Mother's Day & the Silent Relationships

According to Wikipedia, Mother's Day was first celebrated by Anna Jarvis in West Virginia in 1905 to commemorate her mother's death 2 years previous. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday of May as Mother's Day.

Like so many holidays that are packed with meaning, Mothers Day has gone the way of Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter as a victim of consumerism. Is there anything worse? Well, I'm afraid there is.

Mothers Day loses its meaning without that which makes a woman a mother, and that is the relationship with her child. I am not only speaking of the warm, loving relationship of a mother and daughter/son, I'm also speaking of the biological relationship that's overlooked in the spirit of technology and progress.

Today, young women sell their eggs for purposes of research and fertility treatments. They undergo a series of hormone injections and invasive procedures in order for their eggs to be harvested and used to assist another in her pregnancy, or a research lab to practice somatic cell nuclear transfer. I don't believe these young women really understand what they are doing. After an egg is harvested, it's fertilized or coaxed to become an embryo -- that embryo is the egg donor's genetic offspring. Some of these embryos will go into frozen storage--her genetic offspring. Other embryos will be killed in research--again, her genetic offspring.

This Mothers Day as we celebrate the relationships with our moms and our kids, and remember the history of the occasion, let us not forget the children whose mothers don't know how to see them.

In the Bible, the inability to have a child is met with many emotions including deep sadness and even humiliation. The ability to continue a familial lineage was a high value. For Hannah, it was not just the joy and pride to have a child, it was also about the kind of child she might be blessed with--one who would serve God. Left in the hands of her almighty God, she prayed that her one wish would be fulfilled--and Hannah became a mother.

Today our misguided world is so intent on destroying, abusing, and profiting from our children, they have lost sight of the fact that these children still have mothers.
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