This week we're supposed to be particularly mindful of the bounty of our lives. Normally, that's the kind of column I would write, too, with Thanksgiving so close and the leaves in Ohio shouting their last hurrah.

But it was here in the heartland where we made headlines recently, and they weren't the kind you clip and send to relatives. It's embarrassing, really, having everyone see just how mean you can be just because the law lets you.

Sayda Umanzor is an illegal immigrant living in Conneaut, Ohio, with her husband and three children, two of whom were born in America. On Oct. 26, she was nursing her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney, when federal agents knocked on the door of her home on Maple Street and tore her away from her screaming baby.

Brittney had never had formula and refused to eat for the three days she was in county custody. Umanzor's sister finally weaned her to a bottle on the fourth day.

During her 11 days of incarceration, Umanzor was sick with worry over what had happened to her children. She was also in physical pain because her breasts had become engorged.

Lucia Stone, a breastfeeding advocate who speaks Spanish, brought a breast pump to the jail after Kate Masley, an assistant health professor at Cleveland State University, called for her help. Stone was not allowed to examine Umanzor and had to explain how to use the pump by phone, through a visitor's window.

Umanzor was clearly in pain, Stone said.

"She told me, 'My breasts are very hard and a little hot.' She also said her heart hurt, her back hurt a lot and that she was very cold, which I worried meant that she was developing a fever."

At first, Umanzor resisted learning how to pump her milk.

"She kept asking, 'Why am I going to take my milk out if I'm never going to see my children again?'"

Stone coaxed her to try. "I told her, 'First we have to take care of your health and see that your milk gets to your baby.' With that, her eyes lit up."

It took more than a half-hour for the 26-year-old mother to express two small bottles of milk. The jail, however, did not have adequate storage facilities, and the milk was dumped, Stone said.

"None of the milk got to the baby," Stone said. When she called Umanzor's sister, who was caring for the baby, "I could hear Brittney screaming in the background."

Masley wrote a letter of protest that was signed by dozens of concerned women. Cleveland lawyer David Leopold rushed the letter to Julia Myers, assistant secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Myers' response was swift, instructing agents and officers not to jail nursing mothers in the future unless they pose a national security risk.

Umanzor and her baby are reunited. For now.

Predictably, those who oppose immigration rights insist any suffering the baby or her mother endured could have been avoided if Umanzor had just gone back to Honduras where she belongs. As if she were just here on a lark, a vacation. As if her departure were only a matter of buying a return flight home.

Curiously, many of the people attacking this mother, and mothers like her, are the same people who claim God's righteousness when it comes to limiting other women's reproductive rights.

They are the ones who insist that every life is sacred. That every baby, born or unborn, is their business. That's their deal with God, they say.

Apparently there is a loophole in this holy contract. Somehow, babies of immigrants — even those born in America — don't quite qualify for the sacred baby status. Some lives, some babies, are just worth less.

The baby who was dependent on breast milk and refused to eat? Well, that can happen to the wrong kind of kid in America. A mother who sits in jail, her breasts hard and engorged? Must be God teaching her a lesson.

How else to explain the despondent mother, the inconsolable child?

How else to explain this happening — only days before Thanksgiving?

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz ([email protected]) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.