Something Different Again

My wife is a physical therapist. She treats babies from birth to three years old. Yesterday she saw a month old baby for the first time. The baby was taken to the hospital with an internal brain bleed. The parents said that it was attacked by a dog. After examination, the doctors concluded that the child suffered a traumatic brain injury two weeks prior because the skull fracture showed signs of healing. Both parents were placed in jail. They each blamed the other. The father is out on bail. The mother remains in jail. They will both be charged with assault, which carries a light sentence. Since they are both first time offenders, they probably will receive little or no jail time. Their child, for all intents and purposes, is dead. A normal baby at birth is now profoundly brain injured, cannot breath on his own, eats through a tube, and is blind.

As you probably can tell from previous blogs, I consider myself on the spectrum of liberal to moderate. But on some issues, I find myself more to the conservative side. In this case, is sterilization too severe a punishment? Do people who beat a two week old child so severely that the child is now nothing more than a shell of a human have the right to have more children? We need to take a test to drive a car. Why don't we need to take tests to have children?