Pro-life blog buzz 10-26-12
by Kelli
We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.
- Reflections of a Paralytic comments on “the petty concerns of American feminists” compared to the concerns of women in other countries:
It’s bad enough that women to want to deny their femininity in the first place by suppressing their fertility and killing their unborn children, but to insist that the public must pay for these things otherwise it’s some kind of violation of our “rights” is, quite frankly, embarrassing to me as a fellow American woman and insulting to women who really are victims of oppressive and inhumane regimes.If American feminists want to make a big deal about anything “oppressive” in our country, they should really be focusing their attention to our pornified culture and its sexualization of young girls.
- John Smeaton discusses the Children’s Referendum being proposed in Ireland, which has similar objectives to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child being promoted in the U.S. Congress. Both proposals, while seemingly beneficial on the surface, would undermine parental authority on issues like abortion and religion.
- Real Choice points out some stark differences in information on “prenatal care” on Planned Parenthood’s website vs. WomensHealth.gov:
On the [WomensHealth.gov] web site, none of the main points about prenatal care is aimed at finding anything wrong with the baby. On the Planned Parenthood site, five of 11 are geared toward finding something wrong with the baby. - Right to Life of Michigan shares the story of a mother who converted from pro-choice to pro-life after she gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome.
- Stand for Life presents both sides of the debate on whether pro-lifers should vote for Republican Mitt Romney for President.
- Wesley J. Smith explains why he believes “consumerist” egg freezing and IVF should not be covered by insurance.
- At ProLife NZ, a human rights lawyer gives evidence that eugenics, while never really having disappeared, is being publicly promoted in the UK and NZ – “not by latter-day Hitlers but by sober professors”:
On the eve of the Paralympics, BBC Newsnight ran a segment called “Eugenics, Helping or Eradicating Disability?” The show began with the question “is it a noble aim to rid the world of mental and physical disability”? As if for the sake of completeness, the piece then described how “the most heinous crimes of the 20th century, the holocaust, the mass murder of the disabled, the enforced sterilisation of anyone considered inferior, all took place in the name of eugenics”.It continued: “Many of the Paralympians we’ll be celebrating in London have the same disabilities as those whose rights have been violated. But does this mean we should write off eugenics in its totality?… Should the prospect of designer babies be ignored just because of its associations with Nazism?”
[Image via barnardos.ie; photo via ProLife NZ]
Oct.26, 2012 3:30 pm |
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Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
That women make 77 cents on the man’s dollar statistic is a LIE!!!!! It compares what the average woman in the labor market now makes with what the average man in the labor market now makes. It makes no allowance for the fact that women are more likely to move in and out of the labor market. Nor does it make allowance for the fact that people who work at high-risk jobs such as garbage collector and lumberjack almost always have to be men because of the upper body physical strength demanded. Since workers in such high-risk jobs are more likely than others to get injured or even killed on the job, they have to be highly paid to compensate.
The truth is that women have GREATER FREEDOM than men to take time off from work. They CANNOT perform the physically risky jobs that pay highly.
When comparisons are made of men and women working at the SAME JOBS for the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME, the difference in pay becomes about 2 cents! It is negligible.
Men live 5-7 years LESS than women.
Men are the majority of the homeless.
Men are the majority of those injured and killed on the job.
Men are more likely to commit (as opposed to attempt) suicide.
Men are the vast majority of the imprisoned. They are much more likely to be executed.
In many respects, men as a gender have characteristics indicating oppression.
“is it a noble aim to rid the world of mental and physical disability” Absolutely yes.
“is it a noble aim to rid the world of the mentally and physically disabled” Absolutely no.
Reflections of a Paralytic makes a good point about the *real* ‘war on women’ and *real* human rights violations (hint, not having someone else pay for something you want isn’t a human rights violation), but she goes about it from a very dangerous viewpoint. It’s very dangerous to put forth that you shouldn’t fight over ‘petty’ things because someone, somewhere deals with worse. 1st off, there is always someone, somewhere who deals with worse. But that ‘worst’ doesn’t excuse a ‘less worse’. 2nd rights are one of those ‘give an inch and they’ll take a mile’ things. If you don’t come down hard, fast, and vigorously on each little infraction pretty soon not only will there be much bigger infractions, but you’ll lose the right/ability to do anything about them at all. So, while it’s true that not getting free contraceptives isn’t a human rights violation for women the arguement isn’t ‘you shouldn’t protest that because some women can’t even go to school’ but rather ‘you look a fool protesting for that because you are infantalizing women’. (Or any other of a half dozen political points that ultimately boil down to: you’re being an idiot). Her presented viewpoint can be applied to anything: don’t worry about petty religious freedom violations like being told to hide your cross necklace or not wear a Jesus Saves shirt to school because somewhere else people are being beheaded for proclaiming Christ; don’t worry about petty work safety violations like the loose handrail, somewhere else children are forced to work 16 hour days in jobs that will cripple them by their twenties; don’t complain about being molested, someone else was gang raped; etc. I’d admonish everyone to avoid even the semblence of ‘someone else has it worse so stop complaining, because it is equally applicable (if wrongly so, again that ‘worst’ exists does not excuse, make better, or limit the trauma or damage of ‘less worse’) to *any* situation, even the one you would fight for.
@DeniseNoe
“That women make 77 cents on the man’s dollar statistic is a LIE!!!!!”
And it’s such a stupid lie too, if women really did the same work for less pay men would be literally unemployable, any company that hired men would be out of business very quickly.
DeniseNoe and U-104, well, the wise old request for “equal pay for equal work” is terrifying to today’s ‘feminsts’, they absolutely would be horrified by being forced to do “equal work” for their “equal pay”. They want equal pay for as unequal work as possible.
How is the rights of the child thing bad?
JackBorsch, the problem isn’t the ‘rights’ it’s that such laws and treaties set up, by law, the government as the sole arbitor of what is ‘best’ for the child. That’s the parent’s job, not the governments. Internationally such laws have been used to take children away from families who choose to homeschool, to dictate to parents how frequently or in what form religious attendance/worship/instruction can take place, to legalize underage abortions without parental notification, to create a ‘right’ to sex at any age leading to lower of age of consent or weakening of statutory rape laws, and that’s just the *start*. Similar laws have been tried in some states in the U.S.. in fact a law based very closely on the UN’s Rights of the Child treaty was found in Washington state to be in practice such a violation of parental and family rights it was repealed by the people. If a ‘Rights of the Child’ law/treaty becomes law in a land then a government appointed representative can dictate any and all aspects of your parenting by declaring anything they want you to do is in the “best interest of the child”.
Children’s rights are held in proxy by their natural or legal parents and should not be the realm of the government unless and only if real criminal abuse or neglect can be shown to be taking place. These laws all sound very high standing and ethical. But if you actually trust the government to raise your children better than you than turn them over to the state and apply to be their foster parents, answerable to the state for all your parenting decisions, and don’t forget to send them to public schools from preschool through graduating college, follow all CDC vaccine guidelines (including the Gardasil vaccine), and their dietary guidelines as well.
I recommend heading over to http://www.parentalrights.org to get further information on the abuses of such laws. And check out their “Overruled” documentary for a look of it happening in America.
@ Jespren: As I’ve previously said, the statutory rape laws are widely ignored. If these laws were rigorously enforced, a big dent would be made in the number of pregnancies among minor girls.
Okay, I am looking at that link now. “Reproductive freedom for minors”… ridiculous. I agree with you mostly Jespren. I do wonder about why anyone would disagree that a child can choose their own religion (considering all the evangelism people have done on my kids against my expressed wishes, it seems like Christians would be all for that one lol), I’m also fine with spanking being illegal. But other than that, yeah, I would agree with the points on that page.
The UN better watch out or I will go Texan on them :)
JackBorsch, Christians know well enough our government is anti-religion (except humanism, paganism, and currently Islam is in style too), if the ‘child’ gets to ‘choose’ their religion what that ends up as is the government saying things like you can only take the child to one church service a week, you can’t ‘proselytize’ to your own children, can’t send them to church-based schools, or can’t teach them that your religion is ‘right’. Remember there are leading ‘ethicist’ and secularists that have called raising a child in a Christian household as “abuse” and called religious belief a “mental disorder”. Again, this doesn’t really have anything to do with letting ‘the child’ pick a religion, it has to do with the government’s ‘child’s advocate’ deciding what is in the best interest of the child.
I do wonder about why anyone would disagree that a child can choose their own religion (considering all the evangelism people have done on my kids against my expressed wishes, it seems like Christians would be all for that one lol),
I’m down with that. My daughter is actually Christian.
I’m also fine with spanking being illegal.
I’m not fine with that.
“I’m also fine with spanking being illegal.
I’m not fine with that. ”
Oh yeah, you and I talked about that before. I mean, I’m not like campaigning for it’s illegality but it wouldn’t break my heart. And I’m glad you respect your daughter’s right to choose her religion, though I wouldn’t have expected anything less of you. :P
When I think of the war on women, I think of little girls having their genitals mutilated in the most barbaric way possible, with no anesthetic; pre-pubescent girls being forced to marry men old enough to be their GRANDFATHERS; girls and young women being forced into the sex trade (yes, it happens here in this country), young women being stoned, beheaded, or killed in equally horrible methods in “honor killings,” and so on. The fact that the government does not pay for your birth control is NOT an act of war!
@ phillymiss: Why is so little attention paid to the facts about men’s greater homelessness and lesser average lifespans?
Don’t men in many ways have the characteristics of a group that is discriminated against and oppressed?
phillymiss,
Here’s a heartbreaking report on child marriages in India:
http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/mp4/GTH338_WS&search=child%20marriage&p=1&parent=0&subnav=false
“Why is so little attention paid to the facts about men’s greater homelessness and lesser average lifespans?
Don’t men in many ways have the characteristics of a group that is discriminated against and oppressed? ”
I actually agree with you on this one. Men are also like 75% of murder victims and are most of the victims of aggravated assault. Life sucks for everyone no matter your gender!
That link above (Hans Johnson) is a heartbreaking form of child marriage, where the female child moves into her inlaws house and leaves her own family so young, but it’s also a veryh incomplete showing of ‘child marriage’ in India. Most ‘child’ marriages are really just arranged marriages. The marriage happens, sometimes even with 2 or 3 year olds, then the bride and groom return to their respective families until they are of legal age (18 to early twenties) before they come together as husband and wife. It’s done to get doweries out of the way, combine pricey cerimonies with older siblings or relatives, to insure good marriage lines, etc, but it’s incorrect to look at Indian ‘child marriage’ as a fullfilled marriage between two children. What American’s traditionally fear as ‘child marriages’ are far more likely to be found in portions of the Middle East and Africa, as those places are far more likely to marry a prepubesent bride to a postpubescent groom with the marriage being immediately or shortly consumated. Most child marriages in India (most not all) are between brides and grooms of near ages where the physical aspects of marriage only happens after both parties have reached puberty and/or legal age.
Teen girls in America are often sexually exploited in ways that are close to the horrors of child marriage. The statutory rape laws are so widely ignored that it is a genuine national disgrace. If adult men completely stopped sexually exploiting minor girls there would be a large drop in pregnancies that are likely to end in abortion.