Heartless

The biggest buzz in the last two days is that of the body of a dead newborn found in the staff locker of the supermarket near the office, a supermarket I sometimes go to. The supermarket staff couldn't bear the foul stench emanating from the locker, used a master key to open it and found the baby. The police don't know yet if it alive or dead when it was left there.

The supermarket is so close by, the photographer got there in time to take a picture as the police took the body away -- in a cardboard box used to pack vegetables. I suppose that was why the reporter asked some supermarket customers what they thought of the find. I suppose he couldn't get to talk to anybody else. I would have thought you'd probably want to talk to the guy who used the next locker, for instance. Of all the people the rep picked, it was a couple of sixteen-year-old students who said the baby's mother was "heartless" to have abandoned the baby's body in the locker. First off, I don't know why he asked a couple of teenagers who clearly can't think out of their own experience. They obviously couldn't empathise with someone who had a baby she wasn't prepared for, may never have wanted, who, for nine months didn't know what to do as it formed within her. She probably delivered it on her own, scared half to death with the pain, with what she was going to do with it, maybe it was dead, maybe it wasn't. So frightened, so alone, with no one to turn to, nowhere to go, she left it in a locker. And let's not even go into post-natal depression. I think they were the heartless ones discussing someone when they had no idea of what it is to walk in her shoes. There's one life slipped between the cracks, one baby slipped away. Oh geez, this is a depressing post. I think missing Spock is still hanging heavy on me. I'll try and write something more fun tomorrow.