bearing blog

Amy Welborn wants to know,

…why do you think the mouth is a baby’s primary sensory organ?

… it seems so unsafe, on the face of it. The only thing I can figure is that it ensures the baby will get some kind of food even if it’s neglected, as it shoves everything into its mouth. But that still doesn’t seem to compensate for the danger factor.

In a "natural" environment the hazards of, say, choking would be reduced. There are no such things as coins or marbles—slippery little trachea-plugging spheres and discs that they are—in the wild. Nor are there sliced-up apple chunks. Few foods (grapes are the only example I can think of, and wild ones, of course, are tiny) are actually choking hazards when presented whole, unprocessed, uncut.

Most rocks of the right size, that is, are rough and textured and unlikely to be choked on if a baby decides to roll it around in his mouth.

Healthy babies that are allowed to stick the normal sorts of things (not marbles) in their mouths develop a pretty good gag reflex. Remember, gagging isn’t choking. A baby who gags on a rock, stick, or leaf isn’t in any danger, even if it *looks* scary. That’s just part of the oral exploratory process.

And poison isn’t likely to be a problem either, as in the wild most poisonous substances are terribly bitter.

The point is only that the serious hazards we associate with babies sticking stuff in their mouths are mainly created by our modern life, to which evolution has not had a chance to catch up.

It helps to know the difference between what gagging looks like and what choking looks like.  After H., who used to work in a day care, explained that to me (and demonstrated, which was mildly amusing—she lay down on the grass and waved her arms and legs to show me ‘choking baby’)—I got a lot more relaxed about babies mouthing things.

My babies have gagged on lots of stuff.  I only ever saw one choking once (on a slice of apple)—he was sitting on the floor flailing his arms in a panic—and he had brought it up by the time I got to him. 

If I know that what he’ s just stuck in his mouth is a marble or a coin, though, I tend to do the Face-Down Finger Sweep.  Pick him up, hold him face down (gravity should be your friend, not your enemy—contrary to what you might think, you do not need to see what you are doing), pry the jaws open and do one sweep across the tongue with the index finger.

Check this out, and be sure to read the comments.   

Viewing the tale of the Lorax through an institutional lens, ruin is not the result of corporate greed, but a lack of institutions. The truffula trees grow in an unowned commons. (The Lorax may speak for the trees, but he does not own them.) The Once-ler has no incentive to conserve the truffula trees for, as he notes to himself, if he doesn’t cut them down someone else will. He’s responding to the incentives created by a lack of property rights in the trees, and the inevitable tragedy results.

I agree with one commenter that this makes me happier about reading The Lorax to my kids, mainly because the economic moral is much more nuanced than the famous, scraping-the-surface environmental one.

H/T The Volokh Conspiracy. 

Earlier I posted about the Vatican’s recent statement regarding the liceity of using vaccines derived, ultimately, as a fruit of one or more abortions:

The document concludes that is our right to abstain from these vaccines if we can, but we may, licitly, temporarily have recourse to them in the face of "the danger of favouring the spread of the pathological agent." 

So if there is no alternative, in the face of risk, it is permitted to use the vaccine, which is a passive material cooperation with evil.

But it must not be just ANY risk that allows us to cooperate with evil.  It must
be a PROPORTIONATE risk.

What is the proportionate risk that would allow us to cooperate with the evil of
abortion by providing a market for vaccines developed as a fruit of abortion?

My children are breastfed, do not go to school or day care, and are generally healthy.
They are at low risk of contracting most of the illnesses that vaccination prevents
and, I might add, are at low risk of spreading them because they are not in contact
with large numbers of other children on a daily basis. 

Perhaps this is only so because so many others are vaccinated.  I appreciate that.
It complicates the moral calculus, though, or at least it renders it distinctly
nonlinear.  If the risk is low, there is less justification to use the vaccines
because the risk is perhaps not proportionate.  But if fewer people use the vaccines,
there will be more risk and the risk level may rise to the point where it becomes
proportionate. 

Also, recall that avoiding vaccination does not guarantee catching the disease,
nor does becoming vaccinated guarantee avoiding it.  The choice not to vaccinate
is really the choice to take a somewhat greater risk of catching the disease (and
to avoid entirely any risk from the vaccine itself)—the risk whose "proportionateness"
we are evaluating is the difference between the risk of the two choices.  If the
disease is not likely to be maiming or fatal, perhaps avoiding that danger is not
actually important enough to warrant the remote cooperation with evil. 

Rubella is a tricky example.  The one receiving the vaccintion is not the one who gets
the benefit.   The population is vaccinated in order to lessen the risk of wild
rubella to unborn babies of pregnant women whose immunity may have worn off.   But
I suggest that we don’t have a moral obligation to vaccinate.  The natural state
of the human being is unvaccinated; if there were no rubella shot, we would not consider
it a sin to allow our apparently healthy young children to be in contact with pregnant
women.  (Sick ones are a different story of course.)  The pregnant woman has to bear
the responsibility of avoiding rubella, ultimately. 

The line between a risk that is insufficiently high to justify cooperation with
this evil, and a risk that is sufficiently high, is difficult to draw and quite
subjective.  Here is how I would draw it for a "generic" disease (bearing
in mind that different diseases carry different risks):

– If I had no choice but to place my child in day care, I would consider the risk
of epidemic high enough to justify vaccinating my child for the common good of the
other children in the day care.

– If my young daughter reached puberty and a rubella titre test showed she had
no immunity to rubella, I would consider it justified to vaccinate her for rubella
to protect any unborn child she might conceive in the future.  (Why puberty?  Is
that permission to have sex so she can get pregnant?  No, it’s because when she
gets older I can’t *make* her get vaccinated, and there is a small but present risk
of rape.)  After all, catching rubella in the wild as a young person develops immunity
without any moral problems at all—and that makes it a viable "alternative
to the vaccine."

– I would consider it justified to vaccinate either daughters or sons at puberty
for any serious sexually transmitted disease for which there might exist a vaccine
that is a fruit of abortion.  Again, this is because when they are older I cannot
make them get vaccinated, any more than I can make them not have premarital sex
when they are adults, and there is a small but present risk of rape.  (Whether this
is well- or ill-advised as a matter of parental prudence is another argument—I’m
writing here about the proportionate risk).

– If I had a child with a known compromised immune system, or some other condition
that made the risk of serious complications from the disease highly likely, I would
consider the risk justified enough to vaccinate that child and probably the rest
of the family.

– If my child was known to have been exposed to a disease and a vaccination could
prevent it from developing, I would consider the risk high enough to justify the
cooperation with abortion.

But in the absence of these circumstances, it seems hard to justify the cooperation with abortion by providing a market for the vaccines.