Counterfeit Compassion and the Rape of Mercy
Why not better off dead?
I want to see right done.
Said by a character in a murder mystery I read decades ago, and the character it was said to was deeply struck by it, and the phrasing of the sentiment made her want to assist the speaker in his mission.
Because he hadn’t said justice—which can be an entirely different proposition. To do right might sometimes mean doing or facilitating something we believe or know contravenes law, moral or secular.
Most of the awful problems of life, there’s no enduring solution. The general correctness of a statute or moral imperative, in the interests of society’s general welfare, might cause dreadful individual harm.
A woman gave birth in the woods outside Manchester NH recently. She phoned the police afterwards to get medical assistance for herself. Her own wellbeing and that of her partner was her only concern, so she lied to first responders about the location of the baby.
The police found it, more than an hour later, in the 18F degree weather of the middle of that night—or to be precise, the very early morning. It was lying on the ground behind a blanket inside the now-unheated tent—the woman’s partner had turned off the propane heater before leaving, after the baby’s birth. He’d told her he wasn’t sure if it was alive or not. He was concerned only about retrieving his tablet, and ensuring the tent didn’t burn down unattended.
Outreach workers familiar with the woman were surprised to learn she’d been pregnant. They spoke earnestly of the ravages of mental illness that led to this result.
She was a long-time junkie. She’d been adopted at birth by an MLB Hall of Famer and his second wife. From then until she reached the age of legal majority, they’d tried everything possible to help her, to save her, to treat her, to cure her, to support her. They loved her dearly. Now they’ve filed to be appointed legal guardians of her child, dropped like the offspring of any feral creature but in the wrong season for optimal survival.
I know of a slightly less-dreadful but similar story, a man and his wife who adopted a little girl out of foster care. They loved her dearly. They got every possible form of help for her. Now they are raising her daughter because she’s an incapable and unfit mother. They are older now, of course, and it’s hard to be reliving the same story as middle-aged people.
You can do everything within your human power to gestate and birth a healthy child, and something dreadful can still go wrong.
But when you do everything wrong, the chances of gestating and birthing a healthy child are pretty bad. Some things can’t be ameliorated later, regardless of the money and technology and will you spend to try. Miswiring can’t be fixed.
Would it have been better if these now-adult women had never been born? How much grief and suffering might have been avoided? How many generations of suffering preceded them, and how many will follow?
Can you answer these questions? No one can.
For Christmas I always ask to be made the Vitamin Fairy, visiting everyone in their fertile years and ensuring they take a good multivitamin supplement daily, just in case. I’d like to be the Intentional Childbearing Fairy too but the first wish hasn’t been answered yet.
I don’t believe in state forced intervention in the fertility prospects of free human beings, even when a greater good might be imagined. Perhaps programs that provide cash and other benefits to people who refrain from becoming pregnant when it would clearly be highly disadvantageous to everyone for them to bear a child might not be awful ideas. But they always tend to slide towards coercion and state abuse. Who sets the standards, and who administers the program?
These two specific women—we know their own histories after they came into the world. We know they couldn’t be fixed, couldn’t be made into healthy whole people whose free will had less rather than more likelihood of ending in small and bigger tragedies. They have birthed children whose prospects—well, we don’t know, right? We can’t predict with perfect accuracy. Maybe they’ll beat the odds. Maybe someday they can be celebrated as miracle children whose place in the world is just.
What will that miracle cost them, and all of us?
I don’t know if it would, in the fabric of the universe, have been better if they’d been early aborted and spared any entry into the world at all, but I think it would’ve been a right choice, if freely made by those women, to spare those children everything that will now come after. That baby born in the woods, left freezing and struggling to breathe (as was reported) and then hospitalized and later airlifted to a more specialized medical facility—he’s already endured a lot of suffering and likely to experience a lot more. He was premature. Naked, freezing, tiny, and now subject to painful and frightening medical interventions—who has the right to say it will someday all have been worth it?
***
I can tell another story too. An animal shelter is looking for a foster home for a cancer-stricken dog, so his last few months, perhaps a year, will be happy and comfortable ones.
But will they? Can they be?
What does a creature think, ravaged by a common and dreadful illness, trusting its carers and taken regularly by them to endure horrible and scary treatments, and when at home given medication that may make it feel awful, much or most of the time? Competent adults can refuse such interventions and choose palliative care only. Some competent adults wish to be helped to die quickly, with dignity.
A dog, a cat—they can’t ask for it, tell you what they want, tell you how they feel. Lifeforce is powerful; letting go is hard. When my cat, 28 years ago, was euthanized in my arms, despite the purring I could feel a little struggle of the body too, not to let go. I served her rightly but I’ve not forgotten the moment, nor lost the pain, all these years after.
I think death can often be a very great mercy and blessing. Often of course it’s not.
But suffering has no useful purpose. The best one can hope for is to get through it, not be destroyed by it, not be made cruel by it, not be driven mad by it. To think we have the right to demand anyone experience or run the likely risk of experiencing suffering to suit our moral vision is I think a great evil.
We need to think of what mercy and compassion are, in each instance in which we’re called upon to show them. They are not mere vocabulary words to be thoughtlessly learned. They have profound and complex meanings; they require us to think beyond what we want and rather what the circumstance urges us to contemplate.
This is a beautiful piece. Haunting and pointed. Will take more than one reading to fully appreciate. Thanks for thinking this through...at least as far as it can be thought at the moment.
Not the point of your article, which is thought provoking and needs a couple of reads to fully savour, but it also made me ponder ... interesting how badly so many adopted kids turn out. Even adopted young, presumably too young to have been conditioned by inadequate parents or influenced by subpar environments, they seem to have issues. Foetal alcohol or lack of vitamins as you suggest? Yet vitamins are a recent thing...though our diets have changed over the ages. Maybe the violence of our distant past wasn’t evolved away from because of social considerations, but because our diets especially in utero have improved. Random thoughts.