By Dave Andrusko
Steve Jobs
Coincidence, or not? (This is a true story.) Just yesterday I happened to run across the second “Life: Imagine the Potential,” the immensely powerful pro-adoption video produced by CatholicVote.org. One of the many people, (a list that includes everyone from Willie Nelson to Eleanor Roosevelt) whose face flashes across the screen is Steve Jobs.
Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of what came to be the incredibly influential Apple Empire, died of cancer yesterday at age 56. For techies and those who inspect every blade of the lawn of popular culture, no praise was high enough for a man who changed the way most everyone in the developed world—and many in the developing world—live. He was likened to every creative genius from Thomas Edison to Walt Disney, by friend and foe alike.
But pro-lifers (even those every bit as taken with technology) focus on the part of Jobs’s life that was unknown for a long time: the circumstances of his adoption. He explained the remarkable twist in a 2005 Commencement speech at Stanford. Jobs said his birth mother
felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: ‘We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?’ They said: ‘Of course.’ My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.”
You don’t have to ponder very long to get to the “what ifs” of Jobs’s life. He was born in 1955, long before Roe v. Wade greatly reduced the odds that the result of an “unplanned pregnancy” would survive. However, had he been conceived in 1973….
Our prayers go out to Mr. Jobs’s family.