7QT: March for Life and more

In which mom and I get tricked again by the March for Life. We thought we had seen the whole March and it hadn't even officially started. Doh!

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Somehow I always have trouble finding the hundreds of thousands of people gathered for the March for Life. You would expect it to be easy! But I have a true gift for not finding things.

This year I went to the March for Life with mom and it was AWESOME as usual. It's like a great big Catholic family reunion, including some family friends like the Lutherans for Life and the Eastern Orthodox.

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It wasn't too cold this year but it was really windy. Mom and I walked about a quarter of the way and prayed part of the rosary with a group of seminarians. Mom paused for a while with a group of people who had been conceived by rape and were giving an interview. It turned out to be Rebecca Kiessling's group. She was featured in Mike Huckabee's documentary "The Gift of Life" and her story thoroughly convinced me that, even in cases of rape, abortion is not acceptable.

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And it turns out that a lot of fantastic people were conceived through rape:
http://tinseltownmom.com/10-celebrities-who-were-conceived-by-rape-or-bore-a-child-out-of-rape/

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 Time lapsed video of March for Life

Anyway, for a while mom and I stood on the steps of a building to watch everyone pass. After maybe 100,000 people passed by there was a huge break and we could see police cars in the distance. We figured it was over and almost went home. But after loitering for a while we could see the big March for Life banner and flags (at about 0:42 in the time lapsed video). We realized that we hadn't even seen the main part of the March! We were probably there for about an hour more, watching the rest of the people walk by. Then we joined some teenagers toward the back and finished the March to the Supreme Court building.

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I've mentioned the secular Pro-Life groups in the past but wanted to share an excerpt from a great blog post. Of course, I don't think that there is any compelling reason for abortion but I agree with the rest.

The act of abortion itself, if done without compelling reason, is unjust treatment of the unborn. In a society that condones injustice, everyone in the society is diminished – men and women. That act is particularly harmful to the woman. It treats a fundamental female function as a disease that has to be cured surgically in order for the woman to be more like a man. When pregnant women feel they must resort to abortion for the sake of career goals, pregnant women’s genuine contributions to society are deemed insufficient to win society’s rewards, without their first employing violence against the weak. Abortion pits the woman against her child in an unequal contest. Either she must willfully deny the humanity of her child—an increasingly difficult fiction to maintain in the era of modern technology—or consciously recognize that her child is human and alive just like her, and settle their conflicting interests through might makes right. Both possibilities place a psychological burden on the woman alone.

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On a brighter note, Andy came to visit me and mom at the end of January and we went up to Noxen PA to visit Grampa and Flo for a couple of days. He just got accepted to nursing school and we're all pretty excited about that. Back in Maryland, Andy and I tried the Fractured Prune but we were a little overwhelmed by all of the flavors, kind of like the make-your-own ice cream sundays we had as kids. We decided that the french toast (or was it pancake?), which sounded the most boring, was the best. I think it had maple glaze and cinnamon and sugar.

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FYI, I did make the french onion dip and it was fantastically awesome with our Terra's Taro chips. For my birthday, we made some more dip and had some friends over for pizza! We used zucchini flatbread for crust, nightshade free red sauce, vegan cheese and turkey pepperoni. For a birthday cake, mom made me a yummy chocolate microwave mug cake.

Dairy Free French Onion Dip -- sans bacon, sub dill for rosemary, see vegan mayonnaise recipe below
Homemade Vegan Mayonnaise -- sans mustard and sweetened with two drops of stevia
Paleo Zucchini Flatbread --  squeeze out as much water as possible
Microwave Mug Cake --  with Lilly's chocolate chips

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