The Baby
.
.
Reflection for January 2013:
Where would we be without the Baby?
Babies are such an assumed part of life, that few stop to think where we would be without babies.
Yet without babies, civilization would grind to a halt in less than 50 years.
We would all lie around in unstaffed nursing homes, with nobody to take care of us.
Getting rid of babies, even just a portion of them, contributes more to the demise of our civilization than some potential global warming or some imagined asteroid hit.
Babies replenish the human race.
Babies people the planet.
Babies turn into adults, who do the work.
Babies turn into taxpayers, who pay the bills.
Babies have always been around, and there has never been a shortage of them (until now).
God’s Wisdom
God in His wisdom designed the human race as male and female, designed the love between man and woman to be powerful, faithful and fruitful, providing a constant source of babies born out of that love. God instructed us on how to live out that love in the family, the most basic and most successful method for the perpetuation of the human race.
The success of the family in the continuation of the human race rests in the sacrificial love found only in the family.
The family reflects the same sacrificial love God showed for us on His Cross.
The family reflects Christ’s kind of love, which gives up one’s life for others, as good parents would for the child that they love.
The Importance of the Baby
God, in addition to designing babies into the perpetuation of the human race, chose to come to us himself as a baby.
This says something. On the part of God, it was a very intentional and meaningful choice.
God could have come as a King, a warrior, a wise man, a superman, or even as an alien form of life. He could have come as a teenager, as a woman, or as someone who is 130 years old.
He could have come as bodiless spirit with super powers (as Himself).
But God chose to come to us as a baby.
God also chose to retain the humility and the lack of worldliness which are characteristic of a baby throughout His life, in order to illustrate to us how we should live, and what is of utmost importance in this life.
We just finished celebrating the Nativity of Christ at Christmas.
In His arrival as a baby, God illustrated to us all the essential elements of a holy and successful family.
One man, one woman, for a lifetime, welcoming children.
Babies in History
Matteo di Giovanni – Slaughter of the Innocents
God came to earth as a baby.
He survived Herod’s slaughter of baby boys by fleeing to Egypt, guided by his father Joseph, who was guided by God in a dream.
Apparently Herod knew the potential one baby can represent.
Long before that, Pharaoh knew the potential one baby can represent; Pharoah slaughtered all Hebrew babies in an attempt to get rid of Moses.
Today, many have forgotten the importance, the sacredness, and the potential of babies, as well as of all human life.
Today, we contracept and abort away our babies, our future citizens, out of some misguided and short sighted attempt to avoid inconvenience.
Abortion: Convenience, or Suicidal Act?
Regrettably, in addition to taking away another human being’s right to life, the “convenience” achieved by the elimination of a baby is extremely short lived. The guilt, the loss and the mourning caused by abortion overwhelms us, and our lives are damaged, not improved. We deprive ourselves of our own children, and deprive our society of its future citizens. We also suffer the economic impact of eliminating millions of human beings from future contribution to our nation.
Sonogram of Unborn Baby
Steve Jobs?
Barack Obama?
Steve Jobs was almost aborted, but was put up for adoption instead. How fortunate!
President Obama, as the black child of a single mother, would today have faced a 77% probability of abortion. Is he grateful for his gift of life? Was that gift from God, or was it from his parents, and should parents have the right to dispose of a child? If disposal before birth is O.K., why not after birth?
One child can change the world, and it is not for us to decide which child lives and which child dies. When we do that, we try to play God ourselves.
How Many Babies Do We Need?
God used to do a pretty good job of determining how many babies we need.
Now, if want to take over that job, the moral implications of terminating millions of lives aside, it would be wise to figure out how many babies our society needs.
For starters, we need to replace ourselves; an ever-shrinking society cannot maintain its infrastructure or take care of its aged.
It’s obvious that each married couple needs to have 2 children to replace themselves.
Plus another to make up for those who don’t marry?
Catholics used to have a tradition of firstborn sons going into the priesthood, and of encouraging at least one daughter to enter the convent. The resulting supply of priests and religious who staff the Churches, schools, charitable institutions, orphanages and hospitals, helped families to raise moral and upstanding children, and helped to benefit all of humanity throughout the centuries. These spiritual servants did not marry, did not have children, and had to be replaced in the society. So married couples should have a third child at least, to allow some of their children to make such saintly and dedicated career choices in life.
Disease, plague and accidents also claim lives. More replacements needed.
Some people are not fertile. They have to be replaced as well.
Better add child #4 to the family.
So any determination of number of babies needed should account for all of the above factors and needs. And the number of babies needed from each fertile couple is not going to be, by any calculation zero, nor one or two. Those of us who do not have at least 4 children, unless we have fertility problems, are not pulling our weight, as far at the perpetuation of the human race is concerned.
The More The Merrier!
And for every married couple with zero children, we need a married couple with 8 children.
May God bless large families and may the rest of us celebrate them and support them!
(BTW, for those looking for an economic motivation to add to moral and loving motivations, large families tend to take care of their elderly themselves, rather than relying on your taxpayer money and on nursing homes to take care of their elderly. And their elderly are happier and healthier.)
The Job of Raising a Baby
The job of raising a Baby is the most important job in the world.
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
Rocking the Cradle
CAILLE Leon-Emil 1836-1907 (France)
Babies raised with sacrificial love, most often found in parental love, can turn into heroes and saints like Abraham Lincoln and Pope John Paul the Great.
Babies who are neglected or abused can often turn into cruel monsters like Saddam Hussein and Hitler, who were mistreated as children.
Those who rocked the cradles of these babies (or didn’t) are responsible, to some degree, for the deeds of the children.
The raising of a baby is important. It brings the potential for the greatest joy, the greatest achievement, and the greatest fulfillment in life.
It also requires the greatest sacrifice and work, and brings the potential for the greatest heartache. The Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Mother of Our Lord attest to that.
Ultimately, no matter what choices we make, paradise will elude us on earth; our lives will contain both hardships and blessings.
Eradicating babies from our lives will not eliminate hardship from our lives; discarding babies will simply eliminate beauty and love from our lives.
Not a Union Job
The raising of a baby is not a 9 to 5 job.
It’s not accomplished in a few years.
You don’t get summers off.
Other people cannot be paid to perform the sacrificial level of service that a loving mother and father routinely provide for their children.
And, with all due respect to teachers, teachers and their unions do not provide all that is needed by a child; they can only complement, at best, the essential love, care, nurture and training that the parents provide. You will never find an employee who provides the same level of love and sacrifice for a child that a parent can provide. The likelihood that teachers unions, which look out not for the welfare of the child, but for the comfort and benefits of union bosses and of teachers, the likelihood that these unions will substitute adequately for absentee parents or for working parents, is virtually zero.
Unions Rocking Our Cradles?
Madison Teachers Union Protests, March 2011
>: [
A recent attempt to close the racial achievement gap in Madison, Wisconsin, with the establishment of a special school,
Madison Prep, failed.
The failure was partially due the the fact that union regulations would not permit teachers to provide the sacrificial levels of time and dedication that would be required when attempting to compensate for reduced family and community involvement in the raising of children.
No union, kibbutz, nor Hillary Clinton’s “village” will compensate for the absence of devoted parents in the raising of a child.
Success in the rearing of quality human beings is always tied to love, to time, to adult involvement and to adult-student ratio, as has been proved repeatedly with “Big Brother” and other programs through which adults invest time and love in children.
The Hardest, Yet the Most Rewarding
Despite the time-intensive hard work and sacrifice involved in child rearing, when people are asked, in old age, what had given them the most joy in life, they inevitably answer that a good marriage and their children provide them with the greatest joy and satisfaction, above all other things in life.
Responsibilities in Life
Most would agree that each of us is not born for the sole purpose of existing and being pampered and served by others.
Honestly, where would these people for serving us come from, anyway? Who in their right mind would volunteer to be our servants when they could demand to be masters themselves?
Servants for all ?
So, particularly in democratic societies, we accept the fact that we are not born entitled to servants, and most of us have to work. We have to do our laundry. We have to shovel the snow, and we have to pay our taxes.
Neglect of work is even addressed in the Bible:
If anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat” – 2 Thessalonians 3:10.
So why would the perpetuation of the human race be considered optional, if all other work is not optional?
Are we entitled to evade the hard work of parenting, then to demand that the children of others look after us sacrificially and lovingly in our old age?
Will paid employees and union workiers show us the same kind of care we would get from our children?
Is not the raising of children a duty and a responsibility?
A duty which, incidentally, also provides the greatest satisfaction and joy in life?
The raising of a family remains the biggest source of love and satisfaction on earth.
Those who choose to discard their children through contraception and abortion are shortsightedly hurting themselves, as well as hurting the entire society.
The Irony of Our Situation in 2013
The economic situation we are suffering in the United States at the moment, the staggering debt and the shortage of tax income, is due, in part, to the fact that we are starting to feel the shortage of young people and of babies which started in 1973 with the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade on January 21, 1973.
Since then, we have eliminated 54 million citizens from age 0 to 40. And their potential children are missing. There are probably 100 million citizens, aged 0 to 40, missing from the United States right now. That would be about 1/4 of the nation missing.
Our national deficit, the amount we are missing from taxes, is also about 1/4; 1/4 of the national budget is missing.
Coincidence?
Or lack of foresight, lack of planning, and cumulative effects of lack of baby-appreciation since 1973?
Baby-Appreciation Deficit
One of the lucky 30%
Baby-appreciation is at an all-time low in 2013.
Now we have the most pro-abortion President in U.S. history in office. Ironically, this is a man who would probably have been aborted himself, if abortion had been legal at the time of his birth.
- He is so pro-abortion that he supports the killing of a baby born accidentally in a botched 9-month term partial-birth abortion. He voted for that while he was Senator.
- He is so pro-abortion that he supports the abortion of his own grandchildren.
- He is so pro-abortion that he has forced mandates on religious employers, forcing the employers to provide abortifacient drugs to their employees, against their own religious beliefs. He added this emphasis on abortion after promising his pro-life Democrat colleagues (Stupak and his 11) that ObamaCare would not include abortion.
We now have a President who has forced abortion onto America, against the wishes of 2/3 of the American population, by deception and through lies.
An Ironic Historical Omen?
This first radically pro-abortion President will be re-inaugurated on January 21, 2013.
President Obama’s re-inauguration should have been one day earlier, on January 20, 2013. But this year January 20th fell on a Sunday, so the date was pushed to Monday, January 21, 2013.
January 21, 2013 is, ironically, the eve of the 40th anniversary of the legalization of abortion in the United States by the Supreme Court Decision Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973.
Our most radically pro-abortion President will be re-inaugurated on the last day marking 40 years of abortion in the United States, when the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion and started the elimination of now 1/4 of the population in the United States.
Christians (80% of us) realize the significance of the number 40 in salvation history:
- The Great Flood – 40 days
- The Exodus – 40 years
- Goliath challenging the Israelites – 40 days
- 40 lashes meted out by the Sanhedrin
- Christ’s fast and prayer in the desert – 40 days
- Resurrection to Ascension – 40 days
- Lent – 40 days
The increased ardor of pro-life prayer and pro-life political activity in recent years, particularly during the time approaching the last November 6, 2012 election, inspired many to believe that the election would displace Barack Obama from the Presidency and that the tide of abortion in the United States would be reversed.
This obviously did not occur.
My faith in God makes me suspect that although we did not guess God’s plan, all the prayers and efforts have not been in vain. Those who wait and watch patiently will see the hand of God operating quietly in response to our prayers.
A Personal Note
2009?
Reflecting on babies in January is a personal pleasure for me, since my two sons were January babies. They are no longer babies, but still, together with my husband, they are the joy of my life.
The joy and satisfaction of having their freindship does not approach in any way the satisfaction I have enjoyed from any other pursuit, professional or recreational.
Happy Birthday today to one of my January no-longer-babies!
Then Happy Birthday eleven days from now, to the other January no-longer-baby.
What’s my husband’s birthday? All Saints Day. Really. 🙂
Syte Reitz grew up in Queens, New York, in a family of Lithuanian immigrants who fled Nazi and Soviet domination during World War II. Her education includes a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, and post-doctoral work at Princeton University. Syte left her job as an Assistant Professor at Oakland University, Michigan, to devote herself to raising her children, and ultimately homeschooled them through the end of high school. She is a member of Madison's Cathedral Parish.
