musing minds

A thirteen year old pregnant girl in DCF custody wants an abortion and Florida DCF won’t let her. From the Fox News DaySide website:

Tuesday morning she was scheduled to have the abortion when the state intervened, citing Florida law that says “in no case shall DCF consent to a sterilization, abortion or termination of life support” on behalf of someone who’s under DCF’s care. Sounds pretty clear. But the girl’s lawyers argue that, under the state’s privacy law, minors have a right to decide for themselves whether to continue or abort a pregnancy.

Judge Andrew Napolitano on DaySide with Linda Vester today, said the following:

It’s obvious that DCF can’t control the people that it’s charged with controlling, but it is following the statute which says that it can not consent to this procedure. That’s why we have judges to evaluate what the law is and to make a call on it. Look, this is an abortion, it’s not an appendectomy. This is a living being growing within her that has a right to live under Florida law and under normal principles of morality.(emphasis mine)

Good on you Judge Andrew! (btw – this statement drew a lot of applause from the audience).

Last night, in President Bush’s press conference, he was asked:

Is the poll troubling?

My first thought was, “Yes, if the polls were honest, but since they don’t seem to be, no.”

President Bush’s answer was far better.

Polls? You know, if a President tries to govern based on upon polls, you’re kind of like a dog chasing your tail. I don’t think you can make good, sound decisions based on polls. And I don’t think the American people want a President who relies upon polls and focus groups to make decisions for the American people.

From the AP:

WASHINGTON – President Bush on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and foul language in movie DVDs. The bill gives legal protections to the fledgling filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs.

As a parent this is great news. Ankle Biting Pundits notes that studios aren’t too happy with the notion as they are concerned with protection of copyrights. I can’t see this as a problem long as it’s for personal use and not for redistribution. Think of it this way: if I buy a book and want to black out sections or tear out pages, that’s my right. It’s my book. The same should apply to DVD’s. What is particularily nice about this technology is that it puts the decision making process in the hands of the parents, where it belongs.

My Pet Jawa continues with it’s multi-part series on hostages in Iraq, featuring an exclusive interview with a spouse of a hostage. Check it out.

There’s a new attack ad running on CNN by a group called Move on Pac regarding the ending of the filibuster. It shows a bunch of elephants storming around Washington destroying various landmarks around the capital while the commentator says “the Republicans control the White House….the Senate….the Republicans control congress” going on to say that Republicans want to control the entire government!

Uhmm….last I checked, the reason that the Republicans are in control of those various bodies is because the public put them there. Talk about slash and burn politics: the public is increasingly rejecting Dems at the polls causing them to lose power and what do the Dems do? Last election they tried to delegitimize the elections. Now their attempting to deligitimize the institutions that Republicans occupy, portraying the excercise of democratically derived power as something wildly destructive.

Welcome Jawa Report readers. Please look around.

Kim and I have been a tad busy so posting is a little light. I encourage you to check out our blogroll, particularily the ones you may not have heard of before. We’ve recently added a few Canadian sites that I mentioned a few days ago. Things are pretty politically hot here in the Great White North.

On the Iraq front, I encourage you to check out our friends at OpiniPundit. I just had a gander and they’ve got lots of good stuff. Keep scrolling and you’ll get up to speed pretty quick.

I’ll be travelling for a few days and I may not have internet access (oh man, CNN as my only source of news??!!??) so you may not hear from me for a bit.

Cheers

Jeanette at Oh How I Love Jesus in her post Aborting the Disabled points us to an article with the same name in Christianity Today.

Senators Sam Brownback and Ted Kennedy are sponsoring legislation to require doctors to provide current medical information, treatment options and information about support services to parents of children that have been diagnosed with a disability based on prenatal testing.

A study was done that showed that many parents felt “pressured” into aborting.

I have a disabled daughter. She has epilepsy, moderate hearing and vision impairments and a developmental delay. Genetic testing was done when she was about a year old. She was found to have two chromosomal abnormalities; there are extra genes on her tenth chromosome pair and her nineteenth chomosome pair has a ring in a mosaic pattern. Each chromosome pair usually looks like a number eleven 11, hers have one that’s in a ring, or circle configuration so they look like a 10 and the mosaic is every other pair. So her 19th chromosome looks like this: 11 10 11 10 11 10 11 10…

When I became pregnant again, we decided to have an amniocentisis test done. We didn’t know if our daughter’s disabilities were a “fluke” or if they were the result of mixing the genetic material of her father and I. We were told that the odds were one in two humdred that anything untoward would happen. The procedure seemed to go just fine. We were asked what we would do if the test results showed the same genetic abnormalities. They asked if we would abort. The answer was a very loud NO. We wanted the testing so as to be prepared to deal with a disability. We didn’t want to eliminate it.

Unfortunately, I “hit the lottery” on that one in two hundred chance… Two days after the procedure, I got very sick, high fever and vomiting. We went to the hospital and they couldn’t find a heart beat. The next evening, I went into labor and delivered a perfect tiny boy. From his butt to the top of his head, he fit on my hand from the heel to the fingertips.

The hospital performed an autopsy. He died of a strep infection. Otherwise, he was perfect.

I guess this goes with the parents feeling pressured into aborting. I didn’t quite feel that, but the fact that I was even asked….

Welcome ByrdDroppings readers. Thank you Lorie.

France is apparently backing China in the event it invades Taiwan, and is seeking to open the door to European arms sales to the scary Asian giant. Talk about a blatant invitation to invade. After supporting Saddam and now China it seems that France has thrown all pretense of being an American allie out the window. The question now is whether the U.S. will allow France to have it both ways. (Hat tip LGF)

As many of you know, I’m Canadian. I appreciate that many Americans don’t necessarily find information out of Canada that newsworthy. Many Canadians are distressed by this and consider this to be symptomatic of American “arrogance” (primarily from the liberal wing of our country). Personally I think its because we are a relatively small country population wise. Ask a Canadian from a big city if he knows the news from a local small town and he won’t have a clue. He or she isn’t “ignorant” he’s just got his own things to worry about closer to home.

But I think I’ve got something that you may be interested in: The Canadian blogoshpere. More particularily the conservative blogosphere. It’s rising rapidly, perhaps at a greater pace than what occurred with Rathergate. There’s big things happening up north, and the Canadian blogs are at the forefront of the news. The news was even more concentrated here in Canada than it was in the U.S. and the immense void is rapidly being filled by the blogs. Even members of Parliament are getting in on the act, and believe me, they sound like bloggers and not stuffy politcians. Oh, and in case you haven’t heard, they’re helping take down the Canadian government. Here some of the big ones:

Small Dead Animals
Angry in the Great White North
Andrew Coyne (also a National Post Columnist)
Brock on the Attack

They all have plenty of links to many others. I’ll keep my commentary focused on American politics for now, but I urge you to check out what’s going on up north, it’s pretty wild stuff.