It was a mayhem Monday morning in the Pediatrics ward of the hospital
where I worked. I was about to retire to the doctor’s room to soothen my
frayed nerves, when I got another labour room call, the thirteenth
delivery of the day! But this one was different; it was not a routine
request to attend a delivery. There was a command and an urgency…you
see, it was a precious baby!
Those not initiated into the labour room lexicon,
would wonder why this thirteenth baby was precious? What was so precious
about this baby that was not precious in the first twelve? What does
‘precious baby’ mean? Is it just an inadvertent slip of the tongue of
the ever-stressed obstetric community, or does it mean a cherished baby
or a non-expendable baby? So often, we pediatricians are exhorted to
take care, as it is a precious baby! Does the baby emerge out of the
mother’s womb with a price tag attached? Or has the all-pervading
commercialism started making major inroads (God forbid) into this most
‘precious’ of the bastions of human hope?
A retrospective analysis (read observation) over the
last decade has helped me in precisely defining this entity. Following
is the list of babies who are born ‘precious’ (in decreasing order of
preciousness): first male baby after 2-3 female babies, first male baby
in the family, born after infertility treatment or after many abortions,
doctor’s baby, delivered by caesarian section, born after complicated
pregnancy and labour.
There is also probably an unwritten list of
non-precious babies: (in increasing order of non-preciousness):
Fourth/fifth/sixth baby (baby’s crime –‘already too many’), female baby
after 2-3 females, baby born to unwed mothers (baby could not convince
the parents to marry before conceiving).
What about the baby’s opinion of her/himself? How
would it be if the babies started saying precious parents and ‘non
precious’ parents? In my initial years of practice, these questions
would plague me every time I attended the delivery of a ‘precious’ baby.
Terming some babies as precious is a severely
restricted viewpoint of adults. Would not a less endearing but more
appropriate ‘high risk baby’ suffice. Most obstetricians would dismiss
this as just a matter of semantics. They probably regard the two terms
as synonyms. Does it really matter? The answer is an emphatic Yes! It
does matter! Labelling a baby as precious is a euphemistic way of
dividing babies into expendable and non-expendable. Have we ever called
a child born out of wedlock, a precious child? This term is not only
jarring to the ears, but much more than that, it could damage the
chances of survival of a ‘non precious child’, and preferential
allocation of scarce hospital resources.
To quote George Orwell, ‘All babies are born equal.
No baby is more equal than others’. Retain the term ‘precious baby’ if
you must, but use it for all the babies born on this earth. WAIL [World
Association of Innocent Lovelies (registration pending)] would like to
publish a prayer through this article…
"We, on behalf of all the babies born and unborn, do
hereby solemnly resolve that the term ‘precious baby’ would mean
precious to us and not to the family or the medical fraternity, and
further resolve that all the babies henceforth will be divided only on
the basis of morbidity and mortality risk as ‘normal or ‘high risk’
babies". Amen!
