BALANCED VIEWS

For this family, pro-life view became matter of sacrifice Parties need to focus on threats to American dream

Mary Sanchez

A young mother of five, a survivor of recent cancer surgery, develops a new tumor — and discovers she is pregnant. The cancer is aggressive; to survive she needs chemotherapy, but that would buy only a few years more of life, if that. And it will kill the baby she is carrying.

What should she do? What Carrie DeKlyen and her husband, a Michigan couple who faced this dilemma, decided has been the topic of much public commentary, most of it empathetic but some of it shallow and cruel.

Carrie DeKlyen chose not to undergo chemo, and she is now dead. Her child, named Life Lynn DeKlyen, was born just shy of 25 weeks after conception and died two weeks after her mother on Wednesday. A baby is considered full term around 39 weeks. Despite efforts by doctors, and being tagged as a “miracle baby” by media, Life didn’t have very good odds.

Carrie, 37, left five other children, ranging in age from 2 to 18 years old.

Social media couldn’t hold back. Was Life’s mother selfish to deny her other children their mother? Or was she a saint for giving her baby a chance?

How about she was a mother facing a horrible decision that you wouldn’t wish upon anyone?

The DeKlyens made their difficult choice in a manner consistent with their view that life starts at conception. Abortion was never an option. This view was obviously informed by the couple’s faith.

After the baby’s death, some remarked that the story would no longer resonate as a shining example of the pro-life ethos. The cringeworthy rationale was that the family no longer had the child to hold up as an emblem of the cause.

Wrong. Carrie DeKlyen is still a great example of a woman choosing life for her child.

Others argued that the family’s faith was misplaced; God didn’t save the baby.

“We’re pro-life,” Nick DeKlyen told the Detroit Free Press. “Under no circumstance do we believe you should take a child’s life. (Carrie) sacrificed her life for the child.”

After the baby’s birth, Nick DeKlyen also made the decision that his wife had suffered enough and asked that her feeding tube and breathing machine be disconnected. She died soon after. Others with a more stringent views about what constitutes life might have argued against that decision.

However, despite the sanctimony of some internet commentators, most who contemplated the family’s tragedy were sympathetic. Wouldn’t it be grand if people were more compassionate in other instances as well? Yes, people questioned the decision to keep the baby. But what you didn’t hear was the sort of condemnation that befalls other women who have a lot of children, mounting hospital bills and a husband who isn’t able to provide.

Nick DeKlyen is out of work. He’d reportedly quit work during all of this distress to be available to his family.

People read these kinds of stories with different needs and agendas. Some want miracles. Some want hope. And, in their lesser moments, some want to validate their beliefs.

But if we read and hear these stories, putting aside our ego-driven need to be right, we recognize simply what they are: incredibly difficult decisions that families ultimately have to make alone, using their own understanding of what is right. And it’s not for any of us to pass judgment.

Ross Douthat

Before John McCain put yet another Republican health care plan on life support Friday, I was going to do with the Graham-Cassidy legislation what I’ve done with previous Republican bills, and weigh the plausible ideas that it contains against its hastily rigged-up architecture and predictable GOP stinginess.

But sometimes, when a party has spent most of a year producing health care bills that excite almost nobody and that even the senators voting for them can’t effectively defend, it’s worth stepping back and thinking about our national priorities.

If Obamacare repeal is really dead for the year 2017, both left and right have a chance to shake their minds free of the health care debate and ask themselves: What are the biggest threats to the American dream right now, to our unity and prosperity, our happiness and civic health?

I would suggest that there are two big answers, both of which played crucial roles in getting a carnival showman who promised to Make America Great Again elected president.

First, an economic stagnation that we are only just now, eight years into an economic recovery, beginning to escape — a stagnation that has left median incomes roughly flat for almost a generation, encouraged populism on the left and right, and made every kind of polarization that much worse.

Second, a social crisis that the opioid epidemic has thrown into horrifying relief, but that was apparent in other indicators for a while — in the decline of marriage, rising suicide rates, an upward lurch in mortality for poorer whites, a historically low birthrate, a large-scale male abandonment of the workforce, a dissolving trend in religious and civic life, a crisis of patriotism, belonging, trust.

Now a follow-up question: Is the best way to address either of these crises to spend the next five years constantly uprooting and replanting health insurance systems?

That appears to be what some on both sides want to happen.

But when your main challenges involve men who aren’t working, wages that aren’t rising, families that aren’t forming and communities that are collapsing, constantly overhauling health insurance is at best an indirect response, at worst a non sequitur. Especially since right now health care inflation is relatively low, the deficit has temporarily stabilized and Obamacare is less disruptive than accounts suggested.

There are better options for both parties.

Republicans could actually try to govern on a version of the Trump agenda: With one hand, cut corporate taxes and slash regulations to spur growth; with the other, spend on infrastructure to boost blue-collar work, cut payroll taxes and increase the child tax credit, and push to reduce low-skilled immigration. Democrats, meanwhile, could look at proposals for a larger earned-income tax credit, a family allowance, and let the “job guarantee” and “guaranteed basic income” factions fight things out.

Health care reform was the Barack Obama presidency’s main achievement, but it crippled his administration politically once it passed. Obamacare repeal has devoured the first year of the Trump presidency, with nothing to show for it. The country has bigger problems than its insurance system. It’s time for both parties to act like it.