Those who know me understand that I am passionate about children, as such you will forgive me a political rant or two.
In the midst of Sarah Palin panic about Roe v. Wade, I did some thinking about my own views and I decided we need a national plan for children – all children. While this post is not about love and sex in the way I usually write about it, I do hope you will indulge me. In many ways, it is about our relationship to the next generation — our children. And in a real way, it is about the relationship of a man and woman to a child whom they conceived and the choices they must make.
The article talks about legislation. The one person who really helped me remain committed was Brian McGrory, then the Washington correspondent for the New Haven Register, now Deputy Managing Editor for the Boston Globe. When Phyllis Schafley was passing out leaflets warning about our programs, Brian alerted us. We quickly learned we would have an uphill battle. But thanks to the press — children won. Safety standards for day care passed as did a continuum of care model for chemically dependent mothers and therapeutic care for their children.
This article is adapted from a piece that I wrote for the New Haven Register on Tuesday, October 21, 2008. At the end you will find individual links to my Relationship Columns for the week.
A Broader Approach Needed on Protection of Life
by Rita Watson Tuesday, October 21, 2008 6:06 AM EDT
WITH abortions numbering 850,000 a year, lip-sync moralists are jockeying for the rights to champion the unborn in this election year. I am wondering: Is each person who believes in the right to life willing to support a child – from birth to age 18 – for every mother who “chooses life,” as religious groups advocate, rather than terminating her pregnancy?
Pregnant and waddling like an overstuffed duck, I remember leaving church on “Respect Life Sunday” just after raising my right hand to promise I would oppose abortion. Why? My eyes scanned the page and notably absent were the words “I also oppose war and capital punishment.”
Who are the women making the abortion choice? According to the Centers for Disease Control, of the more than 850,000 legal abortions in a year, 82 percent of the women were unmarried. The breakdown of ages: 25 through 29, about 250,000 abortions per year; 16-19, approximately 126,000; those under 15, fewer than 5,000.
New York City had the nation’s highest abortion rate, with 87,000 pregnancy terminations in a state that had 125,000 total. Second is Texas, with 79,000. Third is Illinois with over 42,000, followed by Pennsylvania, 37,000, and Georgia, 34,000. The states with numbers hovering at 25,000 include Massachusetts, Michigan, Virginia and Washington, with the remainder, including Connecticut, reporting fewer than 11,000 abortions. There were no figures for Alaska, California and New Hampshire.
These most recent comprehensive figures are from 2002 and were reported by CDC in 2005. The number of women seeking legal abortions is not adjusted by percentage in proportion to state populations, and figures do not include privately arranged abortions by physicians who do not necessarily report.
But what does it matter? Numbers represent lives cut short. States should have been designing legislative safety nets and family-focused alternatives long before the Sarah Palin panic.
Perhaps, it is time to focus energies on a new approach and reinvent the U.S. Children’s Bureau of 1912 and update it to be an all inclusive educational, legal and medical agency for both sides of the reproduction issue, designed to help states help women.
Abortion is just one part of a larger problem that often affects families trapped in poverty, illiteracy and overpopulation. At Yale University during the 1980s at the psychology department we spearheaded legislation on infant care leave, national child care standards and 21st century schools. Later at the psychiatry department we drafted a continuum of care model for pregnant substance abusers as an alternative to jail. The landmark bill was promoted nationally by Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., in an effort to put children and families first.
While I cannot raise my hand to oppose abortion without opposing war and capital punishment, I can point a finger at both political parties and ask: “Why is there no platform to support a range of choices for women and a commitment to protect infants and children from conception through their school years?”
Let’s abandon No Child Left Behind – which teaches children to take tests instead of to think – and let’s start with the basics. No Child Left in Poverty. No Child to Bed Hungry. No Child in a Homeless Shelter. And please, No Child Neglected and Abused.
Is it more important to spend millions of dollars on ads to elect a president and bail out Wall Street than to make a nonpartisan commitment to our children – in utero and in life?
If so, the words of Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet” may one day come to haunt us: “A plague on both of your houses.”
(I wish to thank Kathy Collins for her astute editing and for taming my tirade.)
Rita Watson is an associate fellow at Yale University’s Ezra Stiles College.
For those of you wondering what happened to the love, sex, and relationships, go to the Week in Review OR simply click on these links. Hot Coffee Warms Hearts ; Sex Becomes Better with Age ; Heart, Home, Renovation, and Divorce ; First Comes Marriage, Then Comes Love ; Too Much Cheating, We Need Happily Ever After ; and Cougar Love and Longevity, but not for Madonna
Copyright 2008 Rita Watson