What is a child?

Sunday’s gospel recounts the story of Jesus feeding 5000 with just a few loaves and fishes.  When a large throng of people followed them to a deserted place,  Jesus' disciples saw this as a problem and encouraged Jesus to dismiss the crowd because there was nothing to eat and no where to obtain food.  But Jesus saw not a problem, but an opportunity.  Whereas the disciples saw only the cost and the impossibility of the situation, Jesus recognized  a teaching moment in which He could demonstrate the love and compassion of God.  

Lately there has been much talk about the need for compassion with respect to the 60,000 children who have illegally crossed our Southern border in recent months.  Giving them amnesty will only further encourage desperate parents to send their children on the perilous journey in the care of criminals.  Our legislators seem to think this is an intractable problem, citing problems with enforcing our borders and contrasting that with the need for compassion, as if there are only two mutually exclusive alternatives, each with its own downside.  But isn't it possible to do both: enforce our borders and see that these children are safely returned home, but with the opportunity at a later date to enter our country safely and legally?  Instead of either/or, why not both/and?  If we had secure borders and were not overrun with illegal entrants (more than 200,000 adults have also crossed our border illegally in the past 9 months), we could afford to ease up the entrance requirements so that honest, good-intentioned people could immigrate legally. 

Ironically, we feel compassion for the immigrant children, but what do we really understand about our own children, the children conceived legally in our country?  What kind of world they will be inheriting from our generation?  Not only will our children and grandchildren be saddled with incredible debt, but they will be fewer in number, even as the number of elderly who depend on social security and Medicare continue to expand.  The birthrate in America has been steadily declining for the past forty years and is at an all-time low of 1.87 per adult woman.  Keep in mind that in order to replace the existing population, the birthrate needs to be 2.1 per woman, and we passed below that mark 7 years ago.

 While environmentalists may celebrate this decline in carbon-producing humans, there are many ominous consequences, not the least of which is a steady shrinkage in the size of the labor force at a time when more and more tax dollars will be needed to keep pace with rising costs for supporting the elderly.  Japan and China are beginning to face this problem in earnest since their birth rates have been below replacement levels for more than three decades.  Europe is not far behind, and if not for immigration, would be facing the prospect of cities hollowing out and quite literally shutting them down, as has already been the case in a number of cities in East Germany and the former Soviet Russia.

There are many causes for this worldwide decline in birthrates.   First and foremost is the decline in marriage.  Fewer people are getting married and staying married, and the average age for marriage is higher.  Some blame the economy for people putting off starting a family and for limiting family size.   But I think it goes much deeper than this.  The concept of marriage has changed from one that had been characterized as a sacred institution, sealed with permanent vows and dedicated to starting a family, to one that is focused on individual happiness and can be modified or nullified if it is not fulfilling one or both parties perceived needs.  This flawed notion about marriage, coupled with the understanding that sex is completely separated from procreation, has led to a change in the perception of what a child is.  Too often, a child is seen as a burden to be avoided or discarded if necessary.  Children are associated with “lost freedom” i.e., lost wages, lost privacy, lost opportunities to travel, lost independence, even lost sex.  With procreation now separated from sex, people delay or forgo children altogether to accommodate their timing, their budget, and their convenience.  A child is no longer a gift from God, and the product of a loving relationship, but rather, simply a choice.

Moreover, children are often treated as if they were property, not people.  People feel “entitled” to a baby, even if it means the use of donor sperm, eggs and/or a surrogate mom, and whether or not that child will have both a father and mother.  Frozen embryos have been the subject of legal battles, and they are too often used for stem cell research.  Gay couples feel entitled to a child, without regard to the child’s right to know and be raised by their both their biological mother and father. 

Recently, Pope Francis criticized the “culture of comfort” that pushes men and women to avoid having children so as not to interfere with vacations, prosperity, or independence.   His two predecessors warned about the “dictatorship of relativism” in which religious freedom would be violated.  These two warnings have now become reality.  We have a government that mandates every employer pay for free contraception (the word means "against life").  The Hobby Lobby case and others like it have temporarily made it possible for employers to refuse to pay for at least abortificient drugs if it violates their religious belief.  But these two cultural shifts, comfort and relativism, have combined to change our national demographics for the worse, and they’ve also had a devastating effect on marriage itself.  We no longer think of the family as the basic unit of society, but rather, the individual. 

In a very real sense, we are committing national suicide.  We are so focused on ourselves that we are unwilling or unable to perceive the great gift and miracle of children who are the embodiment of God’s love.  Incidentally, I believe that is why we find all babies to be so adorable, they are the embodiment of God's Love.   To prevent or abort a child, is to prevent and destroy Love itself.   A child is not a problem, or a choice, it is an opportunity to experience an incomparable gift of love.