Unfit for Motherhood

A Woman's Right to Choose

The New Zealand government is considering granting the courts power to sentence a serial recidivist child abuser to permanent childlessness.  The proposal is that if such a person were to bear subsequent children they would automatically be removed from the mother at birth.

The Commentariat is affecting outrage over the idea.

Evil and wickedness stalk the heart of every human being.  Human hearts are hearts of darkness.  So believed Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Faulkner.  So declares the Bible itself--the very Word of the Living God.  The heart of man, says the Scripture, is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked.
 

It's not surprising then to find human society riddled with lust, greed, envy, hatred, quarrels, jealousy, and murder.  Many folk spend their lives trying to ameliorate the influence of evil and wickedness upon society.  One tool deployed is the law.  By changing the law, passing new laws, regulating, restricting, and punishing every thing wrong many believe evil will be overcome.  Peoples' lives will be turned around, redeemed.  It is a naive and forlorn hope.  The law can only deal with the outside of man: it cannot cleanse the heart--the thoughts, motives, intentions, and will.  Evil, the Bible tells us, springs from the heart of man, not from his circumstances. 

The law can only restrain evil.  It cannot remove guilt. It cannot cleanse the heart.  It cannot make a new man. 

Another tool deployed is the milk of human kindness.  The proposition is that if you treat people well, if you are kind to them--caring, attentive, encouraging, and positive--they will respond by turning away from wickedness and reforming their lives.  Overcome evil with good.  But likewise, this requires that the wicked seize upon something good done to them and use it to self-transform their inner man, making their thoughts, motives, intentions, and desires more pure and holy. 

A fundamental flaw of this approach is that doing good to someone risks increasing their guilt, their anger, their hatred, and their sense of hopelessness.  The expression "cold as charity" has not come into our cultural lexicon without good reason.  Doubtless we should do good to all people as much as we can, treating them with dignity and respect.  But for the wicked at heart this often only serves to increase their guilt, anger, and resentment.  Our love cannot change the heart of another.  We are neither redeemers or saviours, for we too, who do good, have eyes filled with our own evil logs. 

Society works best when it faces up to the realities of human unrighteousness and to the extreme limitations of actually effecting change.  In such a society the intent of the law is not to reform, but to punish justly, and to protect the innocent from being preyed upon by unconstrained wickedness. 

In this light, the government's proposal to allow courts to sentence a recidivist child abuser and/or child murderer to being a perpetual non-mother seems perfectly reasonable and just.  It is undeniable that we now have in New Zealand a class of abusive mothers who perpetually have children, accept the State's welfare payments for child care, but so neglect and abuse their children that they end up malnourished, broken in limb and mind, or dead.  To grant the courts the power to sentence such "mothers" to perpetual childlessness is both reasonable and necessary. 

Some have protested saying that it does not leave room for the "mother" to reform her life and effect change.  Not necessarily.  But it should be up to the mother to prove to a court that she indeed has changed, has reformed, before she would be allowed to keep her latest child.  At present, the situation is the reverse.  The burden of proof rests with state authorities to convince a court that a new child born to such a mother should be removed. 

We have one caveat to add: children forcibly removed from such depraved serial abusers at birth must be adopted, not kept in the incompetent, bureaucratic perpetual embrace of a government department as a ward of the state.  That merely replaces one form of child abuse by another.  State as mother and father is just another form of child neglect.