Showing posts with label babies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label babies. Show all posts

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Posted through my tears

1grace  noun \ˈgrās\

1
a unmerited divine assistance given humans for their regeneration or sanctification
b :  a virtue coming from God
c :  a state of sanctification enjoyed through divine grace 

http://www.youcaring.com/memorial-fundraiser/ashley-picco-memorial-fund/260229#

I know -- having been the recipient of it a time or a thousand -- grace when I see it.

Oftentimes, grace is the strength God sends you when you are at the end of your own. Sometimes, grace is beauty that descends upon you -- beauty that is not of this world. The video above is the first that begets the second.

Imagine that your pregnant wife dies in her sleep. Imagine that this occurs months before her due date. Imagine that your little son is born of your dead wife via an emergency C-section. Where would you find the strength to do what we see here and do it so beautifully?

One place.


http://www.youcaring.com/memorial-fundraiser/ashley-picco-memorial-fund/260229#
THERE have been times when I have summoned the strength, strength that was not my own, to endure what I might find unendurable and react to it in a manner not of my own nature. Still, I cannot imagine serenading my dying infant son after losing my pregnant wife -- or at least I can't imagine doing so without collapsing into sobs.

The singing father is Chris Picco of Loma Linda, Calif. His wife was Ashley Picco. Their son is Lennon James Picco. Lennon James died in his father's arms the day after this video was shot.

People often wonder where God is when things go horribly and unjustly wrong. The answer is that God is standing beside you, holding you up if you'll let Him. It's a beautiful thing, as you can see above.

If you'd like to help God out in holding up Chris Picco as he endures the unendurable, you can do so here.

Here, too.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Conditional adorability

 
Awwwwwwwwwwwww.


That's the adorable word from WECT television in Wilmington, N.C.
Try not to smile after taking a look at this picture!

Shantee Johnson from Wilmington shared her most recent ultrasound picture and you can see her prenatal daughter is all smiles.

3D and 4D ultrasound technology is giving a lot of future parents the opportunity to get a quality glimpse of their children. Johnson got her ultrasound done at Wilmington Maternal-Fetal Medicine. She's due in mid-March, but was induced Wednesday and is currently in labor. She's expecting a girl.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=639712066039804&set=a.579483858729292.1073741826.531683143509364&type=1&theater

MEANTIME,  "forced ultrasounds" are a Nazi plot against the autonomy of the blah blah blah blahblahblahblah. That's the outraged word from the NARAL Pro-Choice America website:
Imagine this: you're facing an unintended pregnancy. After talking about it with your partner and your family, you decide that abortion is the right choice for you.

You call the doctor, and are told that you have to make two appointments. At the first appointment, you are forced to undergo an ultrasound and have the images described to you. You don't want an ultrasound, and your doctor does not recommend one—but you and your doctor have no choice. Your state has a forced-ultrasound law. 
The Challenge

Many states have some type of ultrasound-related law. Some give women the option; others have forced-ultrasound laws that don't give women a choice.

The people behind forced-ultrasound laws claim they just want to give women more "information." But really these laws make women go through invasive medical procedures against their will.

In a free country, we don't force anyone to undergo medical procedures against their will. Women considering abortion—a safe, legal, and constitutionally protected procedure—are no different. Politicians have no place telling a woman she has to have a procedure she does not want and her doctor does not recommend.
ACTUALLY, ultrasound examinations are absolutely routine for pregnant women as a means of screening for birth defects, as well as the age, position and number of fetuses. Ironically, it's also not unusual for abortion clinics to do ultrasounds before terminating the baby . . . er, pregnancy.

Besides, if this study of abortions at Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles is indicative of what happens across the country, it's not like NARAL Pro-Choice America will be fending off a plague of "unwanted" children. According to the Reuters Health story, when women really don't want to be pregnant, they really don't want to be pregnant.

And in a free country, when women really don't want to be pregnant and others can profit from that, it's absolutely fine to have forced -- legally -- almost 49 million in utero human beings "to undergo medical procedures against their will" from 1970 through 2010.

Which resulted in their deaths.

Because adorability is in the eye of the executioner.

Friday, August 02, 2013

Later's news now . . . or 'Sorry, Wong number!'


There's a birth announcement  you need to know about in today's Morning Deviate. It might be the biggest Louisiana news since all the courts recessed for the day at 4 p.m.

Take a look, because that's the way it is . . . this day in August, 2098.
It’s a boy for ex-Prefect Eli Wallace Edwards and his wife, Yob.

The couple welcomed T. Wong Edwards in Baton Rouge early Thursday morning just three days after celebrating their second wedding anniversary at an offshore strip club floating above the submerged ruins of New Orleans. Yob Bebe Edwards posted the announcement on her Spacebook page early Thursday.

“Everyone except me is getting to sleep. It’s ok though ... I’d rather just lay here and stare at my little Cajun prince!!,” she posted along with a photo of herself gazing into her son’s face.

Born at 12:52 a.m., T. is Edwards’ fifth child and his wife’s third son. The former prefect of the Louisiana Autonomous Region has four grown children. His wife has two sons from a prior marriage. T. weighs 6 lbs., 3 oz., and is 19 inches long.

The baby shares his name with his late grandfather, Edwin W. Edwards, a former American congressman who served four terms as governor in the second half of the 20th century.

Father and son came close to sharing a birthday as well. Ely Edwards will turn 86 next week.

Despite a difficult pregnancy, Yob Edwards was well enough to post updates on Spacebook as she awaited the baby’s arrival Wednesday afternoon and later announce his birth.

It was full house in her labor room at the oceanfront campus of Baton Rouge General Medical Center -- Bluebonnet Hoverway. A stereo-V crew hovered in the background, capturing the moment for the couple’s reality program, “The Prefect’s Squeeze.” A broadcast date for the program — which will air on the Booze&Poontang educational stream — has been pushed back several times.

Edwards, 85, met his 18-year-old wife while he was serving his sentence on holographic-cyborg-poker racketeering charges in a Greater North American Authority penal institution.

The couple said they wanted to share as many experiences as possible in the short amount of time they likely have together.

They live in a yacht anchored over the swamped family ancestral home where the city of Gonzales once existed.

Yob Edwards said their new son is a perfect little boy.

“F*** yeah, bitches! Mah lil schwing man got it goin' lol!” she posted on Spacebook about the new scion of the autonomous region's Zipper dynasty. Meantime, the proud geriatric papa -- popularly known as the Titanium Zipper, following his father the Silver Zipper --  was spotted passing out electronic cigars and holographic casino tokens on the medical center beachfront, buxom blondes on each arm.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Truth in comedy


I think this is all that needs to be said about the coupling of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Thank you, Conan.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The pride of Counciltucky

The Stupid One

When eugenicists talk, this is why people listen.

From the
Any F***ing Imbecile Can Procreate section of the
Omaha World-Herald:
A Council Bluffs mother is in jail, accused of leaving her baby alone in a van, with the doors unlocked, while she went to the supermarket Monday evening.

A passer-by reported hearing a baby in a vehicle about 7:20 p.m. near the SuperSaver parking lot, according to the Pottawattamie County Sheriff's Office.

Sheriff Jeff Danker said deputies found the vehicle's windows cracked about 4 inches and the doors unlocked.

The baby girl inside was crying and sweating, so deputies put the child in their vehicle to cool off.

Danker said deputies estimated the baby was alone in the vehicle for 25 to 30 minutes.

The baby's mother told deputies that she ran inside the store for cash and tomatoes for dinner, then forgot the baby was in the van. She also couldn't remember the baby's middle name, calling the child “the new one” a few times, Danker said.
YOU KNOW what the really sad thing is here? The cops believe the woman really is "the new one's" mother.

Unfortunately, there's probably a decent reason we call the Iowa city across the Missouri River "Counciltucky." And even if there isn't, mouth-breathers like Tiffany Tunney (thanks to Channel 7 for putting a name and a mugshot to this story), are doing a great job of confirming Omahans in their prejudices.


Lord have mercy, because right now, I got nothing.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Never mind the bollocks


Because we Americans seem to be, at heart, a most unserious people, we have outraged national campaigns over this.

A naughtily named new flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, "Schweddy Balls," has inspired a national boycott call and hungry curiosity in Omaha, as elsewhere.

Members of OneMillionMoms.com want the ice cream company to stop making the flavor.

The limited-edition flavor, launched this month, is a tribute to "Saturday Night Live." The name refers to a 1998 sketch in which Alec Baldwin played holiday goodie baker Pete Schweddy.

Monica Cole, director of the online activist campaign, said she's seen the skit, but she's not laughing at it or its namesake dairy treat.

"We find it vulgar, not what we would like our children to be seeing or asking for at the supermarket or a Ben & Jerry's outlet," Cole said from the group's headquarters in Tupelo, Miss.

-- Omaha World-Herald,
Sept. 24, 2011
But not this.
Black babies are dying in Omaha.

That's the simple, straightforward message the group of about 40 people — most of them black women — had to work with. Their assignment was to take 10 minutes to come up with a way of spreading that message to the people who need to hear it.

The fact that the infant mortality rate is high among blacks in Omaha was no surprise to many of those at a community forum earlier this week at the Turning Point campus in north Omaha. That for every 1,000 black babies born in Douglas County, more than 14 will die in their first 12 months.

Or that the rate is three times higher than the county's white infant mortality rate: 4.7 deaths per 1,000 babies.

But a Douglas County Health Department map showing that the highest concentration of baby deaths was near 33rd and Lake Streets, in the area around Salem Baptist Church, surprised Thelma Sims, director of the Salem Children's Center.

Sims first saw the map about a month and a half ago.

"I was really devastated and sad," she said.

She lives and works in the area but hadn't known that from 2005 through 2009 the neighborhood's infant mortality rate was 27 to 33 deaths per 1,000 births — in the range of the rates seen in Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Kyrgyzstan.

Rates are harder to grasp than actual numbers, so when looking at the state's vital statistics for 2005-2010, for example, you find that 113 black infants died in Douglas County during that period.

Of those, the leading causes of death were listed as sudden infant death syndrome, 21; maternal complications of pregnancy, 20; prematurity, 16; and birth defect, 14.
-- Omaha World-Herald,
Sept. 24, 2011
Really, America?

Really?


On this ship of fools, steerage is a dangerous place to book passage. Obviously.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

El socialismo, sí! Darwinismo social, no!


I remember standing in line at the local Sears service center years ago, out in the industrial hell of southwest Omaha, waiting to get a certain part for our lawnmower or something.

The line was long, the service slow. Competence seemed negligible. The vibe was not one of "How do we improve the customer experience today?"

Finally, one guy closer to the front of the line had had enough. I know I had had enough, and this guy had been standing in line longer than me.

"This is worse than Russia!" he erupted. I mean, he screamed that. And then he stormed out the door, part not in hand.

Mind you, this was when the Cold War still raged. When "Russia" meant the Soviet Union. Land of communism . . . and craptastic workmanship.


IN THE NEWS today, we learn that American babies are more likely to die than those in 40 other countries -- most all of which Republicans deride for their allegedly inferior pinko "socialized medicine."

But their babies are alive. Too many of our fine, capitalistic progeny aren't.

From My Health News Daily:
Babies in the United States have a higher risk of dying during their first month of life than do babies born in 40 other countries, according to a new report.

Some of the countries that outrank the United States in terms of newborn death risk are South Korea, Cuba, Malaysia, Lithuania, Poland and Israel, according to the study.

Researchers at the World Health Organization estimated the number of newborn deaths and newborn mortality rates of more than 200 countries over the last 20 years.

The results show that, while newborn mortality rates have decreased globally over that period, progress to lower these rates has been slow, the researchers said.

In 2009, an estimated 3.3 million babies died during their first four weeks of life, compared with 4.6 million in 1990, the report found. About 41 percent of all deaths of children under 5 occur in the first month (the neonatal period). Progress to reduce newborn deaths has been particularly slow in countries in Africa, the researchers said.

A BANANA REPUBLIC, if you ask me, is one where "family values" politicians yell and scream about the genocide of abortion -- which it is -- but are perfectly content to let babies croak once they exit the womb unmolested. Particularly poor babies, who most depend on the ebbing Medicaid kindness of federal and state lawmakers.

In other words, "This is worse than Cuba!"

I guess there are worse things in the world than socialism . . . like whatever the hell it is the United States does now.


Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Not this Bing, that one


You know you're getting old when . . .

Your first thought, when hearing the name of Kate Hudson's and Matthew Bellamy's new baby is "They named the kid after Bing Crosby?" while Mashable's first thought is "They named the kid after a search engine?"

But what I really want to know is how Hudson got hooked up with one of the Bellamy Brothers. Aren't those guys waaaaaaay too old for her?

I guess the May-September couple just let their love flow, and nature took its course. It happens.


Muse?

Muse about what?

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Oh, for God's sake!

Thank you, March for Life people, for making my point for me.

If you want to know why -- despite being dedicated to sticking up for the most vulnerable and powerless humans that ever were or ever will be -- the pro-life movement has accomplished squat over the past 35 years, you need read no further than this from the
Catholic News Service:
Among the speakers on the stage, Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., headed a long string of politicians who took to the microphone to make sure participants saw the fight against abortion in political terms. He warned that "America's liberal elites" were "empathy-deficient" when it comes to the unborn, turning around a phrase about Americans made by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in remarks on the presidential campaign trail a few days earlier.

A brief roar of agreement greeted a warning by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., that electing Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., or Obama as president would mean nominees for federal judgeships would be less pro-life than those nominated under President George W. Bush, so "we need to elect a pro-life president."

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, himself a candidate for president, downplayed those ambitions to emphasize his experience as an obstetrician, helping bring 4,000 babies into the world. Dozens of "Ron Paul for President" banners held high above the crowd made a point of his political ambitions for him.

In his remarks recorded at a White House breakfast earlier that morning and replayed at the rally, Bush lauded those who work for "a culture of life where a woman with an unplanned pregnancy knows there are caring people who will support her; where a
pregnant teen can carry her child and complete her education; where the dignity of both the mother and child is honored and cherished."
IF I WERE Chris Smith, I'd be worried less about the "empathy" deficiency of "America's liberal elites" and worried more about the dumbass sufficiency of America's right-to-life elites.

(And, as a Catholic, I'd worry about the utter Pravdaesque "report no evil" incompetence of the Catholic News Service -- but that's a matter for another post someday.)

See, here's what the irony-insensitive CNS report failed to tell you. And, sadly, what CNS failed to tell you is pretty much all the context you need to know why the pro-life movement, as it's presently constituted, is a doomed proposition.

Let's start with Sen. David Vitter, R.-La.

Sen. Vitter, you see, likes nookie. And, during his political career -- both back in the Bayou State and in Washington -- he has liked nookie so much he's been willing to pay top dollar for it.

From women not Mrs. Vitter.

That is called soliciting prostitution, making Vitter a "john," even though his name is David. This activity is quite illegal in 49 of the 50 states. That's why it was so big a deal when Vitter's number turned up in the phone records of the "D.C. Madam."

And it's why it was such a big deal when the working girl who "loved" him back in New Orleans started blabbing to Penthouse publisher Larry Flynt. Some folks back in Louisiana thought Vitter ought to resign his seat or be kicked out of the U.S. Senate for having engaged in criminal acts.

Those people, however, were prudes. Not like the March for Life organizers.

Then there is the slight problem of Vitter being the Southern regional chair for the Rudy Giuliani campaign while spouting lines like "we need to elect a pro-life president."

You'd think most folks, after hearing such from a backer of the pro-choice Giuliani, would figure their intelligence had just been insulted. And, in fact, most would. They probably would become angry and start booing and throwing things.

But this was a crowd of pro-life activists and their politicized leaders. And David Vitter -- veteran politician and connoisseur of the world's oldest profession that he is -- can read an audience.

HAVING FIGURED OUT there's not fun in holding the moral high ground if you can't cede it, the March for Life organizers then invited Rep. Ron Paul to the microphone.

The long-shot GOP presidential candidate has had his public-relations problems of late, after it came out that a newsletter written in his name had for years contained the worst kind of race-baiting, paranoid, whack-job claptrap.

Paul, however, didn't want to talk about politics (I wonder why). He wanted to talk about the 4,000 babies he brought into the world as an obstetrician.

"Dozens of 'Ron Paul for President' banners held high above the crowd made a point of his political ambitions for him," as the CNS story put it. Yep, there's nothing quite like throwing away moral superiority to scream to the world "I'm a Racist Conspiracy Nut for Life!"

FINALLY, we come to the prerecorded address by President George W. Bush.

Nothing says "I support the vulnerable" like "pro-life" marchers standing there, listening to supportive bromides from a man who lied his nation into a disastrous, unjustified and unjust war in Iraq . . . that is, when he wasn't subverting the United States government to justify, then carry out, the torture of "illegal enemy combatants" in violation of both U.S. and international law.

One march.

Three strikes.

And America's unborn babies are s*** out of luck.


HAT TIP: Your Right Hand Thief.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Thanks for coming. We don't care. Next.


If you want to know how irrelevant America's right-to-life movement has become, all you have to do is turn to Page A-3 of today's Washington Post.

That's where Washington's newspaper of record
put the story telling how:

Tens of thousands of abortion opponents took to the cold, gray streets of Washington yesterday, buoyed by a recent report that the number of abortions in the United States had hit the lowest level in years and vowing to continue the fight.

IT'S NO BIG SIGN of how far pro-lifers have fallen that the Post put the story about tens of thousands of people in a protest march through its own town on an inside page -- it's done that for years. What should have the marchers -- and their leaders -- worried is that the reporter didn't bother to quote one pro-choice leader refuting anything anyone on the pro-life side said.

When no one takes you seriously enough to go to the trouble to refute what you say, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Or engage in a withering reappraisal of what the hell you're doing.

The newspaper said pro-lifers were buoyed by the news that abortions were at a 32-year low. Two questions about that: First, is it so and, second,
did the pro-life movement have anything to do with it?

Again,
from the Washington Post:
At the same time, the long decline in the number of abortion providers appears to be stabilizing, partly a result of the availability of the French abortion pill RU-486, the report found, because some physicians who do not perform surgical abortions provide it to their patients.

The report did not identify reasons for the drop in abortions, but the researchers said it could be caused by a combination of factors.

"It could be more women using contraception and not having as many unintended pregnancies. It could be more restrictions on abortions making it more difficult for women to obtain abortion services. It could be a combination of these and other dynamics," said Rachel K. Jones of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research organization, which published the report in the March issue of the journal
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Whatever the reasons, the trend was welcomed by abortion opponents and abortion rights advocates.

"This study shows that prevention works, and that's what we provide in our health centers every day," said Cecile Richard of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "At the end of the day, Americans of all stripes believe that we need to do more to prevent unintended pregnancy and make health care affordable and accessible."
I TEND TO THINK the drop, instead of having much to do with the efforts of the overly politicized pro-life movement, probably has more to do with naturally changing attitudes by members of a couple of generations who know they could have suffered the same fate as 25 percent of their contemporaries. As well, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that more than a few of the "missing" abortions never went missing at all.

Those probably went "Plan B" instead -- fertilized eggs that never implanted, thanks to the "morning-after pill." Still an abortion, but never will show up in any statistic as one.

So what do we make of a movement so spectacularly unsuccessful that it's ecstatic over abortions falling from 1.6 million a year in 1976 to 1.2 million a year in 2005? Even at the "low" rate, give Americans five years and they've done to their own children in utero what Adolf Hitler did to the Jews ex utero.

That ain't success.

Given that pro-lifers have sold their souls to the Republican Party for a bag full of empty promises about fixing all kinds of social ills -- most especially abortion -- and still have ended up with a couple of Holocausts a decade for three-and-a-half decades now (not to mention the "right" to kill babies at any point of their nine-month sojourn in Mama's womb), you have to wonder why pro-life Americans aren't ready to tar and feather whomever came up with that bright idea.

HERE'S THE THING. Pro-lifers put all their eggs in Republican politicians' basket, giving them every incentive to string folks along with pretty rhetoric and no incentive to actually do anything about abortion, thus eliminating a bloc of "automatic" votes.

Meanwhile, the culture -- where fads become trends, and trends become entrenched behaviors, and entrenched behaviors remake entire societies -- careens along, unmolested by church, activist and politician alike.

It's ironic that the Roe v. Wade anniversary (and the March for Life) always fall close to the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Pro-lifers like to fancy themselves as being in the mold of the civil-rights movement, employing tactics much like those of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

But there are three things King managed to do that the pro-life movement never even thought about. He captured a nation's imagination. He never descended into a shouting match with his opponents. And he transformed the culture of a nation.

Where is the great rhetoric of the pro-life movement? Where is its great art? Its transcendent music? Where?

There is some pretty good music related to the pro-life cause but, alas, it never made it out of the "Christian ghetto."

MARTIN LUTHER KING, on the other hand, marched out of America's black ghettos and into the conscience of a nation. Since 1973, we pro-lifers have marched . . . and we've sat in . . . and we've protested . . . and we've politicked . . . and we've prayed . . . yet what does America see amid all this?

And there lies the problem.

America, in the 35 years since Roe, has seen not Martin Luther King marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge but instead has seen Carrie Nation busting up a saloon. America knows all about what we're against, but little of what we're for.

Hell, we know all about what we're against . . . but do we really know what we're for? Or what America might look like if we achieved it.

The Carrie Nation approach to drinking ultimately may have gained us Prohibition for a season. But now we have Double Drunk Tuesdays and college administrators across the land wringing their hands about students' wild binges -- and the consequences that follow.

Do I wish abortion were illegal, just like every other form of homicide? Absolutely.

But what's more important for the cause of life? That we pass a law (which isn't going to happen anytime soon), or that we -- somehow, someway -- persuade women, their partners, their parents and their doctors that killing is evil, no matter whether or not it's legal.

Prohibiting iniquity doesn't equal success, even though codifying the sentiment would be instructive. Success, instead, lies in fostering virtue.

And victory lies in showing a nation that loving -- not killing -- is the best way to solve even the toughest problems.