BumpNews

Nun in Italy gives birth to baby boy she didn’t know she was carrying

Posted on January 17, 2014

This week, a nun in Italy gave birth to a baby boy, though the El Salvadoran woman told the doctors at the hospital that she had no idea she was pregnant.

The nun lives in the small city of Rieti and complained to fellow nuns at the convent where she lives that she was having stomach pains this Wednesday, January 15. An ambulance came to pick her up to take her to the hospital where she gave birth a short time later.

“I did not know I was pregnant,” the Ansa news agency quoted the nun as saying. “I only felt a stomach pain.”

Rieti’s mayor Simone Petrangeli asked the public and media to respect the woman’s privacy.

Local pastor Don Fabrizio Borrello told journalists that the nun planned to take care of the baby, who she has named Francis after the current Pope.

Well, we know there’s got to be more to this story. Was the 31-year old woman pregnant before she joined the convent? If not, someone’s got some explaining to do as nuns are supposed to follow a vow of chastity.

Or is this another case of Immaculate Conception? The movie Agnes of God also comes to mind. Sorry God. 🙁

Thoughts?

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BumpNews

Viral Nation: 3 emotional Viral stories you should know

Posted on January 9, 2014

Each week, certain local stories and videos catch national attention and go viral. Here are three viral stories that caught our eye this week we wanted to share:

Daddy blogger at DaddyDoinWork.com, Doyin Richards, posted a blog post back in October that included a photo of him baby wearing his youngest daughter, born last July 13, while doing his 2 1/2 year old daughter’s hair. The post, “I Have a Dream: That People Will View a Picture Like This and Not Think It’s a Big Deal,” Richards wrote about being a doting dad and meeting the challenge to do something moms do all the time. He wanted people to see the photo and see it as norm. It got republished on The Good Men Project and eventually landed on the pages of Yahoo! Shine. Awesome!

In a matter of hours of the photo to the story being posted on The Good Men Project, the photo went viral, quickly amassing nearly 5,000 shares, 3,000 comments, and 190,000 likes.

Sadly, some of those commenting on the story had some not-so-nice things to say: “He probably rented those kids. They don’t even look like him,” and “I would bet anything that you’re a deadbeat.”

Richards, a college graduate, and totally present father was understanding of all the emotional reaction to the photo, telling Yahoo Shine:

“The media doesn’t portray fathers as caregivers,” she said. “We’re seen as bumbling fools trying to figure out parenthood, or macho men pushing their kids into the NFL. The other issue is that there’s a stereotype that black fathers are deadbeats.”

Sad and unfortunate. I have my own photo of my husband doing our daughter’s hair. It should be a movement that we all share that photo to combat the negative deadbeats out there.

But perhaps, it’s better to focus on the thousands more that left positive comments and not bring shine to the miserable negative few.

Shine on, papa!

This hilarious Old Spice commercial is very relatable for moms to boys like myself. I spotted it on a friend’s Facebook Wall and I’ve gone back to it again and again, cracking up each time. It was only uploaded on January 3 and has gotten over 3 million views already! Hilarious!

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1”; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));

Post by Trent Shelton.

Finally, a mom shared a video of her daughter who suffers from Alopecia on the website of a motivational speaker Trent Shelton whose outreach video the little girl was watching when she learned a lesson about beauty. It got over 160,000 shares. It’s a tearjerker. Grab your tissues and watch it until the end.

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Texas’ fetus protection law requires brain dead pregnant woman stay on life support

Posted on January 9, 2014

A brain-dead Texas pregnant woman will not be removed from life support against her family’s wishes because of a state law.

After suffering a pulmonary aneurysm last November that ultimately left her brain dead, Marlise Munoz would have been permitted to die naturally per her wishes in an advanced directive. Munoz was and her husband Erick is a paramedic and are therefore well informed about last wishes.

But the Texas Advance Directives Act states, “a person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient.”

Marlise was only 19 weeks pregnant at the time and if the arguments for keeping her alive for the delivery of her baby is a hard one considering that the baby would not have been viable at 19 weeks any way. Right to life proponents may want to keep her on life support until 24 weeks when the baby would potentially be more viable outside the womb.

But there is no guarantee. Over the past 30 years, there have been 19 cases of pregnant women kept alive for the sake of the babies they were carrying, but only 2 babies survived.

“It’s our decision that we didn’t want to live in that condition,” Erick Munoz told The Washington Post in a telephone interview from his wife’s hospital room.

He added that a doctor pronounced his wife brain-dead but administrators at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas replied that she has not been officially declared brain dead and remains hospitalized with a serious condition.

“We are following the law of the state of Texas,” hospital spokeswoman J.R. Labbe said. “This is not a difficult decision for us. We are following the law.”

This case hearkens to the 2005 Terri Schiavo case where her family didn’t want her ventilator removed but Schiavo’s husband did and the very recent Jahi McMath case of a brain dead teen whose parents don’t want removed from life support though her parents were permitted to leave the hospital recently.

It’s quite the moral and ethical conundrum.

What are your thoughts?

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BumpNews

Study: Vitamin D supplements in pregnancy linked to strong baby muscles

Posted on January 5, 2014

Researchers have suggested that babies are likely to have stronger muscles if their mothers had a higher level of vitamin D in their body while they are pregnant.

In the research vitamin D levels were measured in 678 mothers in the later stages of pregnancy.

When the children were four years old, grip strength and muscle mass were measured. Results showed that the higher the levels of vitamin D in the mother, the higher the grip strength of the child, with an additional, but less pronounced association between mother’s vitamin D and child’s muscle mass.

Lead researcher Dr Nicholas Harvey, Senior Lecturer at the Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit (MRC LEU) at the University of Southampton said that these associations between maternal vitamin D and offspring muscle strength may well have consequences for later health; muscle strength peaks in young adulthood before declining in older age and low grip strength in adulthood has been associated with poor health outcomes including diabetes, falls and fractures.

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