Tolerance and Diversity? Not if You're an Ailing Baby

The Twittersphere is awash with snotty, nasty comments from prochoicers lamenting that Beatriz was "forced" to forgo having her baby ripped limb from limb was was instead provided with a life-saving c-section.

The baby, who had anencephaly, lived for five hours. The prochoice Tweeters are disgusted that this child was even allowed to draw a single breath.

I don't know whether I'm feeling more sad, angry, disgusted, or demoralized. How mean do you have to be, to begrudge a sick baby a few hours of life?

Here's little Faith, a baby with anencephaly, at one day old.

Not a monster. Not "pregnancy tissue." Not worthless. A child.

And now I'm nagged with the thought: Was everybody involved in the birth of Beatriz' baby -- this unnamed child -- as hateful and contemptuous as the abortion advocates have been? Was this child treated with disdain and loathing for every moment of her five hours of postnatal life?

Given the attitude I've seen before the child's birth, I'm guessing that she was.

Did anybody hold this baby? Keep her warm and comforted?

Or did everybody around this child share the attitude of resentment?

I'm reminded of  the words of Sojourner Truth:

"If my cup won't hold but a pint and yourn holds a quart, wouldn't ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?''

I wish I had been able to be there, to hold Beatriz's baby, and say, "Your half-measure is yours, sweetheart. You were born into a country where nobody has the right to dash it from your lips. And I thank God for the privilege of being with you while you savored it."

POSTSCRIPT: It didn't strike me until later, but I suppose it is a lot to ask of prochoice people, who after all insist that it's okay for any mother for any reason to deprive even a healthy child of an entire lifetime of perhaps 70 or 80 or 90 years, to think that five hours of being held and loved is anything that anybody owes to any child. If they already don't get that stealing decades of somebody's life is wrong, why would they even entertain the idea that stealing a few hours is wrong?

But at some level I thought that people who might grasp that it's wrong to steal a homeless man's blanket might grasp that stealing from somebody who has very little to steal is still stealing.