I read through this whole thread and not one of you mentioned Swift?
ZPG Zealot, your name certainly suits you. Your fanaticism is as extreme as the ultra-environmentalist who believes that to save the planet we should just kill off people. Or the right wing wackos who think the best way to stop the spread of AIDS is to kill gays.
But, why limit your resource wasting to infants. Why not just advocate eugenics for people who are less productive? Mental or physical handicap? Kill ‘em because they will cost extra to care for. Born to someone on welfare? Smother them before they become a burden to society. Stephen Hawking should have been left to die. FDR should never have been made president. You say a child born into salvery should be killed. Then where would we be without Sojourner Truth? And we definitely wouldn’t have Helen Keller jokes today!
Where do you stop? My wife is diabetic and has been on medical disability for 7 years with an open abdominal wound that has not properly healed after almost 40 surgeries. Should she be knocked off because she uses valuable medical resources that a “healthy” person needs so they can continue working and “producing” for society? My son contracted pertussis (whooping cough) because some nitwit believed the crap about vaccines causing autism. As a result he almost died, was hospitalized for a month and is now asthmatic. Should we have just let him choke to death because he required extra assistance?
Who makes the call on a person’s worth, whether it is in the womb, immediately after birth or when the person is 100 years old? Is it you, ZPG Zealot? What gives you the right to make a judgment on the amount of resources a baby uses and what they might give back when they grow up? Personally I would rather have 100 brand new babies with 100 chances for success than 1 miserable person who only looks at the dark side of life.
Let me give you a little background: my wife and I wanted children because we loved each other so much and wanted to share it with our kids. We believed the world was a beautiful place, people were basically good and we wanted to add to society (those weren’t our exact thought processes at the time but ultimately that is what we felt). We talked about how many kids we wanted to have based on our emotional and financial status’ and even talked about adopting a special needs kid when we got older.
After our son was born we had fertility problems. We went to specialists for treatments but wound up having 5 miscarriages, two of them in the second trimester when it still would have been legal to have an abortion without it being considered a “late-term” procedure. We were able to bury those two.
We decided to adopt through the foster care program, finding a kid who needed us. Yes, we told the agency that we would prefer a white child because we were told by the agents that it is much easier to adopt from within your own race through DCFS. We also specified that it be an individual instead of siblings because we were living in a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house and couldn’t handle too much (our foster evaluation confirmed this).
We wound up getting our daughter, a white 8 week old taken from a birth mother who had already lost 4 older kids to the system and had them adopted out by non-family members. I count my blessings that she came into our lives.
Right after we finalized the adoption, my wife got pregnant without medical assistance. We tried everything to save the baby, even a radical procedure called a transabdominal cerclage. We still lost our son, Tommy, at 22 weeks. Too early for even the most extreme care, he lasted a half hour and died in my hands, gasping for breath.
Should I have smothered him to quicken his death? Maybe others could do it but not me. He is my son. I held his tiny body close to me, kept him warm, talked to him, told him I loved him and kissed him goodbye.
I don’t believe in a cult of babies. I believe in life. I believe that it is so precious that we should hang on to it for as long as we can and as hard as we can. From the instant we saw the little heart beating on the ultrasound and heard the swish-swish sound we wanted nothing more than to take our child home to love and raise. I would sacrifice anything for my children. I drive an older car, wear older clothes, brown bag my lunch, my wife cuts my hair all so I can give to my kids. They are not a burden and never could be. Even if, God forbid, they became incapacitated and needed round the clock care and could never be self-sufficient they would not be a burden. They are my children.
Athiests think that we are here because a string of random events culminated in the creation of intelligent life. If that is so, then shouldn’t that be amazing enough to want to preserve it? There is only one Mona Lisa, one Hope Diamond, one Grand Canyon. They need to be protected. And each time an egg and a sperm combine it has the potential to create an individual that has never been seen in the history of the entire universe. Isn’t that worth protecting?
I think, ZPG Zealot, that our differences are greater than how we view the worth of babies. You see the world as a horrible place full of pain and suffering, death and destruction. Killing a baby is an act of mercy. I see a world where people can overcome the hardships and horrors they encounter.
I’m sorry that you look at the world with such anger and pain. I don’t know what got you to this point in life where you can’t see beauty and hope and you need to quantify a person or be so quick to discard them. I hope that you find some help to deal with the hurt you must have inside.
