Questions From Readers

● Will a baby that is stillborn or that dies shortly after birth have a resurrection if its parents are faithful servants of Jehovah?—H. C., United States.

What Jehovah resurrects or implants in a created body is the life pattern or personality the individual had developed before death. Although a child dying a few hours or days or even a year after birth may not have developed a life pattern or intelligent memory, yet it has a mental and trait inheritance from its forebears, and if time had been allowed for these to develop they would have resulted in a definite personality which would have shown relationship to the family. Said Dr. Milton J. E. Senn in March of 1949 from the Child Study Center of Yale University, in his capacity of professor of pediatrics and psychiatry: “It appears that the beginnings of the individual organism in a psychological sense as well as in a physiological sense begin with conception. . . . The child comes into the world with physical and mental patterns pretty well set, and the child’s behavior during the growing up period is influenced by them.”

Jehovah God and Christ Jesus are able to note and reproduce all these latent tendencies in a babe and to reproduce them in the resurrection, so that the child to whom its mother will then be united will really be her child, and as such traits and tendencies unfold with the child’s growing up under the Kingdom and in the new earth, this fact will become more and more apparent to the mother. She will know it is really her own for these reasons and not for any basic physical resemblance. In the case of one that was stillborn these physical and mental patterns that are inherited were present from the time of conception and for the time the babe was developing in the womb, but the child had never lived as an individual, and resurrection is for those who have lived.

If children are sanctified by reason of a believing parent, then there is no reason to doubt that such “holy” children will have a part in the resurrection, even if they died as babes.