green

Derick introduces a very good point. I am aware that I have previously offended good and sensitive men who are in favour of protecting a woman's right to choose when I stated that this issue is a woman's issue and that men should not have a voice in this debate. Of course what I meant is that it is women who carry the entire weight of pregnancy and childbirth; men, apart from the initial spasm of pleasure, have little to do with the biz. Their engagement, post-orgasmic spasm, is largely optional. It is always the woman who will be physically, psychologically, and economically sidelined by this relatively simple biz of sperm meeting egg. And it is the woman's life which will be altered forever, physically, psychologically, and financially. It is the female who will always carry the burden of reproduction, is it not? This is the reason why I am always edgy when men enter into this reproductive debate. There are many men who hold conservative, perhaps rigid, moral beliefs concerning this issue and often it is these same men who hold positions of power in their state legislatures and who thus can exert a considerable amount of control over women and their bodies. An easy decision for them. They are not going to lose 9 months out of their lives, and they are not going to have to live with the damage, much of which will only display itself after menopause, that pregnancy and childbirth can wreak upon a woman's body. The way Green sees the deal is this: for those women who have a powerful desire to have children the pain and the disruption is no big deal, it is only part of the (heavy?) price of admission. The pay-off is maternity, the pleasure in a new cat, and brute joy. This is a good thing, is it not? Derick makes the only good point that any man can make in my opinion: he points out that there ain't going to be any men who are suffering from unwanted pregnancies. Whenever a woman is happily connected to her desire to have her baby, the secondary issues, issues which are also important predicators as to how well this child will survive, become secondary in her eyes but they are still important indicators to the future well-being of this child. (And what are these secondary issues anyway? Well, that the child will have contact with both a mother and a father and will rest within a stable and loving extended family unit - this is of course only fancy speak for saying that the kid will have a loving and stable set of parents and on-going contact with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, blah, blah. It also seems important that the kid live in a stable household, one where education is prized and drug-dealing, early pregnancy, and mindless violence are viewed as being as being nothing more than interesting manifestations of social pathology. (I would inclined to urge that all problem children be forced to watch Weeds over and over again.)

Very nice to hear your voice on this thread, Hijabigirl.

<p>Yah! Happy Birthday to you, you gorgeous grrl, sez Green. The way I look at it, you got the world on a string. You sure are a cutie, you certainly are a sweetie, and your daughter is a honey! You can't do better than that! And it could be worse, eh. You could be Green's age. Haha. Enjoy your birthday!</p>

I confess that I do get what Robgobblin was on about when he was talking about this biz of bravery. The truth is that before abortion was legalised women were opting to abort even though they were knowingly running a risk of killing themselves by doing so. There were back street abortionists and there were certain docs who, perhaps for money or perhaps because they figured that one life saved was better than two lives lost, risked jail time in order to provide safe abortions. Women who don't want to continue on with their pregnancies will do anything including risk death in order to avoid this. It is better that the choice option remain available for those women. It is equally important that the state permit medical staff the freedom of choice, and permit folks like you the freedom to suggest alternatives to those women who are ambivalent.

Well, in my very long post I did comment that today in most of the Islamic countries "crazed fundamentalists rule." Much of my post had to do with the early history of Islam. Like yourself I do find the crazed, intolerant, and murderous behaviour of the Muslim mobs in the Islamic countries to be absolutely repellent. And I find this business of suicide bombing to be heinous and idiotic. And I find this business of issuing fatwahs over books which have never even been read moronic. I have never been a fan of mass hysteria, violence, and emotion replacing reason. Yes, you are right, modern Islam has acquired a very ugly face. And the voices of the moderates are unheard by us. However, I do believe that the reasons for this are complicated and go beyond the nature of the religion itself. You will note that few adherents of Islam are European and most live in poor, largely underdeveloped countries, countries which were former colonies of European nations. Although the fundamentalist style of Islamic belief, Wahhabism, was born in Saudi Arabia two or three centuries ago its religious leaders have now found fertile ground for making converts in those Islamic countries where the people are poor and feel a sense of grievance and envy towards the rich and white west. This kind of fundamentalist Islam is viewed as marking a total rejection of and, indeed, hatred for all things European/American. This is why, I believe, it is so attractive to so many Muslims at this time. You might be inclined to point out that many of its leaders come from wealthy families and are educated people; this is true but they are idealists. Many Communists and Socialists also come from the most privileged sectors of society. As for the little terrorists and suicide bombers which are hatched inside the Western world, from what I have read (you know Canada foiled our own little knot of juvie home grown terrorists a few years ago, eh) their parents are generally content to be new citizens and are not particularly devout. It is that certain children of immigrants may feel deracinated and in the case of Muslims, if they come in contact with fanatical groups, they will happily hop aboard the belief train. This gives them a sense of belonging and of being connected. It may also give them a sense of power and of joy in their ability to take revenge if they have seen their parents disrespected in their new home. As for your very good question - where are the voices of the moderate Muslims - I have two ideas on this. It may be that these people are afraid to speak up against the bullies what with the bluddy fatwahs and all. It may also be that these people are speaking up inside their own communities, places where neither you nor I can hear them. As for my street cred: I have been doing a bit of reading on Islam and I have travelled in a few Islamic countries. I also have a few good friends who are non-practising Muslims, one of which who is doing a doctorat on Islamic philosophy. I admit to having a difficult time dealing with Islam on an emotional level. I find much of their behaviour utterly gross. I guess the reason that I try to read up on issues and make these posts is because I have a horror of emotion overtaking reason. Long post, eh. :phanvan

Get prescription sunglasses. I have a pair for reading outdoors.

Oooh, this sounds like my kinda Xmas letter! Usually they are so damned upbeat and, well, boastful. I used to dream of writing a fake one in this vein with, you know, tales of dead pets, failed exorcisms, plagues, and the like. :heh:

LOL Wear sunglasses. I do. It makes it much easier to stare at people.

I think that the Brits did well by sending two prominent Muslims over to Sudan in order to defuse that political bomb and rescue that poor innocent and well-meaning teacher.

Peaches, I spoke to Dr. Yau at the TLBC function about my chronic acid reflux, and told him that I have been defilled since the summer and that I am still hoarse; he told me to get in touch with his staff in order to arrange an appt with him. He said that my band may have shifted or something. Up until the point when I spoke directly with him I was merely told that I needed a defill which I have had. I have been sounding like a) a mafioso hitman or Demi Moore for 5 months now. He mentioned that he wanted to institute his own set of tests, yadda, yadda in order to figure it all out. I plan to follow up on this within the next few days. You should also push about your concerns, grrl.

This is an open forum. It strikes me that Wasa has provided general outlines with respect to this biz of hunting for an off-shore lapband surgeon. She has not been pushing specific lapband mechanic/s nor has she been dissing any others apart from indicating that there are one or two individuals whose statistics with respect to erosion, etc give cause for concern. Now, LBT is designed to be a support system for those of us who are planning to be banding or who have been banded. This means that we will have happy banders who wish to talk about their successful experiences with their surgeons. We will also, one would hope, have bandsters who have had bad experiences warn the rest of us to stay away from their docs. An additional problem is that we are going to get the kick-back gang posting on this site. This is regrettable but should be no big surprise. It seems to me that Wasa is not part of this group. She has made a point of posting about this practice and has listed a number of suggestions as to how one might properly research one's choice of surgeon. This seems cool to me.

I believe that Pizzi and Kago both made very good points in their posts. It has been my understanding that some of Somalia's problems do hinge upon tribal membership in warring clans. Each and every member of a clan is expected to view all members of a rival clan as his enemy. There was some concern up here in Toronto that these feuds had been imported and were being continued within our local Somali community. Certainly this long-standing problem with clan wars has complicated international efforts to bring peace to this country. The book you mention, Kagoscuba, sounds very interesting. You might be interested to learn that prior to the establishment of Islam a similar situation, that of constant, and very destructive, clan warfare, existed in Arabia. It was the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad and the establishment of Islam which served to unify these tribes. Islam is a religion which had a social and political dimension as well as a spiritual one at the time of its birth. It unified a collection of warring tribes, and, along with its spiritual requirements, it demanded all believers to show hospitality to travellers and to take care of the weaker members of their people. Traditionally, as the Islamic empires spread, the faithful were tolerant of those who lived under their rule and who held different religious views. These non-believers were referred to as the dhimmi and were required to pay a special tax. There was more religious tolerance and certainly a much greater intellectual life allowed under the Islamic empires than there was in Medieval Christian Europe. Now, sadly, things seem to be much changed. Tolerance and the idea of intellectual examination seem to have been largely smashed in most of the modern Islamic countries and crazed extremist thugs rule. On the other hand, Europe has long since shuffled out of those days where the notion of engaging with ideas and thought were considered to be nothing more than opting to dance with the devil. We have experienced the Enlightenment and since then the events which lead to modernism have snowballed and most of us are in favour of viewing a display of curiosity as a healthy thing. I am an atheist but I will go on record as saying that I have no big problems with Islam as such. It is a very interesting religion and it was a response, as much as anything, to the spiritual, political, moral, and emotional needs in the region at the time. It still must be a pretty good religion for it is still alive and well and picking up new adherents. (It would be interesting to know why, would it not?) I really like what Pizzi has to say for I, too, suspect that the games which were played out in Somalia with that poor well-meaning woman as a pawn were more complicated than we on this side of the Atlantic - bear in mind that our news coverage is gonna be filtered through our own biases - are likely going to hear. There are those blacker folk, Christians it seems, who occupy the southern region. There are those Somalians who are Muslim and who are racially different from their sub-Saharan brothers who occupy the south. (By the way, my opinion is that these individuals are not Arabs but Nubian folk, as are the Ethiopians and the Eritreans. Berbers, a North African group who are much more easily - physically-speaking - confused with Arabs, do not consider themselves to be Arabs, either. I believe that Pizzi is right, that there are both hidden racial and religious issues connected to this story. We have the darker sub-Saharan Christians sharing a territory with the lighter skinned and Muslim Nubians, a group which, moreover, has been accustomed to adhering to clan loyalties. White people, however well meaning, may still carry the stench of colonisation and European arrogance and insensitivity. It might have been a lot of fun for this bunch of politicos to play up to the local rabble and to see what they might be able to extort from the Europeans in order to free this poor well-meaning woman. In brief, I agree with Pizzi, you can't blame this stunt on Islam however attractive this may be; the truth is likely far more complicated and even more offensive.

Some of you good women have mentioned that you are anti-abortion because you yourselves have very much wanted and loved your babies even when they were in utero and thus couldn't conceive of any woman feeling otherwise. You have made very personal and very powerful statements about your own feelings and your own lives and about the lives of some of the women whom you know intimately. This has left me thinking that lucky are the children who have you as their mothers. And that you sound like warm and maternal people. Nevertheless, these are your feelings and in fact your comments would be categorized as anecdotal evidence by any researcher. Those engaging in research of this kind would take your testimony and note down that a certain number of women strongly feel .... concerning this issue. They would of course count the number of women who feel the way you do and then weigh that number against a different set of women, ones who have an entirely different array of reactions towards pregnancy and motherhood. For the truth is that many women cannot deal with pregnancy for many reasons. There are some who cannot deal with this because it falls at the wrong period in her life. Let us say that she is still in highschool and she has drunkenly fooled around on prom night, or that she is in the midst of her academics at university, or that her marriage is already crashing, or that she is a single mum and too poor to take on another kid.... These are only some of the scenarios which do take place. As for L8BloomR's remark that there are other options available out there for the sexually active person, well, yes there are but these are not always failsafe. I was sexually active since I was 19, had absolutely zero desire to ever have a child, and thus took care of business; imagine my horror when I found myself pregnant at the age of 32. I arranged for an abortion ASAP and because I am neither maternal nor imaginative I have never been bothered by a sense of guilt, nor by visitations of unborn baby Greens in my dreams. My story, also anecdotal evidence, would be listed in a different category of experience by those researchers, wouldn't it? This business of fertility is very much a loaded issue. I have seen friends go crazy with grief because they are unable to have children. My brother's second wife is desperate to have a child and would be a fabulous mum. And it is certain that you who have posted above adore your maternal roles. But please acknowledge that there are many women out there who find what you embrace to be burdensome and, yes, terrifying. In the situation of an unwillingly pregnant woman and a foetus, there is the issue of competing rights. We who are pro-choice consider that the rights of the mother trump those of the foetus.

Thanks for posting this, Rob. My brother, a doctor by the way, and his eldest daughter saw Dr. Morgentaler once while they were skiing. My niece who was quite young at the time asked my brother who that funny looking little man was and my brother replied that she was looking at the greatest friend that Canadian women have. Much later when it seemed that certain elements at the University of Western Ontario wanted to block the university's plans to award him an honourary doctorat an on-line petition was set up. That same niece, now a mother herself, forwarded the petition to me, I signed it, and I repeated the little story which I have mentioned above in the comments section. :ranger:

I, too, have read about those statistics which Robgobblin has cited and while I find them awfully attractive I must admit that I consider that much additional work on the demographics of offenders would have to be done in order to make these statistics truly meaningful. It would be interesting to know what percentage of atheists in the general population have a highschool diploma or less as contrasted with the overall population. I suggest this because we are already aware that few offenders, particularly violent offenders, have had any experience with post-secondary education. It would also be useful to know what the percentage of atheist offenders are in those countries which report a comparatively high number of atheists in their populations. If I remember correctly, I believe the Scandinavian countries fall into this group. I believe that 40% of Norway's population lists themselves as atheists. (I really oughta bookmark these sites!) As for this notion that those doctors who do provide abortions do so merely because of the bucks....I find this argument to be specious. It is my understanding that there is no shortage of medical work out there and thus doctors can easily make lotsa bucks without undertaking work of this kind. I am inclined to believe that those doctors who refuse to engage in abortions and those who choose to undertake this work tend to be individuals who, like ourselves who are engaged in this debate, hold wildly differing opinions of whose needs carry the most weight. Though I hesitate to answer for someone else my hunch is that BJean reacted hard at the notion that those doctors who supply abortions are nothing more than a pack of greedy jackals. And there are much easier ways for lazy, incompetant, and greedy docs to scam the system, are there not? Cutting prescriptions for hillbilly heroin is one.

I remember being taken years ago to the nearest hospital to my parents' house after I had sustained an eye injury. This was a Catholic-run hospital and the intake clerk, a young Filipina, was asking me for my data. When it came to my religion I told her that I had none. She kept repeating the question and I kept repeating my answer until finally she said in tones of great shock, "None??? Not even Protestant?" "Nope." I still giggle whenever I remember this.

Thanks for the information, sez Green. It still seems like a waste of time and manpower to me. I am all for profiling when it comes to airport security. It's faster and more efficient. Above all, it is logical!

Now here is a woman who evidently doesn't realise that she is in the Rants & Raves forum of this site.......

I hope all will be fine for you, Loriely. And that you will experience no pain.

To tell ya the truth the downtown Toronto Walmart, the one in my ethnic hood, is pretty good. It is fairly well organised and the cashiers do bag the merchandise. The Greeters, as I have mentioned before, now suit our local environment - they are more in the way of folks who ignore you unless they want to enforce something. Canadians, well Torontonians, prefer this. We don't like people walking up to us getting all in our face with friendliness. On the other hand, our cashiers reflect our ethnic diversity and they are friendly when you display good humour to them. This is very nice. It is fun to share a joke when you are buying 48 cans of Fancy Feast! The only problem which we Canucks have with big box stores, especially those who do not have a unionised staff, is that these stores can push other stores out of business. This is not only a problem for our small stores but also for our own big box stores. You see, in our big box stores the workers are unionised.

I, as all of you very well know by now, believe that no woman who doesn't want a child should be forced to have it. This is why I have spoken about my own case. I was not raped, underaged, or a victim of incest. I was a sexually active woman in my early thirties when I had my abortion. Now, I suspect there are 2 reasons why many of those of us who are pro-choice will often comment that we don't like to see abortion used as a form of birth control: 1) we tend to hope that this makes our pro-choice stand slightly more palatable to the rest of you, and 2) everyone finds the airhead who cannot learn from her mistakes, whether it be an unwanted pregnancy, leaving her house unlocked when she leaves for a two vacation in Aruba, marrying yet another abusive drunk, or leaving dangerous substances within reach of her two year old child to be Very Bluddy Annoying. Smart People rules say that when you have blown it once you make a point of taking care of business the second time around. This is why I personally am not fond of the serial abortion hunter. On the other hand, I figure that Darwin's Law may pertain in these cases. :bounce:

This raises a good question: should disruptive students be allowed to destroy the academic environment at the university level? Universities specifically exist as environments which are designed to foster learning and research. In this respect their mandate differs from that of highschool. Why then should serious students and their instructors be subjected to a destructive environment? It makes no sense to me. I say, suspend or expell the a$$holes! :heh:

At least you will be living in the same country. My friend is living in Montreal and working on his doctorat in Paris. :faint:

I think it's pretty safe to say that this happens to all of us. :phanvan It takes awhile for the head to take in what the eyes are seeing. I am at goal but there are days when I think I have gained it all back again and only by pulling on a pair of size 10 pants and having them fit without getting a muffin top do I know that, yep, I really have lost a bunch of weight. :straight Cheer up, it seems that the head has an even harder time losing weight than the body does....! Weird, eh? :bounce:

It was super fun mugging the canape folks who were carrying the best canapes. A bunch of us would circle one of 'em and not let him go until his platter was picked clean. :heh: Nobody wanted the soggy toast canapes and so that lucky individual was safe from us. Hopefully you can come next year and join in the fun.