If wantedness determines value, newborn’s rescuers wasted time
[W]hat’s notable is that rescuers recognized that this baby’s life was a life worth saving. His mother may have intended to discard and kill him, but those who freed him recognized that the mother’s desire for her child does not determine that child’s value.
Ironically, here in the United States – where our human rights record is supposedly second to none – those who argue for “choice” posit every day that wantedness determines value.
Few would openly admit it, of course, but the degree to which our culture lacks outrage at open arguments that even born-alive infants may be killed at the pleasure of their mothers is the degree to which we have accepted the belief that wantedness determines value – specifically, that our desires determine someone else’s value.
Tragically, such egocentricity unavoidably begets loathing for anything that does not serve our self-interests. Indeed, lobbyists for post-birth abortions no longer even pretend to base their arguments on science.
But there is that nagging issue of a newborn baby crying for life in a four-inch sewage drain in China. If wantedness determines value, then firefighters wasted their time. But if value stems from elsewhere, then attempts to tether it to self-centered desires are not simply fruitless; they are fatal.
~ Gina L. Diorio, Live Action News, May 28
[Photo via LA Times]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
I was reading the other day that China has the highest suicide rate. I wonder why.
China is just a hot mess. I work with a woman who has taken a few days off of work to have an abortion. Not her first …..I never knew she was pregnant.
Wanted / Unwanted ….insanity when it comes to human life!!
Fear… that’s what abortion stems from. Nothing more than illogical fear. It’s what made Herod order his killing spree… fear of Jesus. A *baby*.
Our planet is a hot mess.
Jesus said, “13 Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Mt 7.13-14 ESV
It’s time to wake up and look up, our redemption is drawing near.
A species that “adapts” to the world by killing its own members is a species in crisis and dis-ease.
A species that cooperates among their members and cares for their young until they are strong enough is a species that is adapting to their environment and improving their chances for long term survival.
I think it’s extremely unlikely this baby was not wanted. Single women are not allowed to have children in China and family planning officials keep track of women’s cycles and fertility and require (usually) biyearly checks to make sure there are no illegal pregnancies. Her proclaiming she was ‘too poor for an abortion’ makes no logical sense, this women would have gone through extreme lengths to avoid a forced abortion along with the danger to both her and her extended family of draconian fines, kidnappings, beatings, confiscation of belongings, and/or destuction of family homes. As an unmarried women she would have been given an abortion as a matter of course by anyone in a position of authority, which this women would have had to carefully and explicitly avoid for 9 months. It seems far more reasonable that, having taken all the pains to keep her pregnancy secret, she very much wanted the baby, and is simply doing what she must to attempt to avoid severe punishment for having an unauthorized child. This is a *male* baby, in China that’s huge. The pressure to have a male heir as their one and only child is so strong the notion that someone would go through such extreme lenghts to bring an illegal pregnancy to term if the child wasn’t desperately wanted stretches credulity.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume this baby’s mother did not want him, and tossed him away like garbage. Seems much more likely that someone else tried to “dispose” of him. China is simply on a fast track to hell. God bless this child, and his mother.
One news report said authorities found baby clothing and toys in her apartment, so she probably did want to keep him. This story is good for something: I’ve been able to tell people about the one-child policy and how devastating it is. If the mother had deliberately abandoned a baby, it would have been because she didn’t want to use up her “one baby chip” before she was married. I am encouraged by the fact that a crew rescued the child, that people were moved with compassion for a helpless little person whose life was in danger. That little spark of love and compassion could inflame all of China. Imagine how news stories like this must pull on the hearts of Chinese parents who’ve lost their wanted but illegal children to abortion and infanticide.
This “unwanted child” thing is another genocidal myth pushed by the abortion industry and their liberal propaganda machine. The ones who don’t want these babies are those in the abortion industry themselves, because there’s just no profit in living children.
No one is wanted by everyone, so let’s just kill everyone. That makes sense, right?
Excellent response Victor, sad but spot on. LL
A quick question: if the woman was in labor and accidentally birthed into the toilet, how was the umbilical cord severed? If the baby was still attached to the mother, how could he have fallen in? Just a logistical question..any thoughts? Can the cord be severed by hand?
Well, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies, but the umbilical cord and placenta were still attached.
I’ll have to turn to the nurses on this site to answer if it’s possible the baby was still getting life support. Was he in a strange limbo-land between the womb and birth? Not really, I suppose. They heard him crying, so though there was little oxygen, there was some.
I really don’t want to think too much about what it must have been like for him. :(
We may never know the truth. Perhaps in a moment of panic, she did the unthinkable, and then realized her mistake when she heard her child crying.
He seemed to be awfully wedged inside that sewer pipe for him to have merely “slipped” into it…
But I pray that as a single mother in a place so hostile to human life, that she can find support for her and her child.
Thank you Laura Loo. It is sad. Something else that’s sad is there are plenty of loving families willing to adopt those supposedly unwanted babies, but a greater stigma has been put on adoption than on abortion. Again, no profits for the abortion industry in adoption, and no genocidal benefits for the population control people and just plain racists.