A sad reminder

I just got an email from the LWB staff that baby Han passed away. He was taken to the hospital for fevers and vomiting where it was discovered that he had a large brain tumor pressing behind his eye. I know that his caregivers are grieving deeply for this little guy. A sad reminder that though many of the orphanage staff love and care for their small charges to the best of their ability, their resources are so very limited. With access to better diagnostic tools, maybe Han would have made it...or maybe it was just his time. Only God knows. I hear a lot of talk about Chinese people abandoning their babies. A woman recently said to me about our youngest, "Look how precious she is...how could her mother NOT want her!" Another person commented, "I don't care what I was going through, I would NEVER abandon my baby". That's easy to say when we live in our spacious house with 2 cars in the garage, leftovers going to waste in the refrigerator and ample health insurance. Can we really be so sure of what we'd do when we've never even visited a country overwhelmed by poverty, much less lived in these folk's shoes? I know that in China, few people have the money even to visit the doctor for a cold. Paying for an expensive surgery for a sick or disabled child is absolutely out of the question. At our daughter's orphanage, 8 babies were abandoned in one day. All of them with serious heart defects. This happened one day after a news report that this orphanage provided heart surgeries for sick babies. It breaks my heart to think of the possibility that these mothers faced a choice no one should have to make.... Keep my baby and she will most likely die, or give her up forever to give her a chance to be made well. I'm not saying that there aren't women who abandon their babies because they are truly unwanted or inconvenient. I'm just asking that we think before we pass judgement. The bottom line is that these kids need people who will advocate for them, pray for them, and adopt them. Let's be part of the solution and leave the judging to God.