From the Seattle Times today:
In Palestine, Mother kills raped daughter to restore ‘honor’ while in China, Mother tracks down elusive DNA match for daughter’s transplant
The two headlines were placed on opposite pages, as if an intentional juxtaposition. Certainly a contrast: The Palestinian mother who murdered her daughter, after the teenager gave birth to her brother’s child and the American mother who journeyed to China to find the right cells to help her adopted daughter receive a bone marrow transplant. One mother killing the child she bore, the other mother making sacrifices to save a child not her own, a girl she adopted from China.
A third report also speaks of the power of motherhood. The piece New style and tone for Louisiana politics discusses the governor-elect of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco. This fall I’ve been watching this election because she was running against my college friend Bobby Jindal.
In analyzing how Blanco won, it seems from the article that her experience as a mother was an influential factor:
She also gave credit for her victory to her final debate appearance, in which she recounted the death of her son when asked about the defining moment in her life.
“I’ve always felt or found in a big campaign, people eventually look for humanity,” she said. Her son Ben died in 1998 at 19 when he was hit by a weight that fell from a crane at his summer job.
I can imagine what an effect that had, during the debate, when Blanco described what it was like to lose her son: it’d be difficult to debate that.
How powerful is a mother’s heart.
