Birth and death

First, here's an opinion by Judith Warner, from the Times (of course) about abortion and Dr. George Tiller.* People like babies (and pregnant women) because of their clean-slate-y-ness. Brand-new babies haven't yet shown us their human-ness. They haven't been petty or mean or cruel or stupid or boring yet. It's easy to forget that babies will grow up to be ordinary people, and it's easy to assign them all the good qualities they probably won't have. I think this irrational perspective is kind of necessary, from an evolutionary point of view, so we as a society will take care of babies as well as possible. But in the pro-life world, most of the time it translates into a sort of deification of unborn babies, and total neglect of babies/children/teenagers/adults after that clean-slate thing wears off. Which is totally crappy.

Second, on a semi-related depressing note, here's something I've been thinking about a bit. Near where I live in Portland, a woman recently threw her two small children off a bridge into the Willamette River in the middle of the night. The younger child, who was Dutch's age, died, and his 7-year-old sister was rescued. The comments on online articles about this mostly fall into the category of "she is evil, torture her and throw her in the river." We can have no idea what happened, really. The story is that she did it as revenge on her husband over a custody struggle. My personal narrative about it is about the power that parents have over our children. We are stronger than they are, they are dependent on us, and we are the center of their worlds. We can throw them off real and emotional bridges any time we like. But mostly... we don't. Even parents under terrible stress, with very limited resources, take this responsibility seriously. I think that's pretty amazing.

Last, here's a video Trapeze Girl sent me. I love the magic word the mother says!