Baby-phobia Has Reached Epidemic Proportions

Amen, Mary Kochan!

Imagine the crushing judicial power of a modern nation coming down upon you, trying you, sentencing you, and then planning your execution – all while the charges against you remain secret. You might recall that as the plot of Franz Kafka’s paranoiac novel, The Trial, the protagonist of which is a 30-year-old bank clerk. Under the spell of Kafka’s masterful telling, the reader is left feeling almost as though the horror of the sentence pales in comparison to simply not knowing why.

I revisited the haunted feeling of that novel over the past week or so as the case of the 13-month-old baby, Joseph Maraachli, played out in the media. Just as it seemed a few years ago that the juggernaut of state power in the United States had inexplicably determined to crush the life out of Terri Schiavo, now the state power of Canada was turned against an ill infant. In Terri Schiavo’s case, however, there was a family member who was complicit, who had brought the state power to bear; but in the case of Baby Joseph, his parents wanted him to live, or at least to be properly treated until (if as doctors predicted) his degenerative illness carried him away. That is to say, they did not want him denied treatment just because he was only going to die anyway.

Read the rest of her commentary:

Baby-phobia Has Reached Epidemic Proportions

Lord, have Mercy!