a placeless world

At some point, Beto's parents promised him they would stop sticking needles into their arms. Beto took their word for it — what else is a 7-year-old boy supposed to do?

Then, on the afternoon of March 31, he walked into the kitchen and learned that his parents had lied.

His 8-year-old sister, Alisha, ran to a neighbor's home to call 911. Beto returned to the family kitchen to pull the needles out of his mother's body.

Their efforts went for naught. Paula Castillo was dead on the scene. Armando Roman survived, but may as well have been dead. He soon left town for Boston — Mecca for the heroin faithful — leaving his children in the custody of Utah's Department of Human Services without so much as an apology for his failures as a father.

I struggle to comprehend a lust so strong that it supercedes a parent's natural desire to protect the lives of his children.

Perhaps Melissa Rowland could explain. Her drug of preference was cocaine. Her victims were her unborn twin children — one stillborn, the other nearly dead at delivery.

Her rationale for dismissing a doctor's demand that she undergo an emergency C-section to save the life of her children? A scar would ruin her sex life.

Activists have turned Rowland — whom the Salt Lake County prosecutor unwisely charged with murder — into a postergirl for a woman's right to choose. But I tremble when I think of what would have happened if she had chose.

What if she elected to take the doctor's advice? Both children's lives would have been saved, but for what? So that they could live like Beto and Alisha? Forever afraid of walking into the kitchen to find their mother dead on the cold tile floor?

Half of us are perfectly satisifed with telling a woman what she may and may not do with her children before they are born — and just as satisfied to ignore those children once they arrive.

The other half is content to let a woman do whatever she wants to her unborn children — and recoils in horror when they are drugged, neglected and otherwise abused once they're here.

Rowland's surviving child is too young to know she has been failed. Beto and Alisha are old enough to know they've been failed, but think it's their parents' fault.

They don't yet know, and perhaps they never will.

We've all failed them.