My Daily Domestic Diigolet 02/19/2008

And I have to second what Cathy suggested – let’s give some more attention to the smaller blogs. Each year the “big” blogs like “Closed Cafeteria” and professional Catholic apologists’ blogs get huge nominations and massive votes. What about the average blogger in the pews here at St. Blogs? I can think of several bloggers who deserve these awards. So let’s motivate to make some changes, and focus our spotlights on the people who do a great job in their humble ways.

And I have to second what Cathy suggested – let’s give some more attention to the smaller blogs. Each year the “big” blogs like “Closed Cafeteria” and professional Catholic apologists’ blogs get huge nominations and massive votes. What about the average blogger in the pews here at St. Blogs? I can think of several bloggers who deserve these awards. So let’s motivate to make some changes, and focus our spotlights on the people who do a great job in their humble ways.

One of the questions that I ask bloggers hitting brick walls with their blogs is how long ago they tried something completely out of the box on their blogs? What I find is that in most cases those that I ask reflect back on their last 6-12 months of blogging and realize that they’ve been stuck in a rut and doing the same sorts of posts over and over again, looking to promote their blog in the same places over and over again and really not straying far from a pattern of blogging which is proved to be unsuccessful

Another thing to do is to spend some time reading, commenting and interacting on blogs, forums and social media sites outside of your normal surfing routine.

here’s a new blog, Silent Souls for Huckabee whose contributors have been hurt by abortion, and in reparation, are speaking out for the only truly pro-life candidate left in the race.

Yet, the concept of birth certificates for stillbirth raises complicated questions. In heated Web discussions, some people cite the parents’ deep need for validation while others say birth certificates are legal documents, not memory trinkets or prizes for enduring birthing.

When people ask if she has children, she said, sometimes she mentions Emma, and sometimes she does not. But, she added, “I want to acknowledge that Emma existed.”

“The experience of giving birth and death at the exact same time is something you don’t understand unless you’ve gone through it,” Ms. Edber sai

In the last six years, 19 states, including New Jersey, have enacted laws allowing parents who have had stillbirths to get such certificates. Similar legislation is under consideration in several more, among them New York. More than 25,000 pregnancies a year end in stillbirth, generally defined as a naturally occurring, unintentional intrauterine death after more than 20 weeks of gestation. A cause for the death is usually not determined.

But some abortion rights supporters see the push for these laws as a barely disguised political move to undermine abortion rights.

“What’s going on in there to make these babies so stressed?” Anand wondered. Breaking with hospital practice, he wrangled permission to follow his patients into the O.R. “That’s when I discovered that the babies were not getting anesthesia,” he recalled recently. Infants undergoing major surgery were receiving only a paralytic to keep them still. Anand’s encounter with this practice occurred at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, but it was common almost everywhere. Doctors were convinced that newborns’ nervous systems were too immature to sense pain, and that the dangers of anesthesia exceeded any potential benefits.

Babies who were put under during an operation had lower stress-hormone levels, more stable breathing and blood-sugar readings and fewer postoperative complications.

oday, adequate pain relief for even the youngest infants is the standard of care,

New evidence, however, has persuaded him that fetuses can feel pain by 20 weeks gestation (that is, halfway through a full-term pregnancy) and possibly earlier. As Anand raised awareness about pain in infants, he is now bringing attention to what he calls “signals from the beginnings of pain.”