it’s amazing how ordinary objects can become so significant to only the owner
when my aunt’s best friend passed away, my younger brother was four years old. at his funeral, my brother went up to her and gave her a nickel. he told her very solemnly that it would make her feel better. she smiled for the first time in days, and tucked it in her wallet.
when my brother was 22, his best friend passed away unexpectedly. my aunt drove three hours to be there for him at the funeral. she went up to my brother, gave him a big hug, and then gave him a nickel. it was the same nickel; she had kept it in her wallet for 18 years, and now it’s on a necklace that he never takes off.
what i’m trying to say is that the love you put into the world will always find its way back to you.
Source: ‘When a sperm and egg get together, the body creates tissue in order to support the developing pregnancy. Here are photos of that tissue from 5-9 week pregnancies. This is called the gestational sac, and it’s like the “house” for the pregnancy. Inside this sac there are cells that have the potential to become a fetus but there is no visible embryo at this stage. We rinsed off the blood and menstrual lining (decidua) for these photographs.’
The published images sparked a lot of debate, leading to the story being picked up by other news outlets. For example:
Source:‘Last week, the Guardian published images of pregnancy tissue after abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The small size and appearance of the tissue were shocking to many. We have all absorbed, knowingly and unknowingly, the pervasive anti-abortion narrative that a pregnancy resembles a tiny baby starting in the earliest weeks. Though an early embryo can be seen under the magnification of ultrasound, it can take months for it to be perceptible to the naked eye.’
Source:‘People have responded in disbelief, citing the (magnified) images they’ve seen on ultrasounds. […] ”Think of the illustrations on pregnancy and medical websites. The Mayo Clinic, one of the preeminent medical organizations in the country, shows week-by-week illustrations of embryonic and fetal development without any context of scale, like the rulers in the MYA photos.’
As stated in the article, whilst people talk about a ‘heartbeat’ at 6 weeks, there is no heart developed at this stage - only a group of cells that will become part of the heart.
Source: ‘But what exactly do we mean when we talk about a “fetal heartbeat” at six weeks of pregnancy? Although some people might picture a heart-shaped organ beating inside a fetus, this is not the case. Rather, at six weeks of pregnancy, an ultrasound can detect “a little flutter in the area that will become the future heart of the baby,” said Dr. Saima Aftab, medical director of the Fetal Care Center at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami. This flutter happens because the group of cells that will become the future “pacemaker” of the heart gain the capacity to fire electrical signals, she said.’
It should also be noted that the images show an embryo, not a fetus, until the 9th week.
Source:‘In human pregnancies, a baby-to-be isn’t considered a fetus until the 9th week after conception, or week 11 after your last menstrual period (LMP).’
The co-founders of the MYA Network responded in a New York Times article.
Source: ‘Many people, even those who support abortion rights, did not believe the photos were accurate. Some insisted we had deliberately removed the embryos before taking the photos. The images weren’t consistent with those often seen in embryological textbooks, magnified on ultrasounds or used in anti-abortion propaganda; these enlarged images are not what you see with the naked eye after an abortion. A Stanford gynecologic pathologist has validated our photos, but many people could not believe the pictures were presented unaltered.
[id: tags saying “wait wait i wanna know where they plan on using their full name, why’d you cut it off”]
answer: THEIR WEDDING.
I can’t describe to you the emotion I would feel if I was hanging out with my friend Tim and he was like “hey we’ve been friends for a while now I want to show you something,” and he hands me his driver’s license, upon which I read “Optimus Prime Jones”
so it’s a wednesday night in july and you’re at home and you’ve showered and you’ve masturbated and you’ve gnawed at the inside of your mouth and you’ve eaten and washed the dishes and fixed a corner of the fitted sheet on your bed and texted your grandmother and thought positive thoughts and still the feeling comes. what then
my favorite work memory from this store will always be “hey remember when the subway inside the store closed down and they let me take a bunch of their shit for free and now it lives inside my house?”
still insanely funny to me that ortus nigenad has canonically written 18 volumes of epic poetry about a bodyguard who was, in fact, Just Some Guy, and regularly quotes himself out loud in conversations on the regular. man had to die at the start of gtn because he was too fucking powerful to live
