On the morning when I write these words, a headline on the front page of our local paper reports that the judge in the case involving a mother who put her newborn baby in a dumpster has issued a gag order.
Back on June 1, 2001, 21-year-old Amanda Saul allegedly gave birth in a restroom of her workplace. Later that day some of her fellow-workers found her infant’s dead body in a dumpster behind the business.
All summer long we have followed the saga of this tragedy: first the arrest on the original charge of abuse of a corpse, then the bail provided by compassionate strangers, the inconclusive first autopsy, and now a final development the judge doesn’t want revealed yet. Most of us gagged before he told us to.
But today my attention has been focused on another baby. Tiny Amberly Perkins greeted her parents three months sooner than she should have. Born at the 25-week stage of gestation, she barely weighed one pound.
Even with the finest state-of-the-art equipment, our neonatal ICU people were hard-pressed to keep Amberly alive. Using all of his skill, a pediatric cardiac surgeon managed to repair a hole in Amberly’s heart, and for several days, she seemed to be holding her own.
Like a faint breath on a dying spark, this shred of good news renewed the hope of her anxious parents. When the father heard that my church was praying for his fragile child, he choked up and said, “Tell all of them thank you.” Two weeks later tiny Amberly died.
Here I sit, reflecting on the stark disparities in the circumstances surrounding these two births.
Two babies.
Born during the same summer.
In the same town.
That’s where the similarities end. One parent would have given anything not to have a baby. The others gave everything to keep one. And our schizophrenic society displays its radical polarities on the issues of life by its undeniably extreme responses to both situations.
We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep a barely viable infant alive, because we as a people value human life.
Meanwhile a host of loud voices defend the mother whose baby should have lived, because we obviously are coming to value some things more than human life.