It looks like the Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe v. Wade, to the thrill of many people in this country who are against abortion in general, and some who are against abortion under any circumstance at all.
Let’s set aside for a moment the idea of when a collection of cells in a woman’s womb actually becomes a human being. Best I can tell, nobody knows. All we are doing is guessing based on what our minds and hearts tell us. This is part of why abortion is the most difficult issue in American life.
But no matter where you draw the line, the point of restricting abortion, or ending it, is that a child is a precious thing.
So let’s take that idea and run with it. Let’s build a society around the idea that every single child is precious.
To start off, we’d need to create universal health care for every child, from conception to age 18. If every child is precious, then the child of the poorest family in the poorest neighborhood should get the same level of treatment and care as a billionaire’s baby. All the health problems linked to children in poverty? We would have to sweep them away, because that is how precious our children are.
It goes without saying that every single child born in America would also have to have access to the best education in the world. We would pay our teachers like vice presidents and our principals like CEOs. Whatever gifts any child has would be developed and maximized until they are the best versions of themselves they can possibly be.
Children who are so precious must obviously be protected from danger. We’ve all seen the repeated tragedies of children who have been killed by guns in schools. So the next step is clear: We should ban assault rifles, increase restrictions on handguns, and run tighter checks on gun owners and sellers to keep potential school shooters from getting their hands on guns to begin with. It’s a necessary sacrifice to keep our children safe.
Finally, men have to own up to their roles. If the goal is to have no unwanted children, the simple answer is to give every American man a vasectomy — nearly 100% effective birth control. When a man and woman decide they want to bear a child, it’s easy enough to reverse the procedure and let nature take its course.
All these things are just the beginning, and they’ll probably take several trillion dollars to implement. But it’s all worth it. Because, as the Supreme Court seems prepared to rule, so many things we hold dear — a person’s control over their body, the ability to make our own choices, even the right to privacy — are not as important as an unborn child.
Let’s take that logic where it naturally goes. Otherwise, it would seem like a lot of people only really care about the welfare of children until the umbilical cord gets cut.
And surely that can’t be right.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
