Perfect Baby Syndrone

Sarah and I met John and my nieces at Narita on Wednesday afternoon - which I suppose would be somewhat like driving down from Connecticut to pick them up in Virginia - and drove up to Takayama where we have been catching up on a month's worth of discussion, and sleep.... and being Elliots, naturally, reading. John keeps reading us long and stimulating passages out of Nancy Pearcey's book Total Truth.

The old cabin where we do our reflecting

But what has caught my attention this morning is short passage out of an article in a magazine article I randomly picked up this morning. (We have books and ancient magazines in nearly every room of the cabin.)

In an April 2004 article in The Weekly Standard, Gordon College professor Agnes Howard puts it this way: "Already we act as though what gives moral standing to pregnancy is the choosing of it, preferably in advance, if necessary after the fact but always the conscious determination to continue it rather than end it... To universalize genetic diagnosis is to entrench even more deeply than we already have the idea that a baby becomes a baby only when we choose to grant it that status - if and when it passes genetic muster."

It was that phrase "we act as though what gives moral standing to pregnancy is the choosing of it" or maybe the phrase "we have the idea that a baby becomes a baby only when we choose to grant it that status" that caught my attention. It fits right in with what John's been reading to us.

And it touched me deeply. I thought not of babies but of a young man whom I never knew but whose body I sat vigil over several years ago.

After an evening of drunken foolishness he lurched into the path of a speeding car with predictable results. Friends kept vigil as long as there was hope and his girlfriend never left his side - until the family gathered to say good bye. But after the good-by was said he lay alone and died alone. Even I was struck by the unconscious callousness - did his broken life really have meaning and existence only until they chose to let him go?! - but my daughter was horrified and wanted to go sit by his side (though she didn't know him) until he died. I wish now that I had helped her do that.

We are deceived indeed if we think our choice is what determines the worth of a thing.

The "Perfect Baby Syndrome" article ended: By destroying children like him; by forgetting the words of the One who said, "Whatever you did to one of the least of these you did to Me" - we may defeat certain diseases, but the price is our own moral and spiritual health.