Well, I am back from the weekend away and ready to start typing again. Although, I must admit, it was nice to be away from the news, the internet, cell phone service and any type of technology whatsoever including electricity. Alas, back to the real world, and making a buck or two. Since I have been away three days, I figured I would kick off the shortened week with a nice, uplifting blog; women abandoning their newborns. I stumbled across a short article last week that talked about two separate incidents in which young mothers tried to get rid of their unwanted newborns. One was successful in killing her child, the other luckily was not. The incident that I guess prompted this article in the NYTimes was the discovery of a newborn child in the bottom of an apartment building's trash compactor. It is suspected that the mother who gave birth the day before, dumped the baby down the trash chute from her eigth floor apartment. In this case, the newborn somehow survived and was reported in stable condition afterwards. The 18 year old mother was arrested and is being held on charges. This incident happened only one week after another young mother of 23 gave birth in the restroom of a hospital and left her baby there. In this case, the baby died and the mother is being held on more serious charges. It is obvious in both cases that the mothers were not ready to have children, yet were careless and got pregnant. The worst part about this is, after carrying the baby to term, the mother's outright abandoned the newborns at the earliest possible convenience.
If these two mothers were not ready for children, there were other options available other than the trash chute or the restroom of a hospital for the newborns. There are many families out there who are unable for whatever reason to get pregnant who would have been more than happy to adopt these two newborns and give them a life worth living. Luckily, out of the two incidents, at least one baby has the chance to live and will hopefully find a loving family who will accept him into their home. It is my only hope that with our justice system, we don't find a reason to give that child back to its mother at all but rather strip her of the opportunity of raising the child, an opportunity she did not want to begin with. It is also a hope of mine that this is not an indication of how other mother's are reacting to their newborns or will react in the future. If women don't want to get pregnant, they should be more aware of their bodies and how they actually get pregnant. It is pretty clear that these two women never thought that they would get pregnant when they did, but honestly, what did they think would happen if they had intercourse. Inevitably, if you have intercourse enough times and the time is right for your body, you will get pregnant. Perhaps the education wasn't there for them to learn enough about their bodies and how to properly prevent pregnancies or maybe they came from households where it they didn't matter and in an attempt to feel wanted, threw themselves at the men in their lives. Maybe they will try blaming it on society and claim that since everyone can just get rid of their problems easily these days either through blaming someone else or taking a happy pill, then they should be able to get rid of their "problem" just as easily by abandoning their newborns.
What really needs to be done is to take money dedicated for abortions and dedicate it instead to educating women about pregnancy and how it all works. It is obvious that these women didn't even consider abortions or they would have had them. If they have this much disregard for human life after a baby is born, then they surely would have had no problem having an abortion and abandoning their offspring much earlier. I am not in any means whatsoever condoning abortion, but it just seems as if these two women would have had no problem with it. It is puzzling that they would go through as much trouble as they did, carrying a child through nine months of pregnancy just to abandon it almost immediately after birth. Maybe as I mentioned before, it actually does speak to our society's mentality about human life in general and how we do not place the value we used to on human life in general. Wherever you look, human life does not hold the meaning it used to. As much as we may claime to value life greatly, that value has diminished from where it was even 10 years ago. Not necessarily in every sector of society, but in certain sectors, it has distinctly diminished and these two incident's speak directly to that. We should all cherish those we love, whether they are young old, unborn children, or newborns. Every life has value and if we cut off a life early, we have no knowledge of what that life may have come to be. The baby who died in a hospital restroom could have grown up to become a great artist or businessman, we will never know now. Today, tell your family you love them and make sure they know it. It is not enough to just let time pass by and wander past everyone in a stupor. We must take human life and lift it up again, in every area of society, so that it holds greater value than it does now and we can change perceptions of the way life should be lived.
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