Dylan Griswold

“She continued, “I had an ultrasound when I was about twenty weeks pregnant, and they found the spina bifida and hydrocephalus. I saw a bunch of doctors. Every single one of them told me all the things that were wrong with my daughter. Some people told me to abort her—you know—my child. All of these doctors told me all the problems we were going to have. “Then she was born and the doctors told me about the lesion on her back and the size of her head. She was going to be taken to the Baby Hospital away from me, and she needed surgery. All I could think about was everything wrong with her and maybe I’d made a mistake keeping her. “Then Thomas came into my room. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘What a beautiful baby!’” She paused. “No one else had called her a baby.”
― Daniel Fulkerson, Nothing Good Happens at … the Baby Hospital: The Strange, Silly World of Pediatric Brain Surgery

“The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in “Apropos of Many Things”: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“Woman’s] unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude toward human beings, not only toward her own child, but every human being, which profoundly marks the woman’s personality.” … Women first learn and then teach others that human relations are authentic if they are open to accepting the other person: a person who is recognized and loved because of the dignity which comes from being a person and not from other considerations, such as usefulness, strength, intelligence, beauty, or health.20”
― Erika Bachiochi, Women, Sex and the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching

“We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater