Back to Life, Back from Cambodia?

Canada, a staunchly prochoice country, nonetheless has its equally staunch fetus freaks.

Their cause is hopeless but they keep stomping their little feet and SHRIEEEEKING.

Case in point: the Parental Consent campaign, a co-masturbation between Saskatchewan ProLife and Dominionist ARPA.

They've been told repeatedly that it ain't gonna happen, yet they persist.

One might find this pathetic or even quixotically amusing.

Except.

The campaign continues to disseminate harmful LIES.

Yesterday, it tweeted this statement: "Abortion has a profound impact on adolescent girls," accompanied by this graphic.

There it is again: Parental Consent wants pregnant teens to give up their autonomy to provide someone with a baybeeee.

But they're lying in the process, as I pointed out by replying with this link to a study from 2012.

Getting a legal abortion is much safer than giving birth, suggests a new U.S. study published Monday.

Researchers found that women were about 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth to a live baby than to die from complications of an abortion.

Experts say the findings, though not unexpected, contradict some state laws that suggest abortions are high-risk procedures.

Explicitly contrary to what Parental Consent would have teens believe -- staying pregnant is 14 times more lethal than choosing abortion.

But what is that website at the bottom of the graphic? I'd never heard of Back to Life Canada.

It's a website created in November 2012 to promote celebrate a bunch of women who walked from here to there to protest abortion.

A little more digging revealed that our old pal Faytene Variable Last Name, most recently Grasseschi, is a prime mover.

Weird group, weird activities.

The website contains the requisite Risks of Abortion page, on which the usual bogus and nauseatingly often debunked claims are made.

Then there's The Walkers, a group of 25 women, first names only, most with pictures, and, oddly, ethnic identities. For example, Chinese Canadian, Anglo Canadian, Metis Canadian, French Canadian, and Barbadian Canadian are listed, but two women who look black are identified as Anglo Canadian, which may describe their language but huh?

(Faytene herself does not appear.)

And they have a Big Field Trip! A project called Back to Life Cambodia.

Back to Life Cambodia is a 2-week event that will focus on prayer, prophetic decrees, seminars, and outreaches to establish value for the life within the minds and hearts of the Cambodian people.

The trip was set for May 17-31, 2015, at a cost of only $500 which does not include accommodation, meals, airfare, travel insurance or Cambodian visa but does include .... ?

The page contains a video report from its inaugural 2014 field trip, but contains nothing from 2015.

I looked and found ... more nothing.

Did they not go? Did they get lost? Did the good people of Cambodia tell them to get stuffed and go home?

Inquiring minds. . .

War on Women Goes Global

Weird, dark days for women's rights and not just in the Excited States, though they do take the (fruit) cake.

In the UK, they have an adoption czar, who wants women to, guess what? Give up unwanted children for adoption.

Women who are pregnant with unwanted babies should be advised to have the child and give it away for adoption, the Government’s new adoption czar said today.

They should be offered adoption as a routine ‘third option’ alongside abortion or struggling to raise the baby themselves, he said.

What are the qualifications for adoption czar, you ask?

Mr Narey, a former Prison Service chief who became an advocate of adoption while running the children’s charity, said social workers should no longer press pregnant women with personal difficulties that they should bring up their child.

This, a day after scandalous abortion stats were released showing that some women aborted fetuses that would have become 'special needs' children. So, I guess those women should have carried to term and loving couples would be lined up around the block to adopt.

Yeah. Right.

Now, Poland, poor benighted Poland, where fetus fetishists are also on a roll and want to outlaw abortion altogether.

The draft had been submitted to parliament by anti-abortion activists, drawing support from about 450,000 petitioners from the conservative opposition as well as a rightist, liberal party in the ruling coalition.

Abortion is outlawed in Poland except in cases when pregnancy results from rape or incest, poses a health risk to the mother or if the foetus is severely deformed.

But even under such conditions, hospitals are known to refuse abortions.

Illegal abortions can be punished by up to two years in prison for those who perform them, while the women themselves are not liable.

Polish women's rights group say there are up to 180,000 illegal abortions in Poland each year, while official data indicates just hundreds of legal terminations annually.

We've followed stories from Poland before: like this one of a raped 14-year-old girl caught between the forced birth gang and more humane forces. She was separated from her mother and bullied by a priest into refusing an abortion. Sense prevailed.

This story didn't have a good outcome. A severely myopic woman feared for her eyesight if she continued her third pregnancy. She consulted a bunch of doctors who agreed that her sight was endangered but who wouldn't sign the permission for an abortion. Right to (fetal) life trumps right to see.

And now for some good news.

Last year, Spain liberalized its abortion and contraception laws. The Poop was pissed and Spain was declared to be on a direct route to hell.

Well, looky here. A year later, abortions have declined.

Funny, innit? Treat people like grownups and they act like grownups.

Adoption/Bigotry Conundrum

The Christian Taliban says: Abortion is murder.

It also says: Homosexuals are evil.

So, what happens when a Talibanny confronts a woman with an unplanned pregnancy who has been successfully brainwashed?

SHE calls it 'the adoption conundrum'. Sure is.

Very occasionally, women who are in crisis pregnancy, will discuss and consider adoption. In my experience it is sometimes more common for younger women, especially ‘under age’ teenage girls to think about adoption. In a previous job, when I was helping pregnant girls aged 13 – 17, they would often enquire about adoption, but just as quickly say that they didn’t want their baby to go to homosexual couples. Here in London, when a pregnant lady broaches the possibility of adoption, she is more hesitant, but nonetheless will have the gut reaction that she does not want her baby to go to a homosexual couple. But outside of our centre, who is listening to these women?

This blogger (warning: religious glurge at link) doesn't say whether these women would rather abort than be a party to an evil gay adoption. But it's possible, no?

Rather, she -- I assume it's a she -- whinges about the rights of birth mothers to be bigoted.

In the debate on who should be entitled to adopt children – gay/lesbian couples or a heterosexual family – why aren’t the voices of women who do not want their children to go to homosexual ‘unions’ ever heard? This includes a woman in crisis pregnancy or a woman who for whatever reasons has her child taken from her by government bodies. Might this be a plausible reason why the biological mothers are kept gagged – because if it were more widely known that they did not want their children going to homosexual ‘unions’ that the pro-homosexual adoption lobby would lose their trump card? After all, the lobby groups that support gay adoption talk about it being a ‘right’ to adopt a child, but what right is left to the biological mother? Does she not have the right firstly to freedom of speech where she can say that she does not want her child to go to a homosexual couple? And secondly, does she not have the right to decide that her child who is her flesh and blood ought not to go to a homosexual couple? This talk and bluster about so-called ‘rights’ is very selective –so much so that the rights of ‘the mother of origin’ aka the biological mother are often forgotten altogether.

(Love all those scare quotes.)

Right. And how about birth mothers who don't want their children to go to couples of different ethnic origins? Different religions?

Don't they have rights too, dammit?

I have a (white) cousin who was dating a black guy. Her asshole fundy father actually threatened to kill her if she didn't stop seeing him. She left the province and didn't look back. (Apparently, daddy dearest was heart-broken. I say 'apparently' because I never had anything to do with the jerk again.)

So, if a fundy father would kill a grown-up daughter out of bigotry, it seems to me that some of that fine twisty-pretzelly logic the fetus fetishists love could be worked up and around to justify the abortion of a fetus otherwise destined for a gay couple. After all, don't they believe that the only moral abortion is their own particular, very special-circumstances-driven abortion?

h/t http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2010/11/adoption-conundrum.html

Pregnant for Charity

An article on Globe's Facts and Arguments page, My teenage daughter's pregnancy, has generated some heat in the 146 comments it has generated.

Bare bones of story: Dad learns that 19-year-old Daughter is pregnant. Dad hasn't spoken with Daughter about it but gets his chance when he's called to pick Daughter up. He figures he's got 10 minutes.

I waited until we were on the highway and travelling too fast for her to safely jump out before broaching the subject. "I know you are pregnant," I said, and she let out a long sigh. "I want you to know that I will support whatever decision you make. I just want to make sure that you know you have a choice."

I thought it was a pretty good opening salvo. It let her know that I'm liberal, open-minded and, above all, pro-keeping all the options open.

"Well I'm not going to keep it," she said, defensively.

"That's good," I said. "I wouldn't want you to have a baby right now. But there are other options."

She gave me a guarded, quizzical look and I knew my window of opportunity was closing. In about seven minutes we'd be hitting the driveway and our conversation would be over. I plowed ahead, telling her about how I had been faced with the same situation at her age, only — being the male in the equation — with a lot less decision-making power. My girlfriend and I had discussed our fragile relationship and material poverty, and decided to put the child up for adoption.

"It would be a huge sacrifice on your part," I said, "but it would be nothing compared to the joy you would bring to the lives of a couple unable to have a child of their own."

So, Daughter has some objections that Dad satisfies. Daughter wonders how she would find parents for the child. Dad tells her of several couples he knows desperate for a child, including a couple that Daughter knows well.

I pulled into the driveway and put the car in park. "Yeah. They're dying to have a child."

"Wow," she said, jumping out of the car. She grabbed her bag out of the back seat and flashed me a grin before disappearing into the house. I followed a few seconds later and found her in the kitchen chatting with my wife, her face now as radiant as I'd seen in a long time. "Okay," she said. "I'll do it. I'll give my baby to our friends."

Presto! In a few moments, Daughter has decided to carry on with pregnancy as a gift. But, alas, there is a 'spontaneous' miscarriage a little while later, so we don't get to find out how this went. Also, that childless couple who was going to get the gift are -- happy-happy -- preggers!

So, what do you think? Not very veiled anti-abortion story? Projection of recent film Juno? Weird-ass father manipulating 'child'? Total BS?

The commentors bring up a lot of good points. Like, where was the boyfriend? Like, adoption isn't always such a piece of cake. Like, WTF is Dad up to 'outing' his daughter's pregnancy?

This one is closest to my take on it:

Keile Keile from Toronto, Canada writes: Your daughter knows how to party!

A kid at 19 AND she's giving it to charity?

Like a birthday present, right?

She's 'giving it a better life'. I'm sure that's what she'll tell it when she realizes, a few years from now, she may not ever get to see her biological offspring.