"Still, no matter how much we may wish it life doesn't come with a rewind or a pause button and can only be lived moment by moment."
     Joseph J. Mazzella

I am in the final throes of completing the latest edition of National Right to Life News. (If you aren't a subscriber, call us at 202-626-8828 and we will get you started and send you the latest issue as a bonus.) I mention this because today's edition of TN&V will be short and sweet.

Over the years (but not as much recently, come to think of it), we've run a number of stories on what are called "wrongful birth" and "wrongful life" suits. The common denominator is the parents (suing on their own behalf in the former case, ostensibly on behalf of the child in the latter) argue that if it had been known that the child would be born (usually with a disability), they would have aborted.

Both are ugly. But in the case of wrongful life, the child's parents are maintaining (again supposedly on behalf of the child) that the kid would be better off dead.

Full disclosure: I've never read best-selling author Jodi Picoult nor have I read "Handle With Care," which is just coming out and is just now getting reviewed. So I am basing these few comments largely on the review written for the Washington Post by Dr. Perri Klass
(www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030202755.html).

The novel adds special twists to make an inherently awful situation even worse. For example, the mother is suing her female obstetrician for wrongful life, "arguing that if the diagnosis of osteogenesis imperfecta [brittle bone disease] had been made at the first prenatal ultrasound, she would have been able to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy at 18 weeks," according to Klass. The physician is her best friend!  Likewise their older daughter loses her best friend over the suit--the obstetrician's daughter!

But those plot twists, which are unusual (to say the least), are on top of something that is not the least bit surprising, and is, in fact, absolutely predictable: their five-year-old daughter, Willow, "is devastated," Klass writes, "correctly understanding that her mother is claiming that it would have been better if she had never been born.."

"Handle With Care" is a whopping 477 pages long and carries a hefty price tag of $27.95.  But it only took a half-page review to convince me the book was well worth writing about and  purchasing.