Last week, a motorist pulled over on Steelstown Road in Rathcoole, a mostly desolate and unremarkable country road west of Dublin. He stopped because he needed to take a piss. And then something strange happened. He heard a baby crying. And there, in an empty field, he found a newborn child, left by herself in a shopping bag.

Doctors estimate the baby was between 24 and 36 hours old. The Gardai have appealed for the mother to come forward. They are forswearing legal punishment and promising assistance, to vindicate the child’s claim on her mother’s care and love. They call her baby Marie, and she is beautiful.

She is also a symbol of the new coming dispensation for children.

Closer to home, in Kansas two years ago, another parent put a baby in a shopping bag, so to speak. In 2009, William Marotta answered a Craigslist ad posted by a lesbian couple seeking sperm. He donated a few cups of the stuff. In 2014, a Kansas court ordered him to pay child support. “I donated genetic material, and that was it for me,” he said in his defense.

How you feel about Marotta’s case is probably a good indicator of which side you land on in the culture war.

Read the article “In Defense of the Natural Family” on theweek.com.