It's never too late to throw out your baby

Last Thursday, I read a most startling article in The Indianapolis Star headlined, "Father puts toddler in baby drop box." According to the article,

TOKYO -- Japan's first anonymous drop box for unwanted babies triggered a wave of anger and soul searching Wednesday after it was discovered that a preschooler -- and not an infant -- was left by his father on the service's first day…The drop-off for infants, known as "Stork's Cradle," was begun on May 10 by the Roman Catholic-run Jikei Hospital in the southern city of Kumamoto to discourage abortions and the abandonment of children in unsafe public places...The revelation of the boy's age Tuesday triggered outrage among political leaders, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe saying that "anonymously throwing out a child is unacceptable."

Forgive my ignorance, but would someone please explain to me what the controversy is all about? If there is an approved "child return" policy, why should it matter the age of the child? Is the dignity of a child based on the age of that child? Apparently so. (A 3-month old put in the drop box, no problem; a 3-year old, now that's a different situation altogether.)

In the worldview class I was teaching last week, we had a lengthy conversation about what it takes to uphold the dignity of human beings. As was pointed out, without the creative intentionality that comes from a loving God, it is very difficult to make a case for the inherent dignity of a human being. If we all exist on this earth as the evolutionary result of random chance over billions of years, why not exercise a "survival of the fittest" principle and discard children whenever they become an inconvenient burden to us?

So, why the uproar over finding a 3-year old in the discard box? Because beyond all of the naturalistic gymnastics necessary to reconcile Darwinian evolution with basic human dignity, there is an intuitive part of us (the Christian would say, the moral law of God written on our hearts--Romans 2:15) which recoils at the idea of a little boy being abandoned by his father. Something about that picture just isn't right.

But that's what happens. Truth gets turned on its head when humanity chooses to reject God's divine counsel in favor of our own finite, yet seemingly-superior, understanding of how the world should work. Until we allow God His rightful place in the ordering of our lives, human dignity will always become the collateral damage of human "progress" and efficiency. Without the inherent dignity that only comes through our Creator God, we may as well put our kids in a GLAD trashbag along with last night's pizza and leave them out on the curb for Ray's Trash Service to take them off our hands. Hey, why not?

Comments

[Pete Ross]

The moral revulsion directed at the father of the abandoned pre-schooler is misplaced. We find it shocking for a father to deposit his child in a drop box, but what would have been a better alternative? A father capable of abandoning his own child can do no more humane thing than to deposit the child with a church run orphanage. The father certainly was defective, but can we blame him for recognizing his shortcomings and giving his child a chance with people who would love him?

PGR

[Abby]

Actually the drop-off boxes or whatever you want to call them are the same as many hospitals, fire stations, and police stations have in the US. The reason being is after giving birth a mother can have very significant hormonal changes and it is a way to prevent hurting her baby. So it is not OK to abandon your baby but it is a much, much better alternative.

[Resident Atheist]

Perhaps the 'intuitive part of us which recoils at the idea of a little boy being abandoned by his father' is a evolutionary tool that has been bred for specifically because it propogates the species.

I don't particularly care for the theory that the religious have a lock on human dignity. That implies that atheists are unable understand compassion, morality, or simple humanity. Just because we don't have some higher authority demanding it from us, it does not mean that these traits cannot be justified on their own merit.

'Survival of the fittest' is a cute cliche to describe evolution (I would argue inaccurately). That does not mean that all people that believe in evolution like the fact that the strong usually survive. We can still fight the effects of the theory we believe in.