| Fish Don't Have Fingernails |
My new column on Morgentaler is out. I've had some second thoughts--things I wish I could have said, but was limited by word count. Go on over here and read it and then you can see my comments. Here's a bit of what I said:
Personally, I believe that life begins at conception. But I do understand those who say that despite the fingernails, despite the heartbeat, despite the obvious baby features, a mother should not be forced to carry the baby to term. It is still her body.
While I don’t agree with that position, I respect it. What I don’t understand is this compulsion to celebrate abortion. Even liberal Bill Clinton felt the need to qualify that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”. Though he supported abortion, he knew that there was something fundamentally distasteful about the procedure. In a day when we're used to squinting over "Baby's First Picture" to try to figure out where the head is on that ultrasound printout, the face of abortion has quite literally changed.
Hope you like it! |
| Sheila's Gems Newsletter Out! |
My summer newsletter, Sheila's Gems, was just sent out. Are you on the list to receive it? It's a quarterly email newsletter that helps you keep up with where I'm speaking, what I'm thinking, what I'm reading, and what I'm writing.
If you want to sign up, just head on over here! |
| Abortion & Morgentaler |
My column for this week will be about Morgentaler and abortion.
Now that it's all sent in and there's nothing I can do about it, I hope that I wasn't too harsh on women. My goal was not to make anyone feel guilty; it was only to tell the truth about it.
Anyway, here's an interesting look from Britain about a woman who had seven abortions. It says:
After her third termination, aged 26, she tried to kill herself by overdosing on alcohol and painkillers and spent eight weeks in a psychiatric unit.
And yet the ease with which she was able to secure a fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh abortion with no proper assessment is astounding.
Indeed, she reveals that she went to the same abortion clinic for each of her terminations and claims she was offered only the most cursory of counselling before every one.
'I do wish that someone in those clinics had really sat down with me and talked it through properly,' says Angela, who is now undergoing counselling to help her cope with her past actions.
'The reason why I had so many abortions is that I didn't want to bring a child into the world unless my situation was perfect - but it never was.
'With each termination I felt it was my responsibility to get on with my own life and forget about it. After each one I just blanked out the emotions and never thought about it. I felt no remorse at all.'
She says she felt no remorse, but the article details her suicide attempts and depression. It's really quite sad, although she did keep one baby and he is now the joy of her life.
It seems there's an honest debate in Britain about restricting abortion. I wish we could start one here in Canada, too.
I should have talked more about women's guilt, but I always have that word count demon to battle. I only have 600 words to make an argument in, and that's not a lot once you start to write. Maybe I'll do a follow-up if enough letters to the editor come in... |
| Who Should Raise Kids, Anyway? |
This week's column had to do with some scary decisions by politicians and judges recently regarding parents' rights. All the links to the archived columns are here, so check it out!
I know about the Morgantaler Order of Canada, and that column is coming, don't worry! It's just that I have to get the columns in ahead of time, so sometimes I'm behind the news curve. But it'll be there soon!
Just back from camping, too, where I've written about two months' worth of columns in a week. I don't know when they'll all come out, because news, like Morgentaler, keeps overtaking me. But at least I'll have some in reserve! |
| New Wifey Wednesday Post Up! |
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Stop on by. Every Wednesday I write up some more thoughts on marriage, and ask other bloggers to join in. This week there's a good discussion going on in the comments that you won't want to miss.
I've also got posts up on masculinity, knitting, my summer vacation, and lots more! Stop on by. |
| Inquiring Mothers Want to Know |
My column from last Friday is up! You can check back to see my recently archived columns here.
And I received a lot of "I know exactly what you mean!" emails from this week's. Here's one that was typical:
Oh, my WORD! Do you live in my house? This is so true! I've resorted to putting my 5 year old son back in a booster chair at the dining room table, so he can sit through a meal and not have the half his dinner, and himself, land on the floor.
I'm not the only one who thinks this way...Thanks for making my day - again!
God bless you!
Have a great week!
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| BWOQ |
I had a wonderful time with the Baptist Women of Ontario and Quebec this weekend! I keynoted for their annual conference, and what a great bunch of ladies, dedicated to seeing God's work expand across the world.
I'll let you know soon whether that video is available! If you want to be notified, just drop me a note here and I'll add you to the list. |
| Happy Father's Day! |
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I hope you all have a great day!
And stop by my To Love, Honor and Vacuum blog for lots more posts about making money at home, when kids get sick, what I'm reading this summer, and lots more! |
| Too Much Privacy? |
I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciated your article this week Re: common sense. I am a Registered Nurse [redacted] and was working when the age of consent changed to 14. I disagreed with this immensely. I still felt parents had a right to know about the health status of their 14 year old teen. I have a great respect for teenagers as I have three that I am very proud of as they have been raised to be godly citizens and demonstrate that behaviour. However, 14 year olds are still very young with many questions, a lack of knowledge and experience and still need to be guided in appropriate ways when making decisions.
There are people above the age of 14 who I believe all loved ones, and caring people, involved in their lives, should be given some necessary and important information where it can be helpful to "being a strong support".
When each of us has a little more knowledge to aid in somebody's well being, perhaps there would be many less tragedies in this world.
I respect the right to privacy and confidentiality, however, sometimes it can leave our hands tied when all we would like to do is help.
Sincerely,
One of those people who wish to help |
| And We Pay People for This? |
A new report by epidemiologists at the WHO concludes that AIDS was never a really big threat to the heterosexual community outside of Africa, and it was really overblown.
Gee, no kidding. It would have been nice if they'd figured that out back in 1989, when conservatives were called bigots for arguing that the homosexual community needed to change its practices.
Instead, posters and ad campaigns saying, "This is the face of AIDS", showing everybody BUT gay men, started running, scaring everybody. And we should be scared of STD's, it's just that AIDS was and always will be in North America primarily in the high risk groups: homosexuals, IV drug users, and prostitutes.
But because they focused so much on heterosexuals for political reasons (mostly to drum up research dollars), they minimized the risk to homosexuals, so much so that now behaviour in many homosexual enclaves has become as risky as it was back in the early 80s. It's just ridiculous. If they had focused mostly on gay men to begin with, they potentially could have saved a lot of lives. The simple fact is that the type of activity that gay men are engaged in is a more efficient spreader of the virus than heterosexual activity. But you're not allowed to say that because it would be discriminatory to state the truth!
But the report is worse than that. After making sweeping statements like this:
Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.
They then say this:
Aids organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria, spending it on the wrong measures such as abstinence programmes rather than condoms, and failing to build up health systems.
How does abstinence programs hurt AIDS prevention? For pity's sake, Uganda, the only nation that has embraced abstinence totally, has seen its AIDS rates plummet. But it's not politically correct to advance abstinence, so they're not.
So this article now admits that they were wrong to focus on heterosexuals, a choice made primarily out of political correctness back in the 1990s. But they continue to make a politically correct choice today, even though the data contradicts it. This drives me batty!
In Kenya, health workers try to teach abstinence and monogamy (still a big problem because many men are polygamous). That's the key to minimizing the disease, in the same way that it has been minimized here. I wish people would see that!
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| Lots to Read! |
I've got tons up at my To Love, Honor and Vacuum blog, about everything from my thoughts on welfare reform and growing older to a sneak peek inside my very messy linen closet.
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| Why Western Society is Worth Holding On To |
I'm going to switch gears here for a minute and get a little political.
I'm Canadian, and up here in the far north freedom of speech is under attack. Columnist Mark Steyn, who is Canadian though he lives in the U.S. and writes in the U.S., is being sued along with MacLean's magazine, our national weekly, over an excerpt from his book America Alone.
Only sued is the wrong word, because it implies a court of law. The complainants would never win in an actual court. So they took Maclean's before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (that hearing hasn't commenced yet; The B.C. one started on Monday) instead. There, all they need to prove is that Steyn's excerpt may have promoted hatred and contempt for Muslims.
For pity's sake, it's like you're not allowed to tell the truth anymore. Truth is absolutely no defense. If you want to read about the farce, you can go to Small Dead Animals or Ezra Levant and just keep scrolling down. It's unbelievable.
But here's what I think. In Islam, it is okay to beat your wife. It is okay to have four wives (though Muhammad got special dispensation to have more). It is okay to marry children (Muhammad's favourite wife was 6 when he married her; 9 when he consummated the relationship.). There is no equivalent of the 10 commandments, either. In Judaism and Christianity, lying is wrong. Period. Murder is wrong. Period. In Islam, it's dependent on context. You must not lie to a Muslim, but to lie to an unbeliever in order to promote Islam is okay.
Similarly, rape is contextual. You can't rape a Muslim woman, but a non-Muslim woman is up for grabs. Hence the Australian imam called women "meat" last year.
You can read more of this post over at my blog, To Love, Honor and Vacuum... |
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I've got a new Wifey Wednesday Post up at my 