New Scholarship for Pregnant & Parenting Students

The prolife student group at St. Louis University in Missouri is doing something truly deserving of the name prolife. It is establishing an endowed scholarship for pregnant and parenting students.

Now here is a fundraising goal that our readers are no doubt interested in helping the SLU students to achieve. So, why not contribute what you can?

And if your own current school or alma mater does not have help in abundance for its pregnant and parenting students, then it needs to. Right now. Why not raise the issue? Sadly enough, it could be that no one has. Yet.

Whatever its shortcomings in my personal opinion, Feminists for Life does offer an Evaluate Your Campus tool to find out just how friendly or unfriendly your school is to the pregnant and the parenting--and to identify the changes that need to be made.

For Once, A Single-Issue Approach Would Be Better!

I never thought I'd advocate a single-issue approach to abortion, but I have found one situation where I wish this were the case.

December 10 of this year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And to mark the occasion, the conservative Catholic group C-FAM is sponsoring a petition to call for inclusion of unborn humans in the Declaration.

Ah, but that's not all. In order to declare your support for this proposed revison to the Declaration, you have to declare your undying support for some other stuff, too...after all, it all must automatically go together, no?

Namely, the unborn child not only has the right to life, but "the right to be conceived, born and educated within the family, based on marriage between a woman and a man, the family being the natural and fundamental group unit of society."

So much for us prolifers who believe prolife includes universal public commitment to the equal education of all children, and respect and ample social support for diverse, egalitarian family forms, including families headed by single parents, adoptive and foster parents, and LGBT persons, including of course same-sex couples.

Apparently we are not eligible to support the the unborn child's right to human life. Voila! We are disaqualified! Who needs us God-hating fornicators and sodomites, hunh? We can't be for real anyway, can we?

I bet C-FAM could get a lot more signatures if it did not in this petition put such a "family values" qualification on support for the unborn child's human right of life. If they want to add their beliefs about family life to the Declaration, why not call for that in a *separate* petition?

There are prolifers like me who have thoughtful, compassionate, and even (gasp!) ethical, religious and spiritual motives for not connecting such a view of "family values" to protection of the unborn child.

For one, if an unborn child's right to life is respected by protecting him or her from abortion, but he or she is not conceived, born, and/or educated within the heterosexual nuclear family... then he or she by definition has a wronged and compromised life. He or she has a fundamentally spoiled identity...and how is this so different, from example, from the supposedly no-longer-in-use designation of nonmaritally conceived human beings as "illegitimate"?

When any human is regarded as having a spoiled identity, then he or she becomes *more* vulnerable to violence and discrimination, *not less.* Before birth, as well as after.

Towards Zero Preventable Child Deaths

A report from the United States Fund for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, presents some very welcome news about already-born children's mortality. Since 1960, the global death rate of children under five has decreased by 60 percent.

In an email announcing the report, US Fund for UNICEF head Caryl Stern says this is reason to redouble systematic lifesaving efforts for the 25,000 children who are still lost worldwide every day. "These children are dying for reasons we can prevent. They do not have to die, but they do. I believe that number should be zero."

To support UNICEF's efforts "towards zero," please visit the US Fund's Donate by Program page.

In a post from January 23, 2008, this blog noted that both global child mortality and abortion rates were declining.

Could it be that measures which benefit already-born kids simultaneously benefit unborn children, and vice versa--contrary to the either/or, zero sum thinking of the US abortion debate and its exports?

And what if the approach of striving for zero preventable child deaths were applied more systematically to abortion and its root causes?

Incidentally, such an approach already meshes quite well with with global efforts to reduce maternal mortality.

Ending the Catholic Ban on Contraception

Catholic groups ask pope to end contraception ban

The Nonviolent Choice Directory is a nonsectarian service for people of all faiths and none. And so we defend the personal liberties of people who wish not to be sexually active or use contraceptives like we defend the liberties of those who do choose to engage in these practices. We also recognize that on many other fronts, the Catholic Church has been a real and welcome advocate for the oppressed.

That much said, we welcome the above news. The anticontraception stance of one of humanity's largest faiths has had profoundly negative consequences upon the human rights of life and bodily integrity. For one, how many abortions has it lead to?

US Supreme Court Gives Cruel & Unusual Punishment a Thumbs Up

Reference: Lethal Injection Web-Based Clearinghouse

The US Supreme Court has ruled that lethal injection is not cruel and unusual punishment for prisoners and therefore is constitutional.

Why? Because it does not pose a "substantial or objectively intolerable risk of serious harm."

Aside from the by no means settled question of whether lethal injection causes pain and distress--is not being killed itself "a substantial and objectively intolerable risk of serious harm"?

You don't have to be one of the most highly placed lawyers in the land to figure that one out. Or...maybe you do have to not be one.

Thwarted: Bush Administration Complicity in Eco-Abortion

Environment News Service brings good news today. Federal court has overturned the Bush administration's 2005 "Clean Air Mercury Rule," terming it a violation of the Clean Air Act.

And indeed the Bush policy attempted to permit ung-dly levels of toxic mercury emissions--and this at a time when an estimated 630,000 children in the US alone are born every year with unhealthy levels of mercury in their bodies.

Pregnant and nursing women and their babies, as well as older, still growing children, are the most vulnerable to mercury pollution. Individuals can of course take steps to reduce their exposure. GotMercury.org and the US Food and Drug Administration advise on how to avoid or reduce mercury exposure through fish and seafood consumption. Vegetarianism is also an option, even during pregnancy, nursing, and beyond.

As important as consumer education is, ultimately the most powerful and enduring safeguard against is a federal government that protects all Americans, born and unborn, against mercury and other toxins, instead of serving industries that care more for their bottom lines than for life and health.

On the 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Today I am simply making routine checks of the links on the Nonviolent Choice Directory, to make sure they still work, and slowly but surely adding in new ones.

I, personally, do not feel moved to protest either for or against Roe today. Although the US abortion rate is falling, the question remains of just why. And it still has a long, long way to go, and it will not get there until both prolife and prochoice citizens work together at utmost speed to give women better reasons not to undergo abortions.

And millions of women globally have abortion every year. It doesn't help them or their children that the "either/or, woman v fetus" terms of the Roe v Wade decision are being rapidly globalized.

FAO Calls for Local Food Production to Stave Off Famine

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demands immediate action to protect the Earth's poor from steep escalations in food prices.. FAO is zeroing in on the need to boost local food production in 37 countries.

Food security is part of the right to life, and it is essential to women's good reproductive health and the healthy prenatal and postnatal development of children. Yet so many of Earth's poor are subject to famine, despite the fact that (at least now, this could change) it is a matter of distribution, not availability.

Historically, too, this has been true of many famines. As a boy, Amartya Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. As part of his career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, he researched the causes of this and other past Indian famines. He concluded that the problem was not so much lack of food, but overly high food prices and other preventable, addressable causes--meaning that millions of deaths were wholly unnecessary.

This gets personal for me, too. Some of my ancestors escaped An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Hunger of the nineteenth century, which drove into exile or killed millions of human beings. Irishers will refer to 1847, the most deadly year of An Gorta Mor, as "Black '47" (that's what it's named for, the New York City band of Larry Kirwan and lawsuit-against-the-BBC-winnin' rapper Chris Byrne, aka Seanchai.)

The potato blight was but one cause of many. In fact, it was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The English colonizers forced the Irish to devote most of the land to export food, leaving very little land to grow their own food security. Even though political decolonization of the Two-Thirds World was at its height forty and fifty years ago, this economic scenario prevails today in so many impoverished, famine-threatened nations. Small wonder that so many Irishers, like the people of Concern Worldwide, are involved in hunger relief.

In other words, just as there was during these historical catastrophes--there's currently enough food and food production capacity to go around--the richer countries just don't have political or economic will, or enough of it, to ensure that poorer countries are not robbed of what is rightfully theirs. FAO is right to focus on local food production and security.

In part because I have a long memory...the Nonviolent Choice Directory offers numerous resources on Food & Nutrition (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html if the link doesn't work) not only for people who wish to get involved in this issue, but for pregnant, breastfeeding, and other humans in need of emergency food assistance; for anyone interested in learning about and promoting the nutritional needs of mothers and children; for anyone interested in the eco-friendlier, often less expensive option of vegetarian diet; and for anyone interested in feasible, practical ways to grow their own food security.

The Right to Life Means Alleviating Climate Change

Global warming is one of the largest threats facing life on Earth today. Although the wealthier nations are responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions, human, animal and plant lives in the Two-Thirds World will--and already have--borne the brunt of climate change. Small islands are already feeling the rise of the oceans, and there is evidence that an event as long ago as the 1984 Ethiopian famine resulted from global warming.

Individual behavior changes, especially by heavy resource consumers like people in the US, are vital. That is one reason why the Nonviolent Choice Directory lists resources on Eco-Friendly Living (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/ecolife.html if the link doesn't work), to help visitors learn about the issues and identify and carry out positive actions they can take in their own lives.

(The global warming crisis makes me remember philosophy classes in college, learning about Immanuel Kant. He thought that the test for what makes an ethical action is asking the question, "Would this be a good thing for everyone to do?" And then, in his view, one needs to take that step, regardless of whether others will take it, even as one hopes they will take it up, too.)

At the same time, we urge government and business to rise to their even greater responsibilty to ameliorate climate change. This is a systemic problem as well as a matter of individual lifestyle.

Fortunately representatives from almost all the 190 or so UN member states are meeting right now on the island of Bali, Indonesia to negotiate a successor global warming treaty to the Kyoto Protocol before it expires. Breaking Down Bali is a good overview of the Bali conference and the issues at stake.

As a US citizen, I feel deep shame and outrage at the boorish, spoilsport behavior of my nation's government when it comes to this issue (not to mention others)..all the while professing its devotion to (of all things!) a "culture of life." I can only hope that the US delegates will not overstep their bounds, that they will have some glimmering of what that phrase actually means!

Under Threat: College Women's Right to Nonviolent Choice

Women in college or university are at particular risk of unintended pregnancy and abortion. So many schools have practically nothing available or publicized to help pregnant students carry to term and then carry out their own decisions for parenting, adoption or some other care option for their children. Many even sabotage the educations of pregnant or parenting women, by expelling them, or driving them away by not offering enough financial aid, for example.

That's why the Nonviolent Choice Directory has an Education section (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/education.html if the link doesn't work) and why we just added some more resources to it...not to mention other pages to help get through a crisis pregnancy and beyond, and to prevent crisis pregnancy in the first place.

We have started a list of colleges and universities that have specialized programs to assist pregnant and parenting students. Kudos to the schools that have these programs...but...the list is pathetically short. Every school, at every level, with students past puberty needs to have such a program! And, of course, comprehensive sex education and prevention efforts...

If you are a US citizen, please send your politicians a letter in support of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Students Act (which was introduced into the House by sister Polonian Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio). This will help to create more of these urgently necessary pregnancy and parenting programs at the college/university level. Compared to the need, it's a drop in the bucket, but it's better than nothing, and it's a start.

Please also give them a shout about the Prevention Through Affordable Access Act. The availability of reduced-price contraception for college students and lowincome women is under attack, and if the assault brings down this option, more abortions and other harms are practically inevitable.

Please stand up for college women, and for their already-conceived kids!

A World AIDS Day Message on Maternal Child Health & Life

This just in from South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, or TAC, a grassroots, nonviolent force for justice in the world's most heavily HIV-infected nation and a global inspiration:

As we approach World AIDS Day a key goal must be to improve maternal health and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT).

On World AIDS Day 1999, I stood with hundreds of other people in Cape Town's Company Gardens for the first unveiling in that city of the AIDS Quilt. We were blessed and moved to hear TAC activists in courageous "I Am HIV Positive" T shirts speak up for their own lives and the lives of all HIV-affected people, and lament those who were already needlessly lost. One of them was a young mother who lost her baby simply because they had been denied access to antiretroviral drugs and other lifesaving care. As she spoke, she made cradling motions in the empty air.

Why should any mother have to suffer like this?
And why, on a related matter, should any pregnant, HIV positive woman anywhere in the world have to face the "choice" between abortion or ELSE?

South Africa's notoriously denialist government was and still is slow to alleviate the crisis all around it. It did not roll out its first PMTCT programs until 2003, and TAC still challenges and challenges it to do right by its own promises to its own citizens, in the area of PMTCT and so much else. 800 human beings still die from HIV/AIDS every day in South Africa. And unfortunately this is but a more dramatic and concentrated example of what is happening in all corners of the planet every day.

Please do not let the sheer numbers numb you out...Each of us has something to give to the struggle against the pandemic. Here are some ways.

--Learn from the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS and endorse its Statement of Support. (The Nonviolent Choice Directory is a proud endorser of this statement.)

--Whether or not you are personally HIV positive, you can check out the Treatment Action Campaign's extensive treatment literacy resources, including a number on mother-to-child transmission. Please consider a gift of time, money, publicity, or expertise to this most necessary organization. ..There are too many ghosts already...

PS on the Right to Life

Please remember the message I posted right under today's long deliberations on the UN death penalty debates:

Please don't forget to affirm the rights to life of women and children, born and unborn, by donating $10 or more to distribute the global family planning handbook to health providers in the Two-Thirds World.

Please do your part, however much you can spare, to call a global moratorium on unnecessary deaths of women and children through the lack of family planning knowledge and access.

The UN, the Death Penalty, & the Right to Life

The United Nations has thankfully passed a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty. It is not binding, but it does carry great moral weight in human rights and legal deliberations throughout the UN member states.

A Reuters wire service report discloses an interesting twist to this good news: Rights of unborn raised at U.N. death penalty debate. Apparently representatives of various Two Thirds World nations tried to add an amendment to the resolution urging member states "to take all necessary measures to protect the lives of unborn children."

The Reuters report describes this an attempt to "derail" the moratorium against the death penalty from presumably pro-death Muslim penalty nations. It names and notes that the US supported the amendment, which was proposed by "Iran, Egypt, Syria, Zimbabwe and several Gulf countries. The measure was rejected by an 83-28 vote with 47 abstentions."

I have not been able to find online a breakdown of the vote online, nor any more substantial details about the amendment and debate except from a source I tend to be quite skeptical about, the anti-contraception, Catholic-conservative group C-FAM.

Their "Friday Fax" for November 16, 2007 notes that "Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Libya, Kuwait, Mauritania and Sudan sponsored the right to life amendment" and "the Philippines, San Marino, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Gabon, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Panama stated that they agreed with the substance of the amendments, but as co-sponsors to the death penalty resolution they still did not agree that the amendments were germane to the draft text. Most countries agreed that the right to life issue as presented in the amendments deserved more time for deliberation and consideration and several delegations called for a separate right to life resolution to be brought up at next year’s General Assembly."

Unless and until I can find actual direct coverage of the debates, I have to wonder what was really going on. However, if the Reuters and C-FAM accounts are accurate....judging from Amnesty International's list of [Death Penalty] Abolitionist and Retentionist Countries, the countries named as supporting or sympathizing with the amendment would not all have reason to derail the moratorium for purposes of continuing to inflict the death penalty themselves.

--Abolitionist for All Crimes: Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Panama, Philippines, San Marino

--Abolitionist for ordinary crimes only (Countries whose laws provide for the death penalty only for exceptional crimes such as crimes under military law or crimes committed in exceptional circumstances): Chile

--Abolitionist in practice (Countries which retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes such as murder but can be considered abolitionist in practice in that they have not executed anyone during the past 10 years and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not carrying out executions. The list also includes countries which have made an international commitment not to use the death penalty): Gabon, Mauritania

--Retentionist: Bahrain, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Libya, Kuwait, Sudan, Syria, USA, Zimbabwe

Whatever was really going on this amendment debate, I am glad the moratorium resolution passed. I am glad it was not derailed by people who do not grasp the contradiction of defending unborn life while taking already-born life. And that there was some room to discuss the interconnected rights to life of unborn humans and prisoner humans at such a high level in the UN, with the possibility of more considered and constructive debate in the future. I think the most constructive strategy here is to take these issues one at a time, with a consciousness that they have something to do with one another.

Maternal Child Health Care Access on Earth

The Mother and Child Health (During & After Pregnancy) section (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html if the link doesn't work)of the Nonviolent Choice Directory now includes a subsection on Access to Maternal Child Health Care By Country (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth-careaccess.html if the link doesn't work).

And no, the work is not done...for one, one of oh so many many!!!--we KNOW that, yes, we are unquestionably morally responsible to publish links to all the HIV/AIDS mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT) prevention programs we can possibly discover on the Internet...and we haven't done that yet, either, among so, so much else....

Pardon Our Silence While....

...we are constructing, as part of our Directory, links to help women and children in just about every country on Earth find & access health care before, during, & after birth.

And to encourage greater public commitment everywhere to maternal and child health. This commitment is of course a human right in and of itself, but it also is a surefire protector of the human rights to life and nonviolent choice.

In the meantime, if you need something that can't wait, please email editor@nonviolentchoice.info and we'll see what we can do for you.

More Food and Nutrition Resources

Many more resources now appear in the Food & Nutrition section of the Nonviolent Choice Directory.

So many more resources that should be there, but aren't yet...Please forgive us if you needed something on this topic or any other and didn't find it. Please email editor@nonviolentchoice.info to let us know what's missing, and we will try to find it for you. Apologies, but that is about all we can do to atone for our shortfalls....Wish we were capable of so much more.....

Lucky Dube, 1964-2007

It was heartbreaking to hear that South African reggae star Lucky Dube was murdered yesterday during an attempted carjacking in the Johannesburg suburbs. Two of his seven children were there, and they witnessed his killing.

Lucky Dube was born in deep poverty to a Zulu single mother who had suffered many miscarriages and thought she could never have children. Hence the name she gave him, even though she separated from his father before he was born.

Like so many black South African children before the end of apartheid--and sadly, afterwards, still--Lucky Dube was raised by his grandmother because his mother had to migrate far away to find work. When he started out in music, he and his friends were too poor to buy their own instruments, and got in trouble at school for secretly playing on some they found in a locked cabinet. They turned to riches they already had, their own voices. Although Lucky Dube was best known for reggae, he first got attention for his mbaqanga, traditional Zulu, singing.

Lucky Dube's music was heartfelt, direct, life-affirming and positive, even when melancholy. Despite being banned by the apartheid government, his music enormously moved South Africans in the liberation struggle, and afterwards. He made friends and fans worldwide.

When I visited South Africa several years ago, I remember talking with people, especially black people, about how wonderful his music was. Their faces lit up with joy and pride to hear that a foreigner knew and loved his art, too, his music that meant so much to them.

Lucky Dube's life and death reminds me of this, how each precious life is meant to be and thrive, how violence that cuts any of us short is not meant to be.

Johannesburg has a higher rate of violent crime than almost any city in the world. I think of what has happened to friends who live there. Of the suicide bombings on the streets of Karachi on the return of the former Prime Mininster Benazir Bhutto. Of near-impossibilities of living in Baghdad since the war started.

Even of the continual robberies, assaults, and homicides here in my own inner-city American neighborhood. I could take you around on a pilgrimage to places where people, mostly young African American, have suffered violence and even lost their lives. Including a sweet-faced, charismatic young man who grew up with my daughter.

I wonder what any of us can do. But we have to do it. Fighting back nonviolently is a better way to remember Lucky Dube and all the other cut-short human beings than bitterness, retaliation, despair. As he sang, "Blessed is the hand that giveth, not the one that taketh."

Not Only Children's but WOMEN'S Sacred Lives: The Global Crisis

Women Deliver: A Global Conference is scheduled for October 18-20, 2007 in London, England. The website delivers some quite sobering information on maternal/child health in global perspective. According to the online fact sheet "Unfortunate Facts of Life":

• More than 536,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth every year. That is one every minute, or 10 million per generation – about the same as in 1987.
• Fully 42 percent of all pregnancies everywhere experience a complication. In 15 percent of all pregnancies, the complications are life-threatening.
• Fewer than one in 16,400 women will die in pregnancy or childbirth in the ten top-ranked countries; but one in seven will die in Niger, at the bottom of the list.
• This rich-poor disparity is the largest among all the public health indicators tracked by the World Health Organization.
• The poorer the household, the greater the risk of maternal death: 99 percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries.
  

Ms. Turn the Clock Forward has already given an excellent analysis of the ways that abortion politics, on both "sides," hinder cooperation on and resolution of these giant, vital, life-and-death issues. So I won't repeat that, except to underscore the impertinent questions that folks like us constantly, pestiferously pose:

What stops so many good-hearted, action-bent people--whether they define themselves as prolife or prochoice--from completelyrecognizing and honoring both the lives and wellbeing of pregnant women and their fetuses, who after all are so profoundly interconnected, no matter how much anyone tries to sever them apart?

What immeasurably good things could and would happen next if they could get past this seemingly intractable obstacle to the realization of full human rights?

More Directory Resources on Shelter

The Nonviolent Choice Directory has just added many new worldwide resources on Shelter. Secure, healthy shelter is of course part of the human right to life, and it is profoundly related to freedom of nonviolent choice, in more ways than we can name here.

Please check it out. We could use help with at least one thing, though. We would love to have a directory of only ethical maternity shelters, i.e., ones that do not imprison their residents, prostelytize to them, charge them outrageous fees (or at all), pressure them into adoption, or shame them for their sexual behavior.

We are also interested in ethical recovery homes for pregnant and parenting women who are trying to quit substance abuse.


Thank you!

Wow, A Thumbs Up

The EatonWeb Blog Directory offers these kind words about Nonviolent Choice. (No, we did not pay them to say this, nor to list us.)

• "Thought-provoking and opinionated, this blog takes a relatively unorthodox approach to the controversial issue of abortion. Whatever your position, this blog is worth your time for its thoughtful approach."

Well, gosh. Thank you.