Tiny Tim. Sent to me just now by a friend who wrote, "Be careful with this one. It describes a baby dying after a "botched" abortion. Only read it if you want to and pass it on if you think it will help another." It also has one hell of twist-ending. It is available in booklet form from the woman who was the nurse, write to this addy, "Tiny Tim," P. O. Box 84, Smiths Creek, MI 48074-0084. (P.S. if this link wants you to load some kind of font, just click cancel and it should display anyway)

Thanks for your thoughts and prayers about my father's surgery yesterday. He came through in flying colors.

An Associated Press update on next week's March for Women's Lives, formerly known as the March for Choice. Here's a rah-rah piece about the March.

Meanwhile, here we have an article detailing the plans that Silent No More has for a presence at the March, and over here we have an article from LifeNews with yet a different perspective on the event.

In Minnesota, the state government removes language from an advisory webpage/brochure suggesting a possible link between abortion and breast cancer.

Feminists can choose not to make abortion rights their top political priority.

Choice--there's that word again.

Jurors: Abortion doctor's negligence was not intentional, from KPRC-TV news in Houston.

This is the case of the young woman who sued a Houston-area abortionist because he performed an abortion on her without parental consent. She subsequently came to regret the abortion. The jury found that she was 90% responsible (because she forged a fake ID) while the doctor was 10% responsible.

Chris Rock incorporates abortion into his new stand-up. We're going to share the CD when it comes out, because we have bad taste.

I talked in the post below about how abortion often seems important to people who have already been handed a raw deal in life. It can feel like a get-out-of-jail-free card. This is especially true for women who because of the difficult, painful and hard-to-resolve scars of childhood abuse can experience the world as a jail.

I noticed this in Rose's Story at I'm Not Sorry, the webpage where women can relate their experiences of abortion and why they are glad (or at least not sorry) that they made that choice.

Rose writes:

"I have never felt anything but relief when it was over and done and thankful for the lives I did spare from being unwanted."

This implies that the world is a dark place where it is better to be dead than unwanted. Think for a moment about what kind of life experiences might lead someone to feel this way on a deep, unconscious level.

Rose then writes:

No one who is pro-life ever seems to have any idea what to do with all these "saved babies" - I haven't heard any of them offer to take them in, no questions asked, and I suspect many pro-lifers have drowned a kitten or two in their lives.

Rose's world is one where there are no kind people to take care of children, and where (apparently) kitten-drowning is so common that we must suspect that most people have drowned a kitten or two, including many pro-lifers.

Where do people get ideas like this? In my opinion, people get ideas like this when their childhood was significantly damaging and destructive. A world with less child abuse will be a world with fewer abortions, in more ways than one.

Ms Lauren at Feministe asked her readers a few days ago to comment on abortion.

My readers may remember that in January we discussed whether women's lives have improved since Roe v Wade. I don't think they have.

Some people who commented on Feministe's blog are very much of the belief that abortion is crucial to the well-being of women. It's interesting to look at the reasons given.

One person wrote:

"Without [reproductive rights] women's lives become almost unbearably difficult, especially for those women who are poor."

Especially for women who were raised in neglectful or abusive situations, the world seems dangerous and dark--to the extent that carrying an unplanned pregnancy will make our lives "almost unbearably difficult". I remember feeling this way myself.

Looking around, though, I do have to challenge the idea that women's lives were in reality almost unbearably difficult when abortion was prohibited and have now improved.

This person (a woman) goes on to immediately add:

"Men and women are going to have sex, and I can't imagine men agreeing to having penetrative intercourse only when they want to be fathers and are absolutely convinced that the woman also wants to be a mother. To be completely honest, most of the time men want to have sex and not become fathers."

This suggests that the purpose of abortion rights is to free men to have penetrative intercourse without simultaneously signing onto the possibility of fatherhood.

Since this woman started out by saying that abortion makes women's lives bearable, she may mean that abortion makes our lives bearable because it means that we can now have sex with men who want sex but not babies, and who would want us to clean up the results of some particular acts of penetrative intercourse by driving to an abortion clinic and having the baby sucked out into a dish, so a lab tech can strain it in the back room and count two tiny arms, two tiny legs and a tiny skull to make sure they got it all.

The modern empowered post-Roe v Wade woman. Life is good.

Trial begins in suit against abortion facility for teen's illegal abortion.

A young Houston woman broke down in tears as she told a jury Monday how her unborn child was aborted.

Cherise Mosley Hughes and her father, Fredrick Mosley, are suing a southwest Houston abortion center for performing the abortion in violation of Texas’ 1999 parental notification law. Under the law, parents of a teenage girl must be notified 48 hours before an abortion takes place.

"I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands."--Zora Neale Hurston

A recent story here about a coerced abortion.

The discussion thread that follows is so typical in that it almost immediately departs from reaction to or sympathy for what happened to her.

Ashli at The SICLE Cell has been blogging up a storm recently. She's got great coverage of the 15-year-old who recently bled to death in Detroit in the midst of a late-term abortion and a story from Australia where a judge determined that a girl's cerebral palsy was due not to obstetrical malpractice but to an earlier abortion of the girl's mom.

Also please note that there's been a problem with Ashli's email address. As a result, Ashli most likely never got the emails sent from people who wrote to her in response to several earlier posts (keep scrolling and read it all!) about various situations where people need support.

If you're one of those people and you didn't hear back from Ashli, now you know why. See her blog for how to proceed at this point.

When faced with the past, the strongest man cries. Annie's latest on Catholic Exchange.

After I wrote the entry below, about the regional or national scope of various post-abortion ministries, I wanted to say more about Forgiven and Set Free.

That link will take you to the ordering page for the book on Amazon.

As far as I know, there is no author or post-abortion group page devoted to "Forgiven and Set Free". However, the use of programs built around this book is actually very widespread throughout the country. Many crisis pregnancy or pregnancy resource centers use Forgiven and Set Free as the basis for their post-abortion support groups.

There are about 2000 such pregnancy resource centers around the country and these days, it is becoming more common for them to offer post-abortion help. This can mean as little as making a commitment to help women who are post-abortive by assigning a volunteer to go through a Bible study with her one-on-one, as the need arises, to having regularly scheduled groups that go through a post-abortion Bible study (such as "Forgiven and Set Free") with the help of one or more trained facilitators.

However, there is no national group that has the incentive to create a webpage describing the program and what people can expect to get out of it. If there were, and if it included a list of local agencies that offer the program, it would be a long list with national scope.

In the resources section on the left, post-abortion healing programs are grouped under "national" or "regional". This is somewhat arbitrary, based on my impression of how widespread a program is.

Hope Alive is listed as national, which is a bit of a stretch. This program is, however, available in 27 other countries.

Hope Alive recently updated and expanded their webpage, and I encourage our readers to take a look at what is happening in this group. Especially check out the link to Hope Alive of Hawaii, where you'll find some information about an upcoming international Hope Alive conference.

Transcripts in PDF format of ALL three PBA Ban Act Trials available here, plus some highlights and other stuff, esp. of interest to Catholics (letters and testimony to Congress by US Bishops, etc).

I mentioned that I've been reading In the Night Season by Richard Bausch. Last night, I came across a passage about a woman who has discovered the body of a murder victim. It reminded me of the change that unwittingly and unknowingly lies in store for many women through an abortion.

This woman has encountered the body of a man whose house she cleans once a week. His throat has been slit. He is an old, innocent and gentle black man. The scene is narrated by the police investigator who is about to interview her:

"Hello," she said. He heard a jittery energy in the voice. She was fixed, with her panic, looking from one to the other of the men and seeing only what she had stumbled onto less than an hour ago. For her, life would now be colored by this--her perceptions would continually give off the sense of the proximity of harm, and it would go on that way for months or years, and even if time dulled the edges of it, she would never really find the self she had been before. He felt a kinship with her, and he thought of all those who had suffered the world's unrecoverable shocks, including the ones who had walked into the scenes of violence and mayhem, as a group of initiated people, a growing army of the psychologically scarred.

Although my Easter baking and cooking went well, I myself fell sick about mid-day on Easter. That meant that I stayed in bed dozing off and on through Easter dinner. My mother and father came for dinner. I wonder how much longer we will enjoy the pleasure of their company on holidays? Dad is scheduled for hernia repair surgery on Wednesday. The last two times he had this surgery it was done on an out-patient basis but since the repairs did not hold, this time his doctors are doing a more extensive job and he will be in the hospital for two or three days.

My parents prefer to do almost all their socializing within the family. This means that they will rarely come over to our house for a meal or a party if there are any non-family guests.

They allowed their grandchildren to talk them into two games last night. The shouts of laughter are the reason I periodically awoke. They played the game where a story is created by having each person add a new sentence to the story, with the limitation that each person who adds a sentence is only allowed to see the immediately preceding sentence and then they played our new family favorite, "Celebrity", which I highly recommend. If I can find a webpage that describes the complicated rules, I'll post it.

Here's a good article about the expansion of post-abortion outreach in the Diocese of Peoria:

Diocese offers new help to post-abortion women, men.

Among those filling Catholic churches this weekend to celebrate Christ's resurrection will likely be many who are still carrying a heavy personal cross.

With abortions taking place at the rate of more than 1 million annually since 1973, some researchers estimate that up to 43 percent of U.S. women -- including Catholics -- have had, or will have, at least one abortion before they complete their childbearing years.

Many know that abortion is wrong even before making that choice. Others come to realize it later, perhaps after having more children, experiencing a religious reawakening, or going through other life changes. As a result, millions of women -- as well as their husbands or boyfriends, their parents, and others who may have been involved in the situation -- bear enormous guilt, shame and grief which they often do not feel free to share with anyone.

Now the Diocese of Peoria is preparing to promote and offer a weekend retreat program, known as Rachel's Vineyard, designed to help post-abortion women and men express their sorrow and receive healing.

And more, including a personal story from the retreat facilitator.