timeimmortal

I am in basic agreement with Ken about the whole controversy surrounding Palin and her daughter.

I guess the ‘liberals’* would have a problem with teenage parents getting married — sounds so…50’s. But, I thought that they were pro-choice WHICH INCLUDES THE CHOICE TO CARRY THE CHILD TO TERM, and that they would support decisions which are in line with empirical research that children living with their biological parents have better outcomes in general than children of single parents or those raised by at least one non-biological parent. (This is not to denigrate the work of many industrious single parents or adoptive parents, but only to say that mom and dad tend to do the best (if partly due to selfish genetic reasons operating on a subconscious level)) Thus the decision is the right one, one that even pro-choicers (as they call themselves) must say they support or else they are nothing but abortion advocates, and is ordered toward what will be the best outcomes for the child. Ohh, and has not Obama been preaching, several times recently, that young African-American males should take greater responsibility in the lives of their ‘baby-mamas’? Has he not been telling them to do what the Palin’s and the Johnston’s have encouraged their children to do?

The abortion analysis is also compelling — if teenage pregnancy is a secularist sin, then Bristol is not guilty of any more than several other “ticket children” except that she was ‘caught’.

Also, if Bill’s adultery is not something that ought to be scrutinized (only his honesty about it publicly) why is Palin’s daughter’s indiscretion seen as damning for McCain? As long as Palin is honest, what is the big deal?

Wait…her desire for abstinence education over ‘comprehensive’ education indicates her failure as a mother despite Bristol a) being exposed to a culture through friends that is more lenient on sexual mores, b) being of age for several years according to ‘liberals’ for deciding her sexual life and obtaining ‘remedies’ for ‘problems’ without parental involvement according to those same ‘liberals’ and c) having free will.

If a class refuses to answer questions on a government exam (worth the majority of the students’ mark) but routinely does excellent on class assignments of comparable difficulty to the exam, does that mean the teacher is a bad teacher or that the students chose not to write answers?

Also, I have before me a chart of the smartest cities in Canada and the three cities which routinely elect left of centre politicians are 18th (Toronto), 21st (Vancouver) and 34th (Montreal) while the cities that regularly elect right of centre politicians are 3rd (Calgary), 8th (Edmonton), 12th (Saskatoon) and 17th (Regina). However, the latter are usually derided as being “redneck” and not “sophisticated” like the former, but the latter also have higher percentages who spend money on the arts (ranked 1, 8, 10, 9 respectively) than the former (22, 15, 28 respectively). While economic prowess may be a factor, this certainly makes it look like the ‘liberals’ have some explaining to do. How can the ‘dumb, backwards’ cities have smarter and more cultured populations? Sure the measures are imprecise, but the clear seperation of the groups would indicate something is being captured.

* I have some issues with using that term to designate “left of centre” policies/people since it can denote some “right of centre” values too, such as its close cousin libertarianism

The problem with choices made is that once they are made, we have to live with them. It is a strange facet of our post-Christian society that women would concoct elaborate fictions in order to seem as though they belong to “the secret club of women with children” — and in order, perhaps, to satisfy the urge toward motherhood that is an integral, if ignored, part of their being — and yet remain entrenched in their “choice” to never have children of their own, for real.

For the truth is that motherhood is no more a secret club than is womanhood. And yet for many, it is a far distant country, or seems to be, because they have swallowed whole the lies that society has fed to them.

In opposition to Bill C-484, the Unborn Victims of Crime Act, Bread and Roses, a feminist website, is launching the “One Body. One Person. One Count.” campaign. What an outright lie.

Don’t see it, O Reader? It’s the first sentence of the campaign’s header.

A quick note first: I’m actually not taking issue with the “One Person.” sentence, since that is a truthful statement of the status of unborn children under Canadian law — legally speaking, a fetus is not a person, the same way that women were not considered persons at one point in Canadian history (and could in fact, for some time after they were designated as persons under the law, legally be raped by their husbands), and the same way that Jews were (and, in some countries today, are) not considered persons at various stages in history (and were murdered in droves as a result).

And as disgusted as I am at the prospect of how Canadian law has set up this legal loophole by which the murder of thousands of Canadians every year through the procedure called abortion can be effected, I have to say that I do find it darkly ironic that “personhood” — a designation that early feminism fought long and hard to win for women in Canada — has become the tool by which modern feminism continues to justify the murder of the unborn and the continued oppression of women through it.

But let us come back to the lie, shall we?

“One Body.” It’s a patent falsehood, as any thinking person ought to be able to understand, because the unborn child — while dependent on its mother for nourishment and protection — is a separate and distinct being from its mother. The unborn child — a human being, homo sapiens, by species — contains unique genetic information, distinct and different from that of its mother. Yes, she contributed approximately half of the child’s genetic information, but the father contributed the other half — and in that combination, unique genes emerged that belong to the child, and only to the child. In that way, it is distinct from the mother — its body is not hers.

Even physically, there are two bodies, one within the other — anyone who has viewed an ultrasound can understand that much.

Look, it’s not that I don’t think pro-choice feminists (a phrase which always strikes me as being slightly oxymornic, but nevermind that for now) should have the opportunity to voice their opposition to Bill C-484. Obviously, they have that right, and should be free to exercise it.

I just wish they didn’t have to lie through their teeth when doing so.

* I’m speaking here, O Reader, not only of the way that abortion tends to benefit men more than women, but also of the way that even in Canada, abortion is used by many people as a method of gender selection (a system in which female fetuses are more likely to be aborted)

York University graduate student “did not mean to spark a debate on freedom of expression” when she helped stop (read: censor) an abortion debate on the university’s campus.

With all (un?)due respect to Kelly Holloway: what did you expect, Missy? Precisely how could this young woman have thought that her support of an act of Censorship wouldn’t lead to a debate over the right to speak freely that all people, according to the UN, ostensibly enjoy? Perhaps she thought that the pro-lifers would simply do as they were told and meekly obey the order to keep silent?

“I actually don’t think this is very controversial,” the graduate student at York University said of the decision to cancel a Feb. 28 event that would have shown graphic images of abortion and asked participants whether the procedure should be criminalized.

If the event wasn’t so controversial, why was it cancelled? If the abortion debate isn’t very controversial, why was a debate about abortion not allowed to take place on the campus of York University? If this isn’t that big of a deal, why did Kelly Holloway and others advocate for the cancellation of the event and, by extension, censorship of the pro-life opinion?

“Most people understand that every woman has the right to choose what she does with her own body and that moral considerations about abortion are a very personal matter for individuals to decide,” said Holloway, who helped make the decision as vice-chair of the student centre where the debate was scheduled to be held.

It would be easier to accept the pro-choice talking points if they weren’t so mired in ignorance, half-truths, and outright lies. The fact of the matter is, abortion is not about what a woman does with her own body, because it is not the woman’s body that gets chopped up and vacuumed out of the womb. The fact of the matter is, there is another human being — yes, one that resides, for the time being, within the woman’s body, but nevertheless one which is distinct from the woman at a genetic level and which is, by any metric one might care to employ in a rational and objective way, a distinct being with its own body.

If for no other reason than that abortion involves a minimum of two people — the woman and the unborn child — the question of the Morality of abortion cannot be relegated to the realm of individual choice, because the outcome of the moral decision impacts more than one person (and, indeed, a wholly different human being than the one making the moral decision will be the one to pay with its life if the “right to choose” is exercised). This is to say nothing of the way our post-modern society’s permissive attitudes to abortion have diminished the birthrate to such a low level that only a massive program of Immigration can keep the population at its present level. Abortion may be an individual choice, but the implications and ramifications of the choice affect the lives of others, and impact on society as a whole. For those reasons, the moral issues surrounding abortion cannot be left in the hands of individuals to decide.

“The legal precedent in Canada is that abortion and those women who choose to have the medical procedure will not be criminalized,” said Holloway, who is also president of the York University Graduate Students’ Association. “So every York student has the right to make up their own mind and there is no need for an event, organized by anti-choice campaigners, that is disguised as a debate.”

Except that it was actually going to be a debate — Jose Ruba against a pro-choice student named Michael Payton chosen from the ranks of the Freethinkers, Skeptics, and Atheists at York (a student group). Yes, it was being put on in part by the pro-life group at York, but it was also being put on by the other group as well. Both pro-life and pro-choice people were, in other words, putting on the event.

God forbid, though, that pro-lifers ever get to speak their minds, eh, O Reader? Even in an ecumenical setting, it would be dangerous to let “anti-choice” types speak. Kelly Holloway: censor.

Holloway said banning discussions of the pros and cons of abortion was never the point. Her beef was with inviting the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, (CCBR) a Calgary-based pro-life group that compares abortion to genocide and pushes to make it illegal.

Holloway remembers the display the group brought to University of Toronto a few years ago when she was an undergraduate bioethics student there and active in the student union.

“They erected huge signs in full colour of fabricated fetuses alongside people dying in the Holocaust and also pictures of people being lynched,” she said. “So we set up a table outside of that display as the student union to encourage students to tell us what their reactions were so we could understand the effect it was having on students. We collected hundreds of statements from students who said they were upset, they were appalled, they were traumatized and they were worried about the fact that the student union hadn’t taken responsibility to actually interfere in the matter.”

Maybe people should be upset about abortion. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that the unborn child is a human being, and that it is alive. Maybe people should be confronted with the reality that more often than not, what is “aborted” is not an indistinct clump of cells, but something that is very obviously a somewhat smaller version of a human infant. Maybe people should be shown that abortion doesn’t just excise a growth from the uterus, but that it in fact does rip a tiny human being into pieces to be discarded with the trash.

And maybe people should be disgusted by what they see, and disgusted by the practice of abortion, and by the realization that something so brutal is considered both legal and moral by many in Canada (and around the world).

God forbid people should see both sides of the story — even if one side is very traumatizing to behold — and be allowed to decide for themselves what is and is not moral.

She was not about to let that happen again.

Kelly Holloway: censor. Thanks, Ms. Holloway, for violating the right to freedom of expression of pro-life students at York University. How does it feel, Missy, to know that you’ve now contravened the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

When the student centre executive learned about the event — billed as a debate on abortion rights between Jose Ruba from CCBR and Michael Payton from a student group called Freethinkers, Skeptics and Atheists at York — they held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously to cancel it.

Because it’s too dangerous to let students make their own choices after all, isn’t it!

I tend not to believe the label “pro-choice,” because too many self-professed pro-choicers — Kelly Holloway included — actually don’t care about people having the right to exercise “choice” freely. Such people are more accurately described as being pro-abortion, because their concern is that abortion remain legal in Canada. They then dress their opinion up in the pretty language of individual choice, but it’s just a lie.

It is a lie because those same people who call themselves pro-choice don’t believe in allowing other people the freedom to make their choices in a free and open way. Certainly, Kelly Holloway did not respect the right of the pro-life student group to choose to associate themselves with the CCBR, or the choice that both the pro-life students and the Freethinkers. She didn’t think twice about respecting the choices these groups had made to hold a debate. Instead, when she was informed of their decision to hold the event, she acted swiftly and decisively to deny them their right to choose, to deny them the right to hold the debate, and to deny them their right to freedom of expression.

And now she’s shocked that people called her on the carpet for being a censor.

How stupid does one have to be to be a “pro-choicer,” anyhow? I guess, in the specific case of Kelly Holloway, being a Marxist gets you most of the way there.

Update: Welcome, Blazing Cat Fur readers!

It’s hardly enough, but any law which recognizes that the unborn are living, human beings worthy of some manner of protection from harm is a good thing. And with the Liberals paralyzed for fear of triggering an election, and the NDP and Bloc Quebecois to weakened at the moment to present serious opposition to the bill, now is the perfect time for the Conservative government to be passing it.

A controversial federal justice bill that would make it a separate crime if a fetus dies when its mother is attacked passed through the second stage of proceedings in Parliament on Wednesday.

But MPs opposed to the bill — who say it’s a back-door attempt to attack abortion rights — say they will try to make sure the bill never makes it out of committee.

“I think the NDP, the Bloc and about half the Liberals will mobilize at committee stage to try and nip this in the bud,” said New Democrat MP Pat Martin.

The Unborn Victims of Crime Act passed second reading Wednesday evening by seven votes, splitting support among the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP.

Martin and other critics — including pro-choice groups — fear that, by giving the fetus a right through this legislation, it opens the door for anti-abortion groups to go back to court and argue against abortion.

I like how the newspaper reporter didn’t bother to seek out the opinion of pro-life groups or supporters of the bill, preferring to stay safely on the pro-choice side of the issue and only quoting those who oppose the bill. Media bias aside, though, there’s good news here.

It’s beyond all reasonable debate that the fetus is human, and that it is alive, and that it is a unique being set apart from either of its parents; it is, genetically speaking, different from both the mother and the father. Observations of that nature tend to do away with most of the pro-abortion arguments one tends to encounter, including the notion that the only issue is a woman’s right to “control her own body” (because it’s not just her body, is it?).

Indeed, the only recourse that the pro-abortion lobby has, in the face of the facts, is to argue that the unborn are not “persons” under the law, and to oppose any and all attempts to grant them some or all of the rights enjoyed by those who, under the law, are considered “persons.” If that sort of reasoning sounds familiar, it ought to — notions of personhood have been used to justify the bigotry and murderous excesses of many a dictator, and even a few racist groups, throughout history. Marching in lockstep with the notion of personhood is the notion of “wantedness,” and the suggestion that it is legal and morally acceptable to kill those unborn children which are not “wanted” by the mother. Apparently, though, that reasoning is only valid up until the moment of the child being born — if the mother should decide a couple of years later that she no longer “wants” the child, she’s out of luck.

Not that one could ever accuse the pro-choice side of having the most consistent arguments, logically speaking.

And yet, the plain fact of the matter is that if someone does kill a pregnant woman, two lives are ended; if a pregnant woman is attacked and loses her baby, a human being has still died. Any reasonable person ought to be able to see that in that circumstance, a punishable offence has occurred, and that Canadian law should include provisions to prosecute those who commit such crimes. If nothing else, this bill — Bill C-484 is its technical name — is a breath of fresh air and fresh thinking from a government that, two years on, continues to impress.

And it should pass, not only because it will throw pro-choicers everywhere into hysterics, but because it reflects a biological reality.

Erf writes in with some commentary about this article, regarding the idiotic attempt by Dr. Jorge Carpizo McGregor to justify abortion by likening the unborn to chimpanzees.

Thought you might be interested to know that the idea that a human fetus early on is more chimp than human is not a new one. It sounds a lot like “recapitulation theory“, first proposed by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. According to this theory (long since discredited), a developing embryo of any species passes through its entire evolutionary history before becoming whatever it’s really supposed to be, e.g. human.

Of course, I don’t think even Haeckel claimed that the embryo actually was a member of whatever earlier species it passed through, just that it took on the forms as it was developing. Ah, arguments from ignorance…

Incidentally, this is a popular strawman argument that creationists like to point at to say “look, evolution says this, but it’s been disproven, so evolution is wrong!”

That is a truly useful bit of information. Thanks, Erf, for passing it along.

I suppose that any sufficiently desperate person, anxious to justify his or her continued support for the butchery and murder of the unborn, would more than readily turn to any theory, no matter how discredited it may be. More and more, it seems that pro-choice arguments are propped up by deliberate ignorance and lies, or rhetorical dodges and categories of “wantedness” and “personhood” that are applied in ways worthy of the Germany the world knew some sixty-odd years ago.

In the minds of the York Federation of Students, debating whether abortion should be legal is like debating whether wife-beating should be legal.

Margaret Fung, President of Students for Bioethical Awareness (SBA), one of the hosting clubs, describes what happened: “I was told in a meeting by members of the York Federation of Students that debating abortion is comparable to debating whether a man should be allowed to beat his wife. They said that there is freedom of speech to a limit, and that abortion is not an issue to debate. They demanded that the event not take place and shut us down.” Present at this meeting in addition to Fung were Jeremy Salter, Executive Director of the York Federation of Students (YFS), Fuad Abdi, VP Operations of the YFS and also the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Student Centre, and Amir Mohareb, President of the York Debating Society.

SBA, an official York University Student Club, worked with the York Debating Society to organize the debate. The debaters were Michael Payton from Freethinkers for the pro-choice side and Jose Ruba from the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Awareness for the pro-life side. It was to be an organized debate moderated by the York Debating Society. Both sides were ready and willing to debate, but after it was demanded the event be shut down, dozens of students planning on attending the event were turned away at the door.

I find it intersting how it was the atheist student organization that had stepped up to debate for the pro-abortion side.

But that’s a minor little detail. On one hand, it’s not so surprising that the York Federation of Students banned the event — like most campus student governments, YFS tends to espouse a fairly liberal worldview, and if there’s one thing that has become abundantly clear about liberal college and university students, it is that they are cowards who are so uncomfortable with the idea of having their views seriously and rationally challenged that they would rather just impose Censorship upon opinions with which they disagree.

And that’s really what this is — censorship, as surely as any HRC ruling would be.

And that’s a shame, and a major loss for the students of York University. The Reader is free to take whatever view s/he cares to take on the abortion debate (my own views are reasonably well-known), but I encourage the reader to look past this situation as being merely another instance of pro-lifers attempting to protest the killing of the unborn. This was supposed to be a debate which both sides were looking forward to — it was intended to be an intellectual discussion of the issue, with facts arrayed against facts and argument arrayed against argument. With both sides presented, the participants in the debate and the audience of the debate would be free, at the end, to make their own decisions about the abortion issue…and would be able to do so with a goodly deal of evidence and reasoning to draw upon. That’s the beauty of honest debate — it really brings things out into the open.

Of course, Jose Ruba is a persuasive speaker and devastating in debates, and probably would have carried the day. Which, I think, was something the YFS was afraid of — the risk that some students might swing their views around to the pro-life side was an unacceptable one, and so the event had to be cancelled. And that’s what’s shameful. Universities and colleges are supposed to be about critical thought, about looking at things rationally and making informed decisions after consideration of different arguments and evidence. They are supposed to be places of learning, not places where groupthink is the rule of the day. And yet increasingly, thanks to groups like the YFS, and thanks to university and college faculties and administrations which are likewise cowardly, the tradition of critical thinking in higher education is fading, being replaced by encouragement to follow the approved consensus view.

YFS couldn’t take the risk that even one more student might barbarically begin to believe that the unborn are every bit as human, and every bit as deserving of a right to live, as any of the students filling York’s lecture halls. So the debate about abortion was cancelled. That’s a loss for all the students at York, and one more nail in the coffin of freedom of expression and critical thinking.

Update: Mark Shea has the best one-line take on this whole issue:

I sometimes get the sense that Canada is about one half hour into America’s future.

Ouch, Mr. Shea…ouch.

Update, Part Deux: Welcome, Steynians!

What [pro-lifers] seem to have failed to recognize, therefore, at least with the necessary clarity, is that the humanity or inhumanity of the fetus is often no longer the issue - at least, not within the elite spheres of the pro-death movement…

Agreed. I once interviewed a woman working in an abortion clinic. Our conversation became more heated (not good) and I spluttered something along these lines of “Don’t you know what the fetus is?” She in turn rolled her eyes at me and said “Of course. You think I don’t know? You think women don’t know?”

So it was then that I realized there are two types of pro-choice people: Those who naively believe the fetus is not a person until a certain magical moment in gestation and those who know the fetus is human from day one but don’t care.

As I’ve remarked before, the abortion debate is no longer about whether or not the unborn are human being — that particular question can be (and has been) put to rest, as any student of biology at even a high school level should be able to realize. That an unborn baby is both human (that is, of the species homo sapiens) and alive follows logically from the observation that a newborn baby is a) human (that is, of the species homo sapiens), and b) alive.

What the abortion debate has turned into, then (or, perhaps, what it was always about) is at what stage of development/life it is socially/morally/legally acceptable to kill a living human being. That’s all it comes down to. And for many women (and men), there is seemingly no problem with saying that it is acceptable to kill a human being during the gestational phase of its life. The fact that it is a human being is irrelevant to them. The fact that it is alive is irrelevant to them, except in the sense that its being alive is the problem to begin with. The fact that it is genetically distinct from either of its parents (that is: it is its own person) is irrelevant.

“Human” and “alive” are not, to some pro-choicers, sufficient categories to merit a right to life. To merit a right to life, something which is “human” and “alive” must also be “wanted” and, legally speaking, “a person.”

And that’s the scary part. Because we’ve heard that kind of talk before. And we know where it led.

I have actually had pro-choice (read: pro-abortion) advocates say, to my face, that “post abortion syndrome” is a lie, that it doesn’t exist..

Maybe it is. Then again:

A talented artist hanged herself because she was overcome with grief after aborting her twins, an inquest heard yesterday.

Emma Beck, 30, left a note saying: “Living is hell for me. I should never have had an abortion.

“I see now I would have been a good mum. I told everyone I didn’t want to do it, even at the hospital.”

…

In February [of 2007], the night before her 31st birthday, Miss Beck hanged herself at her home in Helston.

She had recently split up with her boyfriend, identified only as Ben, who was said to have “reacted badly” to her pregnancy.

The guy in this picture is a typical secular post-modern sort: another selfish prat who loved the girl for the sex, but who “reacted badly” when her body did something that it was designed to do as a result of sexual intercourse.

It has already become clear that abortion hurts women to a larger extent than it could ever benefit them. This young woman’s suicide is just one more entry in an already well-documented chronicle of the link between abortion and depression or suicide.

…unknown to one U.K. mother, the kicking she felt from the twins growing inside her actually saved her life, according to a report from the Daily Mail.

Michelle Stepney, 35, said her twins Alice and Harriet, now age 13 months, were a lively pair in the womb. At the time, however, she had no idea that constant kicking she felt actually dislodged a tumor that had formed on her cervix and, according to doctors, saved her life.

Shortly after becoming pregnant, Stepney of Cheam in South-West London was taken to the hospital after suffering what was believed to be a miscarriage. Soon doctors realized she was still pregnant, but had developed life-threatening cervical cancer. Stepney declined to have an abortion and doctors at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London agreed to give her reduced chemotherapy in the hope of stopping the cancer spreading during the pregnancy.

But it wasn’t the chemo that ultimately saved Stepney.

“I couldn’t believe it when the doctors told me that the babies had dislodged the tumor,” she said. “I’d felt them kicking, but I didn’t realize just how important their kicking would turn out to be. I owe my life to my girls, and that’s why I could have never agreed with a termination.”

This woman made a brave choice, choosing not to have an abortion so as not to damage the young lives forming within her. There’s been a number of stories of mothers doing that, but this one has a bit of a twist: it was the decision not to have an abortion that saved this woman’s life. Had she terminated the pregnancy, who knows? Perhaps that tumor would have still been successfully treated…or perhaps, with nothing to knock it free, it would have spread the cancer further into her body.

How many times, I wonder, will the tired arguments of the pro-choicers be revealed as lies before it becomes obvious once again that abortion is nothing less than murder (really, a form of contract killing)?

Brilliant. I may not agree with Ace about all that much, but flashes of funny-ha-ha like this are what keep me coming back to his blog.

Apparenty it’s unrealistic that women ever take unwanted pregnancies to term.

Given the current climate, sure, that’s probably not the most frequently taken path. But then reviewers go all goofy for quirky independent films where decidedly more marginal choices are made — like a guy who devotes his life to having sex with his Real Doll. Those odd choices are celebrated by reviewers as opening our eyes to a world of possibilities.

Giving birth to an unplanned child, though? Dude, how absurd. Let’s not bother making about such bizarre and unrealistic people.

We need movies that really speak to the heart of the experience of life, like Gay Cowboys Eating Pudding. Such stories have a potent resonance for all of us.

Just so, eh, O Reader? The pro-life message should just so totally be kept out of movies these days, since (like) nobody thinks that way anymore.

And people wonder why newspapers like the Washington Post are losing stock while blogs are taking off?