We have two beautiful and affectionate children, both blessed with good health, tolerable personal idiosyncracies, and their mother’s luminous dark eyes. My wife is expecting our third child sometime between Christmas and New Year’s—we did our Christmas shopping early, and spent well beyond our means! So Christmas approaches this year with more than its usual sense of hallowing life in the cradle. 

When my wife was pregnant with our daughter Sarah (now nearly six and perfectly healthy), a blood test (called an Alphafetoprotein [AFP] test) indicated an increased statistical possibility of Down’s syndrome. We went for amniocentesis. Abortion was not a consideration, but we thought it would be better to know. It took the hospital six weeks to get us the anmiocentesis results. Those were very gloomy weeks. My life has demanded few heroic sacrifices, and I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to meet such a challenge—I only hoped the strength would be given to me should I need it. Such thoughts are with me again this year. 

Despite her thirty-nine-ish age, my wife didn’t bother with the blood test or amniocentesis this time. What difference would it make? She’s had an ultrasound, and the baby looks healthy. But there are no guarantees, and our excitement over the prospect of a new child is muted. We have been chastened by our brush with scientific fortune-telling. Age and experience also have a lot to do with it. We’re worried we’ve sentimentally repressed memories of the crying, the spitting up, the diapers, and the endless paraphernalia. We also both work, and can barely keep house and home together as is. And things are already crowded. It may be impossible to accommodate three children, two adults, a Rasputin-like thirteen-year-old dog, and 156,436 plastic toys in this house. (My books stay!) 

But I think we also sense a certain social isolation, especially in a world where having children is seen as a highly individual and largely economic decision. Determined to avoid the fecundity of their parents, people my age seem to greet each child as a project, an exotic plant to be cultivated only in the most favorable and pristine conditions. Since we are less confident of the world we have brought them into, we hover over our children more anxiously than our parents did over us. Of course birth control and the self-sufficiency it permits is the overwhelming reason children seem to be more gifts to oneself than gifts from God. In no longer being a tyrannical inevitability nature affixes to sex, children are increasingly regarded as extensions of their parents’ essentially self-willed existence. “Did you, ah, I mean, was it, you know, planned?” was the reaction of many people to our admittedly sheepish announcement. Implicit in this query is the suggestion that an “unplanned” child is in some way a superfluous child. Others see a large family as an unjustifiable personal extravagance. Still, I think it is hard to find a woman, even today, who does not feel in some way touched by a very personal creator when she first learns she has conceived a child. 

Of course I worry about the new baby’s health. We have been very lucky, and feel a little guilty about having a third child. Relatives and friends struggle with infertility. Other friends have a child, born on the same day as our son, with multiple disabilities. Aren’t we just pushing our luck? I think such fears and suspicions are more prevalent in a time when abortion is readily available and therefore a damaged child is seen as literally unnecessary. Or, as the libertarians like to say, why should society be burdened with the expensive task of caring for the handicapped? Leon Kass, the physician and ethicist, has written about our misguided search for “perfect” babies. Much of our worry over birth defects is exaggerated, Kass writes, a product of technological expectations that eventually will extinguish what is uniquely human in our lives. There is something horribly dehumanizing in the technologizing of procreation, he warns, especially in the moral climate created by abortion. 

I think he’s right, and bringing a third child into the world has made me think about it again. (The editor’s request for a Christmas piece on the impending nativity also helped.) The men who delivered our first two children, both by caesarian section, are abortionists. I expressed some discomfort over this at the time, but my wife is not Catholic, rural Connecticut does not abound in obstetricians, and, finally, it was her decision to make. There is a lot of talk about partnership in pregnancy and childbirth. “We are pregnant,” is the euphemistic line. But “we,” I can report unequivocally, are never pregnant. It is still the woman, not the man, who suffers the pain, takes the risks, and makes the bodily sacrifices to bring forth new life. My wife “knows” our children in a way I never will. Even if I could (which I can’t), I was not about to dictate what doctors she could use. 

For this pregnancy my wife has chosen a new obstetrician, however. Several factors were involved in her decision, but certainly one was an acute unease with the demeanor and philosophical creed of at least one of her former doctors, an outspoken defender of abortion rights and, as it turned out, small families. A few years after Sarah was born, we read a letter this physician wrote to the local newspaper complaining about the increase in births among baby boomers. He argued that no family had the moral right to have more than two children, especially not “yuppies,” who notoriously consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth and resources. ! come from a family of five children, and I found the good doctor’s moral preening both amusing and offensive, if not downright Orwellian. My wife, who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and therefore whose extended family doesn’t extend too far, thought the doctor a bit preemptive. The idea that this pseudo-eugenic scheme had been endorsed by someone whose job it was to bring babies into the world made it seem even more bizarre. 

But I wasn’t surprised. As a newspaper reporter, I had done a series of articles on abortion. Our obstetrician was outspoken and politically active, and a natural person to interview. He speaks with real moral passion, and he told me he was willing to go to jail to protect a woman’s right to abortion. As a young doctor in New York City he had seen too many women die from botched illegal abortions. Sex education, contraceptives, and family planning were the answer, he readily admitted. But abortion was a necessary evil given society’s resistance to frank talk about sex and the inevitability of human error. 

Much of what he said made a good deal of sense, especially when contrasted to a local monsignor I had interviewed about adoption who talked about the evil of contraception. But there was something slightly askew and eerily impersonal about the doctor’s views. Class and intellectual snobbery were part of it, but the larger part was a quirky sense of rectitude and moral mission. It was an intriguing mixture of Emersonian notions of self-reliance and an almost oriental fatalism. He was a fierce individualist whose ideas about the nature and value of individual life were remarkably fuzzy. As far as the doctor was concerned, if there was any mystery in the world it was best not to make a fuss about it, lest you be thought weak or self-indulgent. As human beings we were masters of our own fate. This became clear when I asked him if he thought abortion was killing. 

“There is just no doubt in my mind that every egg and sperm is human,” he said, “it’s individual, it’s alive, and has the potential of becoming a human being. But I don’t accord the same rights to an egg and a sperm or their combination that I do to an infant. And I don’t accord the same rights to an infant that I would to an adult. 

“Life is a continuum,” he added, “and it does not begin with an egg and a sperm, it began millions of years ago and, as far as my personal view, we are all part of the same organism. Essentially we are all hitched to one another, but our health very much depends on control of our reproduction. And reproduction that makes people unhealthy, whether it’s mentally or physically, hurts everyone. I have no doubt ! am taking a degree of human life every time an abortion is done, but I wouldn’t do them unless I thought I was actually giving more to human life than I was taking away.” 

Seeing the “religion” behind at least this one abortion activist’s political stance was instructive. Needless to say, I was stunned by this answer; by the well-mannered thoughtfulness wedded to a genial inhumanity. As far as I was concerned, spirit and matter had drifted a little too far apart in the doctor’s Olympian perspective. I don’t know whether the aristocratic pretension or the grandiose scientism annoyed me more, but it was one of those moments when your Catholicism surges through you like adrenalin in the aftermath of a shock. I read the doctor’s statement to a number of colleagues at the newspaper, expecting them to share my sense of disbelief. But almost no one found it shocking or even disturbing. Indeed, a group of male reporters exchanged stories about the abortions they had paid for before Roe v. Wade. Each shook his head thankfully over having been saved from the incalculable consequences of an unwanted child. 

I don’t doubt that unwanted children are a poor foundation for a marriage, although I know of some evidence to the contrary. I was never faced with such a choice, and I don’t know how I would have resolved it when I was nineteen. Whom would I have listened to? Whom would I have tumed to for help? Looking back, the answers are not encouraging. But I do know the world is a more varied place and life a more curious odyssey than I thought when I was nineteen and the adult world loomed over me like a impermeable iron-gray sky. 

I also know that if there is one thing I believe, it is that we are emphatically not “all part of the same organism.” That view takes us entirely too far down the road to where killing becomes a form of toenail clipping. This urge to prune and trim, to eliminate human irregularity and accident, is an almost irresistible temptation and a great evil. “It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces,” Chesterton reminds us. “I want to love my neighbor not because he is I, but precisely because he is not. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one’s self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible.” 

Fatherhood, a role I long associated with the abuse of power, has given me things I could never have achieved myself, stiffened my spine for responsibilities I once thought mere drudgery, and cast my passions and interests beyond my own limiting ambition. Leon Kass has speculated that in the mysteries of gender and sexuality and procreative love we may find “the beginning of the sanctification of life—yes, even in modem times.” I believe that, and think that to secure human dignity in other spheres /g the unconditional love of children must be encouraged, not hedged in on every side with captious qualifications. This too is the instinct of Christianity, which so sentimentally unites the everyday miracle of a newborn baby with “the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars.” Or so thought Chesterton, old Father Christmas himself. 

So here we all sit, some more pear-shaped and ponderous than others, waiting for Christmas with more than the customary sense that all things will be made new again. Certainly, one way or the other, all things in our home will be made very new indeed. I know this baby, whatever its temperament or fate, will be as sure a manifest mystery and as much a spur to my better nature as my first two children have been. And that fact, quite literally, is a continuing revelation to me. To live with children and not recognize them as wholly individual souls wrestling with their own demons and graces is a kind of blasphemy, I think. My two children gather around their mother this very afternoon, their hands seeking her hard belly or slyly reaching for her remembered breasts, their heads pressed against the surface of that biologically matter-of-fact yet still unimaginable world from which they have been—is the word “delivered”? Yes, it is.