Ivan Carlos

Yesterday a baby died in Chicago. His name was Ivan Carlos and he was only 2 ½ months old. His tiny little life was lived out in a cramped filthy apartment with as many as 18 other people, many of them children. He lived surrounded by dirty clothes, rotting food, and cockroaches.

What must that baby’s life have been? Two and one-half months of filth, likely accompanied by hunger and neglect. Two and one-half months, frightened and alone, maybe hurt and abused. I used to know the kind of people who live crammed into dirty apartments. They are not the kind of people who make loving parents. They scream at hungry infants, rather than comfort or feed them. They sell their food stamps for drug money. They are the kind of people who don’t care about themselves, much less the creature they happened to conceive and by some accident deliver.

I wonder about the pro-life people, and whether they listen to the news. Don’t they hear things like this? How could anybody, anybody, in their right mind imagine that allowing that child to live for 10 weeks in a squalid hell is in some way a good thing? How can they think that forcing women who don’t want children to have children will have a good result? Forcing every woman who happens to get pregnant to bear out the pregnancy will only result in more horror stories like little Ivan Carlos.

Where are the pro-life people when things like this are happening? Once the unwanted babies are born, who takes care of them? If these people were really pro-life, why are they not working toward improving the quality of life for babies everywhere? Why don’t they see to it that the egg-donors of babies like Ivan Carlos have access to decent birth control? Why don’t they take adoption counseling into the inner city, where it can help babies like Ivan Carlos get a new start with loving families? Why oh why don’t they make any effort to help all the thousands of unwanted babies being born every day all over the world?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to help the unwanted babies already living in the world to improve their lot in life? Wouldn’t that be a greater good to the world, or a greater testament to the glory of God, if that’s how you roll? Why should they track down all those women who at least have the sense to know they are not ready for motherhood, and force them to shoulder a burden they don’t want? How on earth does that help anybody?

It sure does not help all the Ivan Carloses in the world.

May he find peace at last.