We Need To Consider What Babies Mean To Us - All Babies

Seven.

Seven infants wailing at midnight, then at 2 a.m. and then once or twice more before the morning dreams of dawning.

Seven tiny bodies in need of cuddling, dressing, bathing, feeding and burping. Seven little bottoms that will fill more than 30,000 diapers - according to the manufacturer that donated them.

Truly, I can’t imagine what Kenny and Bobbi McCaughey will face once the elation of bearing septuplets wears off and they arrive home with seven newborns in tow.

And I can’t imagine being Deborah or Sunil Eappen, the parents whose 8-month-old baby was shaken to death by a woman who one day could earn a fortune from her mistake.

Maybe it’s the numbers that link these incidents for me. Just as I can’t get “seven” out of my head, I’m stuck on 279, too. That’s how many days - less than a year - British au pair Louise Woodward served for accidentally killing Matthew Eappen. It’s the number of days that was deemed punishment enough by Massachusetts Judge Hiller B. Zobel.

Somehow, it’s strange celebrating the remarkable births of seven little McCaugheys so soon after Zobel suggested that the death of one little Eappen hardly matters.

Of course I see the wonder in seven kids being added to a family in one fell swoop. And I laud every soul who sends the McCaugheys clothes, cribs and baby gear, because God knows they’ll need them.

I just keep thinking about Matthew.

A friend called me just before Woodward was convicted by a jury of second-degree murder in Matthew’s death. She had little sympathy for Woodward, who told police that Matthew had choked on vomit - before admitting that she’d dropped him on a towel when he refused to stop crying after a bath.

“I can’t believe how sympathetic everybody is to this girl,” my friend said. “They’re saying nothing about the baby, who is dead.”

My friend is the mother of a boy, 4. She can still see, hear and smell the baby he was at 8 months, and the intervening years have only made him more irreplaceable. As a mother of three boys, one barely 2, I know nothing is as frightening as the thought of losing your beautiful, heart-stopping child.

But I felt for Woodward, too. No one, it seemed, should face life in prison because her attorneys were so foolishly convinced of her acquittal that they refused to allow the jury to consider a lesser charge of manslaughter - which would have brought a shorter sentence.

If Zobel had imposed the life sentence, experts kept saying before the judge’s decision, Woodward would have to serve a minimum of 15 years in prison.

Fifteen years. Another number to consider. By the time she left prison, we deciphered, Woodward would be 34.

Some of us recall being 19 and impatient. I remembered how, 15 years ago - more numbers - my own 8-month-old cried so much, I occasionally imagined shushing him with a shake.

But when Zobel ruled that Woodward’s “confusion” and “immaturity” caused her to kill Matthew by being “a little rough with him,” other numbers prevailed:

The 50-odd years that the Eappens are likely to live without Matthew. The boy, 3, who Deborah Eappen says still misses his brother. The unknown number that may never materialize, but which some people feel certain they’ll hear - the amount Woodward could earn one day by selling her story.

After Woodward’s release, Matthew’s mother asked in the Boston Globe: Did Judge Zobel’s ruling suggest that “you can kill a baby, and that your youth … counts for more than a child’s life?”

The answer, of course, is yes. Louise Woodward is a vital young woman who could gulp, sob and protest her innocence to a world that had no trouble envisioning the number of hours, days and years of life that prison could swallow.

In death, Matthew Eappen became a lovely idea, a phantom whose worth was less easily measured - at least, it seems, to one judge.

We live in a culture that adores babies so much that advertisers use their beautiful, helpless images to sell us everything from carpet cleaners to phone services. We’re so enchanted by them that the idea of one woman having seven at once seems an unimaginable blessing.

Yet people who melt at the sight of a baby in a TV commercial blithely ignore - or care somewhat less for - living babies not in front of their faces. Babies whose mothers are on welfare, or who are born the “wrong” color, or whose fate it is to suffer in nearby ghettos or faraway famines. Or one who died at the hands of a moon-faced teenager who may earn far more than she could ever pay.

Seven may be the luckiest number, but when it comes to children, every single one matters.

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