Two quick things

THING ONE:

After wordily discussing why I wasn't going to go on the cranberry feeding study, rampant curiosity made me go to the last of the information orientation speeches. After getting answers to some basic questions (breakfast/dinnertime can be shifted around my working hours, they don't want you to lose weight or feel hungry, and the foods on the diet include pretzels and cakes), rampant greed made me throw my hat in the ring. The compensation is the money you save on two months of groceries -- plus $1100!

Saying yes != being accepted; they're going to do a lottery of qualifying people. I may have spiked my chances by being honest (there's nothing on the food list I can't eat, but there are three things I'd have to work on choking down). So if I don't get in, eh.

If I do get in... it's amazing what I'd be willing to do to essentially earn the entire cost of ChicagoTARDIS and start the kitty for Gally. Esp. if I'll still have most of the snack foods I crave at odd moments, or sweet/salt equivalents.


THING TWO:
( 9 Chickweed Lane )

Thin Orange Line From The Other Side

This morning, I got a message pointing me at a blog called The Daddy Files. As the name suggests, it's a blog about father Aaron, his wife MJ, and his young son, and on the whole it seems to be of the "my kid did something adorable today" ilk.

Until recently, when they discovered that their second child was dying in utero, and the horrific realization that it could not, in any way, be helped. I don't like children much, but who could not be absolutely gutted by the lines Because a dad is supposed to protect his kids at all costs, yet my son or daughter is dying. What kind of daddy lets his baby die?

They decided to abort the nonviable fetus, to spare MJ more pain and physical complications of an in-utero death. This decision was not easily nor lightly made.

You KNOW what's coming next, don't you?

They had to run a gauntlet of protesters. There's no mention of escorts; it sounds like they had to thread through a group without any support, and it made her break down. Saving a baby? The "baby" was dying. Without knowing one solitary thing about her or why we were there, they inserted themselves directly into our nightmare and made it that much worse. So Aaron grabbed his cell phone camera and went out to exercise his own First Amendment rights. Several people in the comments sounded utterly shocked; frankly, it sounded like any Saturday in front of the quiet clinic to me. Sometimes boyfriends go down to talk to them; I've heard almost everything said word for word except for the bit about filming, and nobody called him Satan and said he'd burn in hell. Other than that, it could have been our clinic.

(By the way, I think it's page 3 of the comments where someone talks about one of the crisis pregnancy centers she went to that talked her out of aborting by promising her what she needed to stay off welfare - a place to stay and daycare for the baby while she worked. Only as soon as the baby was born, the person who made those promises literally could not be found, and nobody else knew anything about the arrangement. She and the infant end up in a homeless shelter.)

MJ speaks out. We were all taunted by these strangers who think they know what is best for us. How do perfect strangers know how we feel? As I entered the building I never had such hatred for those people. I wanted to go across the street and tell the ones who just yelled to me that I was killing my unborn child that it was the other way around. The baby was killing me. (We also find out the ending of the story of the video made in the previous post.)

Aaron memorializes his daughter Alexandra and decides that her brief flicker of life had meaning. Alex may never have seen the light of day, but it’s because of her I was able to shine a light on the bullying and fear-mongering being performed on “God’s behalf.”

And now that's a recurring issue on the blog. Appalling emails asking why stillbirthing a corpse months later is all that bad and his father's anti-protester article and comments on an HBO documentary about an abortion clinic and an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center across the street from each other.


This is why I do it. Because no one has the right to decide, in advance and in abstentia, what happens to women. And no woman already in trouble should have to thread the gauntlet alone.