Society Has Ways Of Assigning Or Denying Value To People

Madonna is now a mother. Last month, to the applause of a waiting world that has zealously followed the details of her pregnancy, the singer gave birth to a daughter, Lourdes Maria.

We are told that Madonna had planned for some time to have a child. She had only to find the appropriate partner to donate the sperm. So she chose her boy toy exercise trainer.

Michael Jackson will soon have another pet. He already owns a boa constrictor, a monkey and other exotic creatures. Soon, he will add to that collection a child. The details are sketchy, but we are told that a receptionist for Michael’s skin doctor is carrying Michael’s baby. How the child was conceived and whether the mother-to-be is to be paid for her labor is not clear.

Contemporary logic (and morality): Celebrities can have anything they want that they can pay for. Since no financial burden for the child’s care will fall on the rest of society, no one has a right to criticize any arrangement a celebrity makes to bring a child into the world. No one has the right to deny that privilege of ownership.

These high-profile cases titillate our interest. We will be so busy chewing on the juicy tidbits of gossip about these celebrity children that we will hardly notice our transition to total acceptance and moral endorsement of a new standard for human conception: Can a parent afford to pay for the needs of a child? Such traditions as marriage don’t matter. The message inherent in this new standard is that only children born to financial security are to be valued.

Although we have no power to control celebrities’ behavior, I find our continual hyping of their example unsettling. Our response seems to confirm that not every child’s life is valuable to all of us - the same message we telegraphed with the welfare reform bill that went into effect Oct. 1.

After 60 years of minimum protection for poor children through Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the federal government has replaced that entitlement with a law that requires parents on welfare to get jobs but doesn’t say what will happen if those jobs aren’t available.

We reformed welfare by punishing parents for the same behavior that we praise - through publicity - among celebrities. We can expect even more children to fall below the poverty level, many the offspring of working poor people whose plight will not be caused by immoral behavior.

We also refuse to provide adequate money to educate all of our children. Rather, we debate prospects of rescuing some of them through charter schools, using the limited money we now have available. By educating a few and abandoning the rest, we say that all children are not worth saving.

Thus, our actions increasingly suggest that children are toys or pets to be owned. Our history, however, indicates that for our society to progress, we need fresh troops, not just those born to secure financial circumstances.

Contrast the homage we pay to the children of celebrities with the callous disregard we pay to the masses of children in our society. The way we treat kids who don’t have links to celebrities indicts us all. On the one hand, we spotlight a child as the ultimate symbol of some star’s self-fulfillment. On the other, we condemn the child born into poverty through no fault of his or her own.

The inherent contradiction does not go unnoticed by young people most in need of an unequivocal moral message sent by responsible adults. Many of these youngsters - themselves conceived in circumstances no less immoral than these conceptions arranged by celebrities - will look at themselves with the sense of worthlessness our actions imply.

But let’s not be so serious. Have you seen a picture of Madonna’s baby? Do you think Michael’s baby will require plastic surgery to look like the current version of his dad?

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