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Say it with me

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Abortion is not medical care.

That’s why Americans should be concerned about abortion coverage in their current health care reform bills:

The two major health-care bills that Congress is examining would, according to Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee, “result in federally mandated coverage of abortion by nearly all health plans, federally mandated recruitment of abortionists by local health networks, and nullification of many state abortion laws. They would also result in federal funding of abortion on a massive scale.”

North of the border, we manage to maintain the spectacular inconsistency that abortion is a woman’s choice, and that at the same time, it is medically necessary. (Abortion is medically necessary when the woman says it is medically necessary.)

So why do even good doctors comply with women’s demands even when they are not necessarily comfortable with abortion and can, with all clarity, see that it is not medically necessary? (That’s another blog post for another day.)

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On the other hand, Brigitte would like to add the following: I was in Montreal this afternoon and I heard a story on the radio (CBC, I believe) that made a reasonably big fuss about timely access to abortion there and how the city’s health and social services agency wanted to reassure citizens that they were doing everything they could to guaranteed access to the procedure. You’d have thought they were discussing care for something serious and medically necessary like, say, heart attacks or cancer patients. But no. Those people can wait while the public systems scrambles to guarantee quick and easy access to abortion.

Stop the abortion mandate broadcast

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I’m going to try and tune in to this broadcast tonight. Of all the speakers, I’m actually tuning in for Kristan Hawkins, who I’ve met twice. To say she is spunky is an understatement. I particularly enjoyed her fundraising advice for pro-life clubs on campus: Make grilled cheese sandwiches with just a hint of garlic outside the bars when they close, and charge five bucks a pop. Pro-life/pro-choice doesn’t appear to matter, she said, when you’re loaded.

“Stop the abortion mandate” is strong language, but then again, I never bought the line that Obama is a conciliatory type and his policy decisions across the board are proving it. So tune in if you are interested.

The media and the news

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So I’m watching the news, the CBC even, and Peter Mansbridge is talking to Michael Ignatieff. And I’m actually impressed that Peter Mansbridge is not giving him an easy time.

Mansbridge: So you said you haven’t met with the Prime Minister for five or six months. Have you asked for a meeting?

Ignatieff: The issue here is Stephen Harper’s leadership style…bla bla bla.

Mansbridge: So I’ll take that as a no, that you haven’t asked for a meeting. (Ignatieff never answered the question.)

Perhaps I’m more acutely aware of media bias having just returned from seeing Media Malpractice. Great movie. I thought I was pretty aware of the depths of media bias against Sarah Palin. I wasn’t. Given the full context for many of the quotes she was cited as being stupid for, I actually think the bias was worse than I thought. Some of Biden’s quotes–ones I’d never heard–were not only factually wrong, but offensive. (One involved saying Obama is the first well-spoken black man to ever rise to the top–something to that effect.)  

Back to Palin, though. In one case, one of her supposedly dumb answers was in response to a question posed by a kid in grade three. Another of her dumb answers was in response to being asked a question for the third time–the first two times she sounded reasonable but by the third time, she didn’t (sound reasonable). That was the section that was played on repeat. As it turns out, Saturday Night Live also made fun of Joe Biden, but that character never gained traction. Then there’s the Obama “57 states” gaffe, and others–that never received any attention. Of note to this Canadian was fleeting media concern prior to Obama’s election over whether he is socialist or not, based on comments he made about redistributing wealth. The media didn’t really ask the tough questions–but I note that apparently some Americans may still think socialism is bad.

The filmmaker is a libertarian who has only ever donated money to the Democrats.  

BTW, Ignatieff  apparently “needs to get some pretty specific commitments on employment insurance” before he decides whether he’ll support the government and prevent an election. An election over employment insurance? You lost me at “specific.”

A woman after my own heart

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Love Naomi Lakritz on life. Here she does a good job of exposing why President Obama’s rhetoric calling for dialogue on abortion is pretty meaningless:

Obama, who intends to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which permits partial-birth abortions, called on pro-life and pro-choice factions to find common ground.

Unless pro-choicers are prepared to acknowledge the scientific fact that a fetus as early as four weeks after conception is a human being with a beating heart and brain waves, and not a mere clump of cells whose humanness is relative only to its degree of wantedness, then no common ground is possible.

Obama made some redundant points when he said “let’s make adoption more available” and “let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their child to term.”

Adoption is already widely available through state and provincial governments and private agencies. What really needs to happen is for pro-choicers to stop limiting their talk to abortion when they discuss choice, and start promoting adoption. They need to talk in terms of women choosing life, as in putting their babies up for adoption, not in choosing death by condemning those unborn babies to being ripped apart and consigned to oblivion.

As far as providing care and support for women to see their pregnancies through to the end, there are plenty of pro-life agencies, both secular and faith-based, that are busy doing just that.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; there is only a need to promote the existence of the wheel so people can take advantage of it.

Back to kidneys for a moment

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Rod Bruinooge started it:

The bottom line is that people like myself are not going to stop until, at the very least, unborn children have more value than a Canadian kidney,” he said.

Dr. Sneddon went on about kidneys, too, as he argued the pro-choice side of things.  (see the comments section)

[He] relied heavily on an analogy of a mother whose son needs her kidney to survive, and that she has the right to deny her son her kidney as her rights to her body part trumps his.

Now back to embryonic stem cell research.  Contrary to what Bill Clinton thinks, the embryo is a fertilized egg, and the the earliest form of human life.  How do their rights get trumped in the name of scientific research?  Even if there had been any sort of success story regarding embryonic stem cell research — and I’ve been looking, believe me — how would one person’s, say, cerebral palsy treatment justify destroying an embryo to harvest its stem cells?

Clinton really kills me when he suggests that using those embryos which would otherwise stay on ice indefinitely for medical research is a pro-life position.  Running scientific experiments on human beings is what Hitler did!  Should we then say that it was more noble that these humans — the Jews — be used for the advancement of science rather than be sent straight to the gas chamber? That is, in fact, how the doctors in Auschwitz justified experimenting on human beings.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC0cxE-BX4c]

It was really a way of exploiting a human resource which they deemed to be already lost.  They thought. “Well, they’ll be dead tomorrow, so let’s use them today.” (2:32 into the film)

And so it begins

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President Obama may overturn the Mexico City policy, which banned taxpayer funds for international abortions. It was put in place by Reagan, kept by Bush Sr., overturned by Clinton, and kept by Bush Jr.:

Bush defended the action, saying then: “It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortion or actively promote abortion.”

Think what you will about the former President Bush–he was great on the life issues–understood them–and held the line against the insidious encroachment of abortion into foreign countries using taxpayer dollars.

Fight FOCA

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There’s a web site that’s sprung up to fight the Freedom of Choice Act. I wasn’t really aware of what FOCA would do–it’s a promise the President-elect made to Planned Parenthood.

The Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) would eliminate every restriction on abortion nationwide.

  • FOCA will do away with state laws on parental involvement, on partial birth abortion, and on all other protections.
  • FOCA will compel taxpayer funding of abortions.
  • FOCA will force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions.

Sounds like an incursion into state jurisdiction to me.

“Canada without abortion. By choice”

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If you are visiting this site, you may have noticed our tagline, “Canada without abortion. By choice.”

Now that the U.S. has a pro-abortion President, I’m glad to see pro-lifers trying to think of other ways to outlaw abortion. Read about that, front page of the Washington Post, here. It’s wise to acknowledge Obama is pro-abortion and move on. (Whether or not a pro-lifer can or should have voted for him is a question we’ve already addressed and that debate is over now.)

Lots of interesting points in this article, including this one:

“You don’t work to limit the murder of innocent victims,” said Judie Brown, president of the American Life League. “You work to stop it.”

Yes, you work to stop it, but the question is how. I don’t think that civilized, compassionate societies should offer, pay for, sanction or condone abortion in any form. In that sense, some day we’ll come to the point where we outlaw it, as William Wilberforce worked to outlaw slavery. We’re not there, not even close. Now Wilberforce outlawed slavery on some sort of technicality–he was very clever about it–the mores of his culture had not yet changed.

We (pro-lifers) need to get creative. We need to look for new and different ways to stop abortion, especially considering Obama’s record on the topic. I hope he’s not as extreme as he appears, but all I have to go on is his solidly pro-abortion, Planned Parenthood Approved (gold star!) record. So better look elsewhere, is what I say, and incidentally, what I did, too in launching this web site and group. (Because in Canada, multi-cultural land of diversity that we are, every leader is pro-choice right now, and, I believe over the course of my lifetime this has always been the case.)

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Interesting commentary from the author of The Party of Death, here. He ends by saying this:

Still, we learn something from Salmon: It is indeed possible for pro-lifers to get friendly treatment from the Washington Post, at least as long as they are supporting pro-choice politicians.

Apparently, I’m not alone

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After I wrote this post, I began second guessing myself. Was the media really so skewed toward Obama? Who am I–the Great Arbiter of Objectivity? Anyway,  thank you to the reader who found this story about How Obama can Win Over the Media–and check out the comments. I cut and pasted one which politely characterizes almost every single one: 

Win over the media? You guys have been his PR department for the past two years. Maybe you should do a story about how media can relearn the process of objective news reporting.

I may not be Miss Objectivity, but I am certainly not alone.

The gloves come off

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The kid-glove jargon, I mean. Usually the pro-choice side is very careful to focus on the whole “my body – my choice” point of view. Abortion is meant to terminate pregnancy, they say. They argue that a woman should not be forced to remain pregnant.

But Obama cuts through that rhetoric, shall we say. And in so doing, he makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. (In a bad way, for all those left wondering.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZF-_EZ8mb0]

One more thought: If a baby is not the correct “punishment” for a mistake, is an abortion?

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