Women, equality rights, and life-giving

I like to do my postings in multiples of five; i.e., every five weeks or even five months. My goodness, one does get distracted. I know that I promised to say something about Ann Coulter, but that dubious character's many charms (logical and balanced reasoning, unfortunately, not being among them) were no match for selling our condo, purchasing and extensively renovating our new townhome, and entertaining company nonstop all summer.

But here I am, back at the old stand after once again taking a hiatus of considerable length. I really must get back to a schedule of frequent postings. Otherwise, I'm risking the loss of my reader.

I have much on my mind, but I'll start with this. I have been thinking for some time about the view of most modern secular feminists that women's rights are somehow subordinate to men's rights if women do not have full and convenient access to abortion services (often disguised with such ironic phrases as "maternal health"). I have emailed large numbers of Christian women in leadership capacities in the church and educational institutions about this matter, and have heard back from nary a one. Either I am too off-putting to correspond with, or else they consider the subject either too obvious or too baffling to address.

What is a poor oblivious male to do?

Well here's one sorry effort on my behalf. I preached at our church recently and shameless inserted into the sermon a reference to childbearing, which had little to do with the topic at hand. I went even further and suggested that the ability to give birth to children gave women more rights than men could ever have. I followed up with a question and answer session about the sermon, and no one in that sanctuary full of females brought it up.

So I'll try it here. I'm going to reproduce the first half of the sermon with the reference to having children, and ask you to comment.

Don't let me down.

Okay, here goes.

The Gospel as Simply as I Can Preach It (first half only)

I was a guest last month at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. In the men's washroom, of all places, I found a familiar booklet printed by Chick Publications. I say familiar because these dubious little booklets have circulated for decades, although it had been many years since I had last seen one.



This particular issue is entitled “This Was Your Life.” Someone had hand-written 'Free' on it,

although given that it was situated on the toilet tank, I was pretty sure it wasn't for sale. It depicts a middle-aged man, successful and wealthy, a pipe-smoker with drink in hand, stricken by a heart attack and now dead and buried. His spirit is bidden to rise from the grave by the angel of death who shows him what a sinful life of self-indulgence, carnality, and indifference to spiritual realities he had led. He is then handed over to a demon to enjoy the Devil's gentle ministrations for eternity.

Having now hopefully scared the you-know-what out of the reader, the tract goes on to offer a similar man the chance to make a better choice. This gentleman confesses his sins, receives Christ as Saviour, asks God to reveal his will, prays before meals, reads bible stories to his children, visits the sick, puts money in the offering, shares from the Bible with others, and becomes a champion employee. He too has a heart attack and dies, but is received directly into heaven.

The booklet ends with a prayer for you to recite to become a Christian yourself, and encourages you to, among other things, read the Bible in the KJV every day.

And that, in three short paragraphs, is the Gospel according to St. Chick.

It was Einstein who said that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." I have entitled this meditation The Gospel as Simply as I Can Preach It.” As that will take me the twenty or so minutes that remain, I will never be asked to become a writer for Chick Publications, a lost opportunity that I will endure stoically.

Now to be completely candid, I was raised in a church whose depiction of God's good news was little different from what I quoted above from Chick. Perhaps your experience was the same. And I did, in God's grace, decide that I wanted to be a follower of Christ and a child of God at a relatively young age, although a broader understanding of what all of that actually meant did not follow for many years. I do not mean to disparage, in any way, the small slice of the Gospel that the booklet represents.

But it is narrow and disproportionate. Its depiction of the Christian life, the Christian mind, the nature and will of God, life's purpose and priorities, and the joy and challenge, and sometimes heartache—even heartbreak—of Christian experience is badly deficient. It's a gospel of bones with little meat. And a good number of the bones are missing as well. Not to mention much of the brain and heart.

Well, where do we start? As the Apostle Paul and the other early disciples set Asia and Europe ablaze with the good news, they had only the Old Testament as their Scripture. So for me, it's back to the beginning, the Garden of Eden.

I understand this story, and many of the others in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, as theological parable or metaphor, not history. Whether you agree or disagree with me on historical matters, the theology is the same. So let's skip the arguing over minor details and get to what God wanted us to learn from the story.

Humankind is depicted in an idyllic state where she and he (Eve and Adam) are to steward the perfect creation handed to them by God. Work was to be as normal for our ancestors as it was for God. God is depicted throughout the Scriptures as a working Deity, and humankind was to be no different.

'Idyllic' didn't mean that there was little or nothing to do. It meant that humanity could realize all that we were created to be in an environment of full equality, peace, justice, love, joy, mutuality, respect and self-respect, challenge and creativity in full partnership with the Triune God, Him and Herself. This, I believe, is what heaven will be like.

It was only after the fall from grace, when Adam and Eve gave up their idyllic experience through trying to improve upon God's will, that economic scarcity entered the scene, and that work became a monotonous drudgery, with notions of equality and respect for others set aside in favour of exploitation, prejudice, greed and self-indulgence, murder, and so on.

While male and female were equal in Eden, and both were charged with stewarding the earth through pleasant and creative work, the woman was given an additional privilege that made her, in one glorious sense, even more like her Creator than man could ever be. She was made Life-giver!! Only the woman would participate in adding to God's perfect but incomplete Creation through the miracle of new birth. There is no better picture of this than the story of Mary, mother of Jesus, when apprised of her coming pregnancy by the angel Gabriel. You can read each thrilling word at your leisure in the Gospel according to Luke chapter one.

Do not underestimate the importance of this in God's eyes. St. Paul, the champion of female worth and equality in the New Testament, alludes to this special status for women in his rather obscure reference in 1 Timothy 2:15: “But women will be saved through childbearing.” I don't believe that this means that bearing children guarantees a spot in heaven. It is also obvious that it doesn't assure women that having babies will be a breeze or that every woman will make it through the event unscathed. So what does it mean?

In other of his writings, St. Paul tells us to “work out our salvation.” He means that salvation is both an experience of choosing to become a child of God, and then living for God by doing the kinds of things that God has empowered us to do in full partnership with himself and his people. Paul often describes women as having full equality with men in the reception of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and in the exercise of those gifts in even the most senior leadership positions. But as an additional act of the greatest honour, woman continues to partner with God as Life-giver.

Marvelous!

This indescribable privilege was also marred as human imperfection and disobedience to God replaced the perfect state. God noted, with incredible regret I have no doubt, that the inevitable consequence of Eve’s choice would lead to this:

"I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master." There goes perfect equality with her husband as a spouse, and joyous partnership with God as a mother, in one fell swoop.

We have since seen a history of men suppressing and exploiting women while hogging all the top positions, whether in the family, the church, or in society generally. Most modern feminists have bought this nonsense that the man's life is somehow the superior one, and that life-giving is an unfortunate side effect of being female that must be controlled by having full access to abortion, in order to have full and equal rights with men. My goodness, in God’s perfect world they have more rights.
 

How can so much nonsense happen in one month?

The proprietor of this space apologizes for his prolonged absence from The Blog. He has been lumbered with the Olympics (of blessed memory), trips to the far reaches of Ontario, numerous guests, reduction to one car as the normally reliable Camry remains in intensive care, wrestling with serious school district issues, and trying to maintain his new sylphlike figure after losing 25 pounds (I had to get that last item in somehow).

And look at what has happened during this five weeks of enforced silence! Canada, a country of which I feel privileged to be a citizen, seems to have plumbed new depths of nonsense. I'll go further. Nonsense is irritating but normally harmless. Some of these happenings to which I am alluding are downright harmful.

First the chattering baboons we sometimes call Members of Parliament, and even more ironically, Honourable. Here is an utterance from several female M.P.s (one of them a medical doctor if you can believe it) about a government plan to urge the G8 countries to combat maternal health issues:

While immunization, access to clean water, better nutrition and improved training for health-care workers are all important to the health and safety of women and girls, addressing the real issues underlying poor maternal and infant health requires that the full gamut of options be made available to promote educated family planning and gender equality. Anything less is a mere band-aid solution.

We have in our little city a marvelous fundraiser called Run for Water, begun by a former student of mine named Ken Baerg. Its purpose is to ensure access to clean water in Ethiopia. Their website includes this observation:

By competing in the Run For Water you are helping villages in Ethiopia acquire the clean drinking water they need. Roughly 80% of Ethiopians require improved drinking water facilities, and Run For Water is partnering with an experienced development agency to contribute to that need.

Lack of clean drinking water is an enormous problem in the less developed world. It is a major contributor to serious health problems and even death. As noted above, in Ethiopia alone, eight out of every ten citizens are affected by it. But to those honourable ideologues of ours in Ottawa, addressing the issue is a mere band-aid solution compared to that problem beyond every problem--the provision of abortions.

Are these women out of their minds? Probably not, but they are obsessed. Beyond this, they can't seem to think of women anywhere else in the world outside of a Canadian context.

Imagine approaching a pregnant African woman with three living children (the fourth, fifth and sixth having died in infancy), all with distended bellies, bad drinking water, poor nutrition, and no one trained to help them, and saying to them, "Look, we could deal with all of these illnesses and untimely deaths by addressing your water and nutrition needs, your various diseases, the absence of good medical care and so on. But heck, these are mere band-aids. What you really need to do is to abort that child (oops! fetal material) you are carrying. So here's a coupon to get you into the new abortion clinic we built in the nearest city. And by the way, we affirm you as a full and equal sister."

The fact that a) the woman probably wants the child, b) this coupon does nothing for her existing children's unhealthy state or her own, c) there is no one trained to look after her when she returns (probably on foot for many kilometers) to her village, and d) she won't even be able to safely slake her thirst after her many days' walk, is nothing compared to the inestimable privilege of a safe abortion.

These women give pro-choice a bad name.

Related to this is the strange leadership being given to this nonsense by the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, Dr. Ignatieff.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says he will not abandon his fight to include reproductive rights in any Canadian-inspired G8 initiative to improve the health of mothers and their babies in the world’s poorest countries (Globe and Mail, March 24/10).

The reason that he has to fight is that his motion to include, in the government's plan for maternal health, the provisions for abortion discussed above was defeated in the Canadian House of Commons, despite the fact the government is in a minority position and the rest of the parties in the House supported his motion. Regrettably for Ignatieff, sixteen of his own Liberal M.P.s either skipped the vote or supported the government, thus ensuring that the motion would fail.

The once dominant Liberal party has suffered under three consecutive flawed leaders--first Paul Martin, then the hapless Stephane Dion, and now Ignatieff. Their last successful prime minister, Jean Chretien, remained in power through a combination of a splintered and largely ineffective opposition, and by doing little except allowing an improved world economy to solve his budget deficit problems. It has been a long, long time since the Liberals have had genuinely inspired leadership.

Given the mixed performance by the robotic Prime Minister Harper and his band of merry sycophants, Canada needs a strong alternative to ensure that the government's feet will always be kept near the fire. This is becoming less and less likely. The Conservatives have done little to address the issues that lead Canadian women to choose to abort. They are really no improvement over the Liberals in this regard. Yet they may have open season for years to come if the Liberals do not get their act together.

But Ignatieff does not appear to be the person to accomplish this. Ironic, isn't it, that his leadership flaws should surface over a motion regarding abortion?

Finally, I want to address the supreme nonsense associated with the (odious to me) high-profile right-wing spokesperson Ann Coulter. The suppression of her vacuous views should be of concern to those who, like myself, want to be able to say things that are important to me but that fall outside the boundaries of acceptability drawn by the chattering baboon class.

More on this soon.

Relief is just an abortion away?

This is my third consecutive post on information vital to making an informed choice about a crisis pregnancy. I am posting these to suggest that Canada is a pro-choice country in name, but in fact insufficient information is available to women to make a fully-informed choice. And the withholding of this information has to be deliberate.

In this post, I want to illustrate how women are not warned of the psychological damage that many suffer from choosing to abort.

While in the short-run a majority of women feel relief from having had an abortion, for too many of them various kinds of post-abortion trauma set in over time. There is a North American group of women who have suffered physically and emotionally from abortion, called Silent No More, devoted to this very issue.

Nevertheless, the website of Planned Parenthood states:
Serious emotional problems after abortion are much less likely than they are after giving birth.

A different page on the website of Planned Parenthood states:
Serious, long-term emotional problems after abortion are about as common as they are after childbirth.

Another page on the website of Planned Parenthood states:
Beware of so-called "crisis pregnancy centers" that are anti-abortion. … [They] will lie to you about the medical and emotional effects of abortion.

But the country of Finland has socialized medicine and keeps detailed health records of its citizens. A search of these records over the years 1987-1994 found that 1,347 women of reproductive age (15-49 years old) committed suicide. A 1996 study of this data found that women who had an abortion were about 5.9 times more likely to commit suicide in the year following this event than women who delivered a child.

In 2008, the Los Angles Times reported:
Several studies published in peer-reviewed medical journals suggest that women who have had abortions are more prone to depression or drug abuse. “But the research does not prove cause and effect, [said Nada Stotland, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association]. It may be, she said, that women who have abortions are more emotionally unstable in the first place.”

The California study cited above controlled for mental disorders by eliminating those women who had been treated for a psychiatric problem in the year prior to their childbirth or abortion. When this was done, it was found that women who had an abortion were about 3.3 times more likely to commit suicide in the eight years following this event than women who delivered a child.

To conclude, in theory we are a pro-choice country. But abortion is easier to obtain than it is to really learn a lot about. When groups such as Abbotsford Right to Life bring up legitimate concerns about the safety of abortion, they are routinely attacked as being anti-woman and anti-choice, and are accused of lying and deceiving women.

Now our local regional hospital does not allow abortions, but nearby hospitals do. Women in Abbotsford could arrange for their pregnancies to be terminated for whatever reason and with reasonable dispatch on the public’s dime. And everything would be all right for them--right? Well, in the case of abortion, ignorance is not bliss. They are being deliberately kept in the dark. Canadian women deserve better than this. Don’t you agree?

I am not simply ignoring the crises that pregnancies can genuinely represent in some cases. Much needs to be done by way of public policy and other forms of support for women and their babies. Regrettably, abortion does not rid society of abusive husbands and boyfriends, bad employers, inflexible education systems, unsympathetic families, judgmental churches, and many of the other problems that women will continue to confront even after recourse to an abortion has been taken.

But for the purposes of this post, I am looking at the easy in-by-nine-and-out-by-five, no muss, no fuss, “Are you worried and distressed? Can't seem to get no rest? Put our product to the test. You'll feel just fine now” solution that is pushed on women without regard for the potential risks.

So I say, if Canada really is pro-choice, let’s have all the voices at the table, and all the facts on the table. A woman’s health, and a woman’s future, is too important to do otherwise.

Look at those cells go!

Most abortions take place in the first trimester; i.e., approximately up to 13 weeks. Women are typically told that the fetus is nothing but a clump of cells at this point.

To give just one example, the National Abortion Rights Action League nominated a pro-life organization called Personhood USA to its Abortion “Hall of Shame.” In announcing the nomination, NARAL claimed that Personhood USA "... exists solely to establish legal rights for fertilized eggs and trigger legal battles over abortion that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Not only could the strategy outlaw abortion, but it could even threaten birth control, stem-cell research, and in-vitro fertilization.”

Now in actual fact, every human being of whatever age and size is a clump of cells. But the impression that medical people and others who use this description want to give, as a way of easing the pregnant woman of any qualms, is that what is inside her at this point would be little more than those frog’s eggs we used to find in swamps when we were kids.

But what is the truth? Here is what those frog eggs are really like:
a. At fertilization
At fertilization, the genetic composition of a preborn human is formed. This genetic information determines gender, eye color, hair color, facial features, and influences characteristics such as intelligence and personality.

b. At 3 weeks
The eyes and spinal cord are visible and the developing brain has two lobes.

c. At 4 weeks
The heart is beating and a circulatory system is in place. The portion of the brain associated with consciousness (the cerebrum) and internal organs such as the lungs are beginning to develop and can be identified.

d. At 7 weeks
Muscles and nerves begin working together. When the upper lip is tickled, the arms move backwards. The portion of the brain associated with consciousness (the cerebrum) has divided into hemispheres.

e. At 9 weeks
More than 90% of the body structures found in a full-grown human are present. The medical classification changes from an embryo to a fetus. Embryologists chose this dividing line because from this point forward, most development involves growth in existing body structures instead of the formation of new ones. The preborn human moves body parts without any outside stimulation.

And at this point we are still four weeks short of completing the first trimester.

Many women who have learned about fetal development after having had an abortion feel like they were deliberately deceived and regretted their choice.

The Abortion-Breast Cancer Link

My professional life has been spent mostly in the academic world. For much of my time, that world held without reservation to letting evidence take a researcher to whatever conclusion the data seemed to demand, and that the conclusion could be voiced without fear of discrimination. Regrettably, times have changed somewhat.

Certain conclusions are now seen as inappropriate rather than merely unsubstantiated. In some fields, a researcher who feels led by her or his research to take a position can fear being attacked for their motives rather than their research skills. Climate-gate is a stellar example.

An area that has puzzled me greatly along those lines is the alleged abortion-breast cancer (ABC) link. Dozens of studies have substantiated this risk, but none of the relevant authorities will admit to it. Breast cancer is not merely an academic discussion for me. It took my mother at age 59, as well as two of her sisters. A third sister is a survivor. In the past 18 months, three of my sisters-in-law have also contracted this potentially deadly disease.

If you were to look up the alleged abortion-breast cancer (or ABC) link in that well-known resource Wikipedia, you would read this:

The abortion-breast cancer hypothesis posits that induced abortion increases the risk of developing breast cancer. This position contrasts with the scientific consensus that abortion does not cause breast cancer.

The Canadian Woman’s Health Network recommends an article published by the Childbirth by Choice Trust that outlines the medical debate concerning the possible link between abortion and the development of breast cancer later in life. It summarizes the results of recent studies showing no credible link between the two.

The Canadian Cancer Society says this:

At the present time, the body of scientific evidence does not support an association between abortion and increased breast cancer risk.

We base this perspective on the findings from a workshop of over 100 of the world’s leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk. The workshop was organized by the US National Cancer Institute and it took place in 2003. The experts reviewed existing human and animal studies on the relationship between pregnancy and breast cancer risk. Among their conclusions were:
• Induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk
• Spontaneous abortion (miscarriage) is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk

By the way, the American Cancer Society makes the identical claim, also referencing this 2003 study, among others.

You might conclude from this that there is no link between the procurement of an abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer. When Abbotsford Right to Life sponsored a public lecture on the abortion-breast cancer link a couple of years ago, our local university student newspaper had as a headline on the front page, “The Myth of the Abortion-Breast Cancer Link”.

But I want to explore a little further the reference by the Canadian and American Cancer Societies to the conclusive 2003 workshop that is the basis of their opinion. Here is a summary of that workshop:

In February 2003, Dr. Louise Brinton, the National Cancer Institute's chief of the Environmental Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, served as chairperson at an NCI workshop in Bethesda, MD, to assess whether abortion was implicated as a breast cancer risk.

In the opinion of "over 100 of the world's leading experts," said the subsequent NCI report, including Dr. Brinton, the answer was no....

At the time, 29 out of 38 studies conducted worldwide over 40 years showed an increased ABC risk, but NCI workshop experts nevertheless concluded it was "well established" that "induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk."

It should be pointed out that none of the authors of the 29 studies that did find a link of anywhere from 30% to 100% were invited to that workshop.

But then a funny thing happened. In April 2009 that same chairperson, Dr. Brinton, co-authored a research paper published in the prestigious journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, which concluded that the risk of a particularly deadly form of breast cancer that attacks women under 40 raises 40 percent if a woman has had an abortion.

Now a cancer society “insider” had found the missing link.

The Toronto Globe and Mail wrote to the NCI on Jan. 8/09 and reported the results of their correspondence as follows:

An e-mail to Dr. Brinton on Friday was returned by an Institute spokesman named Michael Miller who said: "NCI has no comment on this study. Our statement and other information on this issue can be found at http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/ere." That link turns up [the] 2003 document that says a workshop of more than 100 leading experts concluded that having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman's subsequent risk of developing breast cancer.

Requests for an explanation of the apparent discrepancy between that position and the information contained in the study released last spring went unanswered by NCI…

The Globe concluded:
[T]rying to prevent abortions by scaring women with breast cancer would truly be wrong. But so too would be suppressing the risks of abortion or any medical procedure.

But if you go to the NCI website, you will see no reference to Dr. Brinton’s 2009 article, nor does she refer to it herself in the list of research interests on her personal page. NCI continues to hide the remarkable conclusions of the study of one of its own decorated scientists. She herself has never repudiated the results, but she doesn’t promote them either.

The Liberal Party of Canada would prefer that they remain deep-sixed as well. When Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott referred to the issue and the Globe and Mail’s coverage recently, the Liberals' Status of Women critic Anita Neville was quick to call on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to silence Vellacott for his supposedly "false and misleading" statements. In a media release, Neville claimed Vellacott had denigrated "women and their rights and freedoms, adding "enough is enough . . . women deserve better from their elected representatives."

By the way, a 40% increase in risk is not considered to be particularly high. But to put things into context, governments and cancer agencies have done everything they can to reduce our exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke in order to protect us from contracting cancer. The increased risk of cancer from second-hand tobacco smoke is 20 - 30% according to that self-same NCI.

But consider the way second-hand smoke risk is dealt with compared to the higher-risk associated with abortion.

A report from the California Environmental Protection Agency in 2005 concluded that the evidence regarding secondhand smoke and breast cancer is "consistent with a causal association" in younger women. This means that the secondhand smoke acts as if it could be a cause of breast cancer in these women. The 2006 U.S. Surgeon General's report, The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exposure to Tobacco Smoke, found that there is "suggestive but not sufficient" evidence of a link at this point. In any case, women should be told that this possible link to breast cancer is yet another reason to avoid being around secondhand smoke. My source for this information? --The American Cancer Society.

Susan Martinuk, writing about the Brinton article in the January 29, 2010 edition of the Calgary Herald, added this comment:

The topic of breast cancer has long been a media darling and, consequently, there's been no shortage of reports on the plethora of new medical discoveries that are constantly shifting the rules for preventing, diagnosing and treating this disease. We're told about coffee, chocolate and wine; and the usefulness (or not) of mammograms and the harms (or not) of hormone replacement therapy. But this urgent need to keep women informed and up-to-date on the latest research suddenly dissipates if it means turning a critical eye to the sacred cow of abortion.

Canada is NOT Pro Choice: Why I Wish it Were

I would like to invite readers who live in the Fraser Valley of beautiful British Columbia to attend a free public lecture that I am giving on Thursday, February 4 at the Clearbrook Public Library in Abbotsford at 7:15 p.m. It is entitled Canada is NOT Pro Choice: Why I Wish it Were. The library is located at 32320 George Ferguson Way, Abbotsford.

Women's rights--Where does this take us?

Hey, I'm no philosopher, nor a political scientist, nor a human rights specialist. I can't tell you with certainty what full and equal women's rights should look like here in Canada or anywhere else.

What can I tell you?

First of all, in terms of all the ways in which women endured discrimination in the past, western liberal democracies are more or less in the same place. They claim to abhor such discrimination and have brought in legislation to eliminate it. The same goes for violence against women. Some might claim that more could be done by way of, say, affirmative action programs or gay marriage. These things are debated but there appears to be no consensus among countries, or even within countries in many cases.

What appears to be a major difference between how many Canadian feminists understand equal rights for women as opposed to other countries is with respect to abortion and reproductive rights. Canadian female members of Parliament, various provincial legislatures, and many women's organizations link full women's rights with abortion on demand. In almost all other countries, abortion on demand does not exist, at least on paper.

So we either have to say that these Canadian feminist spokespeople are right, and all of the other countries are wrong, or that Canada is a "one off" in terms of what is construed as full and equal human rights.

There is one more complication. As poll after poll has indicated, the majority of Canadian women would accept restrictions on abortion. A very large percentage would even eliminate public funding for same. Therefore, the majority view of Canadian women appears to be consistent with our European, American and Australian colleagues, rather than with the Canadian feminists on this topic.

As a male, I am not going to tell the Canadian feminists that they are wrong. But it looks like Canadian women are doing so.