research - screening for such a rare disease. The pompous and cavalier reply was that if he could prevent just one of these pregnancies from coming to term, then he would have saved the health care system enough money to fund his lab for years.
Sadly, I seemed to be the only one in the audience who was shocked to hear the worth of the life of a child so blatantly equated to dollars and cents.
In the 18 intervening years, genetic screening has become exceedingly normalized, and for ‘diseases’ that are far more benign than this one. Sadly, but predictably, with the decreasing numbers of affected individuals being born into our society, one wonders how long it will be before parents are made to feel obligated to screen for a disease for which their child may be at risk…let alone feel obligated to terminate one that is found to be affected.
This kind of mind-set and disease-free whitewashing of societies used to be the premise for horror movies. But those days are long gone.
“Gattaca” is sounding less like science-fiction, and more like the future…..
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Sheila Harding, on They didn’t go out of their way to publicize it…:
“When I was a boy one of the weapons of discipline held over little boys…was that their mothers would wash their mouths out with soap. … I recall a story about a determined little character who did receive this punishment. He is alleged to have sputtered out through the soap suds, ‘You can soap my talk but you can’t soap my think!’
Don’t ever let anybody soap your think.”
(Greenleaf, R. K., 2003, The servant leader within: A transformative path. Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, p. 114)
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Michelle M., on They didn’t go out of their way to publicize it…:
“I’ll not get into details here, but that’s another way to stymie free speech–to declare unpopular debates closed and decided.”
For sure. An observation from personal experience (but not a free-speech issue as such): I can be friends with people who are pro-choice, can work with people who are pro-choice, and they may appreciate what I can bring to a friendship or to a job, and even “respect” my rights to my beliefs and opinions, but who will never ever discuss those opinions with me, not even to ask me why the heck I think as I do. Is it because they, too, simply consider the discussion closed? Are they afraid of what I might say, or that if I declare my position too firmly, they’ll feel they can’t be my friend anymore? I don’t harp on things, I’m not in their face about it, but I’m not afraid to make a remark if it’s relevant to the conversation at hand (and those who know me know that I am not strident) but such remarks are never picked up– they just won’t ask why, or even start an argument about it, even though I know their own take is completely different.
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Helen Osborn, on Are you comfortable with this? Really?:
Of course there is a third option: adoption. I don’t know why this isn’t part of the script. Perhaps because it would wreck the narrative of a woman’s entire life being completely sidetracked by an unplanned child. Having to carry a pregnancy for nine months, whilst not trivial, is not quite in the same category of life altering consequences.
A few months ago the UK culture programme Newsnight Review reviewed Juno. The panel of reviewers weren’t keen on the anti-abortion message, and they thought Juno trivialised the emotional consequences of giving up a baby for adoption. Now, I am not, for one moment, going to deny that giving up a baby you have carried for nine months would be anything other than devastating. However, the idea that the solution to this problem is to kill the baby instead is stark raving bonkers.
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Cynthia Millan, on That’s crazy:
I think feminism and the sexual revolution did a huge disservice to women everywhere. In trying to equalize men and women, and promoting a reality where women could have casual sex without having to deal with any physical consequences resulting from it, they propagated a huge disconnect between sex and marriage. And the corollary is that there is now a huge disconnect between having babies and marriage. In the good ole days one would find a great guy, get married, then have sex, then have a baby. In that order. And surprise, surprise, this situation spawned no aghast news stories.
Remember, not so very long ago, when a child born to an unwed mother was called “illegitimate”? I am not saying that it was a good thing to label the child. But at least somewhere inside, we as a society understood that it was neither normal, nor to be envied or encouraged. Now, so many women choose to have children without being actually, paper-in-hand, honest-to-god married. Just look at all the common-law couples who reproduce without ever getting married. As a society, we have given validation to the disconnect between marriage and children. Is it any wonder that twenty-somethings and even teenage girls have taken their cue from society and decided to not even pretend to go down the committed-relationship road?
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KEVron, on You knew she didn’t do it alone:
“Behind every man is a woman seeking to undermine his efforts.”
how very pro-woman….
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Cynthia Millan, on Keep cutting, Harper, keep cutting:
Two direct quotes from this article jumped out at me:
1) “Fewer women are marrying and having children. The women who have children are cutting back somewhat on the amount of time they spend looking after them…Unfortunately, what these statistics show is that Canadian women are having problems.”
Truer words were never spoken! I am surprised that even the feminists were able to see this truth, let alone actually admit, in print, that these ARE real problems!!
2) “Educated, working female voters might notice, however, that their government seems determined to ignore them.”
Maybe. But the other faction, like me (educated-but-unpaid working female voters) have noticed that we are specifically NOT being ignored. By addressing my right to have higher education, but still *choose* to stay home with my children (child care subsidy and NOT ramming universal daycare down my throat), the government is telling me they understand that I *want* to be a Mom to my kids. Who knows? Perhaps, in future, they will make the tax system less discriminatory for families wherein mom (or dad?) stays home with the kids. Now that would be a thunderous example of NOT being ignored. And I’m all for it!
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Barb, on Of rotten apples and illegitimate choices:
Genetic screening is deemed to be personal choice and NOT eugenics because it is based on a free will and informed consent.
However, treatment for children born with genetic conditions is a concern. It is a fact that pediatric priority-setting strategies are based on the values of the majority of the public.
This means that if the majority would choose to terminate a fetus with a genetic condition, then this choice or value, is used as a basis to deny surgery to infants born with these conditions.
In this way, individual choice becomes eugenics in a public health care system.
It is a little known fact that there is a shortage of NICU beds in Ontario and priority decisions are made. How many of these choices are made and on what basis are they made? This is a mystery, because Ontario has not published infant mortality statistics in 4 years.
My talk at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics details the story of my daughter Annie, who was born with a genetic condition.
The Coroner determined that the care was inappropriate and the hospital apologized. We would just like to know where all of the Morphine and Fentanl signed out for Anne (without a doctors order) went to and why the final medication report is missing.
http://epresence.ehealthinnovation.org/archives/2008_jun11_633488010617968750/?hideSocial=false&archiveID=255
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John R. Sutherland, on You call them pollsters, I call them something else:
As a former market research practitioner and professor, I can assure you that this so-called poll is representative of nothing. The inclusion of such leading questions rules out any legitimacy for its results.
But the pro-abortion activists ignore all of the genuine polls anyway, because they tend not to provide to such groups as NARAL the results they prefer. Apparently they think that this pathetic imitation of the real thing will prove decisive to someone–the true believers and the brain dead perhaps?
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Marysia, on You say tomato…:
Well, yes of course the reality of the fetus should be part of body literacy.
And of course counselling of women about their fertility control options should include fertility awareness–just as it should include methods of contraception.
To answer your question: Most women who have just had a baby aren’t interested in having another right away, thank you very much. And some of them want that particular baby to be their last.
As long as they employ nonviolent means, ie not abortion, it is their right to voluntarily choose the spacing of their children and whether or not they wish to continue having biological kids.
This desire not to be pregnant every nine months, or to end one’s childbearing years does not come from despicable selfishness, nor hatred of children, nor brainwashing by the patriarchy or do-gooder health professionals with eugenic agendas. It can come from a deeply ethical motive, the desire to protect one’s own health and wellbeing and that of any children one might conceive.
And if one is trying to handle one’s reproductive life “naturally”–well, I think Nature agrees that too frequent or limitless childbirth is devastating to women and children, otherwise why, for example, would the natural contraceptive method of prolonged lactation (the Lactational Amennorrhea Method) be 98% effective at preventing pregnancy? And why is there menopause, and continued libido after menopause? Why can women of all ages enjoy sexual pleasure from clitoral stimulation alone without any risk of conception? Why else did the female human body evolve this way, if the whole concept of family planning was “unnatural”?
I would hope that people who call themselves pro woman pro life would actively support women’s right to learn about and access *all* their voluntary prevention options…. and not look askance at women who want to space their children healthily, or automatically condemn health workers who want to help them do this.
By the way, the new edition of the Global Family Planning Handbook sanctioned by the World Health Organization does include fertility awareness…check it out.