ANOTHER READER sends proof of her failure to use contraception. Her daughter was born just over a week ago.

When contraception is widely available, when it is embraced as normal, when births are planned and scheduled, when deliberation replaces surrender, when convenience replaces hardship and struggle, every child seems like a choice, the product of human will and desire. This delusion represents immense hubris. No child is chosen. What is chosen in this face? It’s a gift too good to be true.

— Comments —

David S. writes:

I could show you pictures just as cute, some of which are the products of first using contraception, then stopping when the couple was ready and willing to have a child. I could show you other pictures just as cute which are the products of a donor’s sperm and a lesbian’s egg.

Laura writes:

Ha!

But you can’t show me pictures of the many babies who were never born. They would have been just as cute too. (Well, maybe just as cute. This is a heck of a cute baby.) Also, you seem to be saying that there is something objectively good about each and every baby. If so, then contraception interferes with the attainment of an objective good.

My point, by the way, wasn’t simply that this baby is cute. My point was that she is not a product.

As for the baby — what you would call, product — of a donor’s sperm and a lesbian’s egg, babies are not toys. They are human beings. They have latent needs and inclinations universal to humankind. Among those is the powerful desire for one’s mother and father. This baby will someday no longer be a baby and, when she is, she will know that she was conceived in an act of marital love between her mother and father, not in a commercial or pseudo-charitable transaction. She will also know her father. He will be real. She won’t have to imagine him as a complete stranger jacking off in a room alone, devoid of love at that moment for anything or anyone but himself.

Please don’t tell me that her mother and father may be bad parents or that love can erase the powerful desire for one’s own mother and father or that many babies have been conceived in acts of prostitution or rape or that she won’t really care how she’s been conceived. We’ve covered all that before. You can argue all you want that human beings are not really human, but you can’t change reality.

Lawrence Auster writes:

“No child is chosen. What is chosen in this face?”

Very good. We didn’t create ourselves. All our qualities come from things that we did not create. Did we create the human form? Did we create our own bodies? Did we create our own personalities?

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