A woman gives birth on a downtown Portland sidewalk shortly before 11 a.m. on a weekday, leaves the baby and walks away.
Another day in the Rose City.
More accurately, another day in Rip City. The corner of Market Street and 13th Avenue where the baby was left is near a boulder garden. Where once there were rose bushes and greenery, there are now large boulders to discourage camping.
Portland police Officer Nathan Kirby-Glatkowski found the mother covered in blood and amniotic fluid a block away from where she left the baby. He told The Oregonian she was incoherent and confused and “undergoing a pretty serious mental health crisis.”
The news coverage focused on the bizarre nature of the police call, tamping down the horror and embarrassment of what happened.
The same day Russians bombed a maternity hospital in Ukraine, a pregnant woman in Portland, Ore., popped out a baby on the sidewalk and moved on.
The Portland woman, whose identity was not released, may very well be someone who was born mentally ill. We are surrounded now by so many people with mental illness that it seems the real pandemic isn’t Covid – it’s insanity brought on by the chemical alteration of brain cells through drugs.
Does the Portland woman have a history of drug use? If so, what kind of drugs? When and how did her drug history begin? And, yes, it does matter.
Perhaps she is like one of the women who haunted Hollywood writer Eve Babitz.
Babitz died late last year in the shadow of a more famous writer, Joan Didion, so her death didn’t receive as much notice. The two writers covered some of the same territory, including the acid revolution and where it was leading America.
When Babitz was in her 20s, she was a charming, voluptuous party girl. There was always a line she did not cross, though.
In an essay for Esquire Magazine in August 1994, she wrote about the kind of life she had been afraid of as a young woman.
Babitz recalled living alone in West Hollywood in 1969, surrounded by hippies, rock stars and dealers when a friend called to tell her about the bloody massacre of actress Sharon Tate and several others in a Benedict Canyon, a neighborhood where the beautiful people lived.
“We were all enchanted, under a spell of peace and love and LSD that we thought had changed the world,” Babitz writes. “In those days, people might drop by for one joint, get hung up on some transformational conversation, and wind up staying for the whole day or three weeks and then leaving for different skies, other adventures. And it was going to last forever.”
However, she never forgot who she was.
“I had always been paranoid in the worst and most obnoxious way, afraid not only of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department but also of ‘joy’ – of ‘scenes,’ of the hints of orgies, of too much happening on drugs, of girls who lost their heads. I knew people like that, their minds wiped clean by some acid/speed combination that left them standing rigid with tears streaming down their faces, and I was afraid of being one of them, dropped off at the UCLA psychiatric clinic.”
Charlie Manson found a following in this world.
While Babitz “couldn’t smoke a joint without hearing the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department kicking down the door,” a woman she had gone to grammar school with had become one of Charlie’s disciples. Babitz later saw her during his trial. She was one of the women who etched crosses in their foreheads.
Today drugs are everywhere. Even middle-class white kids don’t need a guru like Manson to guide them in how to lose their minds. There is little fear of police raids.
The baby girl born on the Portland sidewalk came into a neighborhood that is home to the Helen Gordon Child Development Center, a pre-school run by Portland State University, and apartment houses, some market rate and others subsidized through the city’s Home Forward program.
A block away is the St. Stephen’s Parish Episcopal Church. On a recent day, there was a closed cardboard box sitting on the sidewalk in front of the church. “Take if you need” was written on the outside of the box, and inside were a variety of unopened items including Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookies and Cascadia Farms Vanilla Chia Crunch cereal.
My visit to the neighborhood was book-ended by the appearance of two men. As I paid for parking, a young, shirtless black man with a muscled torso strode by. He would have looked at home in a gym (or on a prison iron pile) except that his thin draw-string pants were hanging down below his rear end, exposing his under shorts. He carried on a loud, animated conversation with himself.
He didn’t bother me. Had he wanted to cause trouble, though, I would’ve been no match for his strength. This is why people opt to avoid downtown.
The other man was a white guy in his 20s who approached me as I was leaving. He looked at me pleadingly, as if to say, “Do you have something for me?”
He tinkered with the parking kiosk, tapping repeatedly at one of the keys. Then he found the goody box on the sidewalk and reached inside.
Kevin Allen, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau, told The Oregonian the mother and baby girl were in good condition.
Public reaction to the story of the baby born on the sidewalk veered towards Portland nice.
“So thankful baby is okay. Hopefully the mother will get the help she needs,” someone tweeted on The Oregonian’s story.
Personally, I hope “the mother” doesn’t have any more babies.
Last decade in Washington state, I volunteered for a couple of years as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate for children in protective custody. The parents of the 14 children I represented all had drug problems, mostly meth. (The mother of three children was killed in Portland in a drug-related fire that was started by the father. No arrests. No prosecution.)
It wouldn’t surprise me if the woman who gave birth on the sidewalk has another child.
It also wouldn’t be surprising if Child Protective Services tries to “reunify” the family.
Sydney Mead, who works downtown and is involved with the Portland Business Alliance and Downtown Portland Clean & Safe, told Facebook readers she was contributing some items to a care package that police were putting together for the woman and baby. Anybody who wanted to contribute something could contact her.
“It is nice to be able to do something to help,” she said.
But it won’t help.
A culture that says “yes” to everything except law and order doesn’t need a care package.
It has to relearn how to say “no.”
The really dangerous epidemic is not Covid. Don't suppose that it ever was. Your solution is correct, too: relearn to say no or trudge on to a collapse into complete squalor. No? Of course not wholly in the Nancy Reagan sense, but still - this far and no farther. Effective compassion often requires sternness, in my experience.
A place like Portland has the hard hand when persecuting "hate crimes" or "homophobia." Indeed, we've become famously merciless when dealing with those who stray off of the rez of progressive groupthink. Joseph McCarthy could only wish for the power of personal and professional destruction modern cancel culture wields. Anti-communism ain't even a close second.
Roosevelt, Earl Warren, J. Edgar Hoover (all of the XO 9066 boyos), and the Stasi would envy the punishment, ostracism, condemnation, and vindictive tracking that all right thinking Portlanders encourage. In our Multnomah Manzanar it is difficult to say who, exactly, are the prisoners: the drug addled lunatics that suffuse our streets or the average Portlander, too intimidated to complain of his capture by criminals, the mad, and the drug addicted. There could not have been more misery in those internment camps. The internees were strong in family and faith and in themselves individually and as a group.
You know, I was never quite certain that we got the correct lesson from the internment of Japanese-Americans. Now, I'm certain of it.
As a boy and young man I would occasionally come across a photograph of Babitz and it never occurred to me to question her chess skills. Probably Duchamp didn't much either. You never know. Anyway, I've been reading her autobiographical material lately. She captured a world we have lost as surely as did Tom Wolfe. The fire famously changed her but I do not know her work well enough to say how.
Babitz was there at the beginning and she saw the direction in which it was all tending.
A pro bono attorney will surely pop up and sue the city for the sad condition of the child and mother? How many newborns are stuffed into the ground along our highway roadsides and boulder border areas such as the one at Market and 13th? Were we to turn up several small corpses what would be our verdict on our society, especially from progressive women leaders?
I can think of very little more grotesque yet more commonplace than this instance of what we do to ourselves, our society.
More like Regan Revolution but let's not quibble over details.