"This is a baby; this is a blessing from God."

My attention was caught last week by seeing a short spot on CNN in which the Vice President's daughter, Mary Cheney, was speaking of the controversy caused by her (and her partner's) decision to have a child together. "This is a baby; this is a blessing from God," she said somewhat nervously into the microphone. The statistics in the news have been rather fascinating to me lately regarding the fact that 51% of America's women are not married. More and more women are making the decision to have a child, whether married or not, either because they have not met their ideal future spouse or because the biological clocks for motherhood are simply arriving. Many of these mothers, like Mary and her partner, are in their late 30's or even early 40's. Do we need to worry, as many conservatives among us tell us, about these children turning out badly? Do we need to worry that our traditional families are breaking down?

It seems to me that the stand for life on the conservative side, led forcefully by James Dobson, faces a dilemma. If we say (and I count myself in this group) that we value children, how can we also condemn the birth of them in any way? After all, the children are not responsible for whatever decisions are made by their parents. When I was coming of age, of course, in the late 1950's and early 1960's, before abortion was even legal in the United States, we simply sent our underage girls away for a few months, expelled them from school upon learning of a pregnancy, had a quickly arranged "shotgun" wedding, or closed our eyes to the fact that illegal abortions were perhaps taking place even within our own community. I loved what my friend from Springdale, Jim, used to say about premature babies: "No, my dear, the baby was not premature; the parents were."

I guess I am considering this issue more thoughtfully today because my second grandson was born almost two years ago to my daughter and her partner. Being in their mid-thirties and mid-forties, they were certainly old enough to examine all the potential issues before the baby was born. The conservative argument is that children do better in homes consisting of a mother and a father who are married. My daughter, especially after learning that the child would be a boy, asked a couple of good friends, men, to be godparents, thus assuring her son of positive role models. The baby would also be born into an upper middle class background and likely be assured of the finest of private schools available. Would he fulfill one of the most dire statistics conservatives say will likely happen to him? Will he go to jail early; will he take drugs; will he be lost in society's cracks? Is it definite that he will become a juvenile delinquent like the prognosticators tell us?

I tend to say, along with Borat, "not so much." Children who are raised by a single mother in poverty (as my sister and I were) with an alcoholic absentee father can still become successful middle-class Americans. Children from upper middle-class families can still become killers within an all-American high school. Sociologists are examining families closely and still have no answer as to what truly makes one child go on to live a fully productive life while another falls into a well with no one to pull him or her out.

As always, I have no answers; I raise the questions only. I agree with Mary Cheney, however, in my fence riding between conservative and more progressive ideas, "Children (all of them) are a blessing from God." We must simply wait for this new generation of babies to grow up and then determine how they fared.