Clowns of God

Little Trig Palin has caused a cascade of thoughts in my head, and it's not clear where they'll end--so let's just take a peek in my gray cells and see what's cooking. A stream-of-consciousness blogging! First off, no matter where Sarah Palin ends up going (or not going) politically, she will always have my personal approval for deciding to give live birth to her Down's Syndrome son--as if my personal approval mattered! It's a brave and proper thing to take what you're given and see what good you can make of it, and an even braver and more proper thing to willingly--with advance notice-- take on the challenge of a child who will, in many ways, never really grow up.

Is it possible that our sons (Mrs. Palin's and my own) are part of a vanishing society? I read that most Down's babies are now aborted, and that there will be fewer and fewer of them in the years to come. Of course, there were no signs before birth that there was anything amiss with Kevin, and I suspect there will always be a goodly number of children whose problems become evident only over time. Pete Singer would have us kill them off too, as a mercy to society if not to his own clueless self.

I once read that in Italy the mentally handicapped are referred to as the clowns of God. That name fits! There's no one cheerier of all my acquaintance than my son, who more often than not wakes up in the morning and bursts into song, or looks outside and exclaims "What a beautiful day!". It's beyond my comprehension that someone else might have decided that his happy life was not worth living. I remember when I was pregnant with our second (and perfectly normal, as it turns out) baby, discussing the value of pre-natal testing for birth defects. I said that it didn't matter, we'd take what we were given. The relief on my doctor's face was palpable. He's had an enormous soft spot in my heart ever since.

That being said, I have seen the other side. I worked in a large state-supported teaching hospital for several years, and for a short time I found myself working on the unit where, among other things, women came to have their pregnancies terminated. That was a difficult assignment. But I learned something very valuable there, because up until that point I naively and probably arrogantly assumed that all abortions were because the mother just didn't want her baby. That was wrong. Most of the pregnancies were being terminated for entirely reasonable reasons--the baby lacked lungs, or lacked a brain, or--in the case of a nurse I knew personally--because the baby was so terribly deformed that he had no functioning systems in his body. None of these children had any chance at all of surviving outside of the womb, and in many cases the baby had already perished, and it was a great mercy to deliver the baby early. I'll never forget witnessing the silent grief of a mother holding her child who had died in the womb--tiny and perfect, but not ever capable of drawing its first breath.

I still just want to have a gigantic tantrum and throw things at a world where these things happen. Pregnancy is supposed to be one of the most joyous times in the life of a family, but sometimes it just isn't. It's such an in-your-face piece of evidence that we live in a broken world full of broken hearts, and makes me long for heaven all the more. I am furious that miscarriages and other fetal deaths happen, and sad beyond measure. And I also get furious that there are women who for whatever reason decide that they don't want their babies, and extinguish them instead of giving them to any one of the hundreds of families who long for babies and can't have their own. I learned early on at the hospital to avoid reading that line of the chart--I didn't want to know which mothers were grieving and which ones were relieved that their inconvenience was gone. It was not my place, and my heart couldn't take the dreadful knowledge. I decided to give each woman the benefit of the doubt, knowing that her life was open before God, and didn't have to be open before mine. Fortunately, I didn't have to stay on that unit long before I was able to move to a different one.

So where have I ended up? With a heart newly broken, because I haven't relived that experience for some time. And with a great appreciation, no matter how I end up voting, for Sarah Palin. Bless you, my dear. God bless Trig, and grant him a happy life. And God bless any family who looks upon a baby with medical or physical problems and says "I'll keep it" and gives it a life of love and care. Your reward shall be great.

Love, Spud.