Thursday, January 25, 2007

"is Dawn Eden Goldstein, was born into a Reform Jewish household. She began writing about independent-label rock music under the abbreviated name Dawn Eden in 1985 for fanzines such as Jersey Beat and the Bob, eventually becoming a popular-music historian, writing for Mojo, Salon, New York Press, Billboard, among other magazines.

[...]

In October 1999, Eden, who was by then an agnostic, had what she describes in The Thrill of the Chaste as a “born-again experience” that transformed her into a “committed Christian.”

... gives practical advice about how women should relate to their parents (if yours are divorced, as Eden's are, you should resist the temptation to blame them for bad sexual choices you've made) and masturbation (avoid it—you'll just feel lonely afterward). But trading on familiar (and tired) gender stereotypes, she notes that men lose interest in women who pursue them.

Meanwhile, on the other side of New Haven, student groups at Yale were gearing up for Roe vs. Wade Week. According to the Yale Daily News, the event, presumably subsidized by student activity funds, does more than just promote abortion. The organizers plan to teach attendees — not just medical students, but anyone who shows up — how to perform the "simple procedure":

On Thursday, the Yale Medical Students for Choice will host workshop on manual vacuum aspiration for medical students, using a papaya as a uterine model. Manual vacuum aspiration is a surgical abortion method that uses a syringe to remove the fetus from a woman’s uterus. Merritt Evans MED ’09 said she thought it was important to have the workshop because the procedure can be used for a variety of different purposes — including miscarriage management and the treatment of a failed medical abortion or ectopic pregnancy — and is inconsistently taught in medical school.

While the workshop is targeted towards medical students, undergraduates are also invited to attend.

“The reason I wanted to include other people is that it is such a simple procedure, but the media attention around it … makes this an emotionally traumatic and a complicated thing,” Evans said. “It’s just to be like, ‘Here is what actually happens, here is what the medical procedure is like, this is what an aborted yolk sac looks like.’ It looks like a piece of cotton.”

It strikes me that Yale's traditional school songs are horribly outdated in light of the school's new mission. A $25 Amazon gift certificate to the commenter who composes the best rewrite of one of the school's anthems. Deadline is midnight tonight. [Update: I'm extending it to 8:30 a.m. EST Friday, January 25.] Remember, do it for God, for country, for Yale, and for all those liberal arts students at one of the country's finest Ivy League universities who are about to learn how to suction a live baby out of the womb.