september 14, 2008
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things from my LJ:

Everywhere I look, especially now since down syndrome is
getting more media attention because of Sarah Palin, I see
stories about families with children with DS that are
sometimes positive but almost always tempered with how
heartbreaking, heartwrenching, lonely, sad and difficult
having a child with down syndrome is. How the costs are
huge with all the medical bills and therapies are. What
what a horrible struggle it is for inclusion, etc.
When I read these things over and over again I think no
wonder so many women are aborting. The fear mongering is
incredible and I believe there is a media bias to want to
tell the worst stories (or at least sad in some way) they
can find. It makes for more dramatic reading.

I know that there are other families out there, like mine,
who are NOT having a hard time of it. Who are having a
relatively easy time with no struggle. I know I am not
alone when I say it is a joy to raise my child with down
syndrome and we do not feel lonely and our hearts are not
breaking. We are not struggling with the system either. We
are not always fighting for inclusion and our lives are not
revolving around therapies.

Maybe we are in the minority but I think our stories are
just as valid and need to be heard.
For this reason, I am asking that if anyone has their story
to share with me, please write it up and email it to me at:
anavoog@gmail.com
I am going to make a webpage for this to balance out all
the negativity I see in the media about our children and
our lives.
With this 90% abortion rate, something has got to give!
Enough!
So please, forward this message to people you know to get the word out that I am compiling these stories.

and to any down syndrome lists/forums and support groups you may go to in your community.

I am going to put my all into this!

Thank you for your help :)

---Ana Voog

++++

Sep. 13th, 2008 | 10:45 am

in a few days, i'll be 18 weeks pregnant

supposedly it measures around 6" from the top of it's head to it's butt :)
my uterus feels about the size of a small melon or very large grapefruit about 1 finger size below my belly button now.

i was trying to order an ultrasound yesterday but i guess they need my midwife to order one for me.
i think that is ridiculous.
i should be able to order an ultrasound myself!
i'm aggravated at the medical establishment for not letting me be in charge of my own pregnancy on this.
how insulting.

i'm still pretty nauseated some days but i'd say it's maybe about 20% better than it has been.

i haven't been eating as much protein as i should. i supposed to eat at least 70 grams a day and i'm lucky if i can get to 40.
i've also been really slack on the prenatal vitamins.
i need to force myself to take those more.

i've gained around 7 pounds.

i was comparing photos of my belly when i was 18 weeks pregnant last time and this time around i look like i did when i was about 22 weeks pregnant.
but i also weighed 10 more pounds more than i did last time at the start of it all.

i haven't felt the baby move ever since those few times around 12 weeks.
i really hope i feel it soon!

we sometimes call this one "buhtoo" (buh #2) since the last one when we didn't know her sex was "matoog" (matthew + voog)

i seem to have developed carpal tunnel syndrome in my left wrist. it's a both a sharp and dull kind of pain that has been going on for weeks now.
i've read that you can get this when pregnant. i don't do any repetitive movemment with my left hand.
i've tried so much to make it better, tylenol, hot compress, cold compress, putting an ace bandage in it. nothing helps much.
if this goes on for another 5 months i am going to be upset because it makes it hard to fall asleep because of the throbbing pain.

in happier news i'm going to this tonight:
http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2008/09/11/3479/something_extraordinary_happened_in_a_minnesota_quarry_last_night

john cage's music and merce cunningham's dance in a rock quarry!
i'm psyched and i desperately need the mental stimulation.

+++

sicko
Sep. 11th, 2008 | 12:00 pm

i finally saw sicko.
wow.
it's his best film, imo.
devastating and brutal.

please see it if you haven't yet.
every american should see that film, ASAP.

+++

the palin fetish
Sep. 10th, 2008 | 02:40 pm

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index.html

camille paglia, so called revolutionary feminist, brings the point home why palin is so dangerous.
because even people like camille, who pride themselves on being edgy free thinkers, are so quickly and easily bamboozled by palin's easy "projectability".

by this i mean, because we know virtually nothing about palin, and because of the way she looks, she is the perfect screen to project our wishes and desires on.
over and over i read "i like palin because she reminds me of....
insert:

1. my hardworking grandmother
2. my feisty next door neighbour
3. my loud talking but loveable aunt
4. a pioneer woman
5. annie oakley
6. a domanatrix librarian who is going to spank your naughty self
7. a VPILF *vomit*
8. a *insert animal or man suffiently feisty* (pitbull, pig, reagan) with lipstick or high heels
9. or the worst and BEST one "she's just like ME!"

etc etc ad nauseum

for camille and others, palin is the perfect nobody/everybody fodder for her to project her wet dream:

"Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls. Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"
Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism...."

weee ha! *wank wank wank*

here's another of her wet dreams:

"Here's another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto's Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:

Abigail Becker
Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830:
A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else. "

wee ha!
annie oakley get yer guns out!

seriously? this is rational thinking???
this is cutting edge feminism?

who cares that she doesn't agree with her policies.
who cares that palin would like to force women to carry the fetus of their rapists and pay for their own rape kits!
palin makes me live out my pioneer fantasy! i wanna get my gun out and drill baby drill!

just being from alaska doesn't make you a frontier woman.
and just having a vagina and being able to shoot with the boys doesn't make you a feminist.
palin not bourgeois? LOL. get real.

IN SHORT:
CAMILLE IS FETISHIZING PALIN

so much for cutting edge feminism. *yawn*
no wonder rush limbaugh loves her.

camille needs to come out of her white priviledged female world of academia fantasy land and get real.
"staying in touch with the mainstream of american life" involves more than saying "i frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil)."

how embarrassing.

the entire article is embarrassing.
i've only scratched the surface of it.

+++

lovely academia
Sep. 6th, 2008 | 12:41 pm
mood: indescribable

a conference called Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy is being held:

http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/cdconference/

they have a speaker named peter singer whose view is this:

"the main point is clear: killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."

(this quote taken from his essay here:
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1993----.htm )

what a conflicted human being:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

from the conference site:

"...What then should we say about those with severe cognitive
disabilities? How should we treat these individuals and what sorts of
entitlements can they claim? Should we grant the arguments of some
philosophers who want to parse our moral universe in ways that depend on
degrees of cognitive capacity, not on being human? How do claims for the
moral consideration of animals bear on the question? Is it morally
acceptable to consign some human beings to the status of "non-persons"?
Philosophers have rarely faced these questions squarely and
systematically."

i'm so glad the big thinkers of the world are getting together for a scholarly discussion whether or not my daughter is a nonperson or can be equated to a hamster :/

it's time for me and my family to move to a new planet, i think

+++

Disability, Parental Martyrdom, and Reproductive Choice
Sep. 4th, 2008 | 01:28 pm

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/09/disability-parental-martyrdom-and.html

Ableism, like other systems of oppression, has overt expressions and covert expressions. The media spotlight on Governor Sarah Palin's young son Trig, who has Down syndrome, is bringing both types of ableism out of the woodworks. It's easy to see prejudice at work when people criticize Palin for not aborting a fetus known to have a disability; the idea that anyone has a responsibility to the citizens of the world not to have a disabled child is clearly based on the idea that disability is a monstrosity to be eliminated rather than a morally neutral variation of human experience.

What may be less easy to see is that praise for Palin's decision to "keep" a fetus with a disability is often based on the exact same premise. The anti-choice adulation that Palin's choice has inspired clearly reflects the same eliminationist assumption that people with disabilities are inherently Other, that they are symbols rather than people.

If you haven't noticed this meme yet, that's probably because the Bristol Palin story overshadowed it rather quickly. But here's a quote from the NYT article about McCain's decision to run with Palin:

"Ms. Palin is known to conservatives for opting not to have an abortion after learning that the child she was carrying, her youngest, had Down syndrome. "It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important that is to the conservative faith community," Mr. Reed [i.e., Ralph Reed, formerly of the Christian Coalition] said."

Here's an example of the kind of reaction Reed is talking about: a WorldNetDaily article (warning: actual WND link) from May (after Trig was born) is headlined:

"GOOD NEWS!

Mom rejects abortion after Down syndrome diagnosis

Praise for governor: 'May God give America more women like her'"

Check out that phrasing: It's not "Governor gives birth to child who happens to have Down syndrome," it's "Mom rejects abortion." To me this reveals two things about this reaction: 1) people who give this kind of praise don't give a shit about the actual kid that gets born, only about the avoided imaginary abortion, and 2) that even anti-choice hardliners expect that fetuses with known disabilities will be aborted.

The truth is, the headline "Mom rejects abortion" could run after every single birth announcement of every woman in America. It's only news when the child that is born is known to have a disability. The narrative that paints Palin's choice as a kind of "pro-life" martyrdom depends on the idea that Trig is only significant because of his disability, which in itself is only significant as a tragedy that shows how saintly "pro-life" Palin is. Palin is SO "pro-life" that she would EVEN keep a baby with Down syndrome is the thinking here. She's extra "pro-life"!

This is a kind of parental version of what in disability studies is known as the trope of the Supercrip—the person with a disability who heroically "overcomes" his or her disability to teach all able-bodied people about the triumph of the human spirit. When parents of people with disabilities are treated as heroes or saints, they are implicitly told that their disabled children are a terrible burden that must be overcome or endured, an instant ticket to martyrdom.

Like Shark-fu, I have an older brother with cognitive disabilities. He lives in a group home now, and it takes a staff of aides, nurses, cooks, and drivers to provide the basic care that my mom and stepdad provided until he was in his mid-20s.

I don't know what my mom's life would have been like if she never had a disabled child. Maybe my parents wouldn't have gotten divorced; maybe my mom would have gone back to work instead of staying home. I don't know. But I do know that she would have had more free time, fewer hospital visits, and a lot less prejudiced nonsense directed against her every parental decision. (When my brother was born in 1974, my parents were told, by doctors, that he would be a "vegetable.")

You have no idea how pernicious the tropes of disability prejudice are until you hear them from your own loving grandparents. I vividly remember my grandfather once telling me my brother was an "angel"—another familiar way to other people with cognitive disabilities—and my grandmother rebutting him by saying, more or less, that my brother had ruined my mother's life. Each of them then appealed to me to affirm their respective ableist paradigms: Was my brother a magical angel sent to teach us all a lesson about sweetness, or was he a terrible burden whose life severely tested those of his loved ones? My grandparents loved us to death, y'all. I'm telling this story to illustrate how fundamentally ableism shapes our way of talking about parenting and disability.

So when CNN anchors say that the "unfortunate" birth of Trig Palin will endear his mom to right-wing voters, or when anti-choice commentators disingenuosly praise the difficult choice that Sarah Palin made to carry her fetus to term, I see the same old bullshit. Choices are not made in a vacuum. We don't know the reasons Sarah Palin made the choice that she did; we don't know that it's because she's any more or less susceptible to the systemic ableism of our culture. Despite the media attempts to claim her as a "pro-life" poster girl and Trig Palin as the aversion of one fake tragedy (abortion) and the embodiment of another (disability), we should recognize the situation for what it is. Sarah Palin is not a hero for having a child with a disability; she's a woman who exercised her reproductive choice.

+++

sexism...over and over and over....
Sep. 3rd, 2008 | 11:08 am

Are women ready to support Palin? is a top headline on CNN.com right now.
it really irks me when i see things like this over and over again, as if women all vote together in some sort of herd mentality.
would we ever EVER see a headline that said "are men ready to support mccain"?
no, i don't think so.

FUCK THIS NOISE.

this is a very good blog here:
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/

that has a "sexism watch" going on for women in politics, regardless of political party.
i highly recommend you read it and see how ingrained sexism is in our culture.

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-sexism-watch-6.html

read this read this read this!