I’ve been travelling and working a lot the last couple of weeks, and feel obliged to write a post on topics ranging from the profound to the embarrassingly silly.
First, I had the great honour to speak at the conference held by Nova Scotians United for Life. It was an incredible experience. I’m proud to call myself pro-life now, and I wish I’d met people like Margo and Mike and so many others there earlier in my life. It makes me happy to see such incredible goodness in the world. And it makes me wish I could somehow persuade a lot of my pro-choice friends and acquaintances to spend an hour at a conference like this; many of them truly believe that pro-lifers are seeking to oppress women or assert their superiority over them, and the love and grace and courage I saw there would (I hope) change at least some minds. I can handle the fact that there are people who sincerely disagree with us about abortion; what drives me nuts are those who aren’t willing to have a good faith argument, but assume we’re all fanatics, crazy and/or evil. I want to post more about my experience in Halifax when I’ve had time to digest it, but it was a privilege to be there, and I learned so much.
Next topic, a bit more grim: I’m doing some research on medical care in Canada for what is referred to as the childbearing year – pre-conception for planned pregnancies, prenatal care and childbirth, and neonatal and post-partum care (it really does add up to almost a year.) I came across a statistic about the number of abortions in Canada that blew my mind. I thought I’d try an experiment and ask our readers to tell me in the comments what they thought the ratio of live births to abortions is today. It occurs to me that our readers are much more informed about abortion than the general public, though. At any rate, it’s way higher than I thought it was. Should this change anything? Something immoral is immoral regardless of how often it occurs. This makes me think that, while I still don’t care for it, the abortion-as-Holocaust analogy makes an important point about the sheer scale of this that not enough of us grasp.
And the final part is where Andrea and my other intellectually serious friends can pretend they don’t know me: Trista Sutter, the Bachelorette who married the handsome-but-dim firefighter she test drove and purchased chose on a reality show, is having a somewhat new sterilization procedure after having her second child. Apart from the mildly queasy feeling I get when I think about the fact that she’s almost certainly being paid to have, and shill for, “Essure”, in which metal and plastic objects are inserted into the fallopian tubes and then scar tissue builds up around them, completely occluding the tube, I’m really not sure how comfortable I am with this. It is most likely profoundly irreversible, but I don’t have any objection in principle to sterilization, and while doing it at a reasonably young age, after only two kids, strikes me as rash, that’s a personal decision. I really wish feminists would engage birth control more critically; we are starting to recognize as a culture that having an ideal of beauty that requires surgery, extreme exercise, chronic undereating and semi-indecent clothing is a form of oppression of women, a way of forcing them to cede physical control of themselves to attain the ideal. What does it say, then, if sexual norms require women to ingest synthetic hormones or have foreign objects permanently wedged into their bodies? Why is so much birth control invasive from the perspective of the woman’s body? Why do the same people who scrutinize fashion and medicalized childbirth and romance novels and employment patterns for any sign of sexism give a free ride to birth control, and for that matter abortion?
In keeping with Andrea’s interview with Ezra Levant on reclaiming words, maybe we do need to call ourselves feminists, and ask these very questions. Heaven knows the professional feminists won’t.
by 
About the abortion statistics–
There are about 22 abortions for every 100 live births in Canada. Therefore there is one abortion for every five to six pregnancies (not accounting for those that are miscarried.)
Is that about what you came up with, Rebecca?
The stats from 2004 state 30 abortions per 100 live births in Canada. And those are the ones that are properly reported, never mind any chemical abortions like those with RU486. That’s a whole lot of empty classrooms. – the equivalent of two a week in Ottawa alone. Chilling.
Hi Melissa,
Here’s the PHAC report: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/cphr-rspc03/pdf/cphr-rspc03_e.pdf
As of 2000, there were 32.9 induced abortions for every live birth in Canada. These numbers aren’t perfect: they exclude home births (for live births) and induced abortions done in clinics (as compared to hospitals) or using drugs rather than surgical abortion. They also don’t include Ontario, which is highly problematic.
It’s also possible that the number have gone down in the decade since, but given that they increased from the low 20s over the prior decade, I’m not optimistic in that regard.
Hi Melissa,
Here’s the PHAC report: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/cphr-rspc03/pdf/cphr-rspc03_e.pdf
As of 2000, there were 32.9 induced abortions for every live birth in Canada. These numbers aren’t perfect: they exclude home births (for live births) and induced abortions done in clinics (as compared to hospitals) or using drugs rather than surgical abortion. They also don’t include Ontario, which is highly problematic.
It’s also possible that the numbers have gone down in the decade since, but given that they increased from the low 20s over the prior decade, I’m not optimistic in that regard.
Wow. It would seem that my statistics are almost 20 years old. (And of course since I don’t always bookmark the pages that I read, I can’t find where I read the original ones.) I knew it was bad, but that is ridiculous.
This means that when I go to the playground with my young kids, and there are ten kids there, three more should be there but are missing because they were aborted. Sad, sad, sad.
Suzanne, one question–
Are you sure that chemical abortions are performed in Canada? I thought RU486 wasn’t approved by Health Canada.
I suppose there might be some cross-border traffic with RU486, but it wouldn’t be that significant considering that other forms of abortion are freely available here.
Melissa – you’re right…RU486 is not available in Canada (at least not for now) – sorry about that. However, “medical abortions” are available in some parts of Canada.
http://www.cfsh.ca/Sexual_Health_Info/Abortion/medical-abortion.aspx (I wonder what the reporting is on these – I doubt any of these get reported in the abortion stats.)
When I worked in oncology twenty years ago, Methotrexate was used to treat cancer patients. We had to take numerous precautions when administering this stuff. No wonder pregant nurses weren’t allowed anywhere near it…
That site, Suzanne, was a real eye-opener. (It was the Canadian Federation For Sexual Health, formerly Planned Parenthood.)
They seem to be awfully concerned about providing non-judgemental information. In fact, they are so concerned that the information be non-judgemental, that they neglect to mention a fair bit of information that might be pertinent to a person making a decision!
“From choice, a world of possibilities”–what exactly does that mean?
I should have picked a better resource from which to quote! I just googled “medical abortion” to get some information and that was one of the first results. It had such an official-sounding title – “Canadian Federation for Sexual Health”. Thanks for pointing out, Melissa, that this was formerly Planned Parenthood. Like they won’t have a biased line in providing information.
I guess “the world of possibilities” refers to all the freedom a woman will have when she doesn’t have the “burden” of a baby to get in the way.