Will Zygote Zealots Rule at the Con Con?

Back in July, Le Devoir disclosed that members of the Québec CPC were unanimously opposed to a resolution that was presented in the slate of policy resolutions for discussion and ratification at the November convention.

Some party members from the West have inserted a proposition to integrate Bill C-484 into the Conservative platform. C-484 is a law that would recognise the fetus in a case where a pregnant mother is murdered. In such a case, the murderer would be charged with two murders instead of one. This is, in fact and despite what the bill itself says, a backdoor way to outlaw abortion because it
recognises the fetus as a legal person. It isn’t a far step to go from that to claiming the termination of the fetus in an abortion to be murder as well. And this isn’t just an over-reaction, similar laws in the United States have led to the outlawing of abortion in certain jurisdictions.

From here.

In the interval between then and now, Stevie and his Harpocrites threw Ken Epp and his Bill C-484 under the bus in a miscalculated bid to placate Québec voters and remove any obstacle to their desired majority rule. Now it has been revealed that a modified version of C-484 is among the hundreds of resolutions up for approval next week at the Con Con.

Is anyone actually surprised? I hope that there are fireworks and MASSIVE confrontations between the fundamentalist religious Cons and the pro-choice Cons.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

Onward Christian Soldiers to the RepubliCon Convention

Among the pages and pages of policy resolutions that the Con rank-and-file members will be considering for approval at their convention in Winnipeg next week there’s this:

PROTECTING CANADA’S HEALTH AND SAFETY Policy Floor Resolutions - Conservative Convention 2008 RESOLUTION P-118 … Foreign Affairs Principles i) The Conservative Party supports a foreign policy that protects Canada’s sovereignty and independence, promotes our national interests (political, economic and strategic), contributes to collective security and defence, promotes democratic principles and human rights, and assists in international development. ii) A Conservative Government will recognize the importance of an ethical dimension in foreign policy and will advance the values broadly supported by Canadians. iii) A Conservative Government will coordinate Canada’s international relations, trade and foreign aid policies to advance the country’s economic interests while promoting human rights and individual freedom. iv) A Conservative Government will integrate our foreign policy with policies on trade and national defence. Foreign Policy Social Values Proposed by Ottawa-Vanier: iii) A Conservative Government will coordinate Canada’s international relations, trade and foreign aid policies to advance the country’s economic interests and social values, while promoting human rights and individual freedom.

Those who can hear the dog whistle know that from so-cons, the expression “social values” is RepubliCon-speak for no-choice, anti-contraception and anti-abortion. It is no accident that this resolution came from the Ottawa-Vanier riding Cons where a number of fundamentalist organizations and associations have established residency, including the National House of Prayer.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

Not your run-of-the-mill liar: Behold Jill Stanek

Enough. Someone should check her medication.

"Barack Obama was elected president despite the fact he supports abortion into the fourth trimester.
Either the 63 million people voting for him didn’t know about his radical record, which includes abandoning abortion survivors to die, didn’t care, or didn’t believe it."

This is beyond willful and malicious fabrication. This is hallucination.

First posted at Birth Pangs.

US evangelicals and teen sex

Many people may have wondered why conservatives were so unruffled when Sarah Palin announced the pregnancy of her teenager daughter, Bristol, in September. This summary of a New Yorker article provides some clues.

In replying to a question about why it appeared that conservatives, Republicans and right-wing groups seemed relatively unperturbed when Sarah Palin announced the unintended pregnancy of her teenage daughter Bristol, hours after her appointment as the VP candidate in the US elections,

…Marlys Popma, head of evangelical outreach for John McCain’s presidential campaign, suggested in responding to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy [...] “There hasn’t been one evangelical family that hasn’t gone through some sort of situation.”

Other facts emerge:

…Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, [...] has surveyed 3,400 teens ages 13 to 17 and analyzed the government’s Add Health study of adolescent health.

Regnerus uses evangelicalism as a proxy for conservativism — an imperfect method, to be sure — and finds that 74 percent of evangelical teens say they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage.
That compares to half of mainline Protestant teens and a quarter of Jewish teens.

At the same time, according to government data, “evangelical teenagers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestant and Jews,” and they make their “sexual debuts” earlier, just after turning sixteen, Talbot writes. Only black Protestants start having sex earlier, she notes….

It’s easy to guess the next piece of the puzzle. Evangelical teens also decline to use contraception more often, meaning that pregnancy becomes an immediate concern when they start having sex.

Read the original article at The New Yorker by Margaret Talbot.

Why yes, I will have a splash of wine with dinner ….

or a micro-brewed beer from the local ale crafters, said the pregnant woman.

All of you busybodies out there, you can choke back your ill-advised counsel to her. According to this recent study, the occasional glass of wine or pint of beer will not damage her fetus.

The University College London team asked mothers about how much alcohol they had drunk during pregnancy when their babies were nine months old. Light drinking was classed as ranging from one drink every so often to two drinks per week, while moderate drinking was between three and six units per week or three to five per one occasion. Heavy drinking was regarded as seven or more units per week or at least six per occasion. …

The researchers then went back when the children were three to ask about their behaviour and understanding. The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found boys born to light drinkers were 40% less likely to have conduct problems and 30% less likely to be hyperactive than those whose mothers had abstained. They also scored more highly on vocabulary tests and on identifying colours, shapes, letters and numbers. Girls born to light drinkers were 30% less likely to have emotional problems than those born to abstainers, although the researchers say this could be due to family and social backgrounds. ....

Dr Yvonne Kelly, the epidemiologist who led the study, said: “Our research has found that light drinking by pregnant mothers does not increase the risk of behavioural problems and cognitive defects. “The reasons behind these findings might in part be because light drinkers tend to be more socially advantaged than abstainers, rather than being due to the physical benefits of low level alcohol consumption seen, for example, in heart disease.” …

Dr Kelly added: “Our study’s findings do raise questions as to whether the current push for policy to recommend complete abstinence during pregnancy is merited and suggest that further research needs to be done.”

Most of us who were pregnant and had babies before this current hysteria around alcohol consumption during gestation always knew that.

Originally published at Birth Pangs.

Pelvic Theology: The Bleat Goes On and On and On …

Yet another high-falutin’ Catholic cleric has his ecclesiastical pantaloons in a knot.

Fordham University Law School’s plan to give an award to the Supreme Court justice Stephen G. Breyer on Wednesday night has drawn criticism from Cardinal Edward M. Egan … Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision overturning Nebraska’s ban on late-term, or so-called partial-birth, abortion. One of the reasons he cited was that the law was unconstitutional because it made no exception for situations in which the mother’s health was at risk.

He is not the first supporter of abortion rights to receive the Fordham ethics prize, established in 1976 to recognize “individuals whose work exemplifies outstanding standards of professional
conduct, promotes the advancement of justice and brings credit to the profession” of the law. But other members of the court who joined in opinions upholding abortion rights — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who received the prize in 2001, and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was given the award in 1992 — did not draw criticism from Catholic activists and the hierarchy.

Ah, but Bader Ginsberg and Day O’Connor were not awarded this recognition during a presidential election campaign where the issue of abortion has become confrontational and is being framed in terms that escape the control of the fetus fetishists.

In recent months, the Cardinal Newman Society, which brought wide attention to this year’s award, has become increasingly outspoken in its criticism of Catholic university officials perceived as less than faithful to church doctrine.

On Oct. 9, Mr. Reilly labeled it “a serious scandal” when Pamela Trotman Reid, the president of St. Joseph College in West Hartford, Conn., was quoted in The Hartford Courant as saying she was “concerned about the right of women to make choices about their own health” if John McCain became president. … In an interview, Mr. Reilly said that the society’s criticisms were not intended to favor one party or candidate over another, or to discourage the exercise of free speech on Catholic campuses.

Or to ensure that the Catholic Church maintains control over women’s reproductive health? As was affirmed at Birth Pangs, these robe-wearing misogynists meddle in political and legal issues because of the implicit authority they claim: Pelvic Theology.

First posted at Birth Pangs

A laborious work of non-fiction.

Reality is often more bizarre than fiction. If four years ago, a satirist had written a novel about the travails of a US right-wing political party and a turbulent election campaign that featured a political ‘marriage of convenience’ between an ersatz war hero and a ditzy moose-hunting governor, critics might have found it over the top.

Thus literary embellishment is applied to the gritty re-telling of 24 real-life stories of childbirth.

Zsuzsi Gartner reviews Great Expectations:

The cover belies the bloody, Gothic comedy of childbirth. An infant sleeps serenely, small spidery fingers curved to cheeks, efficiently wrapped in a cone of white blanket like a little amuse gueule - or a Communion wafer - ready to be plucked up and savoured. But inside Great Expectations there is blood aplenty (and copious other fluids, including tears), thundering pain, death and near-death experiences. The final month of pregnancy is Waiting for Godot, then suddenly the curtain rises on Act IV, Scene III of Macbeth. Editors Dede Crane and Lisa Moore have assembled a hot pot of two dozen Canadian fiction writers and journalists, women and men, to reflect on the childbirth experience from the trenches.

Trench?!? Ha! That’s a new one, I’ve never heard the

va-jay-jay called that.

Teen pregnancy: no longer shameful, still a concern.

It may be that the intense media visibility awarded to Bristol Palin’s unintended pregnancy will bring about a shift in public attitudes towards teen’s sex education.

Sarah Palin’s extreme and fundamentalist views on sex education, rape, and recently, on bombing abortion clinics have given these issues prominence in the US presidential election campaign. A successful fund raising initiative for Planned Parenthood in the US was launched by email. Thousands of thank you cards were sent to the Republican VP candidate in acknowledgement of her pivotal role in provoking US citizens to donate to Planned Parenthood.

Shortly after Palin’s nomination, e-mails began circulating suggesting that pro-choice women make donations to Planned Parenthood in her honor. As of this week, Planned Parenthood has received more than 40,000 donations in Palin’s name, totaling more than $1 million.

And tabloids reported that Jamie Lynn Spears may have unintentionally become pregnant again. Regardless of whether the rumour is founded or not, the public reaction seems to indicate that nobody believes in that quaint saying ‘Ignorance is bliss’ any longer. Even the young yet wise-cracking Juno took responsibility for her mistake and took charge of her choice.

A sensible, well-informed young woman observed the media frenzy around the Palin and Spears unintended pregnancies and wrote a well-researched article about concerns regarding adolescent sexuality.

Every year in the U.S, over one million teenagers become pregnant. Most recently, pregnant teens have flooded Planned Parenthood health centers. Last year, Planned Parenthood centers provided sex education to 1.2 million teens and adults. This year will yield roughly 750,000 pregnant teenage girls, which is a number 12 times more than that of people diagnosed with AIDS in 2008, as well as the total number of persons expected to die from some form of cancer this year.

In regards to percentages, this averages out to about 11 percent of all U.S. children being birthed by teens this year. By the time a teen has reached the age of 19, seven in ten teens have experienced at least one sexual encounter. … It is important that sex education be definitely enforced within schools and should not only approach the idea of sex and teens from an abstinence-only standpoint. According to an analysis of more than 115 studies researched by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (NC), teen sex education programs proved ineffective when including only abstinence-only material, by which teens were neither encouraged nor influenced to abstain or delay sex until a more age-appropriate time.

According to Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, effective sex education is based on “medically accurate information” that is both abstinence-based and also teaches contraception and proper sex initiation, which has proven to be more effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Richards argues that for the past eight years, roughly $1.5 billion or more of taxpayers’ money has been “wasted” on ineffective abstinence-only programs. Richards also demands that education and initiation of sex education must change with the next administration because the current policies have proven unsuccessful. “When it comes to sexuality education, there should be no debate. The only way our children can be prepared is to be informed; this isn’t about ideology, it’s about the health and safety of our kids.”

First posted at Birth Pangs

PREVENTION as well as Devotion

We recently learned that Levi Johnston, who got Bristol Palin in a family way, attended the Republic National Convention with a new tattoo to flash. As proof of his devotion it is said that he had the name Bristol permanently inked on his left ring finger.

Unfortunately, the reality of Bristol’s pregnancy demonstrates that Abstinence-only sex education often fails. Perhaps Levi should also get the word condom tattooed on his johnson.

As a reminder of his devotion, of course.

First posted at Birth Pangs.