A baby is not always simply a bundle of joy, sometimes it can be an instrument of political manipulation, writes John Waters
STRANGE, HOW similar events can have such different connotations in different circumstances. You would think the prospect of new life would be everywhere an occasion of unambiguous rejoicing, but the past week has told a different story. On Tuesday, the newspapers carried accounts of two different announcements relating to the arrival of new human life, with starkly contrasting circumstances and equally divergent meanings.
On the front pages of the redtops was the news that a convicted killer, Una Black, had given birth to a child while in prison. Black has been in the Dóchas Centre in Mountjoy for just a few weeks, having been sentenced in July to nine years' imprisonment for stabbing to death a neighbour in a drunken row about a dog. There is no evidence that she planned her pregnancy for maximum effect during her trial, but if she had she could hardly have got the timing better.
At the sentencing hearing, Black tried to persuade the judge that she should receive a light sentence for the sake of her baby, but Judge Paul Carney, recalling the senselessness and brutality of her crime, maintained a stern resolve. She will be allowed to keep her baby girl in prison for one year only.
There are those who straight-facedly argue that someone like Black should not be in jail at all, that a woman with a young child should never incur a prison sentence. Recently a high-profile campaign to roughly this effect was launched by a feminist politician. Indeed there is no shortage of precedents to indicate that this view is widely held among judges who can scarcely be accused of harbouring feminist opinions.
In one case last year, a husband and wife were tried and convicted on the precise same charge. But, while the man received a hefty prison sentence, the woman walked free because, as the judge put it, her children should not be deprived of both parents.
The judge did not elaborate on the intriguing implications of his conclusion that the father should shoulder 100 per cent of the punishment while the mother received no punishment at all.
The ultimate destination of such logic, of course, is that women remain free to break the law as they please provided they have children or a chance of getting pregnant. I eagerly anticipate, in 12 months' time, at least one senior female politician and several female journalists launching a campaign to have Una Black released early on compassionate grounds. The emotive power of the idea of her baby being snatched from her arms will render this case difficult to answer.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another prospective new life was this week attracting controversy in the allegedly more serious newspapers.
A woman who has just been announced as the running mate of the Republican candidate in the US presidential election revealed within days that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant and will shortly marry the father of this unborn child. The kind of commentators who would be first in the queue to march for the early release of Una Black were to be heard sniggering behind their hands because Sarah Palin is, as they euphemistically reminded us, "a woman of socially conservative views".
Of course, mindful of the risk of seeming hypocritical, liberal opinion has been careful not to express any explicit judgment on the putative moral dimensions of the situation, instead merely pointedly reminding the public of the facts while ostensibly focusing on John McCain's "judgment" and alleged failure to vet his choice properly in advance.
But how does this reflect on McCain's judgment?
Why should John McCain have bothered to find out whether any of Sarah Palin's daughters was pregnant?
What would liberal opinion have demanded of him had he asked such a question and learned in advance that Bristol Palin was five months gone?
Indeed, had it come out that he had learned of the pregnancy beforehand, and as a result decided against having Bristol's mother as his running mate, he would now find himself indicted on a far more serious charge.
Where babies are concerned, a man just cannot win.
In recent times, we have tended to look backwards with condescension and disapproval at an era when the prospect of an "illegitimate" baby caused society to engage in forms of madness out of which arose much unnecessary pain and grief.
But it is not at all clear that much has really changed, except to harmonise with the ideological madness of the present.
A baby is still not always simply a bundle of joy, but sometimes an instrument of political manipulation, an ideological football to be kicked into or against the wind, as expediency proposes.
Babies still make villains out of victims and victims out of villains. On an island nation off the coast of Europe, the arrival of a baby girl carries the potential to redeem a woman who has killed a man in a moment of rage. A few thousand miles away in Alaska, a new baby of as yet indeterminate sex threatens to alter the drift of global politics in the coming decade. Isn't it time the world grew up about babies?