There's been a lot of ridiculous speculation and stupid controversy surrounding Trig Palin, most of which deserves to be completely ignored. This bit of commentary, however, deserves to be highlighted for how monstrous it is:

...a senior Canadian doctor is now expressing concerns that such a prominent public role model as the governor of Alaska and potential vice president of the United States completing a Down syndrome pregnancy may prompt other women to make the same decision against abortion because of that genetic abnormality. And thereby reduce the number of abortions.

This "doctor" seems to have no concern whatsoever for the humanity of those with Down Syndrome. It never seems to cross his mind. His primary concern seems to be that Sarah Palin's example may cause other women to... choose to have their babies, rather than have abortions.

Perhaps the thinking on the issue is different in Canada, but here in the US, the pro-choice side generally tends to try to appear as though they want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. This is a nod to the fact that no matter how you slice it, abortion is morally problematic. This "doctor," on the other hand, appears to be more concerned about the bottom line of the abortion industry than with looking at those tough moral questions in an honest manner. Ed Morrisey at Hot Air had this to say:

This sounds more like the abortion industry worrying over a declining demand than a physician caring for a patient. Parents of DS children manage to have fulfilling lives, and they would say because of their child and not despite the decision to give birth. The Palins do provide a role model in that manner, as do the millions of other parents with such children who get no special attention for their love and sacrifice.

What kind of doctor looks at this situation and says, “The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada”? Does the sight of a strong family represent that great a threat to the abortion industry in Canada or elsewhere?

Apparently so.

Suddenly, the left is concerned about motherhood. Ain't that special? Allah ponders the future:

This is phase one. Phase two will be, “Wouldn’t a strong, responsible, authentic feminist woman have aborted it?” Man, I’m downright giddy at the thought of where the next eight weeks are going to take us.

Jill Staneck has a contrast between Palin's pro-life stand and Obama's refusal to support born-alive infant protection legislation:

Palin is a pro-lifer who not only talks the talk but walks the walk. Palin and her husband chose to deliver her fifth child, Trigg, earlier this year even though he was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. Her doctor recommended abortion but Palin and her family refused. Indeed, 90% of babies with Down syndrome are aborted in the U.S. today.

But Palin told the Anchorage Daily News in April, "We knew through early testing he would face special challenges, and we feel privileged that God would entrust us with this gift and allow us unspeakable joy as he entered our lives. We have faith that every baby is created for good purpose and has potential to make this world a better place. We are truly blessed."

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, actively opposed legislation as IL state senator to protect little babies with Down syndrome who had survived their abortions but were being shelved in a hospital soiled utility room to die.

In fact, I presented my testimony 3 times before committees then-state Sen. Obama sat, describing my experience of holding a baby with Down syndrome for 45 minutes until he died who was an abortion survivor.

Obama was unmoved and aggressively opposed the IL Born Alive Infants Protect Act.

Unbelievable.

The 68ers are still causing problems:

There was a similar moral deficit when it came to foreign policy. The xenophilliac 68ers, could by and large, never grasp that there were two competing truths about Vietnam. Yes, we, the Americans shouldn't have been there. But yes, the Communists were brutal thugs. When after the war had ended and a million and half people went into the sea to escape the regime of the North Vietnamese Stalinists, the famously voluble moralising associated with the 68ers was replaced by sustained silence. Today, aided by the Bush administration's extraordinary meld of simple mindedness and incompetence, the 68ers are similarly unable to come to grips with Jihadism. Too self-absorbed to be self-reflective, they both denounce the neo-conservatives for assuming that everyone wants freedom and democracy, yet insist that we can negotiate without conditions with terrorist regimes on the grounds that we share a great deal in common.

Great essay. Read the whole thing.

Via David Thompson

We head north once again to Canada, land of human-rights trampling "human rights commissions," to examine the case of the York University student union's effort to ban pro-life groups from campus, citing their inherently "sexist" nature:

In response to a series of controversies over abortion debates on Canadian campuses, the student government of York University in Toronto has tabled an outright ban on student clubs that are opposed to abortion.

Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, said student clubs will be free to discuss abortion in student space, as long as they do it "within a pro-choice realm," and that all clubs will be investigated to ensure compliance.

"You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body," Ms. Massa said. "We think that these pro-life, these anti-choice groups, they're sexist in nature ... The way that they speak about women who decide to have abortions is demoralizing. They call them murderers, all of them do ... Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women's rights."

The school's administration condemned the decision as contrary to its academic mission.

I realize that Canada doesn't have the First Amendment, and as such the freedom of speech isn't as protected there as it is here in the US. But come on. To simply preempt any discussion of the issue of abortion unless it comes from a "choice" perspective? These people can't be serious.

And yet, there it is in black and white. The horror of being exposed to a contrary view - one that views abortion as morally wrong to boot (imagine that!) - is just too much for these tender souls to bear. So rather than expose the student body to the dangers of persuasion, the student union is going to preemptively ban the offending speech.

Do these people have no clue how clueless this makes them look? How dictatorial? How fascist? Ah well, this can at least serve as yet another example of the vaunted "tolerance" of the left.

Uncalibrated Irony Meter Alert: It turns out that Ms. Massa, the spokesperson for the York Federation of Students, has a pretty selective idea of what constitutes "free speech":

Gilary Massa, the vice-president, external, of the York Federation of Students and the driving force behind the proposed ban on anti-abortion groups, earlier this year defended free speech as she called for the lifting of a ban on the phrase "Israeli Apartheid."

In a letter to McMaster's provost and the Students Union Executive, Ms. Massa said she was shocked and dismayed to hear that the administration and McMaster Students Union had banned the use of the phrase "Israeli Apartheid" on campus.

The letter called for the ban on the phrase to be rescinded "in accordance with a basic commitment to freedom of expression and organization in the democratic context of the public university."

The letter added, "This strange and unprecedented ban is a blatant violation of democratic freedoms of speech and dissent, and an attack on students' right to organize. It is the position of the YFS and GSA [Graduate Students] that universities are sites where discussions and debates about difficult geopolitical questions should be promoted, not stifled. International controversy about use of the phrase 'Israeli Apartheid' cannot be resolved through repression, but through ongoing intellectual exchange."

Here's some free speech for you: Massa is DUMBER THAN A SACK OF HAMMERS.

FREEDOM! TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE FREEDOM!

Couples who live together are gambling and losing in 85 percent of the cases. Many believe the myth that they are in a “trial marriage.” Actually it is more like a “trial divorce,” in which more than eight out of ten couples will break up either before the wedding or afterwards in divorce. First, about 45 percent of those who begin cohabiting, do not marry. Those who undergo “premarital divorce” often discover it is as painful as the real thing. Another 5-10 percent continue living together and do not marry. These two trends are the major reason the marriage rate has plunged 50 percent since 1970. Couples who cohabit are likely to find that it is a paultry substitute for the real thing, marriage.

Of the 45 percent or so who do marry after living together, they are 50 percent more likely to divorce than those who remained separate before the wedding. So instead of 22 of the 45 couples divorcing (the 50 percent divorce rate) about 33 will divorce. That leaves just 12 couples who have begun their relationship with cohabitation who end up with a marriage lasting 10 years.

Turns out there's a reason for that whole "wait 'til marriage" thing...

It turns out that young people aren't "self-entitled, coddled slackers":

Young Americans have a reverence for national institutions, traditions and family values, a U.S. survey indicates.

A survey of so-called "millennials" -- those between 21 and 29 -- revealed the group overwhelmingly said they support monogamy, marriage, the U.S. Constitution and the military, The Washington Times reported Sunday.

"We were completely surprised. There has been a faulty portrayal of millennials by the media -- television, films, news, blogs, everything. These people are not the self-entitled, coddled slackers they're made out to be. Misnomers and myths about them are all over the place," said Ann Mack, who directed the survey and is the official "director of trend-spotting" at J. Walter Thompson, the nation's largest advertising agency.

Via the Corner, where Mark Steyn notes:

The movie biz in particular seems to believe the big bucks are in unpopular popular culture. One day someone will figure out the flaw in that formula.

May that day come soon.

Great news! 25% of teenaged American girls have an STD!

Thank God we no longer have to deal with those restrictive "moral standards" anymore. Man, was that ever a drag!

Note, if you will, a new link banner over in the sidebar to a site called Abort73.

The Sunday prior to last was Sanctity of Human Life Sunday in many churches in the US. I ran across that link while browsing through some resources that my church had made available to members of the congregation on the issue of abortion, including a little booklet from Abort73.

I'm about as pro-life as they come, and I'm pretty passionate about the debate once it gets going. I've long felt that the argument over abortion in America has been framed incorrectly from a moral standpoint. The pro-abortion side has, for a very long time, been quite successful in focusing attention on their buzzword of "choice," as if the choice made by a pregnant woman about whether or not to keep her baby was far more important than the life of the baby itself. And as long as the debate is focused on concepts like women's rights and the virtue of being able to make free choices, the pro-abortion side will always win - after all, who wants to oppress women, and who doesn't love freedom and the ability to make free choices?

And while in general, the right of free choice is important, it is not more important than the right to life. For instance, if you offend me, inconvenience me or wrong me in some way, I am not free to choose to kill you in response because the value placed on your life is (or should be) much higher than the value placed on my ability to choose a course of action to right the perceived offense, inconvenience or wrong. There is such a thing as a hierarchy of rights, because some rights are dependent upon others, and thus some rights trump others: The right to choose (or, put another way - the right to pursue happiness) is meaningless if you don't have liberty. And liberty is meaningless if you don't have life. Ultimately, all of our rights depend upon the fundamental right to life.

And so, since life is the most important fundamental human right upon which all other rights depend, the ultimate question in the debate over abortion must be this: when does human life begin? If abortion is a transaction that involves, as the pro-abortion crowd constantly claims, only a woman and her doctor, and the fetus is nothing but a non-human clump of cells and not a separate, living human person, then there's no problem. But if that fetus actually is a separate human life, we have a holocaust on our hands.

And that's exactly what the situation is. The only reason abortion is not recognized as a holocaust is because of the way the debate has been framed. The intrinsic value of the unborn child's life and the horrifying injustice of abortion have been obscured by all the talk of "women's rights" and "choice." And let's be frank: because abortions generally happen out of sight, and because a fetus doesn't necessarily "look human," and because we've never met the fetus and never will, well, it's easy to just not think about it too much.

The more I think about the abortion issue, the more chilling it becomes. And not only because of the millions of lives lost to the procedure, but also because of the corrosive effect that it has had on our society. When the Supreme Court made its huge error in legalizing abortion on demand, proponents of the procedure argued that there was no slippery slope, that this would not lead to legalization of assisted suicide and eventually active euthanasia, that abortion would never be taken so lightly as to become little more than a method of birth control, and so on. And yet, today abortion is primarily viewed as a method of birth control, assisted suicide is available in some jurisdictions and has many advocates, and medical professionals are even starting to talk about active involuntary euthanasia.

Back in 1995, I wrote the following:

We hear a lot in our society about the importance of “death with dignity.” Often this phrase is used in the promotion of physician-assisted suicide by people who argue that those with terminal illnesses should have the right to “hasten their death” in the face of suffering. In so arguing, however, advocates of assisted suicide reinforce the idea that those who suffer have no intrinsic value as human beings that would cause society to favor sustaining their life; and as a result they strip those who suffer of any dignity at all. They seem to say that the terminally sick and aged have no inherent dignity - but it can be earned by choosing suicide.

The assisted suicide movement - like so many well-meaning “compassionate” efforts - fails because it does not recognize the inherent worth of every man, woman, and child. Dignity and value are not commodities that rise and fall on some moral market in response to the fluctuations of human frailty. They are intrinsic to what we are as humans. They are a part of our very nature, as real a part of us as the blood that flows in our veins.

These thoughts come to mind as I read of the passing of Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the modern Hospice movement. Her life’s work has allowed countless individuals to face the end of their life with some amount of physical comfort, often in their own home surrounded by their loved ones. There is a profound truth at the core of the movement that she founded: that dignity in death comes not through the act of dying, but through the act of living one’s life to the fullest until death.

One of the most important concepts in Western society is that individuals are not granted rights by a government, but that individuals have been endowed with certain rights by their Creator. Because we are created in the image of God, we each have intrinsic value from the very first moment of our life to the very last. To chip away at that idea is to do damage to - and potentially to destroy - the foundation of every other right that we have. Abortion is nothing more than a chisel, chipping away at and cracking this fundamental foundation of our rights. It has been incredibly damaging to our society, and it will continue to do damage until we have the courage to see it for what it really is. Go look. How comfortable are you?