The Land of Ozz

I had my eye on Fred Thompson at first, but my wife and I ended up giving our votes to Huckabee in the SC primary due to what appeared to be a lack of motivation on Thompson’s part. Duncan Hunter was the first choice for me based solely on my answers to an online survey. If supporters of Thompson and Hunter were following them for their core conservative values, then those supporters should easily shun the remaining republicats and follow Huckabee now that he is the only real conservative in the race. Here are my two cents on each of the remaining GOP candidates:

Huckabee - The only true conservative left. Mike Huckabee is most likely of the remaining candidates to stand up for core family values and nominate conservative judges who will uphold the constitution. Nominating judges is one of the most important and longest lasting reason to choose a person for president in my opinion. The only real negative things he has going against him are the cheesy campaign ads with Chuck Norris and the notion that Mexicans don’t know how to climb fences.

And now for the Republicrats:

McCain - He is one of the most likely REP senators to side with Ted Kennedy on anything and that is more than a little scary. What he has going for him is war hero status and name recognition due to past presidential race experience. I could stomach voting for him in the general election if he could get on the right side of gun control and tax cuts. I actually like him better than any of the rest when it comes to immigration even though I think that immigration should not even be an issue in the race.

Romney - Not far enough removed from pro choice stance prior to entering this race. Seems a little convenient of a switch if you ask me. How is it anyway that his religious convictions will cause him to abstain from alcohol and smoking but leave him to support abortion? (source) And another thing, how exactly did he single handedly turn around dozens (the numbers were stated as high as 100s) of companies in one lifetime? He didn’t. He was CEO of a venture capital / consulting firm that did the work. Never mind that this is a race for president and not CFO of the USA.

Giuliani - Gun control, LIFE of unborn children, marriage protection. Need I say more?

Pon Raul - Who? Anti-war stance sounds like it came right out of the last DEM debate.

The hype on this story has settled in the mainstream media, but it has not left my mind in the past week. I am as knowledgeable as a man can be on abortion without being a physician. I wrote about my history and my personal position on abortion a little over a year ago.

My wife is now approximately 23 weeks pregnant with our third child. She is at about the same place in this pregnancy as she was when we learned about or son Caden’s life threatening heart defects. The heart defects (four of them) were so prominent that an amniocentesis has highly encouraged. I wrote about this experience in the draft for a book that I have been working on.

An amniocentesis is a procedure where they use a very large needle to collect fluid from the area around the baby. This fluid can be used to determine if the baby has a chromosome abnormality. We had but one question, “what is the benefit of gathering this information?” The answer was long and consisted of a lot of beating around the bush. Finally, the answer we got was that the amniocentesis results would empower us with information to help us make a “choice” on what to do next. We determined that what they really meant was that they wanted to know if we were interested in terminating the pregnancy.

Obviously we chose to move forward with the pregnancy. It is my understanding that many parents choose to end the life of their child if defects like these are found and often the decision is made as a result of pressure put on them by the prenatal clinics to consider the termination.

I really did not understand what a partial birth abortion was until a little over a week ago. What makes me sick to my stomach is that my wife and I were highly encouraged to consider our “options” in regards to her pregnancy with Caden. A choice to terminate at that late point in the pregnancy would have resulted in what I now understand to be a partial birth abortion.

Before you follow the links I am about to give you I want to give a firm WARNING that the information you will see and read is very graphic and it is very disturbing. It is all truth and I believe every parent who is considering an abortion should be required to see or read something like this at a minimum. La Shawn Barber has brought together a couple of the best posts on this subject that I have seen. The first post is titled ‘Intact’ Infanticide [WARNING, this is a very graphic description of late term abortion as witnessed by a nurse]. The other post provides a graphical representation of the procedure and is titled Supreme Court Upholds Ban On Partial Birth Abortion[Visual WARNING]. La Shawn has been one of the most faithful bloggers in producing dozens of sobering reports on abortion in a category she has named “child killing”.

It grieves me to think that children’s lives could be taken in this way. What grieves almost as much is the number of U.S. citizens who are sitting on the edge of the seat to cast a vote for a presidential candidate who criticizes the most recent Supreme Court Decision to stop partial birth abortions.

The Senator Hillary Clinton’s Response:

“This decision marks a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman’s right to choose and recognized the importance of women’s health…”Source

From the Senator Barack Obama Camp.

“I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women…” Source

Did they get together for lunch to come up with matching opening sentences that read like they are in stereo surround sound?

Well Senators Obama and Clinton, our experience and many others is that many of the folks recommending this procedure have little if any concern for the woman’s health. The folks giving us the option to bow out of a late term pregnacy simply wanted us to consider reversing a CHOICE we made at conception.

A few months ago I was contacted by the founder of a great outreach project for those parents who face a difficult prenatal diagnosis like we faced with Caden. I almost forgot about this until Mrs. Ozz reminded as we were discussing this subject this past week. Please visit this site and pass it along to any parents who may be getting pressure to terminate a pregnacy as a result of prenatal screenings or tests.

BeNotAfraid.net

“Benotafraid.net is an online outreach to parents who have received a poor or difficult prenatal diagnosis. The family stories, articles, and links within this site are presented as a resource for those who may have been asked to choose between terminating a pregnancy or continuing on despite the diagnosis. The benotafraid.net families faced the same decision and chose not to terminate. By sharing our experiences, we hope to offer encouragement to those who may be afraid to continue on. “

Check out other ProLifeBlogs.

I want to start with a promise that this posting is not going to be a repeat of anything you will read on another blog after the fist few sentences. It’s about time that I dedicated a post to this subject. What better time to do it. Tomorrow will be the 33rd anniversary for Roe V. Wade. I want to offer a big thanks to La Shawn Barber for the link and great post today titled Blogs4Life/March for Life.

I write this post as a man with first hand experience on the subject of abortion. I have witnessed more than one abortion first hand, meaning I was in the room with a friend or girlfriend when they got an abortion. I want to make it perfectly clear that these abortions were performed on women before I even met my wife. I will not go any further in explaining the details to maintain the privacy and dignity of those women who were involved. I shared this because I want you to understand that I speak on this subject from a position of experience.

I look back on what I was a part of and regret it deeply. I wish I could go back and have a chance to do things different. So where does that leave me? It left me in a position of confessing and repenting of my sins before God. I have been forgiven God and I have repented. One definition of repent says, “To feel such regret for past conduct as to change one’s mind regarding it” according to Dictionary.com. I like this definition because it clearly states what I have done. I felt such regret for past conduct that I have changed my mind on abortion. Obviously I once believed that abortion was just another form of birth control.

Let me tell you a story about where I am today now that you know where I come from on the subject of abortion. It was less than 20 weeks into my wife’s pregnancy with our second child that we got some disturbing news. A standard ultrasound found some abnormalities that warranted a level II ultrasound. My wife’s doctor at that time wanted her to go immediately for the level two ultrasound, but I had to leave later that day for a ten day trip to California. We went for the level II ultrasound as soon as I got back into town. That doctor’s visit was where we learned that our baby was going to be born with a very rare heart defect. They found on the ultrasound that his aorta was plumbed up wrong to his heart (interrupted aortic arch) in addition to having an enormous hole between the ventricles called a Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD). The findings were confirmed in a pediatric cardiology lab at the local medical university a few hours later where they performed a fetal echo cardiogram. That was not the end of the findings with his heart, but that really has no bearing on this story. The emotions were absolutely overwhelming as we prepared to leave the room where the echo cardiogram had been performed. I will share with you a very small part of the manuscript of a book I am writing about our experiences.

The whole thing had really not sunk in for me just yet. The staff realized that we were near a state of shock. They told us to sit as long as we needed before leaving. They offered contact information for us to call with any questions that we had after we got home. They scheduled follow-up appointments for Sherry to have the echo cardiograms throughout the remainder of the pregnancy to see if the defect had progressed in either direction. We finished our talk with the doctor and prepared to leave.
A nice lady from their office escorted us to the elevator. What happened next still gives me chills to this day. I started to have trouble breathing. My knees felt as if they were about to come out from under me. I grabbed the wall and asked if there was somewhere I could sit down. The lady walking with us immediately helped me into the nearest room. I sat down and began to sob uncontrollably. Sherry comforted me as she cried. I cried and gasped for air for a while. It seemed that nothing could stop it. The reality of the day’s events had finally caught up with me.

I would guess that you are saying that this is a really emotional story, but what does it have to do with abortion? Well, this is where abortion comes back into the picture. It was made very clear to us that we should come back to the clinic where the level II ultrasound was performed before we went home that day. My wife and I did go back, but we did not know why it was so important. You may have guessed by now. The staff in the clinic wanted to make sure that they offered us an opportunity to get an amniocentesis. We were puzzled as to why an amniocentesis was so important. My wife ended up asking straight up, “What is the big deal with getting an amnio as soon as possible?” Well it turned out that with my wife being at approximately 22 weeks pregnant was on the edge of some threshold for getting an abortion if we chose to “not proceed with this pregnancy”.

If you are curious as to what a baby looks like at 20 weeks in the womb then you will find it in the picture on the right. This picture is from the Option Line which I will talk more about later. I could not put my hands on our ultrasound picture from that day, but it looks very similar only without the color.

The staff in the OB clinic was pretty adamant about presenting this option to us because a rare heart defect like this one could be linked to something genetic that could end up taking the child’s life shortly after the delivery anyway. One big problem for my wife was that she is deathly afraid of needles and she told them so. They made it clear that we had options with or without the amniocentesis. It didn’t take long in this conversation for both of us to say in stereo, “There is nothing a lab test is going to tell us that will change our mind on proceeding with this pregnancy.” Unfortunately that was not the end of the push for an amnio. My wife finally had to request that it be written in big letters on the front of her chart, “Do not offer this patient an amnio again!” Needless to say, she was not offered another amniocentesis during regular office visits.

The pregnancy did eventually have some complications that required an amnio fluid draw. This is where the doctors drew off more than two liters of fluid form around the baby in the last two weeks before he was born. We requested at that point to have the fluid checked since they were drawing it anyway. The test did find a micro deletion of the 22nd chromosome called 22q11.2 which is not a genetic condition not normally associated with death of a newborn.

The follow up to this portion of the story is now a blog called Caden’s Page. I officially started Caden’s Page on the day of Caden’s birth which was Election Day 2004. We chose the name Caden because of its meaning “Fighter”. His middle name was chosen to be Gabriel meaning “God is my Strength”. We could not have picked a more appropriate names for this little boy.

The moral of this story is that an abortion in our case would have robbed the world of a wonderful person. Caden is now 14 months old an absolute joy. He is smart, energetic, and he has a personality that will melt your heart.

I believe that the reality of what an abortion means does not sink in for most people who go through with it. Many are like I was when I was younger. I had never seen an ultrasound. I had no clue what a 12 or 15 week old fetus looked like. I just could not picture the fact that this was a little human being inside these women’s bodies. Then I got married. I went to be at my wife’s side for every OB/GYN visit during the pregnancies of our two boys. I got to see what they looked like at different stages of the pregnancy. I believe that if more people were able to visualize the life that they were about to take, then they would make a different decision. I feel that this is a key starting point to reducing the number of abortions in this country.

There are groups out there who are working to get ultrasound machines in clinics where people go for abortion counseling. There are some great resources on the Focus on the Family web site. The Focus on the Family site links to a great site called Option Line. The Option Line site offers guidance on where to go to get pregnancy counseling. The link earlier in this post points to a page with some great pictures of babies at different stages of a pregnancy.

I am signing up tonight to become an official member of the Pro-Life Blogs. If you are a pro-life bloggger then I recommend that you let people know it. If you are pro-choice, then we have something in common. I am pro-choice as well. I believe that every couple should have the “choice” on whether to engage in sexual relations. Once a couple conceives they have pasted to point of choice as it relates to the life or death of the child.

Anyone who exercises their pro-choice rights to have sex are in fact choosing to become pro-life!

This is one of the many: