Life in MegaPixels

I received a very disturbing email from Mungkey today. It was a forwarded email campaign to support a blog called two million dollar baby that says:

This is just disturbing people, and I do hope you would mind and read this journal. The people involved in this journal are planning to abort a baby, their baby– unless you answer their poll: they reasoned that they could support the child, so they might choose to abort the  baby.  They called the child the twomilliondollarbaby, which is not very amusing.

Please reserve your 10 seconds of internet time and tell others about this story. An unborn baby’s life is in jeopardy. Rally everyone to save a life.

I cannot help but share my opinion publicly on this matter.  My initial reaction was more of genuine compassion and pity. I feel for the troubled teenagers. I feel for the child in her womb. I can almost feel her knees wobbling out of fear and anxiety.  It is not a very easy situation to be in and definitely one that you and I would not like to experience at any point in our lives.

However, setting up a blog to entrust the fate of an unborn fetus to public scrutiny is a totally different matter. It posed for me a question on morality: while the act of saving a life through whatever means possible is a noble and respectable deed, is it morally correct to risk a child’s life for a price tag? For the compassionate souls who were moved by this story, is it morally correct to help save a life while contributing to a certain degree of extortion?

I tried to process all these information in my head, and believe me, it tugged at my heart to realize how awfully selfish and insanely inhuman this act of treachery and connivance could be.  While I am amused at how far the couple would go to raise money for the kid’s future,  I feel saddened and angered by the fact that they are actually using a poor innocent life to blackmail and abuse the genuinely generous hearts of other people reading their blog, in their pursuit for financial freedom from raising a kid, that is a consequence of their irresponsible actions.  Clearly, this is extortion masquerading as a cause at all angles.

As much as I would like to commend the couple for their creatively, I feel guilty that I am part of the world today that is shaping the future tomorrow.  If kids today have judgment that is as flawed and twisted as these couples’, what else can we expect from our future?

Indeed, this situation poses a serious threat to morality. And so I dare leave you with this question -  where have our values gone?