To Give a Defense
Note: The original story reported that the baby was miscarried; then there was a report that the baby was born alive and suffocated, which was later retracted. The official cause of death is still undetermined.
Who knows what was going through this teenage girl’s mind. Does anyone want to make a guess? Maybe she was mentally ill.
Maybe she was on drugs.
Maybe something went horribly wrong in how her parents raised her. (Which I am more than willing to bet, regardless.)
Maybe she has just been overtaken by evil.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Watch the news, wherever this story is covered, over the next day or two or (if we’re lucky, because a weekend is approaching) three.
After three days, the story will have exceeded its half-life. We will return to what we had been doing. The story will have reached its maximum life-span, in which we may wring our hands and speculate, and then do nothing, and then go on.
Here’s a guess: Maybe that’s why.
I am writing this in a white heat, and I do not intend to change much, and that is so far from my normal practice that I am surprised that I am permitting myself at all. But if the writing remains raw, then it remains raw.
This needs to be said. And this needs to be said over and over and over, and not let go, until this awful and numb and pagan world we live in returns to some semblance of sanity; even if it has to be shouted and beaten back into it, which may be the only thing that will work, because shock isn’t working for us.
If this story shocks you, world, too bad. I don’t have sympathy. I don’t want to hear it. Stop sitting on your butt and being shocked for two days, and instead get up and do something about it.
Dear world, stop being so blipping bleeping numb!
Dear world, stop being shocked for a news cycle. Stop feeling what the news cycle tells you to feel.
When you live in a culture in which abortion is considered just another right, then you have no right to be shocked by a teenage girl carrying around her dead baby in a bag while shoplifting at Victoria’s Secret as though it were for a burial shroud. I have one word: Duh. What did you expect?
When you live in a culture in which status is determined materialistically, by how many things we own, then a teenage girl who is apparently more concerned with accumulating lingerie by theft, than with burying her miscarried baby, should not shock you. I have one word: Duh. What did you expect?
When you live in a culture in which a woman’s value is determined by her physique—don’t give me any of this feminist crap, just watch what we hold up as an ideal of the beautiful in pop stars and x-rays—then don’t be shocked either when this teenage girl’s desire at the time was to steal something from Victoria’s Secret. I have one word: Duh. What did you expect?
Are we lost? Are we mad? What has happened to us? And why, for the love of God, are we going to talk about this for three days and then act as though it had never happened? It will just get filed away with last week’s news.
Personal confession time: I lost my daughter to a stillbirth. My ex-wife had eclampsia. When I look at some of the morons who succeed in having children, and mistreat them, and then I consider that the only chance I ever had to raise a child was taken from me without my consent, I get angry. There is not a day that goes by when I would not give up everything else I have in order to have my daughter back, and I don’t care how special needs she may have been. I just want her back.
But my anger and my hurt about that are not the issue, only fuel for me just now. The real issue is this; this is the thing that we have lost, dear sweet world: that life is good. That all life has value and meaning, because it is made in the image of God.
I will venture this guess: The teenage girl was numb about the value of her own child because she was numb about her own value. What was she doing at the time this was all discovered? She was shoplifting at Victoria’s Secret. She was shoplifting lingerie. While still a kid, she was trying to discover her value in being sexy. Who was the father of that child? Was she trying to be sexy for him? Did he care about his child or about his organ? Who knows?
If I had not lost my daughter, and I could write her a “Dear Daughter” blog post, and talk to my dear daughter before she went to bed at night, this is what I would tell her: You have infinite and precious value for one reason. It is because you are alive. It is not in what you wear, it is not in what people think about you, it is not in who you can impress, it is not in how much money you can make, it is in nothing other than the fact that you are here, and no matter who else loves you or doesn’t, I am always your daddy and I will always love you.
But here is the mental and moral evil that you face, world: You are letting the worth of your life be determined by others. You are allowing yourself to be told what life has value, what life doesn’t. And when that starts, we reach the point where soon we value no life, not even our own. And that’s when we’re lost.
A healthy, sane society will respond to each and every life, from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, as in the Nativity: with awe and with love. The good of life is the first value. Without it, no other values have meaning. Without it, all other values are lost. That’s where we begin.
Here’s the solution: Stop listening to what the politicians tell you about who you are. Stop listening to what the advertisers tell you about who you are. Stop listening to what the media tells you about who you are. Stop having your value system formed by the noise around you. Your value, and the value of your children, comes from the fact that you are here and you are made in the image of God and you are his beloved child.
If you don’t believe that, maybe you ought to pray.
If you do believe that, maybe you ought to start shouting from the rooftops until someone starts to listen. That’s what I’m going to do.
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