Parenting & Family Quote by James A. Baldwin

Baldwin doesn’t reach for “sanctity” here to baptize childbirth with piety; he uses the word the way he often used moral language: as a challenge, even an accusation. Put sanctity in quotation marks and it becomes contested territory. He’s flagging how easily societies invoke the sacred to justify power, then yanking that vocabulary back toward an ethic of care. The line is structured like a courtroom contrast: one act that creates obligation, one act that erases it. “Better than” sounds almost mild, which is part of the sting. The understatement forces the reader to hear how grotesque the comparison has become in modern politics.

The subtext is Baldwin’s lifelong insistence that the West’s self-image - civilized, Christian, enlightened - collapses the moment it rationalizes organized killing. “Bombing” isn’t abstract violence; it’s state violence, technological and impersonal, the kind that lets the person pressing the button feel clean. Against that, “bringing a child into this world” is intimate and irrevocable: you can’t welcome a life without inheriting responsibility for the world that receives it.

Context matters: Baldwin wrote in the long shadow of World War II and Hiroshima, and during the Cold War’s normalized threat of annihilation. He was also writing amid U.S. racial violence and imperial conflict, where some lives were treated as disposable collateral. The line works because it collapses private morality and public policy into the same ledger. If a culture can call itself sacred while raining explosives, Baldwin suggests, then “sanctity” is just a costume.