Motherhood on Trial

A young woman has an honest moment of self-revelation about unexpected motherhood. In contrast to the woman profiled in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago who wanted to abort two of her triplets because they’d inconvenience her, this columnist, Megan Basham, realizes that she’s been infected by the spirit of the age, a spirit of selfishness and self-absorption.

She talks about an article she read in Vogue at about the same time she was fretting that she had become pregnant and would now have to put all the things she wanted to accomplish onto the back burner. The magazine article mentions a novel in which a couple has to confront the fact that their son is a murderer.

Far from examining the idea that this mother might bear some responsibility for her son
The State of Illinois has a new law that requires compulsory mental health screening for children and pregnant women. Got that? “Compulsory,” as in you or your parents have no choice in the matter. Talk about women’s rights; where are all the feminist pro-choicers to rail about women being singled out for government scrutiny just because they become pregnant? Where are the liberal privacy advocates?

As for child screening, it’s another step along the road of liberal government taking over the parenting duties. What happens when a child raised in a Christian home is asked by a state-employed psychologist what he’s afraid of and he says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10)? The psychologist will say that the child has a malformed idea of an onerous and angry God. (This is really happened to someone I know.) Pretty soon they’ll be taking our boisterous and happy children and medicating them for ADD in order to pacify them and make them pliable.

I laugh ruefully when I see liberals complain about the Patriot Act, which has enabled minor law enforcement expansions to protect us from terrorist attack, when laws like this massive expansion of government power into our civil liberty are ignored and even championed by the same people.