Friday, August 20, 2010

Neonatricide

In yesterday's front page: "So far this year, 66 babies, including 25 girls and 15 foetuses, were dumped."

Another headline reads: "Total of 472 babies discarded since 2005"

What is happening to the world? :(

How could a mother dump her baby so cruelly? A baby that she has carried within her for 9 months?

Have you read Mitch Albom's For One More Day?

I haven't (!). But I've seen the movie. It tells of how a mother's love can heal a person.

And I guess everyone can relate to that. Though we may not be suicidal like the book's protagonist, all of us have experienced our mother's unconditional love.

Below are quotations from the book which sum it up nicely:

-"[My mother] wasn't easy on me, don't get me wrong. She smacked me. She scolded me. She punished me. But she loved. She really did. She loved me falling off a swing set. She loved me stepping on her floors with muddy shoes. She loved me through vomit and snot and bloody knees. She loved me coming and going, at my worst and my best. She had a bottomless well of love for me."

-“I saw in her expression that old, unshakable mountain of concern. And I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.”

So how could a mother (who's supposed to have this boundless love for her baby) discard her newborn like it's worth nothing?

Instead of loving, cherishing and protecting their babies, a growing number of teenage mothers inhumanely dump them instead.

How can we solve this problem?

Is meting out the death sentence the answer?

On one hand you want to punish the perpetrators for taking away a precious life.

On the other, the punishment seems too harsh for girls of incredibly young age who made very poor judgements out of sheer desperation.

A book by Amy Efaw entitled 'After' explores this very issue (read the review here).

The book deals with these matters:

-"How can one tiny event, one mistake, spin a life out of control..."
-"What drives a young mother to carry out such a drastic, terrifying act?"
-"...the extent of consequences, and how in life, there are never any easy ways out"

Personally, I feel that today's teenagers are bombarded with sexually-explicit content from the media that they consume (TV, movies, music, magazines, the internet). The images and innuendos are everywhere.

But while they are overexposed to the images, they are woefully ignorant of the consequences of engaging in the risque behaviours.

How do we make them see the whole point behind the command: La takrabu zina?

2 comments:

Jarod Yong said...

Teach them how to handle their emotions & all the explicit content they see every day.
Learning to have safe sex is important too.

Najib Azmi said...

"O mankind! Fear your Lord and be dutiful to Him! Verily, the earthquake of the Hour (of Judgement) is a terrible thing. The day you shall see it, every nursing mother will forget her nursling, and every pregnant one will drop her load, and you shall see mankind in n drunken state, yet they will not be drunken, but severe will be the Torment of Allah."

Surah al-Hajj (22: 1-2)