America’s Anti-Child Culture

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Sunday is Mother’s Day, and what odd timing for the New York Times to run an article by Natalie Angier about how animals are not necessarily maternal. In her article this week, Ms. Angier gives numerous macabre examples of how the female of the species mistreats her offspring. Whether it’s cannibalism or neglect, we’re supposed to cringe in horror at the shocking assault on helpless animal babies. I can’t help but wonder if Ms. Angier is sending us a subtle message that such behavior is instinctively natural for the survival of any species – including our own.

She writes, “Among several mammals, including lions, mice and monkeys, females will either spontaneously abort their fetuses or abandon their newborns when times prove rocky or a new male swaggers into town.” Gee, sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The names Amy Richards and Susan Smith come to mind. I was under the impression that the human race was a cut above the animal kingdom, but I guess not.

Last year, the New York Times thought it worth noting that Ms. Richards aborted two of her triplets so she wouldn’t have to move from Manhattan to Staten Island and be forced to shop at Costco. Oddly enough, Ms. Richards received support from like-minded feminists who regarded the culling as mere expediency. Smith, on the other hand, strapped her two toddlers into their car seats and let her car roll into a lake so she could get on with her life with her new lover. That was a no-no, and the South Carolina woman is cooling her heels in prison.

Perhaps the greatest evidence that, in the minds of some women, Darwin’s theory outweighs any semblance of a moral code was the sympathy given to Andrea Yates. The Houston mother murdered her five young children in 2001 by drowning them in a tub. Celebrities rose to her defense, citing postpartum depression, medication, and marital dysfunction to explain what I considered an absolutely horrific crime against innocence.

Anna Quidlen wrote an essay in Newsweek in which she expressed an understanding of the demons that possessed Yates, because the columnist also had rough days with her three children. Katie Couric and Rosie O’Donnell mounted a defense fund for Yates, and I dashed off my opinion for www.rightgrrl.com from the opposite end of the aisle.

Because at one point I had five children under the age of 6, I also knew how difficult the job of motherhood could be. I wrote that the normal inclination would have been for the overburdened mother to run away – not to systematically take each child and hold their struggling bodies underwater in the bathtub till they were dead. To me, that act spoke more of Medea-like anger than depression. I also suggested that perhaps Ms. Quidlen and the others were sympathetic toward her because she had given up her career as a nurse to stay home with her children. Ms. Quidlen wrote, “Women not working outside their homes feel compelled to make their job inside it seem both weighty and joyful.” Funny how pro-choice women always hold women who choose this path in disdain.

Apparently, I was the only female columnist who took that tack, and I received a request from Rick Folbaum to appear on Fox News. I reluctantly agreed, and before the interview he took me into the makeup room and simply told the staff I would be speaking on the Yates issue. Not knowing that I was unsympathetic to the homicidal mother, the two cosmetologists immediately launched into their own piteous tales of PMS. I shut my mouth and murmured noncommittally because they were preparing me for the television audience. Since I ended up looking so awful that I’ve sworn off television appearances forever, I suspect that they guessed that I was not allied with the Yates tea-and-sympathy crowd.

This has become an anti-child culture and crimes against the very young are becoming a daily event. Child pornography is a booming business, and children have become the objects of sexual exploitation. The term “retroactive abortion” is used frequently by stand-up comics but its taken seriously by burned-out mothers. Women’s rights may now rank higher than concerns about our young, but have they created better mothers? I think not.

Twenty-seven years ago, on the day before Mother’s Day, my own mother died. The following day I sat in church, grief stricken, listening to the priest give a homily about mothers. I was the 12th child she bore and only the sixth who survived.

I am forever grateful that she felt humans are higher than the animals, and that she nurtured me in spite of dire poverty and ill health.


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