Category: Songs of the Shining Wire

As I drove home today, I spent a while thinking about Terri Schiavo, who faces death by starvation and dehydration by court order unless either Congress or the Florida state legislature intervenes in time. A parallel sprang to mind, one that I don’t know that I’ve seen before — but it seems to me that Terri has become the new Elian Gonzalez.
Gonzalez, as most will recall, was a small boy rescued from the seas that claimed his mother as the two of them fled Fidel Castro’s oppressive regime. Since his mother died, he had no obvious guardian to make decisions for his welfare, only some extended family living in Florida. The helplessness of the little boy grabbed the nation’s imagination, and when the Cuban government demanded the return of Elian to his father in Cuba, Americans divided passionately on the subject.
One side could not imagine the government — the federal government — returning a little boy to the Communist regime and argued that the willingness of his extended family to care for him gave Elian a better chance at a good life. Others demanded that the wishes of his next of kin be honored, even if that meant Elian would grow up in poverty and oppression. People argued endlessly and accusations about the motives of all concerned flew faster than a Florida hurricane. In the end, the courts kept ruling that the next of kin’s wishes overruled the opportunity of Elian to grow up in freedom, and the Department of Justice took Elian away by force in a disgraceful show of force that embarassed everyone on all sides of the debate. The US government packed him off to Fidel shortly afterwards.
This case may not be an exact analogy, but it comes close. Terri cannot make the decision for herself, and the two families have essentially taken mutually exclusive positions. The court has weighed in to take the extreme position, the one that cannot be reversed if carried out in full, despite the existence of other family members willing to take care of her. Despite pleas for mercy and a rehearing on the factual basis of the case, as it turns out that Terri did not have the proper tests done to reach the diagnosis accepted by the court, the judge has essentially closed off the debate and appellate courts don’t usually take up findings of fact, only matters of procedure. Just as with Elian, when the government abdicated its responsibility to determine what was best in favor of the knee-jerk reaction to abide by the wishes of the next of kin, the Florida court appears ready to do the same thing with Terri.
And it will lead to an even more shameless denouement: the starvation of a helpless woman under the eyes of two parents who desperately want her to live, which may take as long as two weeks to kill her.
Perhaps it may just be me, but this sense of deja-vu became almost inescapable for me. I don’t think it’s necessary to get into the various accusations flying around about the Schiavos and the Schindlers, some of which can be found in the comments of my posts on this subject, to see that any process that ends with that kind of resolution is inherently flawed. Handing a four-year-old boy back to Fidel after his mother sacrified her life to get him out of Cuba’s nightmare may have satisfied some arcanity in the law but defied justice. Following the wishes of Terri’s next of kin may meet the Florida legal code, but starving her of food and water expressly to kill her while others beg to support her defies all reason, especially given the information we read yesterday in National Review.
Can we be this heartless … twice?
UPDATE: It’s looking poorly for Terri, as Congress stalemated on two different bills:

A brain-damaged Florida woman at the heart of a prolonged and emotional end-of-life case appeared set to have her feeding tube removed on Friday after state and federal lawmakers failed to agree on how to intervene and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.
The House late Wednesday night and the Senate on Thursday passed legislation aimed at prolonging the life of Terri Schiavo, 41, by allowing federal courts to review the case. Such cases have traditionally been the province of state courts, state legislatures and families.
The two bills were vastly different in scope and the day ended with harsh political recrimination instead of compromise on the fate of Schiavo, who has been fed through a tube since she suffered a heart attack in 1990.

I could see that result coming a mile away, as soon as the Senate dropped the House bill and concentrated of the Martinez bill instead. With the Supreme Court refusing to hear the case, the last hope will be the Florida Senate tomorrow morning.

CNN reports that a Texas court allowed doctors to override a mother’s wishes and euthanize a severely afflicted five-month-old baby from a withdrawal of medical care:

A critically ill 5-month-old was taken off life support and died Tuesday, a day after a judge cleared the way for doctors to halt care they believed to be futile. The infant’s mother had fought to keep him alive.
Sun Hudson had been diagnosed with a fatal genetic disorder called thanatophoric dysplasia, a condition characterized by a tiny chest and lungs too small to support life. He had been on a ventilator since birth.

Thanatophoric dysplasia is an unpleasant and rare form of dwarfism that occurs once in about 35,000 births in the US. CNN does not properly describe the prognosis of the disease, however. It is not always fatal, although nearly so in the neonatal stage. Usually, thanataphoric dwarves (the name is Greek for “death bearing”) only live for hours, or days at the most. Once a baby gets past the neonatal stage, survival is possible, although the child will never have hope for a normal life. The limbs usually have significant deformities and the spinal column as well.
What makes this case significant is that Sun Hudson had lived for five months, which presumably meant that he could have survived longer and perhaps even overcome some of the difficulties of his affliction, although that was a long shot. The mother clearly wanted to continue the treatment, but Texas law allows doctors to pull the plug over the objections of the next of kin by refusing treatment. Wanda Hudson had the option of moving Sun to another hospital, but all refused to accept him. The state had him put to death on the wishes of the medical establishment.
That surpasses even the Groningen Protocol, which specifically calls for parental approval before euthanizing infants. Understandably, this case has its share of difficult decisions, but it’s hard to understand how the court can overrule the wishes of the next of kin in making a determination to kill a child, simply because the doctors didn’t want to go on treating him. Something tells me that we’ve stumbled over a line here, and what’s on the other side has little purchase and a long fall. (via The Corner and CQ reader Meryl)
UPDATE: Thanks to CQ reader Mark, we have more of the story:

In what medical ethicists say is a first in the United States, a hospital acting under state law, with the concurrence of a judge, disconnected a critically ill baby from life support Tuesday over his mother’s objections.

Here’s an indication why the court may have decided to overrule the mother:

In the Hudson case, the hospital encouraged the mother to go to court and agreed to pay her lawyer after concern arose about her mental state. She said “the sun that shines in the sky,” not a man, fathered her child and would decide its fate. She repeated her belief Tuesday. … Ms. Hudson said she’d made no funeral plans and would not attend if one were held. She said her parents, who did not talk to the news media and disapproved “of my talking about the sun,” might be present.

But perhaps this may not be the last time we see a case like this:

Ms. Hudson’s lawyer, Mr. Caballero, is also involved in another Houston case, that of 68-year-old Spiro Nikolouzos, a retired electrical engineer. St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital wants to remove him from life support, but the patient’s wife, Jannette, has gone to court to force continued care.

Like Mark, this case has its arguments on both sides, but I fear a very bad precedent has been set. The next one to pay may well be Jannette Nikolouzos.

Last November, the Netherlands medical community reported that doctors occasionally practiced euthanasia on children and babies and wanted the government to codify rules and practices for doctors to use. The proposal, called the Groningen Protocol, sought to allow doctors the final choice as to when to end a child’s life, even if the parents objected (from the original AP story):

Under the Groningen protocol, if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child’s life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12.
The hospital, beyond confirming the protocol in general terms, refused to discuss its details.
“It is for very sad cases,” said a hospital spokesman, who declined to be identified. “After years of discussions, we made our own protocol to cover the small number of infants born with such severe disabilities that doctors can see they have extreme pain and no hope for life. Our estimate is that it will not be used but 10 to 15 times a year.”
A parent’s role is limited under the protocol. While experts and critics familiar with the policy said a parent’s wishes to let a child live or die naturally most likely would be considered, they note that the decision must be professional, so rests with doctors.

At the time, the Netherlands claimed that less than ten children had been put to death as a result of the practice, but the effect of their statement was more outrage. The international outcry over killing babies, rather than attempting to save lives or even allowing them to die compassionately, surprised the Dutch medical community and forced the government to postpone codifying the acceptable terms for killing children.
Now it turns out that the Dutch government didn’t tell the whole truth last year when the Groningen Protocol first came to light. The AP reports now that as many as five times the number of children killed that the Dutch initially acknowledged have been euthanized:

Euthanizing terminally ill newborns, while still very rare, is more common in the Netherlands than was believed when the startling practice was reported a few months ago — and experts say it also occurs, quietly, in other countries.
Dutch doctors estimate that at least five newborn mercy killings occur for every one reported in that country, which has allowed euthanasia for competent adults since 1985. …
Two pediatricians at the hospital, Drs. Pieter J.J. Sauer and Eduard Verhagen, report in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine that 22 mercy killings of newborns who otherwise would have lingered in intensive care for years were reported to authorities from 1997 to 2004, about three each year. But national surveys of Dutch doctors have found 15 to 20 such cases a year, out of about 200,000 births.

The problem, according to the AP, isn’t limited to the Netherlands. In fact, the French may be the worst offenders, with a whopping 73% of all physicians surveyed have euthanized at least one infant with drug overdoses, the preferred method. That’s 30 points higher than the Dutch, which still reports almost half of all physicians have killed newborns. Other countries in Europe report much smaller percentages, between 2-4%.
How can almost three-quarters of French physicians have run across that many instances of infants requiring death? Do they have a high percentage of birth defects in France? We worried about the Netherlands, but even the Dutch might be shocked at the French figures.
What this demonstrates is a shocking disregard for the sacred nature of human life and the devolution of a physician’s status from health provider to human mechanic. The soulessness of such physicians that view their patients on this materialistic basis should frighten every French patient with a chronic, debilitating illness. Certainly expectant mothers who value their unborn children’s lives might think twice about using French or Dutch obstetrician.
If this is the advanced civilization that Europe uses as an example of their prized secularization, they can have it. It seems to me that European ethics keep sliding back towards their lowest common denominator, that ghastly period of time when jackbooted thugs killed the infirm for being a drain on society. They started with the children and the chronically ill in Germany during the 1930s, too. That’s not where they stopped.

After reading your comments and e-mails from last night and this morning, I want to make a couple of points more clear. One, the reason I don’t get into the details of the Schiavo case is because, as you can see from the comments section here and the e-mail I’ve been getting, most of them are hotly disputed and not easily reconcilable. I’m taking a more philosophical approach because that’s where I’m most comfortable. Again, what this boils down to is a family dispute over both Terri’s condition now and her state of mind before she became comatose. Both sides have legitimate and valid points on these issues, and they’re further complicated by the lack of clear instructions from Terri herself.
Under these circumstances, where the parents have essentially agreed to take over primary care of Terri, I tend to sympathize more with them and on the side of life than I do with the husband and its termination. However, as a married man, I understand that spouses share intimite information such as quality-of-life decisions that they wouldn’t necessarily share with their parents. If what her husband says about Terri’s philosophy is true, bailing now and leaving her in a PVS state (if that’s truly what it is) would be a betrayal.
And so on, and so on. This is a family dispute with societal implications, but at its heart it is a family dispute with no clear resolution. I’ll pray for God’s will to be done, either way, and that he peace and justice to Terri’s family.
Second, most of the critical e-mails I have received have not been as rude as to imply that I personally was killing Terri with my silence. However, most of them asked me why I didn’t post about this topic while the past two weeks it’s been Eason Jordan Express at CQ (“Get yer fresh Eason’s Fables! Red-hot Jordans heah! Fresh posts, 24-7!”). That’s a fairer question, and it has to do with a couple of reasons why I blog in the first place.
The Schiavo case has received tremendous publicity and coverage from all media outlets, and most of that coverage has been fair and balanced, at least from my point of view. Both sides have gotten their stories told, and Terri’s parents have been able to exert enough media pressure to get the Florida legislature and government to pass legislation specifically on Terri’s behalf. While the details have been hotly disputed, at least they’ve made it into the mainstream media.
Now compare that with Eason Jordan. Here we have the chief of CNN, one of just a handful of media conglomerates who deliver that information to you, making allegations of American soldiers deliberately assassinating and torturing journalists not once, but repeatedly, and always out of earshot of Americans. The other few national/global media outlets refuse to report the story, not even when it involves two prominent American politicians. For two weeks, the only way the American public got any news (let alone details) of Jordan’s slander was through bloggers, and not just me.
Jordan’s comments not only damaged the reputation of our men and women fighting overseas, they made their jobs more dangerous, thanks to Jordan’s inflammatory rhetoric. He made these McCarthyite charges without any evidence of truth, and as the leader of CNN, that makes one wonder (especially after the Tailwind fiasco and Jordan’s own admission of selling out CNN to Saddam for access to Baghdad) whether CNN reports truthfully at any time, including on the Schiavo case.
Nor was Jordan the only issue. Where was the rest of the media while Jordan engaged in rumormongering overseas? After all, if what Jordan said was true and CNN wasn’t going to report it, why not NBC, or CBS? Don’t they exist to report news, especially when it impacts Americans? Apparently not when it comes to media management and their biases and anti-American posing for overseas dollars.
I’m more interested in stories and perspectives that don’t get the kind of exposure their competing perspectives do in the media. I don’t intend on writing much about the Michael Jackson trial, either, but that doesn’t make me insensitive to child molestation. I didn’t write a single word (that I can recall) about Scott Peterson’s trial, either, but killing a pregnant mother and an unborn child has more moral clarity and implications than either the Jackson or Schiavo cases — but all of the relevant information has already been reported, and was being repeated ad nauseam.
In the end, I write about that which both interests me and inspires me to comment, and I try to limit that to intelligent commentary with some depth, rather than simply point to a story and say, “Go read this.” In the case of Terri Schiavo, that story has not only gotten plenty of attention already, but it revolves around an almost unresolvable dispute between family members. So again, I will pray for God’s will to be done and for peace to all involved when it is fulfilled. Hopefully, this will make my position a little easier to understand.

I have received a ton of e-mail the past two days, mostly from people I don’t know, scolding me as one of the “big guns” of the blogosphere for not posting on Terri Schiavo and the plight of her family. Some have even gone so far as to imply that if she dies, her death would be my fault for not having posted about the case. I cannot tell you how rude and wrong that is, for in the first place, I am not a member of the Terri Schiavo family, and that’s where this decision belongs. Second, I blog — I am not God, and neither are the rest of you. Some people need to get a grip, for goodness’ sake.
As a Catholic, I believe in the sanctity of life, which means I naturally sympathize with the parents of Schiavo, who want nothing more than to keep their daughter alive. Under the law, however, her husband is the next of kin and has the presumption of speaking for Terri when she is unable to speak for herself. He has insisted that she doesn’t want to be kept alive while living in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Unfortunately, he has other reasons for insisting on this besides anything his wife might have told him — a bunch of money in a trust fund, for one thing, and a girlfriend as well.
Who can really know the will of Terri Schiavo? The three people closest to her tell diametrically opposed stories, and the rest of us have no clue. If it was an issue for her, she could have written a Living Will or left some sort of written instruction for the courts. I suspect that like most of us who have not been hospitalized, she simply never gave it much thought — which is another reason I tend to sympathize with the parents and on the side of life.
But that’s not really the issue, nor is Terri specifically. The issue is a society that treats its infirm and inconvenient as unnecessary burdens, weights that can simply be tossed in the trash as easily as fast-food wrappers. We abort babies by the truckload because they complicate our lives. Some of them get tossed into dumpsters after having reached birth. We execute prisoners because it’s supposedly more cost-effective to do so, even though they inevitably eat up years and years of courtroom time on almost-endless appeals. The suicidal get heroic treatment in movies and real life, with ghouls like Jack Kevorkian lauded and feted and, after getting locked up, becoming a minor celebrity cause.
When did life get so cheap? When were humans reduced to commodities?
If people want to save Terri Schiavo and others like her, that’s where we should start. We need to get a definition of life that makes sense and honors its sacred nature. If we cheapen life to simply its utilitarian value, we run the risk of losing not just one Terri but all of the Terris who struggle for life and the tender touch of their families.
Until that happens, the laws of Florida will wind up applying to Terri’s case. I suspect that the courts will honor the wishes of her legal next of kin, Michael, rather than the more reasonable position of her parents. The Florida legislature and Governor Jeb Bush have done what they could to influence that decision, but in the end it wasn’t enough.
I’m praying for Terri Schiavo and her parents. I’d encourage all of the bloggers and blogreaders to do the same, and to get people to take another look at the Groninger Protocol society we seem to be creating.
For more in-depth reporting on this, please check out Blogs for Terri (hat tip: Michelle Malkin).

Hugh Hewitt addresses the Groningen Protocol debate in his latest Weekly Standard on-line column, “Death By Committee”. Hugh has led what little media attention that Groningen Academic Hospital’s announcement of killing four babies has generated, and he marvels at the sharp outbreak of widespread apathy he sees:

Incredibly, the nation’s elite media has turned a collective blind eye to this story, though the Los Angeles Times did, on the day following the Drudge headline, find time to put on the paper’s front page, above the fold, the story that Salmon and Steelhead May Lose Protection, but not a column inch of ink for a radical leap past Kevorkian land into the regions of Mengele.
LAST WEEK I marveled at the casual manner with which the Target Corporation announced that the Salvation Army could no longer place its kettles and ring its bells outside the giant retailer’s 1,500+ stores. It was a callous and Scrooge-like act, one that I and thousands of others found sufficiently appalling as to oblige us not to shop at the store this season. I noted the irony of a retailer grown fat on Christmas gift sales tossing the charity most closely aligned with the public’s image of Christmas spirit.
How foolish to imagine that actions such as Target’s would offend greatly when protocol’s such as Groningen’s pass without comment before the eyes of editorialists and talking heads.

The reason that the Groningen Protocol fails to rouse much interest relates more to its banality than anything else. We have been killing unborn humans legally for over thirty years in the United States, sublimating any sense of value in their humanity for the expediency of casting off responsibility for them. One can argue that Roe v. Wade caused this, but to be honest, the US had moved inexorably to legalize abortion through legislation before the 1973 decision. If it were set aside today, Congress and most states would immediately ratify abortion, albeit with varying restrictions.
The lack of widespread horror following Groningen’s announcement betrays a world where human life only matters for its commercial value, not as a sacred or unique gift. Even the revelation that Groningen proposes to kill children it deems too inconvenient to live despite their parents’ wishes, up to age 12, fails to shock a world desensitized to humanity and wrapped up in its so-called secular “humanism”.
The more I consider the Groningen Protocol and the lack of any protest to it, the more pessimistic I become about the capacity for the world to recover its soul. A few days ago — in fact, the day before this story broke — I watched an excellent movie called Judgement At Nuremberg. An adaptation of a fictional play about the Nazi trials, it used the very real atrocities of forced sterilization of “undesirables” and the slaughter of those the Nazis deemed undesirable to underscore the banality of those who stood trial at the dock. Richard Widmark and Spencer Tracy portrayed Americans whose exposure to these atrocities forever changed them.
Nowadays, it’s just another story off the wire.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have not just reached a slippery slope — we have hit a greased chute, which is what depresses me more than anything else. Now that Groningen has commenced killing the undesirables and the world has answered with a shrug, we will now hear from the chorus of statists telling us that in an era of limited resources, we need to make these hard decisions for the benefit of the families involved and the greater good of society. That child who may never walk or talk will be such a burden on his family, they’ll say; the parents are too close to the situation to make an informed decision, so we’ll make it for them — for their own good, of course. And the time wasted on keeping him alive could be used to save other lives. We’ll all sound so reasonable while we march living human beings to their death, without their consent or desire, when inconvenience is their only crime.
In twenty years, most of Europe will have their own home-grown Groningers, and the ghouls here in America will scold us for not being as sophisticated as the Dutch, the French, and so on.
We’ve crossed the Rubicon, my friends. The only hope we have will be to make friends with the committee that decides our worth to society.

The Netherlands admitted today that Dutch doctors have carried out euthanasia without requests from the patients or their families. The hospital where these killings took place had requested that the government promulgate a “protocol” for killing newborns they judged doomed, and the admission formed part of the request:

A hospital in the Netherlands – the first nation to permit euthanasia – recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures, which include administering a lethal dose of sedatives.
The announcement by the Groningen Academic Hospital came amid a growing discussion in Holland on whether to legalize euthanasia on people incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives – a prospect viewed with horror by euthanasia opponents and as a natural evolution by advocates.

Unfortunately, opponents also saw it as a natural evolution, which is why they opposed allowing euthanasia in the first place. When a society loses sight of the special nature of human life by allowing the innocent to be slaughtered for the sake of expediency, the question of where to stop cannot be answered philosophically. The answer only comes at the limit of convenience.
Much has been made of the supposed “values vote” in the last American election, probably too much, as the data on which the speculation is based is too flawed for broad assumptions. However, the euthanasia debate is completely about values: the value of human life and its meaning to human society. It is one thing for a person to take their own life, or for the family of a brain-dead relative to pull life support. What makes this different is the state apparatus taking on that decision for themselves, deciding who among the citizens supposedly under their protection has no worth and eats up too many resources to go on living. It profoundly repudiates millenia of Western thought, which teaches that individual human life has a precious — the religious would say sacred — value.
Without this value at the heart of any society, when humans are valued only for their potential production and devalued for their perceived cost, the decision to end those lives deemed inconvenient to the state comes next. At first, the state limits the killing to those who cases find the broadest acceptance: unborn fetuses, terminally ill patients, and the like. After that threshold has been crossed, the next step is for someone to promulgate a protocol for the state to make the decisions about who lives and who dies. Who becomes inconvenient? The mentally retarded. The insane. The chronically ill, especially those who have incurable communicable diseases.
How long is it until we get to the Jews? Political dissidents? Those who don’t fit a particular superficial profile, like “non-Aryans”?
I thought about this question quite a bit today, and I believe the problems stems from an aggrandisement of the state. Our founding fathers’ genius was in their understanding of the potential for evil in an overly intrusive central government. When government assumes responsibility for all of the choices in individual lives — when the central government pays all of the bills for their care, for example — then they reduce individual life to a ledger amount, a profit-and-loss statement. It opens the door to the rationing of such services in order to save resources for “the greater good”. That’s when we get Groningen Protocols — and lose our souls.
I’m reminded of the old joke about the man who offers a million dollars to a woman for her sexual favors. When she assents, he pulls out a hundred-dollar bill and gives it to her. When she throws it back at him and asks, “What kind of a girl do you think I am?”, he replies, “We’ve established what kind of girl you are. Now we’re just negotiating over the price.”
The Netherlands have determined their value of human life. The debate over the Groningen Protocol is just negotiating over the price.

My good friend Haddayr Copley-Woods writes another excellent column today for the Minnesota Women’s Press, this time on events in her neighborhood and the related murders of two young people: one an innocent bystander in a gang shooting, and the other the originally intended target who was murdered months later.

Well, they finally did it. This time, the person aiming to kill Timothy Oliver, 18, got his man instead of a little girl doing homework in her living room. The paper didn’t say what many readers probably thought about the South Minneapolis shooting: “Oh—a gangster. Someone who doesn’t matter.”Certainly Brian Keith Edwards—the man who allegedly shot Oliver—believed he didn’t matter; so did Myon Burrell, the first man who tried to shoot him. In fact, Burrell thought both Oliver and Tyesha Edwards, the 11-year-old girl he shot and killed more than a year ago, were throwaway people. Even if he didn’t mean to shoot her specifically, he certainly didn’t care that his inexpertly aimed bullets might go astray.
At least one person doesn’t think Oliver is a throwaway: Tyesha’s stepfather, Leonard Winborn. “There’s another family that’s grieving,” he said, following the shooting. “There’s another family that’s going through the same things we did.”

Disturbed by the different reactions the two deaths caused her personally, as well as in the community, Haddayr writes about the understandable need to emotionally protect oneself from every terrible event that occurs, but wonders what effect that has over the long run. The constant attacks and death that seem to surround us not only desensitizes us to the fact that individual people die, but that each one leaves family and friends behind who will never stop grieving for their child, spouse, grade-school friend, regardless of the wrongs that person committed. She describes a particularly callous reaction that unfortunately is all too common:

For instance, I recently explained to a new acquaintance the havoc that a group of drug dealers has recently made at the end of my otherwise terrific block.
He looked sympathetic until I told him where I lived. Then he actually snorted. “I’ll bet they’re not the only drug dealers on the block,” he said. “You just have to expect that sort of thing over there.” The tone in his voice said: “Oh. That place. The place where the people don’t matter.”

Haddayr warned me that I might not like the politics in her column, and she does take a couple of shots at the state government with which I might disagree, but in essence her challenge is spiritual, not political, and personal rather than public. In a situation where a person is killed trying to harm another person, especially a child, my sympathies are reserved for the intended victim. But in this case, both victims were the targets of senseless violence, and even if Oliver belonged to a gang, it doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed in cold blood, nor does it mean that the people who live in the area deserve to be written off. Oliver was 18 years old and could have turned his life around; he could have worked to help others to do the same. But now we’ll never know, and his family will live the rest of their lives wondering what could have been.
As a Christian, I believe in redemption and the sanctity of life. Jesus challenged us to love our neighbors as ourselves. That doesn’t mean we excuse our neighbors or don’t protect ourselves from those who do us harm, but it does mean that we are challenged to do better than to consider other people — especially entire classes of people — as throwaways. Every life has value, at least potentially, and it’s not for us to shrug off the grief and sadness of our neighbors so callously. Leonard Winborn understands this, and we should learn what he teaches. Make sure you read Haddayr’s entire column.

Another dead baby has been found abandoned in Minnesota.
I don’t need to post the details of this poor child’s short life and tragic death, only to say that the baby only lived between one and five days and was abandoned on the shore of Lake Pepin. I don’t need to do so because the details, such as are known, are depressingly familiar: the corpse of the baby is found by strangers, abandoned as garbage, with the usual call from authorities for information about the mother so that the child can be identified and the mother treated by professionals. When the mother is found, probably a frightened teenager, she will have a heartbreaking story of fear and hopelessness that will mitigate the barbaric abandonment of her infant child. The litany has become a complete process of its own.
Impending childbirth may be the most hopeful event of our human existence. The potential of the child to make a difference in the world is bound only by imagination. No matter what circumstances into which a child is born, that child can move mountains. Think about the people who have made a difference, just in recent history, such as Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. Bill Clinton rose up from a poor and broken home to become the leader of the free world, a remarkable achievement whatever you think of his politics.
So what happens for a young person to have no hope at all when faced with an unplanned pregnancy? While the litany above seems to be the same, the mothers themselves come from different circumstances; some fear their parents, some fear abuse, some fear the future, and I can certainly understand why. Having children under the best of circumstances can be daunting. Giving birth alone and unsupported exponentially magnifies the fears. But many couples wait years to adopt babies, wanting nothing more than to provide a loving home to children whose birth parents cannot support them under their present circumstances. And Minnesota hospitals allow birth mothers to leave newborns up to three days old in their custody, no questions asked.
Why do these mothers opt to abandon the child under circumstances where death is inevitable?
I doubt that it’s a purposeful choice, but instead it’s borne out of despair, of utter hopelessness. The mothers do not think of the child as such, nor do they think of the potential joy and hope that the child represents. All they can see are the obstacles, the recriminations. In its way, it is a type of sickness, but it’s neither physical nor necessarily mental; it’s a spiritual sickness, being cursed to only see despair and death. It springs from the culture of nihilism and materialism, where life itself is irrelevant because it is essentially hopeless in and of itself. If we all end up dead anyway, what difference does this child make?
If only they understood how precious and sacred that life is, if only they could know the hope that child will represent to her family once they are over the shock — or failing that, the hope that child would represent to a childless couple who only want the chance for hope. If only they had hope for themselves, they would have hope for their children.
Find the mother, yes, certainly, and take whatever steps are necessary under the law to prevent these tragedies in the future. But in the meantime, pray for her. While you’re at it, make sure your children and others whose lives you touch understand that hope exists and that obstacles can be overcome. Tell them that whatever the circumstances, they can come to you and you will help them, putting aside judgments and recriminations until and if they are appropriate. Only death is the end of the world. Everything else is just life, and where life exists, so does hope, if you know to look for it.
Let this child be the last.