Who Loves You, Baby?

Two recent pieces on the burden of parental choice

Francis X. Maier reviewed The Dignity of Dependence for The Catholic Thing. I’m gratified to see he wrote this:

And the author is skilled at her craft. The Dignity of Dependence is not just exhaustively researched; it’s also elegantly written and persuasively argued. It’s a pleasure to read. And while it is very much a “feminist” manifesto, it’s also the expression of a sane Christian humanism.

But what means even more to me is seeing this:

Sargeant’s chapters “Illegal to Care,” “The Blessings of Burdens,” and “The School of Love” are especially strong. They’ll resonate with anyone who has a child with special needs (as my wife and I do)

As the book heads out into the world, it means so much to me if it rings true for parents raising children with significant disabilities, or anyone else embracing a form of dependence that I don’t know personally.

And apropos of the discussion of parents, disability, and choice, I had a recent piece in First Things titled “Parents Are Not Their Children’s Authors.” The piece starts as a response to Orchid’s IVF screening + ranking of embryos. Since First Things may be paywalled for more of you, I’ll pull a longer quote:

Parents may have lost some of their antibodies to this pitch, however, if they do think of their children’s lives as entirely the parents’ fault. Extreme orthorexia during pregnancy, anxieties about attachment parenting after delivery, texting children throughout the school day all betray a fear that children are fragile, easy for parents to ruin. Some amateur (and professional) therapists encourage clients to look back to their parents to figure out how their bad parenting is to blame for present misfortune.

The whole world is clamoring with the question: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Fewer and fewer parents can rest in the peace of hearing Christ’s answer: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God would be displayed in him.” Each of us bears wounds, natural or spiritual, few of which have a clear genealogy of fault. To be a human person is to be exposed and permeable, to harm as well as healing. No parent (save Joachim and Anne, Mary and Joseph) will raise a sinless child. No child (save Jesus) has a sinless parent.

But in a secular age, the best foil to Siddiqui’s pursuit of perfection may be economist Emily Oster. In her pregnancy guide, Expecting Better, Oster is upfront with her reader that she will not give a guide to eliminating risk. Driving risks to zero is impossible, and even getting them to the realistic minimum is rarely worth the parental sacrifice. As an economist, Oster is well aware of the 80–20 Pareto rule of thumb—that 80 percent of the desired result is often available with 20 percent of the effort. Focusing on the most manageable risks (such as knowing the signs of preeclampsia) provides moms with huge benefits. Chasing down the last little risks (defensively microwaving deli meat) provides a minimal risk reduction while being onerous.

I wrote this piece before the president recommended pregnant women avoid Tylenol, but that recommendation is much of a piece with this idea mothers are responsible for every hardship their baby bears. It isn’t true, and it’s destructive.

Meanwhile, at Word on Fire, I got to write a response to my book twin. Daniel K. Williams’s new book, Abortion and America’s Churches, comes out October 1st, the same day as The Dignity of Dependence.

My post isn’t a full review (I liked the book!) but a close look at one philosophical thread:

In Williams’s telling, in the wake of World War II, there was a desire in many philosophical and religious traditions to be able to speak about human dignity without relying on reference to God. Religious language limited who would listen. In the wake of the Holocaust, there was an urgent need to find a minimum ground of human dignity that many diverse nations could assent to. What was objective and unambiguous about human beings?

For some thinkers, a way of grounding human value was pointing to other human beings who valued a particular person at risk. If someone was loved, whether by their mother, their child, their students, their neighbor, it required no reference to God to argue that when they were the target of violence, the harm rippled outward. This humanist view put more emphasis on the way we belong to each other, but it also made human dignity contingent on, as Williams puts it, the “rationality and the socialization process.” […]

The mother had a stronger claim to live in relationship with other human beings. (It is not clear how the Lutherans assessed her baby’s relationship with God as weaker than her own.) Her husband, her other children, her coworkers, her neighbors could all step forward to give voice to their love for her. The baby, veiled in her flesh, could not produce similar witnesses who had met him face to face. The fact that the mother did not want to see her baby draw breath was not an invitation to pity but a proof that he was unpitiable.