I’m sure this blog is not going to please all of you environmentally friendly parents who are staunch advocates of cloth diapers, but bear with me for a bit.
No matter how bad they are for the planet this next story about disposable diapers has got to give pause to any parent (or any person for that matter) who values human life.
True story: An 18-month-old boy is alive today because he was wearing a disposable diaper when he fell from a third-floor apartment window. According to news reports, the toddler climbed onto a sofa and crawled out of an open window in his apartment building in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife last week, but officials say he survived because his diaper’s plastic shell got snagged on a security spike embedded in the building’s concrete wall.
Authorities say the only reason the boy is alive after tumbling 30 feet is because the disposable diaper broke his fall. Witnesses say the baby dangled from the security spike for about a minute, then the disposable diaper’s Velcro strips opened and the baby fell to the ground, “but at a much slower speed.” According to police officers, “the diaper obviously lessened the impact of the fall and saved the baby’s life.”
News reports say the child was treated for minor fractures at a local hospital, but his injuries could have been much worse. As for the boy’s parents they are not crediting their use of disposable diapers for saving their son’s life; rather they regard the incident as a miracle.
“It wasn’t the diaper that saved him,” the boy’s 23-year-old father told news reporters. “It was God.”
The boy’s father better hope that God shows his mercy again because police are now looking at parental negligence as a cause of the boy’s fall. A conviction could land the dad in jail.
And to all you cloth diaper proponents:
Yes, I realize 80% of diapering in this country is done with disposables, which equates to roughly 18 billion diapers a year. And yes, those 18 billion diapers add up to 82,000 tons of plastic a year and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp, which means 250,000 fewer trees in the world. BUT, in this case that single disposable diaper helped save a little boy (who may or may not have negligent parents)… and can you really put a price tag on that?
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