A National Sickness

When my son was born, the nurses who were working on the umbilical cord and cleanup called one of the doctors over.  "Look at this cord blood," one of them said.  The doctor said, "This baby must have had excellent in utero nutrition."  The other nurse said, "Well, look at his skin, too.  You can see he was already well cared for."

I tried, you know, all throughout my pregnancy.  I tried my best to make sure that the baby had every nutrient that he needed, every day.  I started eating foods in strange combinations to make sure I was getting enough vitamins and minerals in my diet, and it's paid off.  Not only was he born full-term at a healthy weight, he hasn't had any of the problems that plague so many children.  No ear infections, no weird skin afflictions, nothing like that.  He's a bundle of robust good health.  We're very proud of that.

But I'm not just writing this to brag.  I'm writing this because I find the way we talk about these things (or don't) and the way we treat our children in general in this country to be appalling. 

As research into what happens in utero goes on, we're finding out more about how much nutrition in the womb matters.  I think most of us are already aware that a deficiency in folic acid early in pregnancy is linked to neural tube defects, especially spina bifida.  But, when it is recommended by the government that all women who are of childbearing age take a folic acid supplement, it is taken by some people to mean that the government is trying to say that women should always be planning to be pregnant, because maybe that's what women are for.  I find this baffling.  Unplanned pregnancies are most of the pregnancies in this country, and as far as I can tell, most of those unplanned pregnancies are not aborted.  So, a small thing that you could do to prevent lifelong spinal cord dysfunction isn't worth it because of what it says about you, the woman.  Here, as in so many other cases, women's ability to take umbrage and see themselves as victims of a government machine trying to squash their rights and personhood takes precedence over the health and welfare of any unplanned children.  That seems fair, so compassionate. 

Please note that while the FDA does mandate folic-acid enrichment of some cereal products, it does not mandate that any women, pregnant or otherwise, take folic acid supplements.  It just recommends it.  Apparently a recommendation to reduce the odds of spina bifida occurring in children by as much as 70% is fucking oppressive, but probably not as oppressive as spina bifida itself.

And god forbid that you should express sympathy for the goal of getting all pregnant women to pay more attention to their nutrition while they're pregnant.  Apparently it is more important that a woman be able to eat whatever she wants than that the baby be given some chance at good health.  Yes, I believe the majority of mothers do take as much care as they can with this, but it's obvious that too many mothers do not.  One of the reasons we have such a high infant mortality rate is because we have such high rates of preterm births here, and that is sometimes related to in utero care (not always, of course.  It is also related to other factors, but use of alcohol and tobacco during pregnancy are big factors--occasionally, some women smoke during pregnancy because they want smaller babies believing that will make labor easier, which it doesn't.  All it does is set the baby up for lifelong health problems.)

And god forbid you should ever mention the small-but-growing body of research that suggests a link between IVF and some cancers, autism, and other birth defects and complications--not to mention the fact that most such babies are born at low birthweights and often prematurely, putting them already at risk for various health and developmental problems.  Instead, keep following the red herrings and refuse to get your kid vaccinated. 

But what do we care about babies, right?  What we care about is women's rights, and every time the two even remotely, questionably come into conflict, we feel we must choose the woman's right to smoke and drink and not take folic acid during pregnancy.  We get ourselves into that position because of the abortion debate.  It is felt that ceding any concern to the developing fetus is admitting that this thing is a developing person, that what we do to it now can have potentially devastating lifelong consequences for the person it will be.  And admitting that, it is felt, gives up important ground to the pro-life crowd.  Maybe it does, but maybe on this one, the pro-life crowd is right.  I believe that abortion should be safe and legal (and, yes, rare, because I believe that in every case, contraception is preferable) but I am not willing to take away all consideration for the fetus.  And we shouldn't have to.  I believe there is a middle ground where a reasonable case can be made that a potential, developing person is worthy of moral consideration but that there are times when the rights of the woman are more important.  This is an ethical position, please note, not a recommendation for a legal position.

This all disturbs me quite enough, that we care, apparently, so little for giving our children the best chance at a healthy life that we would rather protect abortion rights at any cost than advocate, say, public-health campaigns that would help to educate women about in utero nutrition and its consequences.  But it doesn't really end once the baby is born.  Riddle me this:  If caring about a fetus is not the same as caring about an actual person, then why do our attitudes about fetuses so often carry over even after they're born?

We abuse our children.  We neglect them.  We kill them.  We abandon them, in dumpsters and at hospitals through Safe Haven Laws.  We don't take a lot of time out of our busy lives for them.  We don't take special care to keep fathers, mothers, and children all living in the same household.

In Nebraska, as I'm sure many of you have heard, the Safe Haven Law does not currently have an age expiration.  In the few months since the law passed, some 35 children have been dumped at hospitals, abandoned by their parents.  Most of those children are not infants and are old enough to know they have been abandoned.  Some were in their teens already.  Several of them were driven from out of state by their parents.  One woman drove her son up from Georgia to dump him, then said, "Don't judge me.  I love my son."  Apparently she loved him so much that she could find the wherewithal and money to drive to Nebraska from Georgia to abandon him but not enough to actually take care of him.  Tonight, Campbell Brown asked what's going on that we have so many parents willing to abandon their kids to the state, whether there aren't enough state resources or not enough accesssibility to help parents who feel they can't care for their kids.  I don't think there are enough state resources in the world to prevent this kind of thing.  If parents are bad parents, irresponsible, uncaring, they will still be no matter how much money or aid you provide them.  Good parents take care of their kids even through poverty and hard times.  Any good and loving parent would know the damage they do to their kids by abandoning them.

We do not as a society, though, encourage parents to be responsible and stay with their children and care for them.  We certainly don't encourage men to do so and have gone so far as to tell fathers that they are neither needed nor, in many cases, wanted.  Their money is wanted and required, yes, but not their actual presence.  We don't care, frankly, if putting kids in daycare hurts them in the long run; we don't even want to talk about it because of what it might say about women working. 

And so we get stories like these, girls who have unprotected and sometimes promiscuous sex from young ages (and presumably boys, too, but this survey was focused on girls).  I think it's cute how Dr. Schroeder concludes from these results that what these girls need is sex education.  It's startlingly clear from what the girls said about their sex lives that they know a lot about sex, including how pregnancy happens, what STDs are and how to prevent them.  That isn't the problem.  They're so afraid of losing the "friendship" of boys that they do whatever the boys want.  The problem is they don't know what a relationship with a man that is based on respect rather than sexual demands looks like.  The problem is they don't know what it feels like to be loved by a man--their fathers--for something other than sex.  So, to avoid having these boys think they're uncool or get mad at them, they take the risk of unprotected sex.  That isn't a lack of sex education.  That's a lack of fundamental self-esteem, a self-esteem that your school can't actually give you or teach you because it has to come from your home life, from these basic relationships that are supposed to teach you that you are loved even if you don't want to have sex.  The fact that it isn't--in girls who have not been abused--tells us something pretty fucking awful about our country and how it treats its children.

Add it all up.  We've decided fetuses are not worthy of moral consideration.  We abandon infants, through Safe Haven laws and also illegally in dumpsters and plastic bags.  We abuse and neglect a substantial portion that we don't actually abandon.  Another substantial proportion, we tell them that one or the other of their parents--usually their fathers--are essentially worthless in the cause of raising children.  We expect them to evolve to our desires rather than tailoring our desires to the ways children have been raised for millennia of human history.  We think it's perfectly acceptable to feed our kids any old kind of junk food because we don't "have time" to cook nutritious food--nevermind about the consequences.  We sexualize girls from young ages without ensuring them the benefit of a positive relationship with a man.  While contraception of various kinds is widely available, even when you're poor (Planned Parenthood, for example, has a sliding fee scale--I know from experience) and young, and adoption is also a widely available option, we still have this culture of no blame, no shame for mothers parents who abandon their children or who fail to care for them (to be fair to fathers, I doubt most fathers of abandoned infants even know that they're fathers).  We don't want to talk about anything that would benefit kids but potentially stigmatize or disallow anything any woman wants.  If something does come out, it tends to get buried quickly or shouted at by so-called feminists who support "reproductive choice" for women (but not for men, because this is about equality).  Since we don't want to talk about sex with our kids or take care of our kids, we demand that the government offer programs to do it for us (sex ed in school, self-esteem exercises in school, etc.).  

We, as a society, incentivize irresponsibility, self-centeredness, and to some extent, bad parenting (although we don't only incentivize irresponsibility in parenting and family issues--the bailout so far has been a good example of this, and, gee, look how well AIG is behaving now!).  We don't like to punish people for mistakes that any of us could make, but at the same time, we have to do better at raising kids.  We have to do better by our kids.  We should feel shame at the state of our nation's childrearing. 

I don't frankly know whether it's better or worse in other countries, and I don't care.  If it were found that British parents were even worse than us (and, again, I have no idea--sorry, UK), that wouldn't make our behavior OK.  I don't know what it's going to take anymore--I don't even know how to correct some of the shit we've done.  But we have to because the people who are least deserving of suffering are suffering, even when they don't always know they are.  We are failing to protect the people who most need protection.  And that's wrong.