Posted on 10/29/2001 8:28:28 AM PST by sendtoscott
While the left can get hysterical over child abuse, the actual life of an actual child fades into unimportance when compared to "larger" political issues, just like the actual guilt or innocence of someone accused of abuse does. Regardless of your position on abortion, consider the inconsistency of considering the life of what is arguably human (at the very least) to be merely a choice, while parents and day care workers are prosecuted on trumped up abuse charges. A David Limbaugh article quotes the Planned Parenthood website concerning the real value to the left of the children it takes a village to raise:
Consider Planned Parenthood's advice to pregnant women. "One of your choices is to continue your pregnancy and raise a child. Being a parent is exciting, rewarding and demanding. It can help you grow, understand yourself better and enhance your life." It's all about you, you, you, the baby be damned. The same is true with their comments about adoption. "Some women find that the pain of being separated from their children is deeper and longer lasting than they expected."
The life of a child being cheap does not stop in the middle of a pregnancy. John Leo, in an article in the July 10, 2000 issue of US News and World Report describes what is currently legal to do to children during birth:
And catch their not so subtle display of preference for abortion. "Serious, long-term emotional problems after abortion are rare. They are more likely after childbirth."
...here is an account by Brenda Shafer, a pro-choice nurse who attended a partial-birth abortion in Ohio in 1993: "The doctor delivered the baby's legs and arms, everything but his little head. The baby's body was moving, his little fingers were clasped together. He was kicking his feet. The doctor took a pair of scissors and inserted them into the back of the baby's head and the baby's arms jerked out in a flinch, a startled reaction, like a baby does when he thinks that he might fall. Then the doctor opened the scissors up. Then he stuck a high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby's brains out." "I still have nightmares about what I saw," she added. Yes, that would seem to be an appropriate reaction.
Do you want a society where the partial-birth abortion described above is legal, but we have to regulate spanking on the grounds that the kid might get bruised? This is not to take a position on abortion; it is to point out the inconsistency about what is or is not considered any of the State's business. Given the choice between a fairly severe example of child abuse (a broken bone, cigarette burns, or the use of a cattle prod) and a pair of scissors to the back of the skull, I would prefer to suffer the physical abuse. A baby's survival is no sure thing even if the hospital finishes delivery. One hospital saves themselves the trouble of cleaning a pair of scissors by just leaving the kid to die:
... the partial-birth procedure is entirely elective and is never used to save a mother's life. Many obstetricians and gynecologists, plus former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, signed a statement pointing out that "partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to protect a mother's health or her future fertility."
... the babies are fully delivered, often resulting in live births, and then die outside the mother's body. Attending medical personnel do not provide life support, and the babies oftentimes die in the arms of nurses.
To give the hospital credit, they have taken action. They fired the nurse who blew the whistle on what was happening. What happened to those leaving children to die? According to the same article:
When a nurse or parent isn't holding one of these babies, often they're put in a soiled utility room, they're left there to die alone.
Investigators concluded that the hospital violated no state laws.
Thank you, government.
But soon after, the hospital's parent, Advocate Health Care, tightened its policies to no longer permit abortions on fetuses with non-lethal birth defects like Down syndrome or spina bifida.
The controversy spurred state Sen. Patrick J. O'Malley of Palos Park--now a candidate for the GOP nomination for governor--to introduce a package of bills in the legislature that would have given "born-alive" infants a right to life. After being passed in the Senate, it was killed in a House committee.
Legal and moral consistency does not get much better after the child leaves the hospital, and conservatives are no better than liberals. Take the example of a child accidentally left in a hot car to die. Debra J. Saunders tells of one case where a baby died when he was left in a car for two hours and his core temperature reached 107 degrees. She calls on prosecutors to "quickly settle on probation, and spare [the father] and his family both jail time and unnecessary anguish." Jonah Goldberg, has written that "considering that the death of a child is the ultimate punishment for most people, do you think that if it were against the law to kill your kid thusly, you would be less likely to do it?" However, Saunders herself shoots down a similar claim concerning Andrea Yates (the woman who is charged with killing her five children):
Yates' defenders claim that now that she is receiving top-drawer treatment and medication, she has improved. Her brother Andrew Kennedy told the Dallas Morning News, "I've never seen her this happy -- even 10 years ago, she wasn't this happy."
For the record, Goldberg explicitly comes out in favor of laws against parents deliberately harming their children. Why he (or anyone) believes that killing your child out of anger is not punishment enough, but out of stupidity is, was left unspecified.
There goes the oft-expressed theory that the knowledge of what Andrea Yates did is punishment enough.
Goldberg and Saunders were writing about the same case. Kathleen Parker writes about a "hospital executive-mom who forgot her 7-month-old baby for nine hours and found her dead in the family minivan after work." Parker writes that "two other mothers reported forgetting their babies, who also died, within weeks of [that] case." She doubts that "many people would see [the executive mom] as a criminal deserving of such harsh punishment." She agrees with Goldberg and Saunders that there is "no greater punishment than the loss of one's child, and a judge and jury would be hard-pressed to do more to [the mother] than she's already done to herself."
One of the other two babies was forgotten by her foster mother, and another by a mother who works at McDonald's. Parker believes the hospital executive mother faces harsher public criticism than the other two due to "prejudices of the populist mind" (as the executive is a career woman and the other two are not). This is not the only example of class warfare in what are supposedly our impartial views on children being harmed:
Although some parents really are brutally abusive or hopelessly addicted, many more are not. Some accused parents are innocent of any wrongdoing. In other cases, the family is poor, and that poverty has been confused with child "neglect."
This is just another example of child-abuse mutual assured destruction (with the middle class going after the poor, and the poor condemning a middle class woman) similar to conservatives going after day care centers and liberals going after homeschoolers.
Elsewhere commenting on kids being left in cars, Goldberg writes that he is "opposed to the burgeoning effort to make leaving your kid in a car a crime." He complains about people who assert "just because I am opposed to a law, I am therefore in favor of whatever that law was intended to prevent." Goldberg also wrote, in an August 8, 2001 Washington Times article about President Bush's "Communities of Character" initiative, that "there's a huge difference between things needing to be done and the government needing to do them." Welcome to anarchy, Mr. Goldberg.
You can complain that anyone can be stupid once and forget a kid, but one woman was tried and convicted for repeatedly leaving her children locked in her car's trunk while she was at work (she turned up her car radio once to drown them out). She received a sentence of three months in jail and five months of home detention.
Another woman served two years of a six year sentence for beating an 18 month old child to death, and was then released from prison. When she was facing deportation (she was Haitian), a three judge panel ruled that the fatal beating she admitted giving the baby was not a crime of violence and overturned her deportation order. The county medical examiner said that he had "never seen such a brutal beating involving a baby". All three judges were appointed by the one and only Janet Reno. Compare this to the man who was sentenced to three years for throwing dog in traffic where it was killed. Remember, its for the children.
Face facts, nobody gives a damn about your kid unless it furthers some political agenda. In a Fox News article Murder: A New Feminist View of Motherhood, Wendy McElroy quotes one study in which mothers were charged in 55% of the cases where a child is killed by a parent, and another where they "perpetrate 78% of fatal child abuse." Instead of society being troubled by this:
... there is silence or worse. The "worse" is political correctness, which views women as victims, never as victimizers.
McElroy goes on to quote Cheryl Meyer, writing in the feminist web site Women's Enews. Meyer believes that Andrea Yates "deserves our understanding, not distance," belongs in the hospital instead of jail, and that we shouldn't focus "on the legal technicalities of her case." In her article "Mrs. Yates' Unthinkable Act", Deb Weiss writes about Yates becoming a "bizarre darling, a warped martyr, a poster-girl for the Wrongs of Women":
The mainstream media has accepted this feminist myth so completely it is scrambling to somehow soften the unmitigated evil of a mother murdering her five young children. Evil is not too strong a word.
Before those poor babies were cold in their graves, most national news organizations were hyping 'post-partum depression' in a transparent effort to deflect moral judgment of the murderous mother.
Weiss highlights how "protecting the children" is nothing more than a political football, where the actual saftey of actual children takes a back seat to merely making trendy points about society in general:
In most news accounts, the children themselves were virtually invisible, except as symbols or symptoms of their mother's pain. Like little post-natal fetuses whose parent had been obliged to undergo a particularly devastating abortion, they swiftly became an afterthought. Instead, the spotlight shone tenderly on Mrs. Yates.
It's as if reporters feared that without immediate journalistic intervention, some uncouth jury (they're from Texas, for pity's sake!) might be tempted to impose some mindless Texan penalty on this poor good woman.
... We know perfectly well that if it had been Russell Yates who had killed his children one by one, the coverage would have been mind-blowingly different. (Indeed, though Mr. Yates is not the killer, [Newsweek senior editor Evan Thomas] offered several dark hints that maleness itself might have triggered the tragedy: Mr. Yates was, allegedly, a domineering husband, insensitive to the needs and moods of his fragile wife.)
Don Feder points out that Jeffrey Dahmer had at least as good a claim to the nutjob defense as Yates does, but nobody cared about him as a person. The Evan Thomas July 2, 2001 Newsweek article mentioned above goes into some detail in defending Yates as a person, despite the fact that she killed five children. Thomas begins with her history as an almost saintly person:
For sure, if Russell Yates had killed his children, there would have been no festival of understanding for 'Fathers Who Kill,' no conga line of anguished young men to describe for Matt and Katie or Diane and Charlie, with quivering lips, the emptiness they felt before knifing or shooting or drowning or smothering their babies.
... Most mass killers are sociopaths, utterly alienated from other human beings. They are callous or sadistic. Andrea was the opposite; if anything, she apparently cared too much. She may have felt she could never do enough for her demanding husband. In a horribly twisted way, she may have tried to be too good a mother.
The only thing missing is a story about how her touch healed blindness and leprosy. Despite this, she evidently had some problem that went deeper than society's expectations:
She was always trying to be such a good girl, Andrea's mother, Jutta Kennedy, told a NEWSWEEK reporter in an exclusive interview late last week, wiping away tears while watering flowers outside her modest, one-story home.
She was the most compassionate of my children. Always thinking of other people, never herself. She was always trying to care for everybody.
Jutta Kennedy recalled how every day, for seven or eight years, Andrea would come to her parents' house to take care of her father, Andrew Kennedy, who suffered from Alzheimer's. "Her father was completely out of it," Mrs. Kennedy said, remembering how her husband had doted on Andrea, the youngest of the five Kennedy children. "Andrea was his baby. She was named for him. And she would do everything for him. She would change his clothes and wash him and help feed him." At the same time, Andrea was often pregnant and caring for her own growing family. Even as she coped with all this, when a neighbor needed help she would run next door, her mother recalled.
... Andrea had always been the perfect child, eager to please.
Certainly, serious problems surfaced after the birth of her fourth boy, Luke, two years ago. Rusty Yates was not specific about the symptoms, but they must have been severe, because his wife was treated not only with antidepressants, Effexor and Wellbutrin, but with Haldol, a very strong antipsychotic medication. To medical experts, this suggests that she was possibly delusional. The medication seemed to work. "It took a while," said Rusty last week, "but she just snapped out of it, she was like herself again, all of a sudden."
Keep in mind how this relates to claims she was isolated (being a homeschooler and all) and needed to get help (i.e. somebody prescribed the medication). Thomas goes on, eventually uncorking a serious contender for the understatement of the year:
... But not before she tried to kill herself. According to a neighbor of her parents, Jesse Torres, Andrea overdosed at her parents' house in June 1999 by swallowing a handful of pills prescribed for her ailing father.
Remember, the doctor who treated Yates, and took her off the Haldol, is the type of the "expert" some believe is qualified to judge your child raising practices. Despite that, the lives of the Yates children are being used politically to justify more State intervention in peoples' lives and violating their privacy. One example of this is Froma Harrop's article in the June 28, 2001 Seattle Times, "Questioning the motives of home-schooling parents", where she writes:
... Dora Yates told a friend that Andrea had just been to the doctor and had changed medication. She was apparently contemplating therapy. Up to this point, she had been reluctant to talk to a doctor about her problems. She was taken off the powerful anti-psychotic drug Haldol, in hindsight, an unfortunate step.
...The best way to maintain the sanctity of a family madhouse is to keep the inmates inside. Allowing children to move about in the world could jeopardize the deal.
Suppose one of the Yates children had complained to the authorities; what would they have done, put Andrea Yates on Haldol? While some want the State to have the power to determine how your children are educated and raised, the State itself wants no responsibility for the result.
In some cases, it might also prevent tragedy. Suppose one of Andrea Yates' children had gone to a school and told a teacher of the mother's spiraling mental state. The teacher could have called a child-welfare officer and five little lives might have been saved.
After the Columbine killings, the Jefferson County Public Schools faced a lawsuit for not spotting the problems the two shooters had before the incident. The lawyer defending the schools stated, in their defense, that "the plaintiffs are trying to attribute the evil of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to these teachers. There's no evil in being hoodwinked by evil." This comes from an April 28, 2001 article in the North County Times. An English instructor at Mt. San Jacinto College agrees that the blame rests with the parents:
But teachers bear the brunt of the criticism for things they can't control.
The point is not that a parent should rely on the government to raise his or her children, or that a parent should not be at the very least morally responsible for how that child is raised. The point is that parents get the blame, while the government demands the power. As far as who should be blamed for what happened at Columbine, read the following from Thomas Sowell:
...Let's take violent kids, because they certainly are a problem. Critics blamed teachers for not preventing the Columbine High School massacre. Apparently, the teachers were to blame because they didn't recognize the signs. Yet, as a parent, I would have gone through the roof if I discovered my child had posters of Hitler and was building bombs in the garage. Wait, I would have known what my child was doing under my roof, or at least made every effort to.
...A child's education is certainly shaped by a teacher, but it's the parents, society and the kids themselves that have to bear a great deal of responsibility for whether a child succeeds or fails.
Columbine High School was in the news long before the recent tragic shootings there. It was featured in a "20/20" broadcast about "death education" back in 1991. This macabre subject is one of the endless procession of brainwashing programs that are taking up time sorely needed for academic work in schools across the country. One of the Columbine students who is now grown blames the course's morbid preoccupation with death for her own unsuccessful attempt at suicide.
The comments above about parental responsibility are not isolated opinions. Jillian Lloyd, writing in the Christian Science Monitor gives some background on one effort to go after parents:
The movement to hold parents more accountable for their children's misdeeds has been progressing nationwide in recent years. At least 15 states have passed laws holding parents liable for the criminal acts of their children. And many more states - including Colorado - have parental-responsibility laws that make parents civilly liable for damages.
The indispensable Thomas Sowell describes this in more detail:
Responsibility and control go together. For decades now, our laws and our educational system have consistently undermined parental authority. Yet new legal responsibilities for parents are being proposed after parental control has been eroded.
Basically, the State should have power because they are the experts, but parents should have the responsibility because they spend so much more time with their kids than any one teacher does. This is despite examples of State failure in the Columbine case:
Preschoolers are taught that their parents have no right to spank them. All sorts of propaganda programs in the schools -- from so-called "drug prevention" to "sex education" -- stress that each individual makes his or her own decisions, independently of parental or societal values.
Most people have no idea how pervasive and unremitting are the efforts to drive a wedge between children and their parents and to replace parental influence with the influence of teachers, counselors and even the children's similarly immature peers.
...There are nationwide networks -- some of them government-sponsored -- which have disseminated pre-packaged programs designed to wean school children away from the values with which they have been raised and mold them to the values of self-anointed agents of "change."
...What all these efforts have in common, aside from an arrogant presumption of superiority, is a drive for power without responsibility. They don't even take responsibility for their own activities, which are hidden, denied or camouflaged. Above all, they are not prepared to be held accountable for the consequences of their playing with children's minds.
...many others - from teachers to school counselors to juvenile officers - apparently missed clues that Eric and Dylan were on a road to destruction. Three months ago, a court officer wrote glowing reports of the two when they completed 45 hours of community service after a car-burglary arrest.
In the April 17, 2001 issue of The Weekly Standard, David B. Kopel points to Columbine as an example of the lengths the police will not go to when children are in danger, if they might get hurt. The two Columbine shooters, as they were a risk to the safety of police officers that the average parents are not, were allowed to go on their rampage unmolested (no pun intended):
...although police officers, sheriff's deputies, and SWAT team members began arriving at the school quickly, none of them entered the building for 20 minutes.
Never let that image get out of your head of two young thugs, who breezed through the government's attempts to identify dangerous individuals, shooting and killing children in a government school while government agents cowered outside. Remember it next time somebody justifies government on the grounds that it protects us and educates us.
...the police commanders decided that protecting officers from a risk to their lives was more important than attempting to stop the murder of student after student after student after student after student after student after student after student after student after student. Based on the police inaction when the murderers were attempting to break into the room near the cafeteria, and further inaction when the murderers returned to the library where they had already killed 10 students, it is clear that no matter how many students were going to be killed, not one officer's life would be risked.
October 24, 2001
Somebody needs to actually take an actual journalism course, actually.
U.S. Panel Overturns Deportation
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a deportation order for a Haitian nanny convicted of killing an 18-month-old infant, saying the fatal beating she admitted giving the child was not a crime of violence.
The judges blocked the order in March, ruling that Melanie Jeanbeaucejour's deportation would cause her family "severe emotional hardship." She had twice been ordered out of the country by a U.S. immigration judge after serving two years of a six-year sentence in the child's death.
The previously undisclosed ruling, which remains under court seal, was handed down by Board of Immigration Appeals Judges Cecelia Espenoza, Gustavo Villageliu and Lory D. Rosenburg. All three were appointed by former Attorney General Janet Reno.
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