How I have changed...

A few years ago...we'll say a decade and less, I was a huge supporter of NOW (National Organization of Women), because it put itself out there as a promoting of equal rights for women, for cracking down on abuse against women issues, and in the fight to end discrimination against women of all colors, sexual orientation, etc. which I was totally on board with and was excited about!

But, the whole abortion thing hurts. They now talk about having to win the fight against "fetal personhood". Because if we call a fetus a person, abortion will be murder.

Abortion is murder.

Even when I was pro-choice, I always was able to acknowledge that it was yet another form of murder, since we have so many legal ways for murder available in this country.



But, to read the language taken from the website:

"If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's [Roe's] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [Fourteenth] Amendment.

In other words, if opponents can convince the Supreme Court that "times have changed" since Roe was decided and that a fetus should now be recognized as a "person" under the Constitution, then abortion would immediately become an act of murder in every state across the country."



The thing is, regardless of what the law reads...a fetus is a person.

When it is wanted, pro-choice people refer to it as a baby. As in, "Surprise, we're going to have a baby!"

When it is unexpected, unwanted, suddenly it doesn't count as one, for unknown reasons that break my heart.

No baby is a mistake. No baby did anything wrong by being created. Perhaps the circumstances leading up to conception were bad choices, perhaps even violent ones (though that percentage is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR lower than pro-choice organizations would have you believe). But the baby itself has not done anything wrong.

That is why it is murder. Cold-blooded murder.

To hear about a baby being talked about so coldly hurts me so deeply, because I look at my two wonderful girls and I think about my little Adi who didn't get very far. And even though she was only eight weeks old in my womb when she stopped developing, I know she was human, that she was a person, that she was not just a random clump of blood and tissue. I saw her. I held her little body in my hand and she had arms and legs and a head...she was a person.

To deny that a fetus is not a human is so hard for me to understand. Yet, these are often times the same people who argue against capital punishment, war, torture...but somehow, a little, tiny, completely innocent baby is not worthy of being protected or respected.

That disconnect sends me reeling sometimes.

I don't know how to fix it. Well, that's not entirely true. I work with young people, teaching them how to respect themselves and others and to remain chaste outside of marriage. I work with young women, teaching them that saying 'no' to physical advances by young men is difficult, but shows how much they respect themselves and WOW - guys do respect that...at least, the guys worth spending time with respect it. Of course, I do all this 'ground work' within the teachings of the Catholic Church, so I am immediately discounted by people, which is a shame.

Although the Church is made up of sinners, some of whose sins are atrocious and hurt me deeply, the Church herself is perfect. Christ founded the Church, so it is perfect. That we are all sinners is something of a comfort to me because it reminds me that when I fall - so has everyone else, including Peter, and he's the ROCK of the Church.

So, although my voice, and those like mine will always be a quiet whisper in the din, I keep speaking, because if even one life may be inspired, even one life saved from abortion, one life given guidance to walk closer to the right path....a beautiful, wonderful, amazing thing has happepened.

More randomness

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see. (I got 46!!!)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (I don't have this capability here, so if there's a * by it I loved it)
4) Reprint this list in your own so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 *The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 *Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 *To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 *The Bible (just wanted to mention this isn't meant to be read like a normal book, cover to cover)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 *Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (stopped after one chapter...the sentence structure couldnt' draw me in)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 *Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn’t this under no. 33?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 *Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 *The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 *A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 *The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 *Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Something to distract me...

1. One Movie that Made you Laugh: French Kiss

2. One Movie that Made you cry: The Constant Gardener

3. One Movie that you loved when you were a child: Newsies

4. One Movie that you've seen more than once: Jaws

5. One Movie you loved but were embarrassed to admit it: Maid in Manhattan

6. One Movie that you hated: Cloverfield

7. One Movie that Scared You: Silence of the Lambs

8. One Movie that bored you: The Weatherman

9. One Movie that everyone loves but you don’t see why: The Godfather

10. One Movie that made you miserable: Seperate Tables

11. One Movie that you weren't brave enough to see: Passion of the Christ.

12. One Movie character that you've fallen in love with: Elinor Dashwood, from Sense and Sensibility (I love Emma Thompson)

13. The Last Movie you saw: Sherlock Holmes.

14. The Next Movie you hope to see: Clash of the Titans

15. Your Favorite Movie: Casablanca

I am so tired of being in pain. And today is even a good day, relatively speaking. Only my right wrist is really bad today.

But, constant, chronic pain. I forget what it's like to be without it. Both ankles, both knees, my hips if I've had a few bad days with my ankles, both shoulders, and my right wrist.

I know people deal with much worse. But pain meds are doing much right now, my PT doesn't seem to be working and any time I have a "normal" day of movement I'm laid up for 2-3 days and then spend the next week or two on what I consider normal movement, which is almost none compared to a healthy person.

I'm not even 30 years old, I'm overweight, in constant pain and right now I don't see a stop to my situation. Oh...this is a bad day. Tomorrow will be better.