Signs of Life at Vogue Magazine?

Maybe it's just New Year's optimism, but I am sometimes tempted to wonder whether we're reaching some sort of turning point in the battle to establish a culture of life in the United States.  While getting a haircut just before Christmas, I indulged myself by reading the latest issue of Vogue magazine.  There -- amidst advertisements for $3,690 (!) Gucchi purses, maps of the great fashion houses of Paris, and an article on Christmas gift-giving that pondered, "But how can I spend less than $100 and not feel chintzy, you wonder?  In point of fact, this is almost surpassingly easy." -- I was surprised by two powerful pro-life articles.

One was a tribute to Oriana Fallaci by a journalist named Janine di Giovanni.  Giovanni described how Fallaci had been her model for much of her journalistic life -- and her private life.  Upon reading Fallaci's Letter to a Child Never Born, in which Fallaci explores her tortured feelings about the fact that she never had children, Giovanni wrote:  "I decided I had enough. . .  I flew . . . to meet up with the love of my life, a French reporter I had met in Sarajevo.  For many years, we'd had a tempestuous Fallaci-style relationship -- passionate about our work, but also about each other.  We married a few weeks after I left Baghdad, and barely nine months later, our son, Luca was born.  Seeing how Fallaci had lived -- burning with conviction but with no tranquil private life -- inspired me to change my destiny."

The second article was a haunting story by John Burnham Schwartz about the heartbreak he and his wife experienced during their multi-year quest to have a child.  The article was extraordinary in its focus on the suffering caused by the failure of multiple pregnancies and the imagery he used to describe this suffering.  He begins with this story: 

I have a good friend, a lovely and unfailingly optimistic woman some 30 years older than I am, who over lunch a couple of years ago quietly announced that she'd had seven pregnancies and two beautiful children.  Her faint smile let me know that she wasn't complaining about her history -- on the contrary, she considered herself blessed -- while the flicker of sorrow in her eyes attested to the fact that she would never foget the pain.  I have no memory of my inadequate response, though I remember being shocked.  The numbers seven and two seemed to speak for themselves, the stark difference between them -- that unspoken five -- like a ledger of ghosts suddenly written on our lunch table.  I'd had no idea that beyond her children, both grown into wonderful adults, there had been, long before our friendship, a series of tragically unoccupied places in her family.

And, towards the end of the article, he writes:

Every morning on my way to my third-floor office I stop in for a visit with my son, Garrick, who is eight months old.  I do this just to remind myself; to pray at the altar; to take a whiff of his life.  I think to myself:  If any of the others had worked, we wouldn't have him.  And I can imagine no one but him.  I don't know God very well, but it's my belief that God can imagine no one but him.

In Vogue magazine?  Not one, but two, married couples wanting children? The suggestion that we are all created in the image and likeness of God?  Take a look for yourself, if you can find a copy of the the December 2006 Vogue at your doctor or hairdresser or barber.  It's the one with the picture of Nicole Kidman on the cover, dressed in what looks like a gold-plated bustier.

Lisa