The Value of the Wanted

Some contradictions you see so much of you start to wonder if you should even mention them any more... Still, it's been throwing me off the last week that at Large Corporate Employer I keep finding emails in my inbox with subject lines like Save The Little Babies! It's fundraising week for March of Dimes here, which in addition to Planned Parenthood and some environmental causes is up at the top of Large Corporate Employer's cause celebre list.

Coming from the religious and political background that I do, seeing "save the babies" emails and finding fliers on my desk with tiny footprints on them suggests to me a pro-life cause of some sort. And indeed, March of Dimes does great work. (I know they provided a lot of help to a co-worker who had her baby at 32 weeks a few years back.)

Now, to be fair, although corporate giving funnels a lot of money into Planned Parenthood, we don't get treated to PP fundraisers and events around here. I think even most supporters must have some sense that this isn't something which deserves to be talked about openly.

Yet the combination of the two causes seems to underline perhaps the only great victory of existentialist philosophy in the wider culture -- though few people recognize it by that name. The worth of the unborn is routinely defined by how much they are wanted. On the one hand we have a respected, well funded charity whose purpose is to help save the lives of babies born very prematurely. On the other, we have a not insignificant number of politicians who assert that it should be a protected right for mothers who do not want their children (of exactly the same early viability age) to utilize "partial birth" abortions.