timeimmortal

I didn’t say anything about the Gloucester 17 last week, but I trust the Reader is familiar with the story, or at least the main elements of it. Seventeen girls more or less made a pact to get pregnant simultaneously (or as close to it as possible), and then prior to graduating from high school. Apparently, it was the “in” thing to do. None of the fathers seems to be, in any way, present or relevant to the scenario as it unfolds — men as sperm donors, nothing more — and most of the “men” involved were older than the girls themselves (which means, I think, that most of them would be up on charges of statutory rape if they were ever identified).

One of the girls was evidently in such a rush to get pregnant that she had sex with a 24-year old homeless man in order to meet the deadline, so to speak.

There’s so much wrong with this situation that it’s almost impossible to pick a point at which to begin. The absenteeism of the fathers is worrisome and them some, but from the beginning it hasn’t been something which has been lamented in any way. Indeed, the pregnancy pact seemed pretty much built upon the understanding that the fathers would not be involved at all in the pregnancy or the rearing of the resultant child — the dads were, in other words, just sperm donors, and nothing else. The implication that men are no longer expected to take responsibility for their sexual actions is staggering.

There’s also the matter of age disparity. I realize that were everyone involved a bit older, an 8-year age disparity between participants in a sexual relationship wouldn’t be that much of a shocker. It’s happened before. But we’re not talking 32- and 40-year olds here. And to be perfectly fair, I don’t know what the law in Gloucester says regarding the minimum age of consent — around here, some of the fathers would be facing charges. That none of the stories I’ve read on the matter have said anything about the issue of statutory rape is troubling, I find, because the silence seems to carry with it the implication that the whole issue of older people exploiting (or taking advantage) of young teens in a sexual manner is no longer an issue at all.

The response of the community and media has been laughable, as one story after another has carried the lament that more and better access to birth control, or more and better sex education, would have prevented this travesty. Such reasoning is absurd: I don’t think anyone could doubt that all these young women knew everything they would have needed to know about birth control and “protection” — and none of them had in mind a goal that could have been realized through the use thereof. Birth control and sex education mean nothing to someone who has set out to get pregnant, and no amount of sex education or free condoms would have prevented this pact from emerging or succeeding.

What might have helped prevent this mess would have been maintaining, rather than stripping away, the social stigma against teenage, pre-marital pregnancy. If you’re anxious to get pregnant at age 16, and if you’re willing to go to the absurd, and potentially very dangerous lengths of having sex with the guy who lives behind the dumpster near the corner store, a little shame over your actions is probably exactly what you need to feel. If you’re willing to essentially torpedo your future beyond high school because you’re so deluded you think a stroller is The. Hawt. High School. Fashion. Accessory. Of. The. Year, a little shame over your actions and choices might just be the tonic you need to drink.

But we don’t believe in shame anymore, nor do we believe in right judgement. Our post-Christian social attitude can only lead us to say one of two things about these girls: “Hey, don’t judge,” and “Do what makes you happy, baby.”

Of course, most of these young women — or, come to think of it, their children — won’t be “happy” in the end. One commentator asked a very disturbing, but probably accurate question: how many of these babies, once born, will survive even half a year? How many will, later on in life, suffer from shaken baby syndrome? Ace, whose article I link to above, asks what is probably an even more prescient question: “Anyone thinking these seventeen girls’ seventeen children (with many more to come in the next ten years, I’m sure) will have a happy lot in life? That they’ll grow up well-adjusted and well-parented and successful?” Personally, I think Ace’s high-ball estimate of three (out of 17, remember) growing up into well-adjusted adults is…well…too optimistic. Most of these kids will grow up in borderline poverty, and will be the “sluttified” kids at the day-care, the slightly chubby five-year olds wearing the “Juicy” t-shirts and cut-off pants.

And in due time, they’ll be the ones having babies at 16 years of age, making their mothers into grandmothers before said mothers see even their 35th birthdays.

Post-Christian sexual morality for the win!

I see that York University’s student government is once again trying to ban pro-life groups from the campus, on the grounds that “pro-life organizations seek to deny women of their basic human right to choose.”

Of course, Gilary Massa, the vice president of the YFS, doesn’t call them “pro-life” — she prefers the term “anti-choice.”

One of the ladies at ProWomanProLife points out an obvious problem with that misleading label:

I always am skeptical of a body that insists on calling a pro-life organization “anti-choice.” It pretends abortion to be the only valid ‘choice.’ (Note to pro-abortionists: Choice and abortion are NOT synonyms.)

Then again, perhaps in the minds of many pro-abortionists, abortion is the only valid choice out there; after all, Canada’s dismal birth rate has to come from somewhere.

The plain fact of the matter is that the YFS is just looking to censor those with whom they disagree; this isn’t really about human rights or women’s rights. Pro-life groups have no power to deny anyone access to anything in particular — most are only interested in introducing additional information back into a discussion that has become increasingly one-sided (and then in favour of rampant birth control use and pro-abortion advocacy). It’s becoming increasingly difficult to discuss pregnancy in a university campus’ health centre without having the option of abortion rammed down one’s throat as a first option.

If anyone here is anti-choice, it’s those who would deny pro-life groups their right to hold and articulate a contrary opinion. What’s truly odious is that at no time has abortion been legally declared a human right in Canada. Meanwhile, the freedom of expression of these pro-life groups, which York University is seeking to deny, is enshrined as a human right, and is being taken away in favour of a demand that York students only be exposed to approved opinions.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the truth is precisely the inverse of the rhetoric of the progressive elements in this story?

Update: What the heck?

I was extremely shocked to discover that the increasingly notorious Gilary Massa is a hijab-wearing Muslim woman. I mean, radical pro-choice activist does not bring the hijab to mind. Islam is against abortion. But one thing I unfortunately do associate with Islam in Canada right now (but not all Muslims, of course, and especially not the ones I know personally) is assaults on Canadian freedom of speech. In Halifax. Against Ezra Levant. Against Mark Steyn. Against the MCC, which suffers death threats from fellow Muslims. Ditto Irshad Manji. What, I ask, gives here?

Maybe she’s a progressive Muslim, you know? One of those moderates we keep on hearing about in the various mythologies that percolate through political discourse these days? She’s just fine with the hijab and what it represents, but don’t you dare get between her and the right of a woman to “control her own body.”

Sorta like those pro-choice Catholics, O Reader. Except, in a headscarf.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Hat tip to SoCon for this graphic:

I’ve never understood this.

People — especially enlightened, progressive sorts — obses over things like genetically-modified foods and the quantity of hormones and chemicals in things like milk or chicken meat. And then, if they are female, they get up in the morning and take yet another estrogen-laced pill that alters the normal hormone levels in their own body.

What a strange society we are. We demand that our Food be organic and we’re encouraged to opt for re-useable grocery bags that don’t put as much of a strain on our environment or our landfills. But then when it comes to sex, we insist on altered hormone levels in the female body and the use of “one time” latex sheaths. Plastic and hormones aren’t good enough for the chicken breast we bring home for dinner, but are mandatory for the romantic interlude that follows.

As if birth control and abortion weren’t indicators enough, perhaps the actions of Canadian feminist author Alice Walker toward her daughter, Rebecca Walker, can be taken as indicative of the deep level of animosity that modern feminism has for children, childbearing, and indeed the whole concept of motherhood.

Alice Walker’s contempt for the idea of motherhood, in spite of having had a daughter herself, is so deep and complete that she has in essence disowned her own daughter, and seeks to undermine Rebecca’s career as a writer at every turn as well. Rebecca’s offence? Getting pregnant and having a child.

You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.

In fact, having a child has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Far from ‘enslaving’ me, three-and-a-half-year-old Tenzin has opened my world. My only regret is that I discovered the joys of motherhood so late — I have been trying for a second child for two years, but so far with no luck.

I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.

As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.

…

Although I knew what my mother felt about babies, I still hoped that when I told her I was pregnant, she would be excited for me.

‘Mum, I’m pregnant’

Instead, when I called her one morning in the spring of 2004, while I was at one of her homes housesitting, and told her my news and that I’d never been happier, she went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then she asked if I could check on her garden. I put the phone down and sobbed — she had deliberately withheld her approval with the intention of hurting me. What loving mother would do that?

Worse was to follow. My mother took umbrage at an interview in which I’d mentioned that my parents didn’t protect or look out for me. She sent me an e-mail, threatening to undermine my reputation as a writer. I couldn’t believe she could be so hurtful — particularly when I was pregnant.

Devastated, I asked her to apologise and acknowledge how much she’d hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding affection and resenting me for things I had no control over — the fact that I am mixed-race, that I have a wealthy, white, professional father and that I was born at all.

But she wouldn’t back down. Instead, she wrote me a letter saying that our relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with her first name, rather than ‘Mom’.

That was a month before Tenzin’s birth in December 2004, and I have had no contact with my mother since. She didn’t even get in touch when he was rushed into the special care baby unit after he was born suffering breathing difficulties.

Alice Walker is, I gather, something of a feminist icon. Maybe I’m just an unenlightened neanderthal, but I don’t think she deserves the accolades she gets. She comes off as less of an enlightened champion of women, instead seeming to be more of a petty, vindictive asshat.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

To be fair, I understand that for almost all women, menstruation is not a pleasant experience. That’s no surprise: cramps and bleeding are, pretty much by definition, unpleasant things to have to endure, especially for extended lengths of time (such things are bad enough if they last but five minutes).

I get that. Being male, I don’t experience it myself, so I probably don’t have an accurate sense of scope about the issue, but I get that it’s uncomfortable, painful, annoying, and all the rest.

Equally, I understand that it is part of the physiological reality of being female; it’s a part of how women’s bodies are designed to work. One would think, then, that in our enlightened Western culture that ostensibly values (and regards as equal to men) women, that things like menstruation would be…well, not promoted, but understood in a proper context. One would think that little girls fearful of getting their first period would be consoled and taught that it’s part of growing up, that it means their body is healthy and that while it is uncomfortable, it doesn’t make them any less a person. One would hope that girls would be told that, in essence, being a girl is a good thing.

One would further hope that any little girls who were so fearful of getting their period that they demand to undergo a sex-change operation would get a bit more counseling, rather than a cheque from the government to cover the expense of the operation.

Have we come to the point where certain aspects of the normative function of the female body are regarded as so repugnant that we regard it as permissible — and perhaps even acceptable — for women to take even extreme measures to avoid them? This is especially true in regard to menstruation, one observes — birth control methods like the pill are often marketed on their ability to reduce the yearly number or severity of menstrual periods. Apparently there is even research being done on birth control supplements that reduce the yearly number of periods to one, perhaps even to zero.

In short, the view that is coming to prominence seems to be that women are biologically flawed somehow, that it is better to circumvent, diminish, and/or attempt to avoid certain natural realities of the female body.

How utterly hateful.

It turns out that the pill — that ubiquitous birth control method — is responsible for a potentially massive number of pregnancy terminations every year.

And yes, I realize that the point of taking the pill is, in most cases, to avoid getting pregnant. That doesn’t change the fact that a potentially massive number of implantations are being prevented, in essence aborting perhaps millions of unborn children at the very earliest stages of development.

Women on BCPs [birth control pills] have 28-day cycles and thus have 13 cycles/year (365/28 = 13.3).

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute , 10,410,000 U.S. women are current pill users, a figure that constitutes 26.9% of all those using some method of contraception.

Gambrell notes that there is a 14% breakthrough ovulation rate in females taking the 50 microgram pills (10,410,000 x .14 = 1,457,400 ovulations each cycle). (1)

1,457,400 x 13 cycles/year = 18,946,200 possible exposures to pregnancy each year.

Since the normal fecundity rate (chance of pregnancy without using contraceptives) for the average couple is 20%, and if we were to suppose that the cervical mucus change cut down the sperm reaching the ovum by 50% (a very generous allowance), that means that there would be 20% x 50% x 18,946,200= 1,894,620 fertilized ovums that would have otherwise implanted in the walls of the uterus.

Of this number, the accepted rate for “pill pregnancies” is 3-5 per 100 women years i.e 3%-5%. (2)

This means that 95-97% of these unborn babies were prevented from implanting in the lining of the womb because of the oral contraceptive’s thinning of the endometrium (#3 above).

In other words, approximately 1,800,000 (95% x 1,894,620) babies die every year through the use of oral contraceptives.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 854,122 legally induced abortions in the US in 2003.

Therefore the ratio between BCP abortion vs. conventional abortions is 2.2:1.  This means that for every  ONE women aborting through conventional means in the U.S., more than TWO women are aborting through the use of oral contraceptives.

Culture of death, indeed. God help us.

In some respects, it means less, now, to be a mother than it once did. I do not mean, in saying that, that those women who are mothers are possessed of less worth than their own mothers were; no, their worth is the same, and their “act” of being mothers equally noble and dignified.

I mean, instead, that so much which would have at one time been thought of as a nigh-unthinkable antithesis of motherhood — no-fault divorce, abortion-on-demand, the proliferation of birth control — has become nothing more, nor anything less, than a series of common commercial products in our society, as easily obtained as a pack of cigarettes once was (one could glibly note that today, in stark contrast to obtaining an abortion, one must still present convincing proof of age in excess of 18 years in order to obtain cigarettes legally).

And to an event and “product,” each of those things in some way flies in the face of motherhood. Divorce deprives it of its logical, biological, necessary opposite — fatherhood. Abortion abruptly ceases the natural course of nurturing and, in due time, birthing a child — it prevents one entirely from becoming a mother. And birth control attempts to circumvent the possibility that, through allowing the sexual act between one man and one woman to run its natural course, motherhood might result from the conjugal act.

But I wonder…could all this have been predicted, say, from some distant moment in history?

David Warren reflects, in his usual oblique way, on Mother’s Day through the lens of she who is the mother of us all: Mary, Mother of Christ, Mother of God:

In a sentence, the veneration of Mary is an inevitable extension of the worship of Christ: for if there is God the Son, there must be a Mother of God. Or to be plainer still, in line with the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. — the human “Jesus,” and the divine “Christ,” are not two different persons. They are one and the same, and He was the Son of God, and of Mary.

Hence the extraordinary veneration of Mary, from the earliest Christian times, and through the centuries — so powerful that even the Muslims, appearing from the 7th century A.D., also venerate her. And long, long before even Christianity dawned upon the world, she is anticipated in every “Mother Goddess” known to anthropology.

A Darwinist, or a Jungian, or sociobiologist, or whatever, may hold that this is all merely a projection of the big raw fact of human motherhood — onto a cosmos that is fearfully beyond the comprehension of the primitive human mind. This hypothesis has the glib plausibility that is required to monopolize teaching in the academy, today. It is itself a view of considerable antiquity, and the anthropologists have discovered essentially atheist primitive tribes.

This is a “secular” newspaper and I am only dealing with the pragmatic consequences of religious beliefs. What is the consequence of Marian “idolatry” (as my Protestant ancestors would call it, while turning in their graves), or as I would characterize it, the veneration of “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei” that has animated so much of this world’s most magnificent art and poetry?

Its practical effect is to found all our intellectual and emotional ideas about motherhood, deep as they are, in something still deeper. It is to believe that real substance and significance underlies our natural love for our own human mothers, that it is not simply a biological quirk to be explained away by a few material causes. That it is instead the profoundest echo of what Dante finally called, “l’ amor che move il sole e l’ alter stele” — “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Buy into that, and one’s own human mother is not reduced to a mechanism of “sexual selection” (to quote a zoological sage of the century before last), nor arbitrarily salvaged with the tearjerk posturing of a card. She is rather enlarged to her true proportions.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Were I of a combative mindset, I might speculate that one could have reasoned, from the first moment Protestant thought began to turn against Mary and Marian adoration (it serves to note that the first Reformer, Luther, was a devoutly Marian in his personal practice of Christian faith), that all this secular nightmare would come to pass. It is a tenuous thing to suggest, and not easily defensible.

But I wonder if there isn’t, inherent in that historical rejection of Mary as the Mother of All (and, indeed, the Mother of God) that so infused Protestantism during its formative decades, to be found the seeds of modern secular society’s rejection of motherhood on principle.

File this under “you can lead a horse to water…”

I think the good Reader can agree that Europe has evolved, in recent decades, very liberal sexual morés, and that European governments spend a lot of time and money promoting safe sex, birth control, and all the rest. I’m sure that sex-ed in European schools is probably quite comprehensive, much more so than in North America.

And what has been the result? Are European teens and young-ish adults more sexually responsible than their North American counterparts?

Apparently not: “[a] third of 16 to 35-year-old men and 23% of women questioned said they drank to increase their chance of sex.”

Almost half of participants in Vienna, Austria had drunk alcoholand had sex by the time they were 16 compared with 36% in Venice, Italy, 37% in Palma, Spain and 30% in Liverpool.

…

Those who had been drunk in the past four weeks were more likely to have had five or more partners, sex without a condom and to have regretted sex after drink or drugs in the past 12 months.

Cannabis, Cocaine or ecstasy use was linked to similar consequences.

Study leader Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool said: “Millions of young Europeans now take drugs and drink in ways which alter their sexual decisions and increase their chances of unsafe sex or sex that is later regretted.

“Yet despite the negative consequences, we found many are deliberately taking these substances to achieve quite specific sexual effects.”

Chickens do indeed come home to roost; it was predicted, many years ago and many times since then, that comprehensive, birth control-focused sex education would increase the promiscuity and sexual irresponsibility of society.. Of course, only easily ignored conservative commentators were doing the predicting. Now that the evidence is showing that those predictions are being borne out, perhaps we can begin to re-think the damage we are doing to our children, and to ourselves?

If you can’t make people listen to reason, give them a reason to listen. Since our post-Christian culture values sex so much, why not argue against abortion from the perspective of its overwhelmingly detrimental effect on the typical woman’s sex life?

n the May 2 instalment of his regular health feature in The Times, Dr. Thomas Stuttaford responded to a reader who complained of a loss of interest in sex following an abortion. “Though my boyfriend and I agreed it was the right thing to do, I feel guilty and I’ve gone off sex,” wrote the questioner. Dr. Stuttaford responded by saying that loss of libido after an abortion is “so common that it can almost be said to be expected”.

Asked if the feelings would pass, Stuttaford wrote, “It is possible, but by no means inevitable, that the changes this will have wrought in the way you feel about a future together may have irretrievably undermined your relationship.”

Indeed, Dr. Stuttaford observed that in “years of experience with patients” has “reinforced the teaching I received in my early medical life that even the most ardent affair may not survive an abortion, although both partners often remain good friends. Frequently, there has been too much emotion around, even if there have been no spoken recriminations. The shadow of the decision to have the termination, and any doubts one or other may have had about this deep down in their psyche, means that sooner or later they will be tempted to start again with, as if it were, a clean slate.”

Stuttaford referred to a study, authored “about 15 years ago,” that he said showed that although “nearly all” women suffer feelings of guilt and grief following abortion, the effects usually passed within a month.

“My own opinion,” he writes, “is that the American research workers were unduly sanguine in expecting women to jettison guilt and overcome their feelings of loss - the grief response - within just a month.”

Statistical research by the Elliot Institute shows that, in many cases, the emotional effects of abortion are still discernable eight weeks after an abortion. In one study, two months after their abortions, 44 percent of women complained of nervous disorders, 36 percent had experienced sleep disturbances, 31 percent had regrets about their decision and 11 percent had been prescribed psychotropic medicine by their family doctor.

The follow-up comment by the doctor that neither partner should feel guilty seems a bit…CYA-ish in the wake of the above, but I suppose that one has to cover one’s ass rather than risk one’s career as a researcher into this matter by being branded as an anti-abortion zealot.

At every turn, the numbers alone cry out against the idea that abortion is a valid, respectable birth control option (and let us be honest, O Reader: an overwhelming majority of women use abortion as nothing more than auxiliary birth control). It’s kind of an open secret, now, that most abortion service providers, and most abortion lobbyists, tend to let that reality get pushed to the sidelines. Much of the abortion regime is predicated on a series of calculated lies, or distorted truths.

And that should tell us something, shouldn’t it?

Pro-lifers aren’t kidding when they assert that abortion hurts women more than it could ever help. But who ever did listen to sound advice?

Count Roland is, I think, seeking to supplant Ed Darrell as my most frequent correspondent. He writes in yet again with some supplemental thoughts on this article, which hinted at how our society’s loss of innocence in recent decades more or less parallels the reduction in the number of children our society is producing.

This has ben noticed, at least by ‘fringe’ ‘conservative’ not crazy intellectuals for at least 25 years with Neil Postman’s “The Disappearance of Childhood” and his and Diana West’s analyses (hers in “The Death of the Grownup“) pin the decline as definitively started in the 50’s and prepared for since about the time of Vatican I (Not to mention various papal writings which indicated part of this due to their topics - Humanae Vitae and adolescent sexuality for example).

It is a return to the situation of the middle ages and earlier without the large hanging anvil of the necessity of several children to survive oneself and have at least a couple children survive to adulthood. Our one designer baby and our pet or doll surrogates fill the rest of the psychological space, or so some are deluded to believe, and that one child will survive sans accidents and we have the government to support us in old age, not children, so one is enough.

But I agree with both of them that the ‘adultification’ you speak of is of a severely adolescent nature since adult and child are contrast classes with adolescence only recently bridging the gap in our thoughts. But, if one of the contrast classes diminishes, so does the other. Without children there are no adults and vice versa. Thus all that remains is the adolescent group which attempts to marry the rights of adulthood with the responsibilities of childhood. A system stable that does not create.

Mark Steyn and many others have spoken about the concept of permanent adolescence being the prevailing trend in our post-Christian society, and I do think there’s more than just a ring of truth to the observation. Adolescence, as I recall it, was a struggle to exert one’s rights as a fledgling adult while still retaining all the child-like ways of acting and living that made life “fun.” And it is no stretch at all to say that many people these days have not grown up past that point.

A glance at the birth control-addled, sex-obsessed meta-adults that roam about Edmonton’s downtown area on any given evening (especially on weekends) tells the tale more than any number of essays could: ours is a world in which “fun” (read: gratification) is the ultimate object for many people, and for whom “responsibility” is nothing more than an extremely hard-to-spell (more than) four-letter word. We have become a society of people obsessed with the things we have a “right” to do, and yet we care not a whit for any consideration that intrudes on, or gets in the way of, our fun. We are, in other word, a society of people stuck in a permanent adolescence.

And it will likely be up to Christians to pick up the pieces once that unstable social framework devolves into pagan chaos.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!