Let Us Judge Not
by Marcy Wineman Axness

None of us, I'm sure, will soon forget the tragic tug-of-war over Jessica, which played out in agonizing slow motion as the case percolated through the maze of our porous legal system. We came to feel like intimate confessors as the television images of the DeBoers, the Schmidts, and Jessie joined us over our morning coffee and toast. It wasn't long, it seems, before we each chose 'our side', and began wagging fingers and tsk-tsking as we stood in line at the bank, or gathered for a meeting, or lay back for a facial.

I fondly remember when our country's collective heart and soul was racked by the plight of another baby Jessica, the toddler who fell down a pipe. For her story demanded no more of us than simple anguish and worry over a little girl stuck in an impossibly tight place. The story of this year's Jessica asks much more of us-that we leave behind the comfort of our black-and-white perceptions and tidy definitions and negotiate the gray areas that so confound and frustrate us. There is so very much for us to learn from this sad story, but it is only in the gray world of paradox and nuance that we will be open for the lessons.

For it is in the gray areas where our humanity and compassion thrive, qualities which we forsake when we vilify, brand, or pompously decry the actions of another without having "walked a mile in her moccasins." When we stand in judgment of another, when we insist on drawing the battle lines, on making some the good guys and some the bad guys, we distance ourselves from our own humanity. There is always another side to the story, and when we ignore that possibility, again we chisel away at our humanity.

Each of the players in this drama-with one stirring exception-bears on his or her heart facets of both victim and villain, saint and sinner. But to see those many facets we must see our own, and how many of us are prepared to face the shadows of our own paradoxical natures? The plain truth in this story is that there is no plain truth. It is a holographic issue which changes shape according to where one stands.

I doubt that many of us have stood where the players in this tragedy have stood; my imagination is sorely strained to fathom the experience of giving birth under tenuous circumstances to a child I'd already agreed to surrender, feeling unsupported, uneducated, perhaps ashamed and overwhelmed; I can't imagine (especially since I'm a woman) discovering a child of mine had been lost to me before I'd known about her; I can't conjure the sensibilities of a would-be parent who, through infertility, has already borne such tremendous loss, and who, so desperate for a child, heeds what proves to be the tragically unsound advice to cling to a baby against clearly treacherous legal odds.

I don't think any one person will ever know the entire story: Cara Schmidt's motives in falsifying the name of the birthfather; what precipitated her change of heart; what transpired at those C.U.B. meetings; the circumstances of Dan Schmidt's prior parenting; the DeBoer's rationale for digging in for a prolonged struggle which began when Jessica was just 3 weeks old, a struggle which bore scant prospects for success and which threatened the much greater trauma to an older, aware Jessica, once the legal machinations had been exhausted.

For people to speak as if they do know the whole story is to betray themselves as fools. In the tradition of literature, theater, and chess, the obvious conclusion is often a trap into which fall the arrogant, the short-sighted, the capricious.

I suppose if we all followed the creed, "Judge not, lest ye be judged", there would be no editorial pages, no colorful radio and television commentators who are paid to make some of us apoplectic. But in this story of Jessica and her parents, I believe it is the only hope of mining any true insight out of the heart-wrenching pain. And how desperately we need insight into these profound, tremendously complex issues that touch us in the deepest, most tender places, and provoke such passionate response. If it's the laws you find abhorrent, then rail at your legislators-don't vilify those who have suffered within those laws.

(c)1993 by Marcy Wineman Axness

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