By Merrie Spaeth
Dallas, TX – Parenthood is the last place for amateurs.
I'm the only commentator who hasn't weighed in on the Andrea Yates case - the Houston woman who has admitted drowning her five children. It turns out she was severely depressed after her second child's birth; that psychiatric workers recommended the family have no more children. Her husband may be a NASA engineer, but he pushed her to have three more children - and home-school them.
But, as I said, I haven't said anything about that. It was the recent case in Dallas of 18-month-old Roy Aguilera, brutally killed by his mother and his father that finally got to me.
Parenthood is the last place we allow complete incompetence - do-it-yourself, train on the job. In this case the baby was born to an 18-year-old mother, into circumstances so dire that child protective services tried to remove him. A jury returned the infant to the 'mother' - I use the word reluctantly.
It's not clear which parent, or both, were responsible for continuing torture, including sexual abuse, over months. What is clear is that these two people (who also have an older child), just like Andrea AND RUSSELL Yates, were not fit to be parents.
Here is the collision of American rights and tradition. We believe in the sanctity of the home; the rights of parents to raise their children. We were founded as a country with a deep skepticism of government and regulation - but we also believe in protecting the helpless - certainly all the children in these cases. It's anathema that government should have any role in who can become a parent, but it's similarly appalling that these two couples were allowed to take out their sickness, their violence, their viciousness on these children.
What's missing? The community. The Yates hadn't joined a church because the husband never found one he liked - and probably never would have, given his attitude about everything. But he had neighbors, parents and in-laws and co-workers. In the Aguilera case, the community and a group of jurors gave a baby back to Yesenia Hernandez, the 'mother' who has allowed or inflicted broken legs, bruises, burns, and worse. What, I wonder, do those jurors think now? What do Andrea Yates' neighbors and in-laws think?
We asked the jurors in Houston to determine her competence to stand trial. We asked the wrong question too late. She - AND her husband - should have been found incompetent to be parents.
We, as Americans, are always looking for lessons. We're a people of self-improvement. I don't see any legal solution to the rights of parental freedom and privacy, and protecting children's lives, but I do see a legal, moral and religious imperative for the jurors, formally empanelled or not. We are our (baby) brother's keeper. Will we serve?
Merrie Spaeth is a communications consultant in Dallas, TX.