How Smart Do You Have to Be to Raise a Child?

The state said a 19-year-old with an intellectual disability wasn’t equipped to look after her baby and whisked the newborn off to another family just after birth - a decision the mother was ready to fight. But how smart do you have to be to raise a child?

- Lisa Miller

The young woman labored in the back seat of her parents’ car as it sped down the country highway toward the hospital. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving 2012, and already the tall trees pressing at the edges of the road were bare. Sara Gordon had felt the hard pangs before breakfast. Her baby, a girl, was born after lunch. The baby was perfect, as babies are, but Sara’s life to this point had been anything but. Poor, white, and single, Sara Gordon was 19 years old at the time of her daughter’s birth, living with her parents, and still in school. The baby’s father, whom Sara prefers to call “that low-life scumbag,” had denied paternity and was nowhere to be found. Not that she much cared. There was no affection between Sara and the scumbag, no relationship even - only sex and a pregnancy, which Sara failed to mention until her father discerned it at dinner one night when she was about eight weeks along. She pushed a plate of lasagna away and got up from the table. “She’s knocked up,” said Sam Gordon to his wife, Kim. “She better not be,” said Kim in response. But she knew he was right: Lasagna had always been Sara’s favorite dish.