Showing posts with label pregnant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pregnant. Show all posts

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, September 19, 2008

Fair is fair. But society isn't.

Rod Dreher over at Crunchy Con posts the following points about "white privilege" sent in by a reader of his. I'm ashamed to say that, in reading the post, I was taken aback that I hadn't even considered some of it before.

TO SHOWCASE just one example, what about Bristol Palin getting knocked up by her "f***in redneck" boyfriend, and how, if the young couple were black, we'd be clucking about "social mayhem" and the problem of black illegitimacy. Which we would.

Is it a problem that we
don't see preggers Bristol and her ruffian baby daddy as some sort of baby-mama ho and her white-trash Tupac? Do the daughters of GOP vice-presidential candidates have a higher class of unplanned, unwed pregnancy?

Or is it a problem that we've become conditioned to see just about every unwed black mother and her baby daddy as just that, almost without exception?

MAYBE THE PROBLEM is both. That we're too quick to overlook the forces of social disruption lying at the heart of every white Romeo and Juliet and too quick to condemn African-American kids when they do the same damned thing.

No difference in the offense. Big difference in white society's perception. And that's flat-out wrong.

Not to mention racist.

Anyway, here's part of what Crunchy Con posted. Go read the rest . . . and cringe as you do:
For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help. White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay. White privilege is when you can call yourself a "f**kin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their f**kin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot s**t" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug. White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Palins put bee in Buzz's bonnet


Far be it from me to promote substance abuse -- particularly that of an illegal nature -- but this column on Bayou Buzz.com really is best read stoned.
For the first time ever, the 2008 Republican Convention celebrated unwed teenage motherhood by seating Sarah Palin's reportedly 5-months' pregnant daughter with her teenage lover, proudly in the VIP row. As the swollen, 17-year-old Bristol Palin complacently gripped her swarthy impregnator's hand, Alaska's governor and the prospective mother's mother sternly lectured on family values and accused "the media" of persecuting her family.

Has the Republican Party gone mad?

No. But perhaps it's watched "The Da Vinci Code" too many times.

Are the Republicans returning to the cult of the goddess?

Maybe. Anything to win the election, right?

The Republican wanna-be First and Second Families made a fascinating tableau, with fertility being unabashedly the message. Sarah wore a tight choker of fat pearls, the luminous gift of oysters, enhancers of libido and mimics of male anatomy. Her plain, silvery tunic fit like Joan of Arc's breastplate and set her apart as the GOP's new high priestess. Cindy McCain, swathed in pearls, wore a bright green outfit—highlighting the Republicans' odd claim to now be champions of global warming. And green is also the color of fertility, of shimmering, budding springtime woods, of leafy glens and grassy fields where fertility rites took place until authoritarian Christianity wiped it out. With her tightly-pinched face and platinum hair hanging loose, her older children gathered around her, Cindy stood for fertility well-preserved.

But the frisky Palins are fertility real and present. Bristol showed us her tummy, her breasts, her pregnant fulsomeness. Sarah's husband, whom she calls "The First Dude," a crow's caw of sexual prowess and desirability, exhibited his softer side by cuddling the infant rumored to actually be his grandchild (by the voluptuous Bristol and her lover), although Sarah claims to be the mother.

If there weren't tricolor flags and people wearing elephant hats, one might think we were at Stonehenge.

How will bright green outfits, bouncy boobies, big bellies, sleeping babies, beehive hairdos, and fecund boyfriends help McCain win the presidency?

Because sex sells; sex wins votes; sex seals the deal.
I'M REALLY AT A LOSS what to say about this -- at least at a loss for things to say that don't begin with "Holy" and end a couple of expletives later.

C'mon, is this s*** for real?

"(T)he swollen, 17-year-old Bristol Palin complacently gripped her swarthy impregnator's hand"?

What, couldn't Sarah Whalen, The Bayou Buzz's hot-and-bothered columnist, work in the phrase "turgid member" while she was at it?

I don't know exactly what has so stung the Bayou Buzz "editors" -- and I think I'll keep "editors" in quotes from now on in relation to this amateurish and weird website -- that they would post Whalen's ode to whack, but you have to wonder whether it has been covered editorially by Al Goldstein at some point.

One thing I do know for sure after reading this: Sigmund Freud died 69 years too soon.

Over at Catholic and Enjoying It, Mark Shea thinks the Buzz piece is another example of the "nutroot" liberal freak-out over the existential threat Sarah Palin's example poses to Abortion, Inc. The piece is a freak-out, that's for damn certain, but it's not of the "nutroot," Daily Kos variety.

NO, THIS IS a down-home, whacked-out, "there's no eccentric like a Louisiana eccentric" freak-out. This is the crazy aunt you might find in Anne Rice's attic.

This is Uncle Fester at Pat O'Brien's after his third hurricane.

From what can be gathered online, Sarah Whalen "is an expert in Islamic Law and a photojournalist specializing in U.S. foreign policy issues." At some point, she apparently taught at Loyola University in New Orleans. And she has been a contributor to the Arab News and The Palestine Chronicle.

One who appears to have "gone native."

The bee in the bonnet of The Bayou Buzz isn't political commentary as spewed by Nutroot Nation. No, this is political commentary you rightly could expect from Hamas. Or the official Saudi press, as it were.

BEFORE THE INTERNET democratized the publishing universe, this Bayou Buzz screed is what you would find lying on a table at the student union. In all its mistyped, poorly photocopied glory.

It's also -- way down the bayou or way up in the piney woods -- the kind of "philosophical treatise" over which you might find some not-half-as-clever-as-he-thinks sort waxing rhapsodic. At least once he'd borrowed a dictionary to look up words such as "swarthy" and "fecund."

In other words, "Move along. There's nothing to see here."

Unless, of course, you happen to be a trained mental-health professional. Or maybe Jack Bauer.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

But we'll always have the Superdome

I have GOT to stop reading the gossip columns. Abstinence would be better for my blood pressure and my digestion.

For example, I never ought to have clicked on
Courtney Hazlett's "The Scoop" on
MSNBC just now. Alas, I was suckered in by the headline highlighting Paula Abdul's latest alleged histrionics in an airport terminal.

That was entertaining enough -- and who the hell
is Michael, Sidney and Leslie? -- but, ultimately, all it did was lead me to the next item which, of course, had to do with la famille Spears
.

HERE I WAS, listening to some very tasty Etta James on the stereo and still basking in the glow of LSU's dismantling of
The O-H I-O State University on the way to becoming college football's undisputed national champs. Life was sweet, and I had slipped comfortably into my "God, I wish I was sitting on a front porch back home in Baton Rouge right now, playing 'Hey, Fightin' Tigers' over and over and over"
reverie side of the love-hate relationship I got going with my home state.

And then I open up the gossip column and get visions of double-wides -- Louisiana double-wides -- dancing in my head.

Thank you, Courtney Freakin' Hazlett, and
thank you to the enlightened citizenry of Kentwood, by God, La.:

Residents of Jamie Lynn Spears’ hometown of Kentwood, La., just don’t know what all the fuss is about when it comes to the current state of the youngest Spears’ uterus.

“No one can understand why the media is making such a big deal over Jamie’s pregnancy,” local Mandy Knight told OK! Magazine. “That’s normal for people around here … her pregnancy really isn’t so shocking.”

Tell that to the rest of America. Or Nickelodeon. Regardless, the town has rallied around their celebrity and celebrity baby-daddy, Casey Aldridge. “We’re all so proud of him for doing the right thing,” said Cheryl Rape, the town librarian at the Liberty Library in Liberty, Miss., to the mag. “We all do wish him well.”

ACTUALLY, "normal" historically has involved matrimony before pregnancy, and that even used to be more or less true in many Louisiana towns that aren't Kentwood. That carnal knowledge of a juvenile and the resulting unwed motherhood is viewed as "normal" in Kentwood is only further proof of Favog's Law -- the Bud Light empties don't fall far from the double-wide.

And while -- like the unfortunately named Mississippi librarian (in what, I suspect, just might be one of the more-unused libraries in these United States) -- I am gratified that the Redneck Romeo and Juliet chose to let their child be born, I don't know that meets any sane threshold for being "proud" of the baby-daddy.


Oy.
So many brain cells, so little Pabst Blue Ribbon to kill 'em dead, so's I kin fergit.

But at least we'll always have the Superdome, all us Louisiana expats will. That and the memory of one hell of a Tiger football team.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Ah reckon it runs in the fambly

I just went to confession Monday. I must be Christian about this.

This happens all the time, and I must take the beam out of my own eye before I. . . .


AW, HELL! I just can't hep it! I gotta post this. And, alas, I must note that it would appear that the Bud Light empties don't fall far from the double wide.

KnowwhatImean, Vern?

At least according to the MSNBC story:

Another Spears baby is reportedly on the way — and it’s not Britney’s.

Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old “Zoey 101” star and sister of Britney, told OK! magazine that she’s pregnant and that the father is her boyfriend, Casey Aldridge.

“It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected,” she said. “I was in complete and total shock and so was he.”

Spears is 12 weeks along and initially kept the news to herself when she learned of the pregnancy from an at-home test and subsequent doctor visit, she told the celebrity magazine, which hits stands in New York on Wednesday and the rest of the country by Friday.

What message does she want to send to other teens about premarital sex? “I definitely don’t think it’s something you should do; it’s better to wait,” she told the magazine. “But I can’t be judgmental because it’s a position I put myself in.”

(snip)

Another person who might not be so thrilled by the news? Britney. A source close to the pop princess told TMZ.com that Jamie Lynn’s older sister is “frantic” over the news. The Web site reports that Britney may not have been aware of the news until today.

Jamie Lynn plans to raise the baby in her home state of Louisiana — “so it can have a normal family life.”