No, Your Newborn Is Not a Miracle

Are you a curmudgeon? Take this litmus test:

Every time a baby is born at the Medina Hospital [in Rochester, NY] the whole hospital can rejoice. The parents of the newborn will push a button that will play a lullaby over the hospital's public address system. The "first tune" program was started by Mark Maxwell of Athens, Georgia. When Maxwell's wife was expecting their first child, another family had just lost a child in a hospital fire. Mark wanted to remind people that in the midst of sickness and tragedy, there is new life.

"Because hospitals are full of trauma and sickness and death, I mean that's what a hospital has, but you know a healthy born baby, I mean there's nothing better, in my opinion," said Maxwell. Several hospitals throughout the country have adopted the "first tune" program.

Urgh. Don't know about you, but my inner Grinch is about to get all Hulky. What a saccharine, insipid, mawkish load of crap.

I'd like to ask those who insist upon using loudspeakers in a public space in order to tell everyone of their procreative success: Do I know you? I'm sure the fruit of your loins means a lot to you. The thing is, it doesn't mean jack to anyone else, except (in all likelihood) your family and friends, who can probably be counted on to coo and fawn on demand. So why not keep your announcements limited to them?

There's something sickeningly preening about broadcasting to hundreds, even thousands of total strangers that you completed the old in-out with the effect that nature intended. Honestly, what do you want — a fucking medal?

I know we live in a dish-all culture that shamelessly churns private moments into public ones, but — news flash! — unless your names are Tom and Katie and you have a newborn with a freakishly full head of hair, your happy tidings will reap well-deserved yawns. Pray tell: Did your precious baby receive a visit from three frankincense-carrying wise men from the Middle East? Does he or she do anything miraculous beyond producing amazing quantities of poop and piss 24/7? If not, you expect people to care why?

A hospital is not a place any of us visit because we want to be there. Finding a captive audience in a medical facility does not give you license to impose your maudlin Hallmark™ moments on it. Just the opposite. In other words: the glory of your functioning reproductive system notwithstanding, the rest of us have no need for the maternity ward's institutional schmaltz, nor for your brand of self-absorbed, coercive sentimentality.

The pervasive social demand to celebrate each new infant (and really every young child) as a unique gift from the heavens, as a bona fide miracle, is a barf-worthy cultural conceit that's not just regrettable for the overinflated sense of self-worth with which it imbues children from birth. The idea is also plainly untrue. Miracles — if you believe they exist to begin with — are by definition rare, unrepeatable events. Of course, ever since fish slithered onto land, sperm and eggs have combined to form mammals trillions upon trillions of times. Nothing could be more ordinary, more pedestrian, more unremarkable.

No, there's nothing wrong with celebrating even something as everyday as a newborn, and I don't begrudge new parents their joy. Hey, I think my kids are wonderful too. I just have no particular desire to commandeer the nearest public address system and loudly apprise a crowd of unsuspecting strangers of that fact, especially when my mostly sick and incapacitated audience has not the slightest choice in the matter.

As for Mark Maxwell, the Good Samaritan merchandise-hawking Christian entrepreneur behind the "first tune" plan: How very charitable of him to cheer up couples who lost their child by rubbing their faces into the birth of his. You can see Maxwell's thoughtful reasoning: "What's with the moping mugs, people? I know your baby got roasted alive in a raging fire, but buck up now, 'cause other people's infants aren't charred one bit!"

This kind of nose-thumbing, passive-aggressive piety passes for grace?

Comments

[smurfy]

>a fucking medal?

Was that meant as pun?

[Windypundit]

"I think my kids are wonderful too. I just have no particular desire to find the nearest public address system and loudly apprise a crowd of unsuspecting strangers of that fact"

That's because your kids aren't as wonderful as their kids. Oh, they know every parent says their kids are wonderful, but their kids really are wonderful. You'd see that if you hadn't deluded yourself into thinking that your own kids are wonderful when your kids are obviously not as wonderful as their kids.

[Nick]

And I'm sure the women who are in the hospital because they just had a miscarriage, or something similar, will rejoice in being reminded several times a day that they don't have a baby any more.

[ben]

Well said!
How about they ring the church bells (or whatever else they have as public broadcasting system) all over the US of A every time a soldier is lost in Iraq?

[Phelps]

Maybe they should keep a toteboard in the lobby of the hospital, with a kind of stock graph on it.

BORN: 103
DIED: 142
NET: -39

[Timothy]

He's the sort of guy I'd remind that a baby will never stop crying if you don't give it a good shaking.

[David]

If I'm lying in a hospital bed ravaged by some disease, why would someone's birth announcement supposed to make me feel better?

Maybe stuff like this is the first step in the arrogance that some parents seem to have regarding their children's place in the world. Everything must revolve around their kids. As such, they expect everyone to behave like class 2 electronics. They must not interfere with their children, and must accept any interference from their children.

[Lee]

I'm glad I'm not the only person that read the story and found it incredibly conceited and a bit ...morbid(?).

[Jeff the Poustman]

Agreed on the use of the word miracle,too. A 'miracle' is exactly what a (normal) birth is *not*. It may be all sorts of other nice things, but not that.