Is Juniper’s miraculous survival one of the feel good stories of all time? I think so. Here is the story of the premature birth of our heroine and the follow-up on RadioLab.
And the child’s parents are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists so Juniper’s survival became a beautifully and powerfully written book as well.
And Harry Potter plays a big part in Juniper’s survival, believe it or not. Read the article at UpWorthy, ‘J. K. Rowling Found Out Her Books Helped Save This Baby’s Life’ for that.
On the worst night, when our 1-pound daughter was fading in the darkness of her incubator, my husband opened a book and began to read aloud.
“Chapter One: The Boy Who Lived.”
He needed to say those words. I thought it was strange that he’d chosen the first book in a seven-volume series, a series that totals more than 4,000 pages, for a little girl who might not survive the night.
“How about ‘Goodnight Moon’?” I offered. “That’s a good book.”
Tom saw it all more clearly than I did. He wanted Juniper, born barely viable at 23 weeks gestation, to hear a story about children who could fly. He wanted to read to her about a baby who survived the most powerful evil in the world because his mother stood by his crib and protected him with her life.
In our family, the Harry Potter books are dog-eared and worn.
Tears? Oh, yeah.
Rowling sends a book inscribed to ‘The Girl Who Lived’? Weeping.
Couldn’t be happier with Jo, right? Between Lumos and gestures like this, what’s not to love?
Then there’s this note of sobriety: abortions in America are legal without qualification up to 24 weeks. Juniper was born and viable at 23 weeks. As noted in this article, ‘Babies born at 23 Weeks Complicate Abortion Debate.’
How is a baby who survives at 23 weeks a cause for celebration and those whose lives are ended at 24 weeks and beyond, which is to say, “those who are killed by abortionists for cash,” a matter of indifference or polite feet shuffling and the ardent wish that we could move on to other subjects, please?
A friend in DC wrote me after reading the Lumos YouTube post I put up at HogwartsProfessor last month:
Thank you, John, for sharing this. I agree that Rowling is a remarkable woman. As I looked at her video on Lumos, the thought occurred to me: How powerful it would be if she would come out in defense of unborn children facing extermination by abortion as strongly as she has come out in defense of children suffering in orphanages and institutions. Unborn children also need her support, perhaps even more so.
No argument from me on that score.
But The Presence will never do that, I’m all but certain.
She gives million pound donations to the Labour Party in addition to her charitable efforts.
And the Labour Party is pro-abortion, as I’m sure you know. Not an issue for her, which, as you point out, is logically bizarre given her concerns about newborns and children who are voiceless.
Living in the age of abortion-on-demand is akin to living in a country in which manumission, eugenics-driven sterilizations, and human trafficking are not only legal but the cause of righteousness and indignation among their defenders. Everything in this upside-down land where we live in which ‘feminism’ is joined at the waist to ‘infanticide,’ everything to include all virtuous actions and feel good charities and gestures, must eventually come back to the injustice and human carnage we strain to forget and overlook. Can there be a truly good deed without reference to the greater horror?
Would that Rowling could find her way to support an organization like Nurturing Network or The Gabriel Project, even if only with a shout-out on Twitter. As it is, she condemns eugenics and institutional murder of children’s potential in her novels and charities — and is silent about the tragedies of global gendercide as well as racist eugenics and murder of the voiceless in the US and UK.
A hearty and heart-felt two cheers for all Rowling does for MS sufferers and child living in institutional homes worldwide. And a prayer that she will one day soon muster the courage necessary to speak for the unborn and for mothers who have no choice but abortion.
Beating up on Donald Trump and his relatively witless supporters via clever Twitter notes requires exactly zero courage. Everyone in the chattering class is on board the ‘Donald Sucks’ train. Ditto for celebrating the Women’s Marches around the world which Rowling cheered last month with a series of tweets and re-tweets.
Courage would have meant acknowledging the hundreds of thousands of women who gathered on the Mall in Washington a week later to give voice to the voiceless millions of children whose lives are ended by abortion.
Here is a video of Juniper meeting Tom Felton in Orlando earlier this year. Let’s raise a glass to this ‘Girl Who Lived’ — and ‘Remember Cedric Diggory’ for the reasons Albus Dumbledore gave us at the end of Goblet of Fire:
“Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come, when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory.“
Evil tramples and murders the innocent and voiceless unless we choose to make right choices, however hard, and unless we stand up against evil, however powerful.
Juniper the plant, ironically, is the traditional ‘natural’ abortifacient. For a writer whose cleverly chosen character cryptonyms are legend, one can only hope the name of ‘The Girl Who Lived’ might bring her to reflect on and champion the millions who do not.
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