At Least My Kitchen’s Clean

I tend to be moody, morose, melodramatic. No, really. And I used to nourish that part of me, that glass-half-empty, woe-is-me, gloom-despair-and-agony-on-me personality. Your dad is sick? Mine died. Your pants are tight? Mine won’t zip. Your hair is frizzy? Uh, did you see what is rooted to my head?

That sad fog creeps in tonight, blotting out the horizon and erasing the forest, but not the trees. All I know is that my Reluctant Student has issues with sequencing, with memory, with his multiplication tables. I’m in the lull between reading books. January 2006 was the rainiest January ever here. My right pointer finger hurts. I’m retaining water and I have a cavity but no dental insurance.

See how good I am at that? I wandered through my entire adolescence in a melancholy mood. I can mope with the best of them. I know that once I start, I could end up drowning in my own bad press.

At least now I know it’s just a mood, not a fact. The rain will stop. The fog will lift. A forest lurks behind the trees.

Untitled Due to Lack of Title Supply

You might change your opinion of me when I tell you this.

I’ve never watched Law & Order. Or Dynasty. And I hate chicken wings.

So, tonight, I exercised (two months, every day, let’s hear it for commitment!) and then I went to the grocery story ostensibly to buy cat food. On the way, a car pulled out in front of me at an intersection–my light turned green and this oncoming car noticed that her light turned green, too, so she immediately turned left. If I’d been a little less observant and driving a cooler, hotter, faster car than my 1993 Mercury Sable (boring ice blue), perhaps I would have rammed into the side of her smallish vehicle. But I was paying attention. And my car meanders.

The SUV next to me, however, in the right lane, very nearly crashed into the inattentive driver’s car. We all paused in the middle of the intersection. I couldn’t go further because the erring driver’s car was in front of me. She couldn’t move out of my way because the SUV was blocking her way. The SUV wouldn’t get out of the way because he first had to roll down his window and rebuke the inattentive driver with great drama and extra finger-wagging and maybe even some harsh language. I’m just guessing.

I simply honked my horn in a “GET OUT OF THE WAY YOU IDIOT” sort of pleasant pattern. The light turned red and finally, the lecture ended and the SUV moved, so the inattentive car moved and then I moved.

I went for cat food and spent $96 because I remembered things here and there I must have. For instance, potato chips and Tostitos (Restaurant Style) for the Super Bowl on Sunday. And four avacados and french onion dip. The triumph of the Seahawks hinges on the adequate consumption of junk food in my house. I also decided hot dogs (with chili) would be an excellent meal on Super Bowl Sunday. I remembered to buy relish, too, for my husband. And chili, no beans.

I forgot the buns, though, because my formerly reliable, outstanding and exquisite memory is failing one bun at a time. I hate that. I still have supreme confidence in my abilities, but shaky performance. Kind of like my Mercury Sable. Only without the empty waterbottles on my floorboards and old Sunday School papers tucked in my pockets.

On Having a Viewpoint and a Story

My dad had been dead only a week or two. My brother slouched in the gold fake-Americana rocker and said to me, “Want to hear a family secret?” And that’s how I learned that my great-aunt was not who she seemed to be. She was really my aunt–my dad’s older sister.

Until then, here’s what I believed: My dad, the oldest child, had a younger brother and a younger sister. His mother, Jeanette, had three sisters, Aunt Petranella, Aunt Constance and Aunt Lucille. As it turned out, Aunt Lucille was actually the first child of my grandmother, Jeanette, who’d been a pregnant teenager at age 14 in 1938. Her parents raised the child as their own. My dad’s mother, Jeanette, was not Aunt Lucille’s sister, but Aunt Lucille’s mother, too.

My brother once saw my dad’s birth certificate and noticed that it indicated the mother had a previous living child. How could this be if my father was the oldest kid in his family? Now we know.

That explains why my dad was so close to his “aunt.”

Here’s another story.

Back at the beginning of 1971, a marriage was in deep doo-doo. (That’s a technical term.) The husband and his wife had three small children and money was scarce. They barely spoke to each other, yet one night things happened and the wife became pregnant.

The husband was livid and accused her of getting pregnant on purpose. She pointed out that it took two people to produce the problem they faced. She went to her obstetrician for prenatal care, but her husband refused to allow her to give birth in the hospital. Their insurance didn’t cover it and he was still furious at this development.

She checked out the only book about childbirth she could find from the library and prepared to give birth at home. One October night, she put her three kids to bed and closed herself into her bedroom where she labored throughout the night. Her husband came into the room in time to don rubber gloves, catch the baby, tie off the umbilical cord with a sterilized shoelace and cut the cord. The only existing picture from that night shows him holding a coffee cup, grinning from ear to ear, still wearing his rubber gloves.

The birth of that child changed him in a deep, fundamental way. She lit up his life and even though his marriage ended a few years later, the birth of his unexpected youngest daughter transformed him, redeemed him. It was as if he had been the one who was born that night.

He ended up with full custody of the children and spent his remaining years shoring up the family that he’d earlier eschewed.

That man was my dad. That unwanted, unplanned, inconvenient baby was my baby sister.

Here’s another story.

Way back in 1960, a preacher’s wife became pregnant by the youth pastor. Her husband was not the youth pastor, so you can see that this was problematic. What’s a woman to do when she already has five children and is pregnant by an inappropriate man, a man who is not her husband? The marriage ended, but thankfully, the life of that baby was spared. That infant grew up to be my husband. And despite the circumstances of his conception, he was loved by everyone who knew him, both his mother, his biological father and the father who took him in and raised him as the most beloved son. This is the truest picture of forgiveness and redemptive love that I know.

You see, we all have a point of view which has been colored by our personal experiences. As an adoptive mother, as a relative of more than one “unintended” people, as the daughter of parents who embraced a baby at the worst possible time, as the wife of a man who should never have been conceived, let alone born, I have a particular perspective. So do you.

We all have a story. And in light of the stories I know, I believe in good coming from bad, in hope coming from hopeless situation, in strength coming from hardship, in redemption showing up when you least expect it. You can’t argue with my stories any more than I can argue with yours. But I do know for sure that we can’t possibly know the future. What seems inevitable at this exact moment–an impossible situation, impassable obstacles, insurmountable troubles looming ahead–may turn out to be only a mirage when we get closer. You just never know.

That’s why I believe in erring on the side of life. With life comes hope. I can’t see it any other way.

I’m Pretty Boring in My Old Age

In real life, I prefer not to call attention to myself, so I am mystified by my recent post proclaiming my own birthday. What’s wrong with me? Perhaps it’s old age breaking down my inhibitions.

Yesterday morning, I took my daughter to the grocery store to buy essentials: milk, bread, cookies and $107 worth of groceries when it was all said and done. My little girl sat in the cart, so she was positioned perfectly to transfer everything to the conveyor belt. Which she did, by herself, no help from Mommy required. She wore a sundress, tights and hot-pink Converse Chuck Taylors . She looked ridiculous and charming, so much that every menopausal woman in the story smiled and tried to chat with her. (Her Royal Majesty of the Pink High-Tops wouldn’t answer a single question nor make eye contact.)

I spent my birthday afternoon getting my hair cut. My poor stylist. I said, “Okay, see? I don’t want to look like a cocker spaniel. You know what I mean? See this? Ears? No. Too much length. But no layers. I hate layers. Layers make me look like Little Orphan Annie. You know what I mean? And my bangs. I think I need more bangs. What do you think? They are thinning a little and can you fix that? I want a sort of a bob, but not too short. And not like a mushroom. The curl is natural, yes. See, how it’s weighed down and flat on my head, but like a cocker spaniel down here?” I went on for five incoherent minutes while she squinted at me and finally pulled out a book full of hairstyles. We settled on a style and at one point, they were straightening my hair, two of them at once, tugging and burning the curl out of my locks. I went home with super-straight, silky hair, in contrast to my normal Ronald McDonald bouffant.

I was home only an hour or two, long enough to cook dinner and tidy up a little. My mother came over half an hour late to watch the children. As we drove, I telephoned the restaurant–they won’t take reservations for parties of less than six people–and asked to be put on the waiting list. Good thing I used the telephone girl’s name (“Stephanie”), when we arrived because they had no trace of us on their list and the waiting time was up to an hour and a half. When I said, “Well, I talked to Stephanie,” she whirled around and said, “That’s me!”

We waited only fifteen minutes, then sat in a corner table where we could see the sky darken from gray to black before our dinners arrived. We gazed at the lit-up ferry as it slid up to the dock nearby and I said, “We need to take the kids on a ferry this summer.” Two tables were full of high school kids in formal gowns and tuxedos. I only wish we’d been right next to them so I could have eavesdropped successfully.

Dinner was excellent and my husband was in fine form, making me laugh. We really ought to go out more often.

Last night, I watched “The Beach” on DVD. I’d recently read the book and wanted to see the movie in its entirety. (I’ve seen bits of it on the Oxygen network.) I was most fascinated by the special features, specifically the director’s commentary about deleted scenes. Of course, the book was better than the movie. Books are always better than the movies.

This morning, my daughter insisted on wearing a Barbie ballerina costume to church, which I allowed. I simply dressed her in a black turtleneck and black pants and her pink Chuck Taylors. She looked endearing in a crazy sort of way. Sadly, I didn’t get a photograph. She reminded me of that guy who dressed like the tooth fairy on some television commerical. Only smaller and more adorable and with blond curls.

We napped together, she and I, for two glorious hours, during which time I had an insane dream involving Mexican guys keying my car and two baby alligators in my garage and my daughter wandering the street due to my carelessness and my husband scolding me for driving in a dangerous residential area in Houston.

When we woke, she informed me we’d be going around the block and I knew better than to argue. I pointed out that she’d have to get dressed and that it was cold and rainy. We made it only halfway around, she on her tricycle, me walking, when she decided to turn back. She parked her trike, then we started off again, splashing through puddles and veritable streams on the side of the road. It’s rained thirty-eight out of the last forty days and half our driveway is a pond large enough to cover the tops of yellow rubber boots.

Can you believe this recitation of my weekend? I feel like I should be writing it on notebook paper and turning it in for a grade to my creative writing teacher who would then ask me to please rewrite and use more interesting details and embellishments. Have you learned nothing from James Frey? she’d say.

I watched the Screen Actor’s Guild Awards tonight. My favorite moment just might be Jamie Lee Curtis stumbling and then regaining her balance while she came down the stairs. And I was pleased that “Crash” won for Best Film Ensemble. And Reese Witherspoon won, which is perfect.

Then I sobbed during the end of Grey’s Anatomy, which can mean only one thing.

I’m not menopausal yet, despite being fortysomething.

(Thank you, everyone, for the birthday greetings. I appreciate it.)

It’s My Birthday!

The rain falls today on my 41st birthday, also known as The Day the Challenger Space Shuttle Exploded and National De-Lurk on Mel’s Blog Day.

Later, after I’ve had my hair styled and blown straight, only to become frizzy again before dinner’s over, and I’ve feasted on seafood while gazing at a gray Puget Sound view, I will be back. To contemplate my journey, my recollections, my oldness.

Meanwhile, won’t you please, please, please delurk and say hello? (Pick a post–it doesn’t even have to be this one–and share your thoughts.) I know you’re out there–my handy-dandy stat counter tells me so!

And if you prefer not to delurk and wish me happy birthday? Well, then send cash.

While you’re at it, go over to Dave’s blog and wish him happy birthday, too. He was born today, too, thirty-six years ago.

Have a great day (in my honor)!

Oprah Fries Frey: More on the Fray

Oh boy, do I love the fury of Oprah–directed at someone else, of course. I think I would shrivel up and melt into a green puddle on the floor just like that wicked witch on the Wizard of Oz who was splashed with water if Oprah ever directed that grim-faced look at me.

I hardly ever watch Oprah because her show comes on at 4:00 p.m. when my house is usually full of children and I’m trying to think up and cook dinner while juggling an assortment of flaming children. Oh wait, no flames. Just kids and juggling. But today, I made a point of turning on the show to watch James Frey look at her with dead eyes and a dry mouth while she demanded to know what was truth and what was false.

Poor James Frey. I mean, sure, he lied and capitalized on his lies, but I felt sorry for him anyway, even though I like the ticked off version of Oprah. I like a person who does not tolerate nonsense. I admire that in a person.

I never read A Million Little Pieces. I probably won’t, either, now that I know it’s basically false. I read an excerpt and I found his writing style unimpressive anyway. And I have twenty dozen books stacked up to read. (I am not lying. Twenty dozen, at least. No exaggeration.)

Right now, I’m almost finished with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and although it makes me feel about as old as a Pet Rock, I like it. No, I don’t like feeling as old as a Pet Rock, but I like this book, even though I’m really really really far outside of Dave Eggers’ demographic.

In other news . . . there is no other news.

School-At-Home: Fun, Fun, Fun!

Setting: My desk
Time: 10:45 a.m.
Characters:
Middle-aged mother–(cocker-spaniel hairstyle, old blue Eddie Bauer sweatshirt, well-worn Eddie Bauer jeans, Minnetonka suede slippers, no make-up)
Pre-teen son–(reluctant student, hand-me-down Army long-sleeved t-shirt, gray sweatpants, bare feet, bed-head hairstyle)

Mother: Okay, let’s review. Who was the founder of Maryland?

Son: I can’t do this! It’s too hard! (Wail, shout, stomp.)

Mother: Cecil Calvert. Remember this: Mmmmmmm-Maryland, Cee-cee. Get it? Cee-cee, mmmmm, Cecil Calvert, Cee-cee, Mmmmm-Maryland. Okay? Now, write this down.

Son: I hate writing! I hate this! Okay, whatever! Are we almost done?

Mother: No. Now, who was the founder of Georgia?

Son, shrieking: I don’t know! Mom, I feel weird, so weird. (Begin rocking back and forth. Clutch stomach.) I can’t do this. I’m sick, my head hurts!

Mother: Remember, James Oglethorpe, see the “O” and the “G”? Oh-glethorpe? Oh and Gee. Okay? Oglethorpe. James Oglethorpe. And why did he found Georgia? Do you remember? Georgia has an “o” and a “g”, just like Oglethorpe. Get it?

Son: No! No! I can’t do this! It’s too hard!

Mother: Okay. Write it down. He founded Georgia so debtors from England had a place to go. Remember? Debtors. Write it. James O-G-L-E-T-H-O-R-P-E. Okay.

Son: I want to hurt myself! (Slaps his own face.) I’m going to stab myself with the pencil. Arrrrrrrrrg!

Mother: What about Roger Williams? Remember him? Rhode Island? Roger Williams? Both starting with “r”. Okay? Roger Williams, founded Rhode Island.

Son: (Sways side to side.) Are we almost done? I’m hungry. Hungry! I hate writing. Okay. Rhode Island.

[Continue for forty-five minutes or until the Mother blows a vein in her head and collapses on the keyboard.]
—————————————

He finished the review. I insisted he immediately take the assessment. He dictated the answers to me.

Sigh. Why was that so hard? He passed easily.

On The Middle Ages

I want to talk about having a point of view and about how we come to see the world through our own unique set of eyeglasses. But I just can’t tonight. I have sudden onset of adult attention deficit disorder which scrambled my brain like a half dozen eggs.

I can’t think straight. That’s what will happen to you if seventy-five percent of your children are ill, but only vaguely under the weather so that they merely behave like hooligans, shrieking and chasing and then whining and crying when they fall and whack their heads on the couch. And then you start to regret keeping the 7-year old home from school with his sore throat because, really, he seems fine, though sniffling and coughing from time to time, usually in the direction of a baby’s bottle.

And my cat seems ill. I need to make an appointment for her to see the vet tomorrow. I also need to make an appointment to have my mop hair cut and I want an appointment on Saturday, but I can’t make the appointment because I have some kind of mental disorder which makes me pathologically reluctant to dial the number and make an appointment for any reason, no matter how important or mundane. But my colorist is coming on Friday night and surely, surely the planets will align and my stylist (I can’t remember her name, it’s been so long) will have an appointment just for me on Saturday. At one-ish, so I will look tremendously stunning for my birthday dinner.

I’m middle-aged. This didn’t used to bother me, but then again, I didn’t used to be middle-aged. When I turned twenty-six, I was despondent, but that was because I wanted a fetus in my uterus and my uterus was uncooperative, to say the least. So, I was working at an insurance company in the correpondence department, earning a fairly decent salary, enjoying flex-time, excellent healthcare benefits, including dental and eyecare . . . and yet, I couldn’t stop crying in the bathroom because all I wanted was to be a Mom with a capital “M.” I thought all my dreams would come true if only I were parenting an impressionable infant who adored me.

And then we adopted twins who had the temerity to throw fits in my general direction and to poop on the carpet when I had my back turned and to disregard my preference for sleeping past 7 a.m. I turned out to still have issues, financial issues, identity crisis issues, loneliness issues, and bad-hair issues. I know. How can anyone be so short-sighted? But I was. I pinned all my hopes and dreams on a drooling human being who would be dependent on me for its twenty-four hour entertainment needs.

Ha.

Where was I? Oh, so when I turned twenty-six, two years after my dad died, two years into the black hole of infertility, two years into a job that bored me silly, I was a mite depressed. No other birthday has bothered me. But as I mentioned, back then I wasn’t middle-aged. And now I am.

My mother is only twenty-two years older than me, which sounds like a lot, right? Two decades and a little more . . . yet, I can remember twenty-two years ago and I’m scared because it doesn’t seem so distant. Twenty-two years ago, I was in my first year of college. I remember the weather (brittle cold, windy, trees starkly naked), the clothes I wore (a blue dress with a ruffled neckline that I constantly tugged up), the status of my hair (permed and shoulder length), the weird taste of the chocolate shakes in the Student Union. I remember my shoes (black low heels with interlocking circles of leather that were slightly too big and slipped off if I walked too fast), my friend’s braces (Wilma*joy, only seventeen and overly enthusiastic), the round moon at night whose beauty made me want to weep while I strolled back to my dorm from the library.

Twenty-two years is not that long. And my mother? She just got a cane. A cane! Her lifetime of avoiding physical exertion and neglecting her body while buying yet another pair of lime green ballet flats with matching purse has caught up with her. She winces when she walks. She unbends slowly when she stands, taking as long as a drawbridge to stretch upright.

I do not want to be her. I want to be energetic and physically fit and able to run up the stairs and stoop down to pick up a fork off the floor. I know I can’t do much about the crepepaper state of my eyelids or the age spots (age spots!)on my hands. Age is inevitable–preferable, really, when you consider the alternative–but I’m a little irritated by the physical changes which are happening without my permission. (Yes, I’m talking about you spider veins!)

I wished today that I could see myself side by side, standing next to the sixteen year old me and the twenty-five year old me. I judged myself so harshly then, measured myself against impossible standards and then berated myself for not meeting them. I’d like to apologize to the me of the past.

Now? Now I try to be gentle. I try not to criticize myself for things I cannot control. I stand up straight and welcome another birthday and I would be extremely pleased if only I could once and for all settle on a grown-up hairstyle which would take into account both my natural curls, my unruly cowlicks, my desire for straight hair and which would eliminate my default look, which we liked to call “Weary Cocker Spaniel.”

On the other hand, my grandmother is ninety-nine and if I live that long, I’m not even half-way there.

But I still need a hairstyle.

A Whole Lotta Nothing

Monday again. Well, almost Tuesday now, actually. The sun shone today, perhaps in celebration of yesterday’s Seattle Seahawks victory over the Carolina Panthers. (Sorry, MaryKay!) For once, I’ll have a reason to watch the Superbowl, other than the commercials. What’s sad is that my husband, the true Sports Fan in our house, didn’t get to watch the game at all. He preached yesterday, then had a meeting, then did a funeral, then had another meeting. I watched it in his stead, however, and thus had a messy house to clean up this morning.

But good news! We have a fancy new car in our driveway tonight.

But bad news! It’s a rental car, providing us transportion since our pathetic little 1993 Mercury Sable abruptly stopped running this afternoon while my husband drove home from a lunch meeting.

But good news! This happened in town, nor far from the church. If the car stalled on I-5, he might have been in a terrible crash. We hope it’s something simple and cheap to repair. We’re trying to hold off another year before we buy a new car. The Deathtrap (aka our 1991 Chevy Astro van) has already died. Now we just have to figure out what to do with the corpse. We’re down to one feeble car.

For the past seven minutes, my eyes have wandered this red-striped family room while I half-listen to the news and try to pin down some of the thoughts that drifted through my brain today. I usually contemplate at least one (seemingly) profound thought in the shower each morning and often watch as clouds of ideas breeze through during the day, but alas, this is a day in which my brain has been swept clean, possibly by too many cans of Diet Coke with Lime, too little sleep, too much laundry and chilly fingers and toes.

I got nothing. But have no fear! I’ll be back tomorrow.

Sanctity of Human Life Sunday

[Disclaimer: This is one of my rare politically charged posts. Please skip this is my anti-abortion stance will cause your brain to explode and/or make you want to slap me for being insensitive. I have a point of view and sometimes, I throw caution to the wind and express it. You are free to express your opposing point of view, too, of course, but please, be gentle.]

I clipped this newspaper article by George Will last April. Mr. Will cites the case of a fetus in Britain who was aborted at 28 weeks gestation because it was prenatally diagnosed with a cleft lip and palate. Apparently, this fit the British law that abortion is permitted only when “there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.”

I wonder what Bobby Martin, a boy who was born without arms or legs, but who ended up playing high school football (and appearing on Oprah) would think about that? What is his parents took a look at an ultrasound picture and gasped, “Oh no! We don’t want a boy without limbs.”

No one would blame them. Right? Why bring a child into the world only to suffer?

The case I saw on television the other night would certainly fit the criteria for abortion in Britain. The doctors can’t even diagnose this child, a now-twelve year old girl who hasn’t grown beyond the physical size and mental capacity of a six-month old baby. What purpose does such a life serve? Wouldn’t she (and her long-suffering family) be better off if she hadn’t been born?

Then I turned the channel and saw the amazing story of these children and young adults who communicate almost entirely through music. Though their cognitive and communicative skills are impaired, they all display an amazing aptitude and passion for music, specifically the piano. These children with different abilities face difficulties in their lives most of us cannot even imagine. Would we choose to let them live, if the choice were ours to make?

Not all women take advantage of prenatal testing. What happens when a devastatingly imperfect baby is born? Well, in the Netherlands (land of my ancestry, I might point out) “the Groningen Protocol, as the hospital’s guidelines have come to be known, would create a legal framework for permitting doctors to actively end the life of newborns deemed to be in similar pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities.”

Child euthanasia remains illegal everywhere else. Unless, of course, the child is still a fetus, in which case, in the United States, abortion laws which essentially allow abortion at any time. Did you know that “U.S. abortion law, in terms of how late an abortion may take place, is far more permissive than that of other nations such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, for example.”?

The Associated Press article by Linda A. Johnson published on March 10, 2005, concludes, “Experts said the Dutch report [of newborn “mercy killings”] will generate discussion but won’t change American opinion or practices.”

I’m sure that’s true. After all, almost ninety-two percent of American abortions aren’t done because a baby is imperfect. They are done for the following reasons:

25.5% Want to postpone childbearing
21.3% Cannot afford a baby
14.1% Has relationship problem or partner does not want pregnancy
12.2% Too young; parent(s) or other(s) object to pregnancy
10.8% Having a child will disrupt education or job
7.9% Want no (more) children

Not because the fetus has no arms and legs. Not because the fetus is missing a chromosome or has an extra one. Not because the fetus is doomed to die of a birth defect at birth anyway. Not even because the mother’s life is in danger.

No. Most abortions are done because of convenience, not the “health” and “life” of the mother, but for her convenience. While our laws bend over backwards to give women the right to abort a baby which might endanger her life–you know the rhetoric, the heart-tugging stories–almost a million conceived human beings are aborted per year. Dramatic stories (like the boy with no arms and legs and his triumph in life) are matched by dramatic stories of women in terrible, disturbing, horrific circumstances. And I’ll agree that there are ethically challenging cases where difficult choices must be made.

But most unborn human beings are simply obliterated for other reasons. Ninety-two percent of aborted fetuses, gone. Over thirty-three million human beings since abortion was legalized.

And if you are a black fetus in America, you have an even higher chance of being aborted before birth. “In the 41 areas for which race was adequately reported, approximately 55% of women who obtained legal induced abortions were known to be white, 35% were black, and 7% were of other races; for 3% of the women, race was unknown. The abortion ratio for black women (503 per 1,000 live births) was 3.0 times the ratio for white women (167 per 1,000 live births). Additionally, the abortion ratio for women of other races (329 per 1,000 live births) was 2.0 times the ratio for white women. The abortion rate for black women (30 per 1,000 women) was 3.1 times the rate for white women (10 per 1,000 women), whereas the abortion rate for women of other races (22 per 1,000 women) was 2.2 times the rate for white women.”

Only 12.9% of our population is black, yet 35% of the women who obtained abortions in 2000 were black.

Why isn’t Ray Nagin outraged by that? Where is Kanye West’s outcry?

Thirty-three years ago, abortion became legal in the United States. Happy anniversary. Aren’t we all so much happier now?

[Check out Barbara Curtis’ post on this topic over at Mommylife. She’s the mother of 12, including childen with Down Syndrome, and a former abortion-rights crusader.

[Edited to remove reference to Ann Coulter from the post, but you can check out her radical viewpoint here.] I hate for the point of my post to be lost in the distaste many have for Ann Coulter.]