In our last episode, my brother and his wife were pregnant with their second unintended pregnancy. A couple of years earlier, in response to the first one, they had decided to marry in order to prove their commitment to their child and to show everyone how adult they were. Unfortunately, they’ve had trouble making ends meet and have had to lean heavily on family to make ends meet. Money spent on cigarettes and eating out had taken precedence over paying the electric bill, Now that there is a second pregnancy, the recommendation of many family members was to have an abortion.

There was no abortion. That shouldn’t surprise you. “I’m Catholic,” she explained when it was suggested. “And anyway, it’s too late for that kind of thing.”

This is the problem with drawing the line of Choice at the end of the first trimester. It solves a political question by filibuster. People who are in denial about their own situation don’t even talk about the matter with others until it’s too late. Especially those who are Catholic.

No, she didn’t say she it was out of the question because she’s Catholic, she said it was out of the question because she’s Catholic and it’s too late.

Yes, that is the reality of the Catholic life, as it played out here. Not to know one’s heart what is right, but rather to know in one’s heart that this was bad and ought not be spoken of until it’s too late. And after then, the decision was out of one’s hand.

Very adult. Very responsible. Very moral. God will provide. All is good.

“And anyway,” she said by way of punctuation, “This is none of your business. It’s our personal choice.”

A personal choice. Perhaps. But liberty comes at the price of responsibility, and one could already see the train wreck coming. To borrow from Rod Serling, “That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, The Twilight Zone.”

But by what we must assume is mere coincidence, she wasn’t really liking this marriage very much. She never had been. She was always sure her husband had been cheating on her. To those looking on, there was no apparent evidence for this, and it appeared that she was insecure for no reason.

To be frank, he wasn’t that happy with the marriage either. She spent money he felt they didn’t have, and he was tired of her blathering on about her insecurities. So he tolerated the talk of divorce and chatted idly with friends about life after “he moved out.”

But this was all none of our business. Personal choice.

Did I mention their beautiful son? Quite a treasure. Surprisingly happy, all things considered. Intelligent. Polite. Engaged. Blissfully unaware of the storm clouds brewing around him. Well, okay, I didn’t mention him, but keep him in mind. Some day his presence may turn out to matter. As will the eventual arrival of a sibling-to-be.

So that sums it up. A peek behind the scenes in a situation where we ought never have gone. A private matter in which neither society nor even family has any business. Two people making private choices. Mostly private. There is a kid involved, and one to come. But that’s still private, right?

You see, the church seems oh so worried about how gays marrying might matter to the world’s morality. And yet those are private choices. Where is the same public energy spent on the proper rearing of children? Why do we even care about the state licensing marriage—effectively a private choice, when the state cares not a wit about licensing the rearing of children, something that most assuredly is not so simply summarized as a mere private choice?

But I digress. Because you imagine this to be the essence of my story tonight and in fact it is mere prelude. I did promise a train wreck, after all.

The telephone rings. It is late at night. It is the wife in this private little family. She is calling anyone, everyone. Family and friends. You know—those who have inquired and been told it is not their business.

She apologizes for the late hour. She does not, as it happens, apologize for any of the above, for the sleep any of that might lose them. But the thought that a ringing phone might disturb them matters. Well, fine. Some might say it’s mere protocol and a point of no consequence.

The husband has been in an accident.

The husband had gotten drunk and crashed the car.

He wasn’t terribly hurt, and no one else was involved. Thank God for small favors, as some might be inclined to say. Where God is in the rest of this mess, I cannot say. Why does He get all the credit for the good and no blame for the bad?

Now, I perhaps didn’t mention that she had recently obtained a second car. That’s a very curious element of all of this. Upon learning of that factoid, my first utterance was “They can’t afford that.” But as I think on it, the complexity goes further than that.

Just as owning one’s first car is what many experience as the birth of independence in the world, the purchase of a second car might be seen as just one more nail in the coffin of this marriage. In retrospect, it has allowed the two to see themselves as less dependent on one another and may have fueled the thought that it was acceptable for him to set out drinking without discussing it with her. Had there been only one shared resource, he might have felt the need to coordinate this with her, and a problem might have been avoided.

But what’s done is done.

And so we have it, two people who are each flawed in some fairly serious ways, and yet have managed to more or less fumble through thus far by compensating for each other’s weaknesses.

But these are also two people who are each selfishly obsessed with their own independence. They wish to be independent of family. They each appear to wish to be independent of each other. There’s just one thing: A child is involved, and another will be soon.

At the urging of family, my brother went to an AA meeting today. Will he keep going? I’m betting he’ll find an excuse not to, a reason to believe it’s ok to miss just one meeting, then maybe two. Or perhaps he just won’t identify with “that crowd.” But we’ll see. It’s a free country. He can, after all, do as he pleases.

Next, I suppose, comes a court hearing on the matter.

You’ll have to tune in for the next episode, I suppose, to find out what happens, assuming I have the energy to write it. It’s painful enough to watch it happening.

This reminds me a bit of the nation’s debt situation. Many people took on risk that exceeded their grasp, either being told by others that what they were doing was “obviously right” or sometimes knowing there were potential problems but also knowing they would not be the ones forced to pay if a catastrophe happened. As a public, we did nothing until the fall, all in the name of personal liberty. Are those, in fact, our national values—that we simply stand by and watch train wrecks as they happen and say we will do nothing until after the horrible collision we can see coming a mile away?

We allow organized religion to tell us that morality means having babies is unconditionally Good, Responsible, and Moral, while aborting babies, even those we aren’t prepared for, is Bad, Irresponsible, and Immoral. We allow them to dictate which children must be born, but we do not require them to pay for those who run into financial trouble down the line as a consquence of these coerced choices.

I hear freedom and liberty and morality used a lot today these days as justifications for a lot of callously selfish behavior. I’m all for freedom and liberty, but I want some responsibility as well.

And I insist on new definitions of morality, ones that accept that abortion is sometimes the moral and responsible thing, and that bringing a child into this kind of chaos as sometimes the immoral and irreponsible thing. This could indeed have been a private matter, a victimless crime. But from the moment another life was brought into the world, it ceased to be. The situation is a mess and no model of any morality I subscribe to.

Am I my brother’s keeper? That’s not the right question. Perhaps the better question is:

Am I my brother’s janitor?