Memorial Day

Ross Douthat finally finds himself able to weep for a embryo that made it past the birth canal. Douthat thinks he's discovered that being an in-vitro baby will cause trauma and suffering, since the entire process is out of one's control. And the kid doesn't have a good time of it either, he says.

Douthat says (in part),"one grown-up donor baby quoted in the study describes as the feeling of existing entirely for “other people’s purposes, and not my own.” That pretty much describes any child ever conceived before birth control, especially in those halcyon conservative days when children were conceived by accident and with lethal regularity, and put to work as soon as their little fingers could hold a hoe or loom spindle. The Golden Age of America, the land of Corporate Titans, saw the utter exploitation of children on a daily basis, something the Progressives attempted to stop, to the conservatives' horror. How dare they interfere with a parent's prerogative!

It's odd, therefore, that on this Day of Memory in which we salute our war dead, that Douthat doesn't choose to write about the other child victims of our times, the children who wake up every morning wondering if their Dad or Mom is going to come home from our endless wars. Or the thousands of children who will wake up without a parent for the rest of their lives. Who will protect those children? Who will support them and keep them from harm? Who will listen to them weep with pain, year after year, and soothe the tearing hole of loss? Who will go to their graduations, walk them down the aisle when they marry, hold their children and look for familiar features? What about those post-fetuses? Don't they count, or does Douthat only care about American boys and girls when he can score political points against them?