A Brief Note on Consequences

On a cool October evening some years back, a young woman – let’s call her Jenny, age 18 – checked into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica and gave birth to a baby boy.  Her friends had urged her to have an abortion.  So did her boyfriend, Jack, also 18, who waited with us now outside the delivery room, his eyes red with feelings he didn’t expect and couldn’t put a name to.

I sat next to him and listened while he explained that yes, he really loved Jenny, but it just hadn’t worked out.  He drank too much.  He liked to fight.  He couldn’t hold a job.  And now he was in trouble with the law for driving his car through the plate-glass front window of a gas station, boozed to oblivion.  The idea of being a dad – well, it just seemed crazy.

Jenny, who’d followed Jack from the Midwest, fended off her friends through the sixth, seventh, and into the eighth month, agreeing that sure, abortion was the sensible route, and yes, she’d get the problem taken care of.  And then, on a rainy afternoon, she walked into a local Catholic church instead.  

The priest referred her to a support group who, at her request, connected her with a young woman lawyer who did prolife adoption work.  The lawyer explained some options: She knew quite a few Catholic and other Christian couples seeking to adopt.  But Jenny already knew what she wanted.  A week or so later, the phone rang in our home.

What I remember most about the next few weeks is Jenny’s courage.  She had no money.  She loved Jack but had no illusions about building a life with him.  Her friends thought she was a fool for putting herself through the birth and never showed up at the hospital.  Her family back home in Wisconsin didn’t even know where she was.  

Yet in the midst of her turmoil and anxiety, and completely alone, she focused on just one thing: giving her baby a chance to live.

Why Jenny chose us, or more specifically my wife Suann, was simple. She’d seen Suann on local TV talking about the humanity of the unborn child.  What moved Jenny was some grace or goodness that she sensed, correctly, in my wife – qualities Jenny herself shared.  

She could have turned her baby into a profit; many other good couples were eager for a child and could pay.  Instead she went with two people who were living month to month on writing and odd jobs.  We had to borrow the money for her hospital bill.  The doctor and lawyer, both Catholic, worked gratis.  Jenny asked only for the cost of a ticket home to the Midwest.   

Looking back, all this sounds implausible.  But it happened.

In the hospital waiting room, that autumn night, a nurse finally came along to fetch my wife and me.  And in that moment, the roads that had briefly brought us together with Jack – the baby’s natural father – parted ways.  He grabbed my hand and thanked us, but stayed behind.  We went ahead to meet the newborn.  When we came back later, he was gone.  We never saw him again.  

As for the baby: Well, as the days flowed on into the first months of his life, and we held and played with him night after night, our unexpected gift from God, he seemed (at least to me) to have his mother’s eyes, the eyes of the mother who would raise and love him – my wife’s eyes.

All of the above happened nearly half a century ago.  Our son is a grown man now.  He has a good job, a gifted, beautiful wife, a ferociously talented son of his own, and a daughter, Veronica, who owns his heart.  

“Vero” is wheelchair bound.  She was born severely disabled.  She can’t speak.  She can’t feed or clean herself.  Yet beneath those burdens is a being with a distinct personality, a young woman with a forever purpose in the mind of God, conscious of the world, with her own likes and dislikes, joys and frustrations.  Now 21, her smile can light up the room.  Her displeasure can be equally vivid.  But she knows that she’s loved, and watching the everyday devotion – the unapplauded heroism – of her parents is a master class in what it means to be human for anyone who enters the family’s orbit.

These things are much on my mind lately thanks to the young influencer couple who aborted their unborn child with Down syndrome and shared the whole experience online.  It’s hard to imagine what they were thinking, or even if they were thinking – and perhaps that shallowness counts in their favor.  

In the real world, the world beyond our digital fantasyland, they killed an unborn human life, a unique and irreplaceable imago Dei.  But they also killed something precious and godly in themselves.  And actions have consequences:  They’ve already faced ample criticism.  They now have plenty of time to consider (or ignore) the gravity of what they did.  Influencers, like actors, have a short shelf life.  Mistakes don’t.

  I suppose my point here is that memorable passage, roughly translated, from the Talmud:  “Whoever saves a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he had saved an entire world. And whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture accounts it as if he had destroyed an entire world.”  

As we near another Fathers’ Day, I remember that lost, complicated boy in the hospital waiting room so long ago.  I hope Jack became a good man.  I hope he became a good dad.  But even more often, and with even more gratitude, I remember the young woman who chose life and gave us our second, treasured son. 

 We never heard from her again; nor has our son sought her out.  He knows who his mother is: the woman who raised and loves him, and always will.

But Jenny, wherever you are, I hope you’re happy and well.  Because you did good.