Pardon, please repeat again once more for the second time?

By Emmanuelle

WE ARE BORN pantay-pantay. Pardon, please repeat that again once more for the second time?

The Child was born in a manger, the Mother pushing, and maybe the surrogate Father himself ushering Him into this world. The most holy birth of all, and it had to be in one of the worst possible unsanitary conditions. The Three Kings were coming with their gifts to ease things a bit; but the soldiers were, too, following surreptitiously behind the kings, who were pushing all efforts to be the really wise men they were supposed to be – truly slow and somehow misleading. One can just feel the tension with every thump of the heart.

Still, there are even worst scenes. Laboring, giving birth in transit – in a ship before it sinks off the Visayan coasts, hanging on for dear live in a cramped tricycle with a crazed husband for a driver, at the backseat of a taxi rushing in breakneck speed to a hospital, or immodest legs splayed out atop a bus seat, the conductor for a midwife. He, with the darkly-smudged fingers from ticketing stubs and heaving bags and sacks and gulay.

Or slumped with back against a tree trunk for buelo sa pag-iri, by a rugged mountain trail. Alone in the wilderness of nature. Or alone within the wilderness that is the city of man. Penniless, without a decent wrap to clean or blanket a newborn.

I have seen women pull out their babies on their own. One most clear and haunting was this migrant from Mindanao. She sat on her haunches like a labandera before her batya. She closed her eyes, she scrunched her jaws to her face, her hands between her legs, busily knowingly working the baby’s head through and its whole body out. Then, and only then, did she looked up for help.

And in contrast, the best smooth deliveries that planning and savings can buy – painless procedures, paid wards or private rooms, nurseries, postcard-pretty mommies shielding with snowy-white nappies their babies feeding from their breasts. No bottle-feeders here, it’s bad, it’s not the fad. Picture picture all the while.

A big percentage of babies are long awaited, wanted, expected, loved from the very beginnings of their tiny lives, warmly welcomed, adored, marveled at as the miracles that they really are. A sadly undocumented number of their counterparts however are forcibly flushed out as aborted fetuses before they get the faintest of a living chance.

And there are those who are better off not to have been born at all – to have to live a life of rejection, abuse, hunger and other deprivations. It is never a life. It is a tragic fate, among other tragedies.

So, let me tell you a true story that happened in a hospital that had been a second home to me for the past years.

(To be continued)

(Readers may reach columnist at jingmil@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/
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