Proponents of embryonic stem cell research had gathered about 200 children suffering with diabetes to help make their case. Missy wasn’t watching as a casual observer. Her eight-year-old has juvenile diabetes. She has a vested interest in all diabetes research. But she was absolutely horrified by what she saw. Mothers, fathers and children themselves were begging Congress to allow the cells of pre-born babies to be harvested for research.
Missy is still haunted by the little girl her daughter’s age who asked if her life wasn’t more important than that of a tiny cell no bigger than a dot. This child, who lives with a life-threatening disease, has been taught that lives have relative value. I can’t imagine how that must feel to a child who knows that she is not “normal” or healthy by most standards. By making her a pawn for evil in a cultural war, she has been denied the very God who will bring her peace as she navigates the frightening reality of a chronic illness. Perhaps instead of training her to be a soldier in the culture of death, someone should have lovingly lead her to the author of life.
God breathes life into each and every one of us. And only God should determine when we live and when we die. God allows children to have diabetes. That little girl would have been much better served if someone had helped her to understand that illness is a blessing. Really and truly. While we certainly don’t hope that any child will suffer with diabetes or leukemia or any of the other diseases which will benefit from stem cell research, we can, with full faith, know that our Lord will bring great good out of a bad situation if we only allow Him.
Someone should teach that little girl that to allow the Lord to work in our lives, we have to accept His will and live by his law. The Lord has said that we are not to kill even if we think that we might save our lives by doing so. Jesus lovingly reassures us that, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and who ever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:25).
I do not have diabetes, nor do I have a child with diabetes. I have only had a glimpse of the daily reality of this disease by watching Missy’s family and hearing Missy’s fears. I do have a vested interest of my own in stem cell research. I was treated for Hodgkin’s disease more than 10 years ago. Chemotherapy was successful but it left me vulnerable to leukemia. Both Hodgkin’s disease and leukemia are targets of stem cell research. I had cancer in my 20s. My only sibling had cancer in her 20s. That’s not quite a pattern, but there is certainly room to fear for my own children if I choose. Instead, I choose to trust and to act prudently.
When my fifth child was born, I asked my father for an extraordinary baby gift. I asked him to pay for the banking of umbilical cord blood — stem cells. My oncologist thought it a splendid idea. I thought again and again how the gift of this child’s life might one day give one of his siblings life again. The blood sits in a bank in Pennsylvania. I hope we never need it. And I hope ethical research continues so that ethically harvested stem cells will benefit many children. In the meantime, I trust that God has a plan for Missy’s daughter, for the children on Capitol Hill, for me and for my children. I trust. And I don’t go chasing unethical solutions out of fear. I choose to live in faith.
I also have another hope. No, a prayer. I pray that one day, when the little girl who testified is older, she will marry someone she loves. I pray that in that covenant of marriage, she will conceive a child. And I pray that when some doctor reminds her that she is taking her life in her hands by carrying a pregnancy to term as a juvenile diabetic, she won’t be haunted by her own voice asking whose life is more important: hers or that of an embryo. Instead I hope she’ll trust and she’ll tell that doctor that she is not taking her life in her own hands; she is leaving it in God’s.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
