Breaking Bad News and the Problem of Suffering

by Dr. Martin Slack

It was late one night when one of my senior nurses found me. My fourth daughter was just a few weeks old, a beautiful, healthy, baby girl. Now I was standing in the corridor of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where I was a consultant, with my back against the wall, feeling wretched with tears in my eyes.

I had just come out of the counselling room where I had explained to a young mother and father that their baby - as longed for and as loved as mine - was going to die. I had sat with them, explaining why this was happening, and watching as their lives crumpled in front of me.

Leaving them, I couldn’t face going back into the Unit. The contrast between my joy and their tragedy was immense. Thoughts of the injustice of it all filled my brain. The anger of not being able to do more. The wrong of a life snuffed out so soon. The pain of a young couple now inconsolable. Why God, why?

That young couple, tragically, were just one of many: Parents to be told their baby would, in all likelihood, be profoundly brain damaged, or blind, or both. Parents to whom I would carry the now lifeless body of their extremely preterm infant who had just died. Parents, who having just given birth, I had to tell that their baby had been born dead.

How could a good God allow such suffering? That is a question that prompts many to doubt the existence of God at all, good or not.

But should it? What are we saying when we ask that question? We are saying that things aren’t as they should be, that it is wrong for babies to die, it is wrong for young parents to be bereaved, it is wrong for an innocent life to be so profoundly damaged as to require constant, life-long care. But why is it wrong? Who says it is wrong? What tells us it is wrong?

We all know, instinctively, that it is desperately wrong. The innocent should not suffer.

But who says so? Evolutionary biologists, or the new atheists? No. They have no answer other than that suffering is to be expected in a world that is the product of chance and the fight for survival. But they have no answer for the cry of pain from hurting hearts.

We know it is wrong because something deep inside us tells us that the world should not be like this. And there, the God of the Christian Bible, a good God, agrees with us.