Occasionally, I get a lot of great news articles in my in box and today, I got quite a few of them. These are fun stories, sad stories and just plain interesting stories. Once upon a time, I read these stories with only a passing smile for the ideas in them – but since I became a mother, my perspective has changed. There is more in these stories that touches me now – maybe they will you too.
December Babies Going Home in Stockings
There’s a hospital in California that is sending home all of the babies born this month in Christmas stockings – how neat is that? The Fairchild Medical Center received the stockings through donation from their Auxiliary and the program is brand new and began this year.
Loving Our Children Is Hardly New
A man once remarked that you can judge a civilization and a people by how they treat their insane, their criminals and their young. In Austria, anthropologists are studying burial pits where they believe they have proof that infants were considered equal members of the society. The two pits contained the remains of infants – one in one pit and two in the other.
The graves were decorated and honored in comparable fashion to Paleolithic adults of the same period. The pit containing the two babies looks to be the resting place of twins. The bones haven’t been fully excavated and they haven’t done a full battery of tests in order to ascertain cause of death, but loving our young and mourning them – as well as honoring them in their passing is not new to us and I take some great comfort in that idea.
Would You Let Your Baby’s DNA Be Entered Into a National Database?
In Great Britain, its most senior murder investigator is looking for a human rights debate on the idea of putting every baby’s DNA into a database. He believes that it can help to prevent crime in the future because DNA records would be more expansive and allow for more matches at crime scenes and more. There is a compelling case for taking DNA from people when they die in order to potentially close out old cases.
I can understand his perspective, but at the same time – I can see the vast array of abuse this type of system might occur. This is all theoretical at this point, but as mothers and fathers, we need to think about this and think about whether we’d want our child’s DNA entered into a national database.
What do you think about these stories?
Related Articles:
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Babies in the News: Infant Twins Have Different Skin Color
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Happy Ending to the Newborn Baby Kidnapping
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