Tag Archives: Feminism

News

Irish woman explains why she got an abortion: “I wanted to travel”

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Abortion lady and her partner
Abortion lady and her partner

This is from Life News.

Excerpt:

A young Irish woman has spoken of the trauma she endured by travelling to the UK for an abortion.

Cork woman Tara (24) has told how she and her partner Steve felt they had no choice but to travel eight hours – almost 590 kilometres – to an abortion clinic in west London.

Tara, who does not give her surname, appears in a BBC Three documentary “Abortion: Ireland’s Guilty Secret?” to tell her story and why she’s pro-choice.

Under the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, it is an offence to “intentionally destroy unborn human life” and those found guilty face a maximum jail term of 14 years.

Tara, who had an abortion because she wanted to travel and she wasn’t yet ready, tells reporter Alys Harte that the Government here is “ignoring” her right to choice.

“I’m really angry. I’m angry that they are ignoring women basically at the moment.”

“They shouldn’t have control over my uterus. I deserve that choice and it was taken away from me by my Government.”

“You deserve to be treated as a human and not as a criminal more than anything else,” she said.

The stress of travelling abroad to have an abortion was “not really pleasant”, Tara added.

“This could’ve been so simple. This could’ve been something I could’ve done two weeks ago basically when I found out.”

“It’s not really pleasant for anyone to have to go through the fact that you have to leave home and fly across the water and do something that is such a simple procedure. It definitely adds to the stress of it.”

Tara is one of around 4,000 Irish women who travel to the UK every year for abortions because it is illegal to do so in Ireland.

The country’s abortion laws will be the subject of a special report this year by Amnesty International.

Ireland is one of five countries chosen by Amnesty as “emblematic of global abuses of sexual and reproductive rights”.

The report aims to include testimonies from Irish women who have had abortions and explore issues such as the “prohibitive” high cost of travel, particularly for young women and socio-economically marginalised groups such as asylum seekers, undocumented migrants and Travellers.

The criminalisation of termination of pregnancy which results from rape, incest or sexual violence will also be reviewed as part of the My Body My Rights Campaign.

Tara claims that Ireland is behind its other Western counterparts on the abortion issue.

“The rest of the world can see that this is wrong but we’re in a western society and yet it hasn’t changed yet.”

I think the picture that goes with the story is really telling. Look at the man that she chose… hoop earrings, tattoos, piercings. He is her “partner” – not her husband. He is there for recreation, not to provide for her or lead her on moral/spiritual issues. They are having sex, but it’s doubtful that he has the discipline to provide for a family. Yet she is giving him all of herself anyway, because it’s fun to have recreational sex. Marriage isn’t fun though – marriage is boring. Marriage is work. Marriage is self-sacrifice. She is only 24! It’s too early to think of marriage. Now is the time for having fun, seeking thrills and traveling. It’s time for adventures! Not for prudence and caution. And if a child comes along who wants to stop her fun, then that child just has to die. And he is all for it!

I think this story goes very well with the mean post I wrote earlier expressing my frustration with how we as a society seem to have lost the ability to tell young, unmarried women “NO” when they want to act selfishly and/or unwisely. Look at the man she chose! He is not the kind of man who would tell her NO for anything she is doing wrong. He wants the sex, and he is willing to keep his mouth shut to get it. He’s not looking for a competent partner to support him in some enterprise. They are both more interested in recreational sex than they are in marriage and personal responsibility. I sincerely doubt that this man is financially prepared to be a protector and provider – he chose a woman who just killed his child! And she chose him because she could get his attention and acceptance, but without having to be judged or led by him in any way.

Why would she choose this man? A person who understands morality subjectively will try to surround herself with people who will always tell her that she is doing the right thing – no matter what she is doing. “Follow your heart”. She will also seek to silence anyone from telling her that what she is doing is wrong. She will also vote for laws that will punish people who say in public that what she is doing is wrong. With respect to abortion, that means no clinic protesters, no graphic images from protesters, no mandatory ultrasounds, no public expressions of Christianity. Anything that makes her feel that a majority of people are opposed to her has to be tuned out or silenced by force of government. The most important question that a subjective-morality person asks is “what will people think of me if I do this?” And also “I want to do this, how can I make more people agree with me?”

If we want women to stop making poor decisions with their lives, then we have to speak up and be convincing on issues like abortion, and to teach them to be careful about surrounding themselves with people who are using them, and who will agree with any crazy thing they want to do in order to keep using them.

One last point about this woman. When I look at her picture, I think about her future. I think about whether the man she has chosen is wasting her youth, and whether she understands that men like that do not stick around when a woman gets older. In order to get a man to commit to a woman past the time where she is at her peak of physical attraction, she has to do two things. First, she has to be developing her own skills and accomplishments. Second, she has to choose a man who s trying to achieve something that requires those skills and accomplishments. That’s what causes a man to fall in love and remain devoted to one woman into old age. But this woman is not looking to improve her skills and to get achievements that a good man would find valuable. Instead, she is choosing the easy road. Giving her physical beauty to the wrong man, in order to have fun and thrills today – and there’s no plan for tomorrow.

And as she ages, she will probably find herself without a man who is dedicated to providing for her, and will instead vote for government to take that role in her life. That means higher taxes, more government spending and borrowing, more debt for the next generation, and fewer young men who can afford to marry and have kids. That’s why we need to tell the women of today NO when they want to behave selfishly, and be guided by their emotions.

Polemics

We need to be able to tell women right and wrong

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Disclaimer: in this post, when I refer to women, I mean young, unmarried women influenced by feminism.

I want to give several cases of women behaving badly and then make a general point about whether we are doing the right thing when we decline to criticize women for fear of offending them, and instead point the finger of blame at men, however ridiculous it is to do that.

First case – wife threatens divorce unless husband agrees to abort Down’s syndrome baby:

“When I walked into the room they all turned to me and said ‘Leo has Down syndrome,” he told ABC News. “I had a few moments of shock.”

[…]”They took me in see him and I looked at this guy and I said, he’s beautiful — he’s perfect and I’m absolutely keeping him.”

Soon Forrest walked into his wife’s hospital room with Leo in his arms.

Her reaction was unlike one he ever expected.

“I got the ultimatum right then,” he said. “She told me if I kept him then we would get a divorce.”

[…]One week after his birth, Leo’s mom filed for divorce.

Second case – woman abandons her 5-month old baby to go on a two-week partying binge:

Alena Itapova, 19, who has been nicknamed ‘Monster Mum’ in Russian media for letting baby Veronika die, tried to blame her parents during appeals but ultimately was found guilty. Russian judges refused her appeal and instead increased her sentence. Itapova claimed the baby’s death was her parents’ fault for not teaching her how to properly raise a baby.

During a trial last year, Itapova admitted to leaving her baby alone in her apartment while she disappeared for two weeks. She found her daughter dead when she returned.

Third case – a woman writing for Think Progress bemoans Republican efforts to ban dismemberment abortions:

“Immediately, when I heard the title of these bills, I had to take a deep breath and calm down,” Dr. Anne Davis, the consulting medical director for Physicians for Reproductive Health and an OB-GYN who provides abortions, told ThinkProgress. “This is a familiar tactic, similar to the other types of bans we’ve seen. It seems the strategy is to take language that provokes emotional responses and then to argue that, because there’s an emotional reaction to something, it should be illegal.”

Fourth case – Cathy Young interviews a man accused of rape and finds evidence that contradicts the accuser’s story:

Sulkowicz has said in interviews that she was too embarrassed and ashamed to talk to anyone about the rape, let alone report it; an account of her mattress protest by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith says that she “suffered in silence” in the aftermath of the assault. Yet Nungesser says that for weeks after that night, he and Sulkowicz maintained a cordial relationship, and says she seemingly never indicated that anything was amiss.

Nungesser provided The Daily Beast with Facebook messages with Sulkowicz from August, September, and October 2012. (In an email to The Daily Beast, Sulkowicz confirmed that these records were authentic and not redacted in any way; while she initially offered to provide “annotations” explaining the context on the messages, she then emailed again to say that she would not be sending them.) On Aug. 29, two days after the alleged rape, Nungesser messaged Sulkowicz on Facebook to say, “Small shindig in our room tonight—bring cool freshmen.”

Despite not being able to present the friendly Facebook messages from two days after the rape at the university trial, he was exonerated. She declined to press criminal charges. Making a false charge to the police is a crime. But she can make a false charge and carry a mattress around on campus, and get her victimhood celebrated by United States senators.

And finally fifth case, false rape accusation investigated by the police, charges dismissed because sex proven consensual.

So what’s the point of all this?

The point of all this is that I think that we are letting women getting away with too much. Instead of standing up to their poor decision-making and outright lying (in the rape cases that have been in the news lately), we coddle them and make them out to be victims, and blame the bad men they freely choose to have relationships with when they mess up their lives. They have to take responsibility for their own poor decisions, and make different decisions going forward. There isn’t enough money in the world to give them to make up for all the mistakes they are making.

When a women makes decisions in her life to drink, move away from parents, shack up with bad men, take drugs, contract STDs, vote for higher taxes and bigger government, run up student loan debts, drop out of school, get pregnant before marriage, have abortions, go on welfare, choose younger unemployed boyfriends, choosing violent boyfriends, move in with men before marriage, get frivolous divorces for “unhappiness”, put kids in non-family daycare when they are under two years old, make fake domestic violence charges, make false rape accusations, deprive children of their father, withhold sex from their husbands all the time for no good reason, disrespecting men, disrespecting masculine traits, etc. then we ought to be confident enough to tell them NO and IT’S WRONG.

We should not let them direct the conversation away from their own mistakes so they can blame others and justify continued irresponsible, selfish behavior because it “feels right” to them. Women are making really bad decisions these days, and it seems like men have lost all confidence to be able to tell them NO and IT’S WRONG. It’s so easy for a woman who is behaving badly to just find people who will agree with her and give her sympathy for her bad decisions. Men and women both seem to love to agree with women who are wrecking their lives and causing problems for everyone else around them.

We need to stop condoning and rationalizing their poor decisions. The harm that women cause is very real, and the costs for “fixing” their mistakes through government programs and charity are ballooning. In the UK, we are now seeing taxpayer-funded breast implants and IVF, in some provinces in Canada, taxpayer-funded IVF, and here at home – free contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. We cannot keep paying for lives that are ruined by decision-making dominated by emotions, cultural standards and peer-pressure.

Just because a woman is pretty and sounds nice, that doesn’t make her exempt from the moral law. It’s not even good for a woman, in the long run, to surround herself with people (men and women) who tell her to “follow her heart” – I can guarantee that that her yes-men and yes-women won’t want to deal with the mess she creates by following her heart, when it all blows up in her face. The biggest problem I see is apparently moral Christian men being so desperate for attention and/or sex that they give up the role of being the moral leader so that the woman will prefer them to men who would hold them accountable.

Podcasts

William Lane Craig’s secret weapon is his amazing wife Jan

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I want to draw your attention to a talk on “Vision in Life” given by Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig is the ablest defender of the Christian faith operating today. He has done formal academic debates with all of the best known atheists on major university campuses in front of thousands of university students.

It turns out that he owes a lot of his success to his amazing wife Jan.

The MP3 file is here. (32 minutes)

This talk was Dr. Craig’s chapel address to Biola University students.

About 11 minutes into the talk, Bill describes what happened after he finished his Bachelor’s degree at Wheaton:

And so I joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ for 2 years, and was assigned to Northern Illinois University. And that was where I met my wife Jan. She was a graduate of the University of North Dakota where she had come to faith in Christ. And she had a similar vision for her life of evangelism and discipleship.

And as we worked at NIU together, she with gals and I with the guys, leading students to Christ and discipling them to walk with the Lord, we fell in love. And we decided that we would be more effective if we joined forces and became a team.

So their reason for getting together was because they thought that they would be more effective in evangelism and discipleship if they worked as a team.

It is at this point in the talk where Bill begins to explain just how Jan molded him into the lean, mean debating machine that travels the world striking terror into the hearts of atheists.

Bill’s first story about Jan occurs early after their marriage while he is working on his first Masters degree at Trinity:

And it was also at that time that I began to see what an invaluable asset the Lord had given me in Jan. I remember I came home from classes one day, and found her at the kitchen table with all the catalogs and schedules and papers spread out in front of her and she said, “look! I’ve figured out how you can get two Masters degrees at the same time that it would normally take to get one! All you have to do is take overloads every semester, go to all full-time summer school and do all these other things, and you can do two MAs in the time it takes to do one!”

And I thought, whoa! Are you sure you really want to make the commitment it takes to do this kind of thing? And she said, “Yeah! Go for it!” And it was then I began to see that God had given me a very special woman who was my supporter – my cheerleader – and who really believed in me. And as long as she believed in me, that gave me the confidence to dream bigger dreams, and to take on challenges that I had never thought of before.

In an article on his web site, he talks about how Jan encouraged him to do his first Ph.D:

As graduation from Trinity neared, Jan and I were sitting one evening at the supper table in our little campus apartment, talking about what to do after graduation. Neither of us had any clear leading or inclination of what we should do next.

So Jan said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”

I replied, “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to England and do a doctorate under John Hick.”

“Who’s he?” she asked.

“Oh, he’s this famous British philosopher who’s written extensively on arguments for the existence of God,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a cosmological argument for God’s existence.”

But it hardly seemed a realistic idea.

The next evening at supper Jan handed me a slip of paper with John Hick’s address on it. “I went to the library today and found out that he’s at the University of Birmingham in England,” she said. “Why don’t you write him a letter and ask him if you can do a doctoral thesis under him on the cosmological argument?”

What a woman! So I did, and to our amazement and delight Professor Hick wrote back saying he’d be very pleased to supervise my doctoral work on that subject. So it was an open door!

And in the same article, he explains how Jan encouraged him to get his second Ph.D:

As Jan and I neared the completion of my doctoral studies in Birmingham, our future path was again unclear to us. I had sent out a number of applications for teaching positions in philosophy at American universities but had received no bites. We didn’t know what to do.

I remember it like yesterday. We were sitting at the supper table in our little house outside Birmingham, and Jan suddenly said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”

I laughed because I remembered how the Lord had used her question to guide us in the past. I had no trouble answering the question. “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to Germany and study under Wolfhart Pannenberg.”

“Who’s he?”

“Oh, he’s this famous German theologian who’s defended the resurrection of Christ historically,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a historical apologetic for the resurrection of Jesus.”

Our conversation drifted to other subjects, but Jan later told me that my remark had just lit a fire under her. The next day while I was at the university, she slipped away to the library and began to research grants-in-aid for study at German universities. Most of the leads proved to be defunct or otherwise inapplicable to our situation. But there were two grants she found that were possibilities. You can imagine how surprised I was when she sprung them on me!

Both of these Ph.D experiences are also described in the talk. And the talk concludes as follows:

I am so thankful to be married to a woman who is tremendously resourceful, tremendously talented and energetic, who could have pursued an independent career in any number of areas, but instead, she has chose to wed her aspirations to mine, and to make it her goal to make me the most effective person I can be, for Christ. And she has been like my right arm in ministry over these many years. And it is a tremendous privilege to be a team with a person like that.

And you young men, I would encourage you, if you marry, to find a gal who shares your vision, not some independent vision, but who is interested in aligning herself with you, and pursuing together a common vision and goal that will draw you [together], so that you will avoid the growing separateness that so often creeps into marriages.

And now you know the rest of Bill’s story. The person you marry will have an enormous influence on the impact you will have for Christ and his Kingdom. It is up to you to decide whether that influence is going to be positive or negative, by deciding if you will marry, and if you do marry, by deciding whom you will marry.

I have a popular post that has a lot of questions to ask a woman to make sure that she has the knowledge required to be a wife and mother, but I think in the context of this talk, I should highlight a few other questions that are more about her personality instead of her knowledge.

  • Does she think that the purpose of the relationship is to serve God or to serve herself?
  • Does she enjoy taking on the helper role, or does she ignore the man’s need for help?
  • Is she able provide alternatives when decisions have to be made?
  • Is she comfortable letting a man lead by letting him making decisions?
  • Is she good at being calm, persuasive and reasonable during disagreements?
  • Is she able to control her emotions, and separate facts from feelings?
  • Does she respect what her man has been able to achieve in the normal male roles? (Provider, etc.)
  • Is she the man’s “cheerleader”? Does she praise and encourage him privately and publicly?
  • Does she see her man as an engine for serving God? Does she have a plan to help him perform better?
  • Does she show her man that she is interested in teaching and mentoring others to grow?
  • Does she take an interest in growing her man spiritually? (Men are often more practical than spiritual)

You may also be interested in this talk given by William Lane Craig, entitled “Healthy Relationships” (National Faculty Leadership Conf. 2008) (audio here) In that talk, he offers advice to Christians who want to have a marriage that is consistent with their Christian faith.