After his birth, as I entered the intensive-care nursery, I was deeply ambivalent, having been persuaded by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer's advocacy of expanding reproductive choice to include infanticide. But there was my son, asleep or unconscious, on a ventilator, motionless under a heat lamp, tubes and wires everywhere, monitors alongside his steel and transparent-plastic crib. What most stirred me was the way he resembled me. Nothing had prepared me for this, the shock of recognition, for he was the boy in my own baby pictures, the image of me when I was an infant.
From Dr. Chris Gabbard’s article, “A Life Beyond Reason,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, about life with his son, born with a severe disability. Karen Swallow Prior turned the spotlight on this article at the Her*meneutics blog. I hope Dr. Gabbard thinks a little more about his sympathies with Rabbi Harold Kushner’s deeply flawed view of God, expressed in the penultimate paragraph, but his article was otherwise a joy to read. Read it here.
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