Psychologists tell us that being born is a traumatic experience; you’re squeezed repeatedly for hours, only to emerge into a blindingly bright, cold and loud world. Usually Mommy comforts you, though, and within a few minutes everything is all right.
Unless, unfortunately, you happen to be born head first in a toilet in the Prince Albert Wal-Mart, as one little boy was recently. For whatever reason, his mother gave birth in the cubicle, only to leave the child behind. Luckily a shopper discovered him, and the manager performed an amateur resuscitation before the ambulance arrived.
Being born in a toilet is bad enough. The response of the authorities, though, is worse. As of the time of this writing, the mother, and I use that term loosely, has not been arrested or charged with anything. She was traumatized by the ordeal, and so I guess it would be cruel to punish her. Now my friend Anne gave birth last week, and I’m pretty sure that if I snuck into her house and picked up her little girl and stuck her in a toilet, I’d be put in prison for an awfully long time, as I should be. But if you’re the mother and you stick your own kid in a toilet, we’ll give you a pass.
I know she was probably depressed and confused. Maybe she didn’t even know she was pregnant. Many years ago, a friend of mine had to rush her 18-year-old daughter to the hospital because she was having stomach pains. Six hours later she was holding her grand-daughter, completely floored that neither she nor her daughter clued into the pregnancy. They were a well-educated, normal family, and I do believe that it is possible not to know. But once you realize you’re a mom and another human being is utterly dependent upon you, you have an obligation to make sure that baby is safe. Unfortunately, our society seems to have abandoned that concept.
I guess it’s only natural, given our view of parenthood. We no longer believe in the best interest of the child as much as we do the rights of the parents. Women who take illegal substances or abuse legal ones during their pregnancies rarely suffer anything harsher than having their children put in foster care for a time. They aren’t jailed or fined. Even in conflicts regarding family form, adults’ rights to a child take pre-eminence.
Jump forward a few years, however, and parents suddenly lose this privileged position. In British Columbia, parents can no longer remove their children from curriculum with which they morally disagree. Across the nation, schools can give out birth control to young teens without informing the parents. Physicians must keep their teenage patients’ problems confidential, no matter how much everybody would benefit from the parents being made aware of the children’s destructive behaviour. Parents’ rights have flown out the window.
On the surface, this all seems highly inconsistent. Why would parents enjoy the virtual right to decide whether a baby lives or dies, and yet lose more basic rights to make health care and educational decisions for their older children? The only common thread that I see is our culture’s worship of autonomy. Everybody should get to do whatever he or she wants, and it’s wrong to try to tell anyone they’re making a bad choice. To demand new moms act responsibly throughout their pregnancies and deliveries is too close to making judgments on female sexuality, and we don’t want to go there. Moral freedom trumps responsibility.
Is that really the kind of society we want to live in? Personally, I vastly prefer a world where we have mutual responsibilities and obligations to one in which people can walk out on their commitments, ignore their responsibilities, and even leave their babies in toilets. I don’t want to live in a world of islands, where we all do whatever we want without regard for one another. I want to live in a world where family obligations are taken seriously. Our choices have consequences, especially for those who are most vulnerable, and all moral choices are not equal. We should stop pretending that they are.
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