Fetus Freaks: They're Slow But They're Stupid

Good gord. Regular readers of DJ! know how highly we esteem the intelligence and moral compass of the fetus freaks, but this should be embarrassing even for them.

Let's hop into the Way Back Machine. On November 8 last year, we reported that the Trillium Foundation, the granting agency for Ontario's gaming proceeds, rescinded the second year of a two-year $84K grant to a fake clinic.

There was some squealing from the predictable sources, who amusingly decided collectively that this blog was to be unnamed as the culprit.

On November 25, SUZY ALLCAPS linked to Our Number One Fan (Bertha Wilson Motion, now sadly defunct, aww) who had uncovered the shocking fact that the CEO of the Trillium Foundation, Andrea Cohen Barrack, also serves as volunteer Chair of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Western Hemisphere Region.

Here's SUZY's plain-text URL: http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2014/11/todays-link-dump-abortion-catholic.html#idc-container

And my reaction, dated November 26.

That's about as far as that went, until last week when Patricia Maloney, who is "Canada's pro-life investigator" according to Focus on the Family's Astroturf blog, finally twigged to Ms Cohen Barrack's dedication to public service. (More on Canada's pro-life investigator in a future post.)

As is the custom in the antichoice echo chamber, LifeShite picked up the SCOOP on April 23.

The Ontario Trillium Foundation has denied that CEO Andrea Cohen Barrack is in a conflict of interest after alert bloggers noted that while she is a member of International Planned Parenthood Federation’s governing council, her foundation recently cut funding to a pro-life pregnancy center and approved a grant for Planned Parenthood Toronto.

The fetus freaks are trying hard -- if ridiculously late -- to spin some shit out of this, even contacting Ontario's Conflict of Interest Commissioner, whose lawyer Heather Popliger said:

Popliger told LifeSiteNews in an email the following day that “our understanding is that the President & CEO of the Ontario Trillium Foundation plays no role regarding grant decisions. There is a process for evaluating which entities receive grants, and the Board of Directors of the Ontario Trillium Foundation makes all decisions regarding grants.  The President & CEO has no involvement.”

When questioned about Cohen Barrack’s involvement with IPPF creating the appearance of preferential treatment, Popliger only reiterated that, “the President & CEO has no involvement in the grant process at the Ontario Trillium Foundation.  Accordingly, she is not in a position to, nor is she in fact, providing one entity with preferential treatment.”

Ominously, LifeShite ends with:

The Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport did not respond to enquiries from LifeSiteNews by deadline.

Oooh, I bet the Ministry is peeing its pants.

When you've got your Outrage-O-Meter cranked to MASSIVE allatime, I guess it's hard to remember that you've already hit a particularly dipshit note previously.

"Without Going into Details" *snerk*

We had been wondering why Fetus Freak Media and its running blog lackeys hadn't done its usual shrieky foot-stompy hissy fit routine over the partial rescinding of an Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) grant to a fake pregnancy centre.

The fake clinic itself responded on its blog in a rather tight-lipped manner citing "philosophical differences" with OTF while accusing an unnamed blogger (ahem).

One particular blog has been making false allegations regarding our Centre and is taking credit for the rescinding of the OTF grant.  This same group has been making allegations against other Pregnancy Centre’s [sic] in Canada.

And that seemed to be it for reaction from the zygote zealots.

Well, silly us, we were googling terms like "Lambton Crisis Pregnancy Centre" (the defunded Sarnia racket), "Ontario Trillium Foundation," "crisis pregnancy centres" and, we admit, "Dammit Janet!" and even "fern hill."

Crickets.

It appears that Fetus Freak Central has decreed that we are to remain "anonymous evil blogger" and the clinic itself is not to be named either. "Crisis Pregnancy Centres" seems now to have fully morphed into pregnancy options centres.

Quite by accident, we ran across this yesterday by our old pal Mike Schouten, aka Creepy Dominionist Guy. It's a reprise of a blog post at his site, We Need a Law [Like a Hole in the Head].

Here it is in its full goddy glory (my bold).

Christians who strive to live by the Scriptures will know that the two greatest commandments are to love the Lord with heart, soul and mind, and to love their neighbours as themselves (Mark 12:30-31). 

Follows of Jesus desire to live selfless lives and this is characterized by putting others [sic] needs ahead of their own. I bring this up in connection with the work of faith-based pregnancy care centres. These centres are for the most part staffed by volunteers who give up much to come to the aid of those in need. 

The volunteers provide compassionate help to women experiencing unplanned pregnancies, post abortion grief, domestic violence, and sexual assault. They are on the frontlines of assisting some of the most vulnerable people in society and regularly help women make informed choices that set them on the path to a better life. The care they offer extends well beyond the moment of birth or abortion. In very practical ways they come alongside people in need and so enable them to continue living productive and joy-filled lives as they transition into motherhood. And right now, pregnancy options centres need our support. 

As we documented* just over a year ago, pregnancy options centres are increasingly under attack by abortion advocates. Yes, there are Canadians who are so excited about the fact that a woman ought to be able to kill her own child that they simply cannot fathom the thought that some women choose life for their pre-born child. 

Without going into details we want you to know that these attacks have intensified in recent weeks. We ask that you do what you can to support a pregnancy options centre near you. This can be done through donations (see here for a list of centres across Canada). You can also help them by offering words of encouragement and prayer for those on the front lines. They are daily engaged in the culture seeking to show love to those in need. 

We can do better and we can certainly show those who oppose helping pregnant women that they have a skewed sense of social justice. Let us not be characterized as a country that let's [sic] its citizens flounder in depths of despair.

(*That "documentation" goes to a previous protracted hissy fit over Joyce Arthur's exposure of fake clinics in BC, published in 2009 for hevvinsake. [And what is it with these people and apostrophes?])

Onto their game, we looked some more and found amateur statistician Patricia Maloney's foot-stomper and its follow-up. And while she refers to me as a "fake person," she has at least the good bloggy manners to link to my offensive "potty mouthed" blogposts.

Things have since escalated. I tweeted at Creepy Dominionist Guy on twitter and got this.

Hey, genius, @mike_schouten did you actually read my blogposts? No bullying involved. I asked @ONTrillium questions. They reassessed. OOPS.

— Fern Hill (@fernhilldammit) November 24, 2014

They're playing the martyr card again and I'm now a bully. In addition to being fake and potty-mouthed.

Note though they have NOTHING narsty to say about the organization that actually yanked the funding when asked (nicely) to justify the grant. The nice rich foundation that might yet be bullied convinced of the error of its ways.

Nope. They're attacking a wee blogger.

In other words, without going into details, they got nuthin'.

We, on the other hand, have MASSIVE giggles.

UPDATE: DJ! hits the (fetus fetishizing) Big Time! LifeShite weighs in.

MORE UPDATE: Over here our personal stalker one-man fan-club seems, like most of his tribe, unable to distinguish between politics and rights.

Beware the Mouthy Minority

This poll released today has USian fetus fetishists stoked.

While a majority -- 55% -- still think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, that number is shrinking, down from 60% in 1995.

But what has the zygote zealots really revved is the answer to the time-limit question. As more and more states ban abortion past 20 weeks, the poll asks whether people support such a limit as opposed to the current 24 weeks.

A majority -- 56% -- prefer the lower limit.

OK. That is the Excited States where they are simply insane on the subject.

In Canada 94% of us think abortion should be legal in all or some cases according to a poll the National Post* and we reported on in July last year.

Some 60% of us also support the introduction of a law that places limits on when a woman can have an abortion, with an example: 'such as during the last trimester'.

Our fetus fetishists ignored the tiny minority who want to recriminalize abortion and instead cottoned onto that 60% as proof that a majority of Canadians are 'pro-life'. (Hint to FFs: I'd betcha that 99.99% of us are prolife, just not as you twist define it.)

What a majority of us are NOT is anti-choice. In fact, 49% believe that 'abortion should be permitted whenever a woman decides she wants one', in other words, 'on demand'.

By contrast,the new USian poll shows that only 20% of Merkins think that abortion should be legal 'in all cases'. Also, their nutbar fringe, as represented by the 'illegal in all cases' segment, is much bigger than ours at 15%. Oddly, though, a majority (54%) oppose making it more difficult for abortion clinics to function.

The state of abortion insanity in the US matters to us in Canada for two reasons: when their FFs get stoked, so do ours, and because we've still got a lot of work to do on access.

The NatPo* reported today on a new study on rural access in BC.

Bottom line: women in rural BC have way less access.

The author, Dr. Wendy Norman, said:

“What concerns us is that all surgical abortions in rural B.C. communities are performed in a hospital operating room setting, often under general anesthesia,” says Norman, one of the lead scientists on the Canadian Contraception Access Research Team (@cartgrac). “And half of the abortion providers reported difficulty booking time for abortion procedures due to conflict in operating room scheduling, or nurses or anesthesiologists who refuse to work with abortion cases.”

Bottom line there: Stigma and opposition.

But a hopeful note:

“One encouraging trend we noticed is that almost half of the rural cases are done medically, which is safe and affords women more privacy. This is much higher ratio than previously thought,” says Norman. “But we need to better educate women about this option as it is only available to women within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.”

As we've argued here repeatedly, medical abortion is the way of the future -- private, quick, and cheaper.

And now let's hear from the other coast, where there are significant barriers to women in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Again, there's access in St John's, but not so much elsewhere and the province does not cover all travel expenses.

Robin Whitaker argues that the procedure can and should be carried out in local clinics and doctor's office and medical abortion should be more widely available. But she points out that the preferable drug, RU486, is not approved in Canada.

In this province, RU486 could make early pregnancy termination locally accessible to many more women while saving public money. In addition to family doctors, there is no medical reason that these drugs could not be administered by nurse practitioners, midwives and even via telemedicine, provided that backup medical care was available. (It would also be vital to ensure that government did not download costs onto women by requiring them to pay for the drugs themselves.)

Our fetus fetishists will take anything a pandering CONservative government might offer: defunding, regulations based on spurious claims like sex-selective abortion, continued foot-dragging on the approval process for RU486.

In Ontario, panty-sniffer and amateur statistician, Patricia Maloney, is asking the courts to intervene in her quest for abortion statistics.

Make no mistake. Our fetus fetishists may be small in number, but they're LOUD and relentless. Right now they're sniffing some heady anti-choice emanations from the south.

And by SHRIEEEEKING and fomenting stigma, they have an undemocratically large influence on our private medical business.

Just look at what they're doing in the US with only 15% support.

Canadian women demand expanded, not restricted reproductive options.


*Fuck the National Post. They've just instituted a hit-and-miss paywall. Some stories I can read but can't get back to. Others have an immediate paywall. I'm not linking to them anymore and I apologize to readers of older posts that have links to them.

Amateur Statistics and Pro Grandstanding

Fetus fetishist and amateur statistician Patricia Maloney has been fooling around with StatsCan's CANSIM tables since at least last October when she found, well, something.

She wasn't sure what exactly but it sounded exciting.

CANSIM tables are kind of fun if a bit intimidating to the uninitiated or hard-of-thinking. Here's the one she was playing with.

You can add and remove data and then add, subtract, and come to odd conclusions.

Like 491 aborted fetuses were born 'alive'.

(Doncha love the smell of paradoxes in the morning?)

After a couple of months of harassing public officials who I'm sure had better things to do than patiently explain things to obsessed concerned citizens, she came up with the solitary 'evidence' cited by MPs Vellacott, Benoit, and Lizon in their clarion call to the RCMP to investigate some abortions as homicides.

Where to begin?

The lunacy of taking this woman's hobby seriously?

The idiocy of asking the RCMP to 'investigate' aggregated national statistics from over a nine-year period?

The allegation that medical professionals are committing homicides?

Let's start with the last one because that is how
LifeShite is already spinning this nonsense.

The story quotes Big Nurse and Fried Fetus Aficionado Stanek on her oft-repeated and never proven allegations of lots of failed abortions resulting in live fetuses (in the US, I point out). Then this:

In another grisly case, abortionist Kermit Gosnell was arrested in 2011 after allegedly slitting the spinal chords of hundreds of newborn babies who were born alive in the process of an attempted abortion.

(That case is also from the US. Gosnell was charged with eight counts of murder: one a woman who died after/during an abortion and seven infants supposedly born alive. His trial is scheduled for March.)

SHRIEK! We have dozens of Gosnells infesting hospital operating rooms, slitting itty-bitty spinal cords in Canada !!!!1!

Miranda Nelson at the Straight nails this as 'non-scientific pearl-clutching'.

(For those interested, here's some info [via deBeauxOs] on the viability of extremely pre-term babies.)

In short, the facts are laughable and the allegation is absurd.

It is just another -- if outrageous -- move in the Conservatives' relentless drive to turn back the clock.

I don't know very much about two of the MPs in this but both Lizon and Benoit have Double-Plus-Good anti-choice ratings. Amusingly, Benoit now seems to be backing off, as noted by our sharp-eyed pal Sixth Estate.

On the other hand, Fetus Lobby® poster-boy and forthright misogynist, Maurice Vellacott is a perennial fave around DJ! We even named our Gynophobe Award for him.

Here is DJ!'s collection of Vellacott's Greatest Grandstands: his promotion of BAD (biased, agenda-driven) science, his foot-stomping hissy fits, his endless attempts to institute a personhood law. Etc.

I'll just highlight two of his most recent ploys.

He awarded Queen's Jubilee doodads to not one, but two convicted serial clinic harassers, one of whom was actually in jail at the time.

And lest we forget what an opportunistic lying liar Vellacott is, on International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, he attempted to wrest the spotlight onto himself by claiming that abortion was the most heinous form of fetus-bullying.

My advice to the RCMP? Consider the source. And also consider that Vellacott may well have you investigating fetus-bullying next.

ADDED: There's a small matter of jurisdiction as well.

@kady @mskapay Plus health care and criminal prosecutions are provincial responsibilities - not RCMP jurisdiction

— Stephen Lautens (@stephenlautens) February 1, 2013

ADDED: Globe editorial.

And the letter itself is troubling because it betrays a misunderstanding of the law, and of the dangers of politicians turning to the Mounties to investigate cases based on a personal political agenda.

Can you say 'police state'?