Danforth’s dilemma

When Janet Danforth’s beeper went off at 2 in the morning, the social worker and chaplain-in-training at U.Va. Medical Center didn’t miss a beat. She was being called to the neonatal intensive care unit where the distressed parents of a very sick newborn wanted their baby to be baptized.

There’s a catch, though: Danforth is Jewish.

“I’d been trained that anybody can do a baptism,” she said. “I did it and felt very good about it. This ritual made a huge impact on this family.”

Later, as a master’s student on her way to chaplaincy certification, she remembered the situation and knew this would be the topic of her thesis. After interviewing ministers, rabbis, bioethicists and lay Christians and investigating the religious writings of her own Reformed Jewish teachings, she has concluded that she did the right thing.

“[The ministers said] that it’s not about the person who does it. It’s about the family coming forth with the public declaration that they want their child to be baptized,” said Danforth (MA, Religious Studies, Bioethics ’03).

Similarly, Reform Rabbis compared the act to a Jewish chaplain giving a hungry Christian a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur, a Jewish day of fasting.

“We don’t give up who we are,” Danforth said, “in meeting the needs of people [whose beliefs] are different from ours.”

The question of whether she should have told the family she is Jewish (she did not) was a little trickier. Ethicists at the Center for Biomedical Ethics uniformly said don’t tell, that presenting this theological quandary to a family in crisis may only make the situation more traumatic.

But Danforth preferred the advice of a Jewish chaplain who said she would let the family know her background, because it’s part of creating an honest therapeutic relationship. “It’s the relationship that people really want,” Danforth said.