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Now you have to think about why someone would prefer to whisk the child away to a steel table and a lethal injection. I think it has to do with the intersection of those two admirable virtues, tidiness and compassion. Tidiness requires that people who are damaged be scrubbed away. Compassion murmurs that this is what they, themselves, actually wish. If they can't say so, we'll strongly wish it for them.

But what is the ultimate outcome of a world where only the perfect survive? Yes, I know that at present there are plenty of imperfect specimens around. Yet this kind of thinking has a tendency to creep. I'm not sure, for example, what is envisioned by this line in the Associated Press report on the Groningen Protocol: infant euthanasia for "diseases where a child could survive only on life support for the rest of its life, such as severe cases of spina bifida." What's "severe"? I've known people with spina bifida and so have you, and they prefer being alive, thank you. If it's dramatically more severe than that, can't we just let nature take its course? And as to the ambiguous phrase "for the rest of its life"—first of all, can we at least say "his"? Second, how long a "rest of his life" are we talking about—decades? And what is "support"—assistance with respiration, nutrition, surgery, a wheelchair?

If you were reading a history book you might be less shocked to find incidents of termination of the ill, elderly, and unwanted children in a time of famine or distress, but it seems to be our very success, our comfort and safety, that makes us deem these imperfect ones disposable. Everyone on TV looks so fine and healthy; everyone we pass while shopping looks well-fed. Surely that's the standard. Those who fail to meet it unsettle or disgust us. Surely they'd prefer to be put to sleep.

This season celebrates the bright moment of a birth in a stable in Bethlehem. But that birth was shadowed immediately with death, lots of it, as Herod wiped out hundreds of newborn children in his futile attempt to get at the one he feared. He cleaned up Bethlehem the way the Marshall cleans up Dodge City.

Herod was searching for the Perfect One, the Christ, who was prophesied to be his downfall. In the process hundreds of "imperfect" children were ripped from their mothers' arms and sacrificed. A similar quest for the "perfect" child now drives this impulse to scrub away the "imperfect" children who fail to meet our expectations. When we greet the sick and dying with speedy annihilation we replicate the ruthlessness of Herod. But what would Christ have us do? Picture him holding a dying child in his arms. What action would he take?

Death looks superficially like such a compassionate thing to do. But that's a projection on the part of the strong and healthy, who find the sight of the weak and dying unsettling. We wish to "put them out of their misery" as we would a pet. But it's really our misery that we're trying to end. Death is an efficient way to solve lots of problems, no doubt about it. It cures poverty, illness, and unpopular opinions. It's tidy, and can certainly be presented as compassionate. But this time-tested means of problem-solving has been opposed, throughout all history, by Christians. Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents was exposed by St. Luke, and believers ever since have honored the memory of those children as a warning of what too much zeal for tidiness can do. It's a Christmas tradition well worth preserving.

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December (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48