Home > Thinking Right > Archives > 2009 > February > 06
Friday, February 6, 2009
Octuplets and all children deserve better
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The octuplets born to an unmarried woman in California are consequences of self-centeredness gone awry.
The woman, Nadya Suleman, had six children, all conceived with the help of a sperm-donor friend. The eight born last month grew from six implanted embryos, life created with friend-donated sperm.
She told NBC’s “Today” show that she wanted a large family because she felt alone as an only child. “All I wanted was children,” she said. “I wanted to be a mom. That’s all I ever wanted in my life. I love my children.”
At a minimum, the cost to a single mother of raising one child to age 18 is between $118,590 and $250,260, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The woman, injured while working at Metropolitan State Hospital in 1999, collected $165,000 in disability payments between 2002 and 2008. She told a workers’ comp judge in 2001 that she spent most of the day in bed and had been unable to care for her first child. But none of these financial details, regardless of how they affect her ability to provide for the needs of 14 children, are the concern here.
The outrage is that a narcissistic adult, for her own pleasure, intentionally brought 14 children into the world, children who will never know their father.
It was a conscious, medically assisted choice to have multiple births — a decision suggesting an impaired mental state that should have raised questions about her fitness as the primary adult female in the children’s lives.
The octuplets should be a wake-up call to the nation. It is child cruelty to inflict the suffering on human life that Suleman visits upon these 14 children.
A nation that pretends to cherish children allows them to be abused in the worst possible way — by casually denying them a mother and a father living together in marriage, each committed to the child’s welfare. Suleman has eight at once, but millions of children are coming into the world suffering the same fate.
In 1960, 5.3 percent of children were born to unmarried women. By 1970, it had doubled to 10.7 percent. In another decade, it was 18.4. By 1990, it was up to 28 percent. By 2005, it was up to 36.8, highest ever.
For whites, 25.4 percent of babies born in 2005 came into the world without married parents. For Hispanics, it’s 47.9. For blacks, it’s 69.5.
As Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears has noted, children born to unmarried women and to those in cohabiting relationships “must often overcome increased risks of poverty, education failure, child abuse, delinquency, emotional distress and mental illness.”
A single woman’s income is part of the reason, but the lack of a father’s guidance in children’s lives is a major cause of their suffering. “Marriage is the best child welfare, crime prevention, anti-poverty program we have,” Sears said in that same speech. The focus of all law and public policies really should be reoriented to children. They desperately need protection from self-centered adults who casually create life for reasons that are frivolous and self-indulgent.
Every child born to an unmarried woman should have a legal advocate appointed by the state to represent the child’s interest. A primary interest would be in holding both male and female adults financially liable.
In the case of the children born to Suleman, the legal advocate would file suit against the fertility clinic or a physician who knowingly contributed to their abuse — life in a multiple-child household headed by a single woman.
The octuplets’ birth dramatically highlights the plight of children carelessly and frivolously conceived. It should be the spectacle that prompts ministers, educators, entertainers, politicians, aunts, uncles and other family members need to recognize the harm unmarried adults are causing to children.
Life begins at conception. Anything adults do prior to that moment that doesn’t harm a third person is their business. At the moment of life, however, the wants and even the needs of the adults are incidental to those of the child.
These 14 children need a protector.
Permalink | Comments (88) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
On Iraqi elections, Senate vacancies
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Last Saturday’s elections for 440 seats on provincial councils in Iraq drew 14,000 candidates. By and large, the elections occurred peacefully. Amazing. Thank Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and the men and women of this country’s armed forces who made this day possible.
If New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch and the Obama administration agreed to a deal to appoint a Republican to succeed U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, the president’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, what principally is different from the deal former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to cut to fill a Senate vacancy? Blago allegedly sought something of value, namely campaign cash. Before stepping down, Gregg extracted something of value —- a pledge not to appoint a Democrat who would diminish Republican influence in the U.S. Senate. Giving money or giving services. Don’t see the big difference.
President Obama thinks $500,000 is pay aplenty for CEOs in bailed-out firms. You take the money, you take the politicians. Pitcher Oliver Perez just signed a three-year contract with the New York Mets worth $36 million. Surely running a big auto company is worth more. But the angry mob is not clamoring for the blood of professional athletes. We really must find a disgraced CEO to do a perp-walk-in-orange across America.
Quote of the week, on turning 90, from Atlanta’s most famous twin, Ruby Crawford: “Ruth [the sister who died three years ago] and I always said when you live in Atlanta, heaven can wait.” The twins were as Atlanta as Rich’s Magnolia Room, “Gone With the Wind” and Peachtree Street.
Real fiscal conservatives would reject the enticement money contained in the pending economic stimulus that invites state and local government to expand programs —- Medicaid for one —- without a permanent funding commitment. Leave enticement money on the table.
Gold Dome Republicans tempted to tie spending to a specific funding source are on a course that marks them as no different than the Democrats they replaced. “Super-speeder” taxes-as-fines tied to trauma funding, or a $10 tax-as-fee on auto tags, as proposed by Reps. Austin Scott (R-Tifton) and Ron Stephens (R-Savannah), cause the kinds of problems that now exist with the Public Defender Standards Council. A tax created in conjunction with a specified service becomes, to claimants, an entitlement. Create programs and levy taxes; never connect one to the other.
Save the headline: “Federal aid helps, hurts insurer AIG.” For “insurer AIG,” substitute the name of any private sector company that gets bailout money.
Let it go, John, just let it go. Congressman Lewis wants Georgia Tech to preserve a building that once housed Lester Maddox’s Pickrick Restaurant. It’s strip-shopping architecture. Tear it down.
End of Course Tests, based on what teachers are expected to teach and students to know, reveal a fact about the education cultures of some local systems. Some give feel-good grades; some have high standards. For most of the eight subjects tested by EOCTs, the number who failed was two to three times the number who failed in class, according to a statistical study done by Chris Clark, an economics professor at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville. In economics, 36 percent failed the statewide test, but only 6 percent failed the class. Some locals inflate grades, presumably to qualify the unqualified for HOPE. Money can’t be determined to be the problem in local systems until you know the competence of its leaders and understand the culture they’ve created.
It’s a tragic story, no doubt. A 93-year-old man froze to death in Michigan after the power company restricted his electricity usage because he’d failed to pay $1,000 in overdue bills. But as is sometimes the case in reports of suffering callously caused by the hard-heartedness of bureaucracies, the account is one fact shy. As is now revealed, the man had assets of $600,000. Still tragic —- but without bad guys. Same is true of the fire at the Forsyth County home of a woman who claimed it was because she had a Barack Obama yard sign. One more fact: Police now suspect her.
Permalink | Comments (34) | Post your comment | Categories: Column
