The Weeping Angel. A beautiful piece of 19 Century funerary art depicting grief over untimely death.
Go to an old cemetery and walk the rows of tombstones noting how many children died and the year in which they died. It will become evident that prior to 1946-47 there are any number of children under the age of seven-the age at which the immune system has completed its maturation. After 1947, graves of children become very uncommon. Why?
Penicillin.
An accidental discovery by Scottish physician Dr. Alexander Fleming on September 28, 1928, penicillin was difficult to make in any appreciable quantity and was only available for allied soldiers during World War II. Excreted unchanged in the urine, penicillin was purified from the urine of its recipients and reused-so miraculous and limited was its availability.
The limited production and availability changed immediately after the war ended in 1945. By 1947, penicillin was widely available, and literally overnight such dread diseases as scarlet fever, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, gonorrhea, staphylococcal sepsis, meningococcal meningitis. and syphilis which was the AIDS of its day were scourges no more.
Fleming discovered penicillin quite by accident when he returned from summer vacation to find the mold Penicillium notatum growing in a petri dish inoculated with bacteria. There was a zone between the mold and the bacterial colonies where no bacteria grew. Curious as to why, Fleming’s investigations would lead him to discover the compound made by the mold and secreted, which he would later name Penicillin.
It was an accident, an example of opportunity meeting with preparation, or as Louis Pasteur would say-‘chance favoring the prepared mind.’
There is no way to predict which quarter discoveries will come from. Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, but had no way of mass-marketing it until the son of runaway slaves, African-American Louis Howard Latimer invented the technique for mass-producing the carbon filaments used in the bulbs. He was the only Black man in the exclusive club of inventors called the Edison Pioneers.
Today, 1/3 of my children’s generation is missing. Aborted. When I suggest that we are losing Flemings and Latimers, I am usually met with the snark that we are also losing more criminals. That’s all the other side has, a bleak assessment of humanity. It’s an assessment so bleak that it makes these folks dismiss the idea that we are literally killing our future Flemings, Edisons, Latimers and Pasteurs. It’s not just science and medicine. Artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, scholars are never going to gift us with their blessings. It makes one wonder.
What if…
Coming Home 
I wonder too…especially since I know some almost-aborted children. I watch them in wonder and ponder “What if they weren’t here?” So sad…I hope mankind says “ENOUGH!” one day soon.
Not only do I wonder “What if…” about all the doctors, artists, teachers, etc, etc, and so forth — it makes me want to cry. In fact, I *have* cried over it.
It’s my generation that’s missing 1/3 of its members.
Those who would be my friends, classmates….and dare I say it, he who would be my husband. I pray that the man God has set aside for me since He formed me in my mother’s womb has lived ….
😦 😦
Yes, just thinking about all we have lost makes me want to cry.
(I love old cemetery art, btw. The angel is both beautiful and haunting.)
Rachel,
God indeed has a plan, and it contains a future for you in it along with the man He has marked for you.
Pray daily for him. He’s ‘out there’ as we speak.
Such a tender heart will not be allowed to live unrequited 😉
God Bless
Penicillin was a wonderful thing, not because we as a society or a species were running short of people, but because each individual child who died knew who they were, by name, lived each day, was beloved by name as a unique person to family, friends, neighbors, classmates.
When the “pro-life” argument starts dealing in raw cumulative numbers, you inadvertently depersonalize the whole nature of individual human life.
I don’t miss “one third of my classmates.” I miss the individual I went to school with who died before the tenth reunion. Phantoms of un-named people who were in fact never born are not my classmates, neighbors, or fellow citizens. In fact, since the number of tax-paying adults would not have multiplied, where exactly would we have gotten the money to build one third more school than we have now, and staff them? And while you cavalierly dismiss facts you find inconvenient, the possibility that some of those aborted would have been serial killers is as relevant as the possibility that they would have invented a commercially feasible means of controlled fusion. Those who have been born are more than sufficient to the challenges of our lives.
Loving a child is not a mass collective experience, although a whole network of adults is needed to raise up a child in the way s/he should go. It is personal and individual.
Let me only love my own children and not give a spit for those of other’s, right? All the parental love in the world didn’t spare Jewish chidren during the Holocaust? Are you suggest we fire all our social workers and police and stop interfering with child abuse – including failure to see that children receive antibiotics for ear infections? Nice world, SJ!
You must be aware of the Social Security shortfall because we lack young people t pay into the system. When it was enacted there were 16 workers for every retiree. Now, how many are there?
You have to out out of the Malthu/Ehrlich rut! Look at Japan’s economic stagnation. Germany’s bishops are worried about how to take care of the elderly. Ditto France, Spain, and Italy.
“Those who have been born are more than sufficient to the challenges of our lives.”
No. We have a serious baby shortage here in the west, and it will be our undoing. Our fertility rates are well below replacement levels, and we’ll hit the point of no-return in about 20 years or so if we keep this up. The U.S. is an exception among western countries, in that its fertility rate is currently hovering around the replacement level (roughly 2.1 children per woman), but this is a temporary effect due to a large influx of conservative immigrants.
Dan, do you want to make pregnancy mandatory? Is a woman, after all, first and foremost a baby making machine to push our population statistics to meet production goals? Is it the duty of every male to impregnate as many women as he can, at all times, just so we will have lots and lots of babies coming along? I think your notion that we need to increase production is complete nonsense, I think its great our birth rate is hovering around the replacement level, but leaving that aside… what kind of totalitarian coercion are you willing to contemplate to advance your goals? You sound like Mao Zedong in 1949!!! And then the REASON to have babies is so they can pay into social security to support us??? What a pyramid scam. How are we going to support THOSE babies when THEY get old?????????
BHG, I do not in fact love children I have never met, but I do know that they have parents or friends or neighbors who love them, and even if they don’t, they have their own self-awareness and potential to love and be loved. So if we all agree on the polio vaccinations, we all benefit. It is the individual who is precious, not the mass social statistics.
I do in fact favor ending social work as we know it. Social workers seem to overlook all the flagrant abuse they should be catching, because they are busy sticking their nose into details that are none of their business. What do you think of the social work mentality that enables someone to write a report calling for standardized sex education for all ten years olds, treating the children as “sexual beings,” because too many religious parents “abuse” their children by appreciating and prolonging their innocence? There are useful functions embedded in the field of social work, and we should put them on a sound basis as we phase out all the arrogant intervention in what IS best left to families.
“Dan, do you want to make pregnancy mandatory?”
No. Read my comment again. I was merely pointing out what is wrong with your statement that “Those who are born are more than sufficient…”
“And then the REASON to have babies is so they can pay into social security to support us??? ”
You are gratuitously putting words into my mouth.
The way the world works is that each generation invests in the next generation. We are now failing to invest sufficiently in the next generation, and we will suffer the consequences of having (collectively) made that choice. Here is an interesting analysis:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/05/demographics–depression-1243457089
I’m sure you find that article enlightening. I find it absurd. George Will wrote a column a couple of years ago asking “Do you think for young newlyweds looking for their first home, the drop in housing prices is a PROBLEM?” The notion that a healthy economy is one in which more and more of us are spending our money on more and more stuff is part of the problem, not part of the solution. However, my mother believes that population growth will over the long term push the price of real estate higher, because there is only so much to go around, and more people seeking a piece of it. Whoever wrote that article doesn’t know much about the Depression if he thinks efforts to prevent one have failed. We could be dealing with 30% unemployment. We were very lucky to get off as easily as we did. Still, it seems that the moral implication of the argument is that we should have more babies to save the housing market. If we have fewer children, we can invest more in each one. What’s wrong with that?
But to get back on point, the notion that we should criminalize abortion so that we have more people, in raw numbers, seems morally offensive. IF abortion is always wrong, it is because the individual life in the womb is infinitely precious, not because we need more babies to keep our economy booming.
“We were very lucky to get off as easily as we did.”
What makes you think it’s over?
“But to get back on point, the notion that we should criminalize abortion so that we have more people, in raw numbers, seems morally offensive. IF abortion is always wrong, it is because the individual life in the womb is infinitely precious, not because we need more babies to keep our economy booming.”
Yes, of course, and you know very well that I agree with that statement. I’ll say it once again: the only reason I mentioned the population issue is because *you* raised it when you said “Those who have been born are more than sufficient to the challenges of our lives.” I could just as easily have leveled the same charge at you: that you want legal abortion in order to control population. But I didn’t do that. All I did was point out that there is some evidence that we will face bigger challenges because of declining population.
I think you owe me an apology for comparing me to Mao Zedong and all the other nonsense you imputed to me up above.
I don’t apologize for pointing out factual parallels. I don’t suppose any of us are perfectly consistent in what we say, and I know political parties are not. The similarity is that you and Mao both favor(ed) population increase as a goal. Mao’s choice had unforseen and unintended consequences, and I expect that yours would too. Mao didn’t make people have large families, he severely discouraged contraception and family planning. On the other hand, I have some respect for Mao, so the comparison is not an insult. Read Fanshen by William Hinton if you get a chance. Compared to what China was before 1949, some good things happened in the first few years. Mao, like Robert Mugabe, later became a very good example of the benefit of term limits. Give anyone enough time in office, and enough accumulated power, they will make a disastrous decision about something or other.
My first comment on this post spoke for individual consideration, not making policy based on mass numbers. It was really a criticism of the way Gerard argued at the beginning. BHG, not you, took up the collectivist argument, and you later responded. I have been arguing for individual consideration, not looking at mass numbers to boost, consistently. I expected you would agree with me when I put it that way. But let’s set the collectivist arguments aside then, and take them off the table.
“My first comment on this post spoke for individual consideration, not making policy based on mass numbers.”
Read my comments again. All I did was point out a trend. I did not argue for making policy based on mass numbers.
If you think you don’t owe me an apology, you have lost my respect.
It has been my experience that if I ever let myself think a given person is beneath contempt, sooner or later we find we really need each other. I must admit I haven’t had a lot of respect for your arguments either, but perhaps there is something we will profoundly agree on another time.
Smooth.
At the very beginning, before we all found ourselves meandering through an exchange of comments that ran some distance from the original post, we were discussing this:
Today, 1/3 of my children’s generation is missing. Aborted. When I suggest that we are losing Flemings and Latimers, I am usually met with the snark that we are also losing more criminals. That’s all the other side has, a bleak assessment of humanity. It’s an assessment so bleak that it makes these folks dismiss the idea that we are literally killing our future Flemings, Edisons, Latimers and Pasteurs. It’s not just science and medicine. Artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, scholars are never going to gift us with their blessings. It makes one wonder.
Now, let us imagine that the 1970s and 1980s had been a period when the sanctity of marriage achieved renewed respect, when extra-marital sex fell sharply, when young men and women found fulfilment in the self discipline of waiting until marriage, of making a commitment to one partner for life, and having children within a stable family held together by a sacred covenant. The habit some young men have of getting five women pregnant at the same time when daddy doesn’t even have a job would have been swept away in a commitment to respect for each woman.
Would we then be lamenting that 1/3 of my children’s generation was never conceived? Would we be speculating about the scientists, doctors, artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, scholars who might have been produced if those young men and woman had felt free to mess around in the years leading up to their marriages? Of course we wouldn’t. I’m not trying to offer abstinence as a moral equivalent of abortion, but I am, one more time, suggesting that piling up statistics and speculating about what might have been is a poor argument. This kind of collateral consequence could have been the result of many decisions and cultural trends, including some that we all agree would have been highly desirable.
Not being conceived at all, and being killed after having been alive are two totally different things, Siarlys. I’m surprised you haven’t put this together yet.