Human Rights: Why Reproduction Should Be

A licensed activity.


This 34-year-old woman, Theresa Platt, is homeless. She sleeps where she can, depending on the kindness of strangers who will let her bed down in their garage or carport, or wherever.

The problem is, she has three children, all under the age of 10 years. She doesn't want them. She doesn't take care of them. Their father is in prison. Hardly surprising, you say? You've heard lots of loser/hard luck stories like that, you say?

Florida sheriff's deputies recently arrested Ms. Platt on charges of child neglect, and took the children into state custody. However, she has apparently been released.

What do you do with people like this? What do we, as a society, do? Her oldest child is six. The other two are three-year-old twins. So she's not exactly a case of teenage pregnancy. Do you think she's a junkie? Or just a person with perhaps a less-than-average IQ, or poor coping skills? An adult who was abused as a child? An alcoholic? She doesn't look like a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed cheerleader, that's for sure. But really, what do you do with her?

Jailing her is not an option if she hasn't committed a crime. So far, her main "crime" appears to be her failure as a mother. She is neglectful and abusive. But couldn't that have been avoided by ensuring that NOBODY has a child without a prior certification for fitness?

The civil liberty crew (of whom I'm often one) will howl about how this would be an infringement on basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They have a good point. But we live in an increasingly crowded and overexploited world, and your right to reproduction as part of your search for liberty or happiness might well conflict with MY right to curtail your reproduction in the interest of my greater enjoyment of my own earnings (as opposed to paying for the city, county, or state to raise your already abused and traumatized sprogs), not to mention my enjoyment of not having to compete with your sproggen for clean drinking water, air, land or space, jobs - the resources of a reasonably happy life, in other words.

Mainly, it's about the sproggen. This is a child-centric world we live in, but only in the most hypocritical meaning of the word. That is to say, we glorify the act of reproduction, we "adore" children by making them the centre of our materialistic focus, as "things" to have, adorn, display, and talk about. We don't give a fuck about their actual welfare. When it comes to their physical safety, their need for emotional fulfilment or security, then we get all self-righteous about parents' right to discipline their children however they wish. Then we whine about how the state has no right to interfere. Then we shriek about the nanny state.

When it comes to adults' right to get stoned on a little weed, or play bouncy-bouncy with the naughty bits of a same-gender pal, or decide not to play host to another life, we want a nanny state. We want the state to peer into your bedroom, check your genitalia for evidence of disallowed use, stick its collective nose into your vagina to ensure that a cell or two that might be attached to what normally equates to gooey menstrual blood "has a right to life," even though everybody (with a working brain) knows that more than two thirds of those cells end up plopping out with blackish clots of menstrual tissue.

But where we really need the state — to ensure that those with the "right to life" don't live a hideous life filled with beatings, bitings, torture, cruelty, indifference, neglect, emotional, physical, and mental stress, suffering, and pain — then we're all on the side of individual rights to liberty and freedom and deity alone knows what other shit.

Well, I'm sick of it. I'm sick of those moronic "right to lifers," or "pro-forced-birthers" wanting to interfere any time a woman spreads her legs. They're the last to oppose war, the death penalty, the hideous foster system that exploits children. They won't support realistic measures to ensure that every pregnancy is a wanted, safe pregnancy, every child a wanted child. They just want to root through women's panty collections.

Fuck you, you self-righteous ass-sucking shills. I don't want to read another story like this. Why the hell should a 19-year-old girl be forced to bring to term the baby of her 20-year-old boyfriend? Two children having a child? This is the result. They beat their weeks-old baby, and break its leg in two places. What kind of person beats a child barely one month old?

The kind of person who never wanted that child, who lacks the means to cope with that child but has been forced to have it anyway, and is filled with rage and frustration and gets no training or help on how to deal with it. You self-righteous godbags, how do you deal with this? Jail the mother, or the father, or both? Put the baby into foster-care? That's really helpful. We end up paying for the care and feeding of one to three people for varying lengths of time instead of having one to three economically productive citizens who contribute to society.

Here's another 19-year-old mother whose kid got squashed by a falling TV set. Why? Because the girl's a kid herself, and had two other kids in the room to deal with. The article doesn't say how old the other kids were, and whether the teenager was supposed to be keeping an eye on all the kids, but adults find it hard enough to watch three children, why is a teenager supposedly better equipped to do so? Chances are the baby will die or be seriously injured.

And here's a kid whose story you do not want to read. This sweet little boy's father, Angel Vidal Mendoza, is wheelchair-bound. He OD'ed on PCP while his wife was not around, attacked the four-year-old, who may be blind for life as a result, and then hacked at his own legs with an axe. Who knows what was going through his head. No, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for him, except that I sure as hell can understand why someone in a wheelchair might want to do some drugs. What happens to the kid? Will the state take him away from his parents? He probably should not be allowed around his father ever again without adult supervision. His mother is probably a poor working woman who relies on his father's disability income to help around the house. Certainly, the single mother of a blind child is going to be severely economically disadvantaged

Alma Beatriz Frias

And what about this paragon, a mother of a two-year-old and a two-month-old? She is wanted on charges of child abuse and neglect, for beating her two kids. Beating a two-month-old? What kind of madness is that? If you see her with or without her two little girls, you might want to let the police know.



Or what about this cute little kid? Malachi Magana was allegedly abused, tortured, and murdered by his mother and her boyfriend. Not that ugly kids don't deserve just as much protection from torture as cute kids, but how could someone look at this kid's face and then hit him? The kid was TWO years old at his death.

Or this loving soul who threw her four-year-old and seven-year-old into a river? The boy is dead, the girl is recovering at a local hospital. The mother is alleged to have "a history of domestic violence" and is in the process of separating from her children's father, with whom she shared custody of the children.

Tell me if you think any one of these tragedies could have been prevented if all human beings were rendered reversibly sterile at birth. In order to reproduce, they would have to take between two and three years' worth of classes, resulting in a certificate or diploma. This would include things like child development; nutrition; basic health and hygiene; life skills including job interviews; sufficient math to balance a checkbook, and create and live within a budget; anger management; conflict resolution; food preparation; diagnosis and management of common childhood ailments; and the like. People would have to be drug- and alcohol-free for five years, including before conception and during the first three years of a child's life; and would have to show that they had sufficient resources to raise a child.

I don't believe that only the rich should reproduce. Some of our finest human beings, including Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, were the children of poor families. And, in fact, I'd rather have a hundred Carl Sagans than a single Paris Hilton. However, there is no denying that some resources are required to raise a child. Perhaps we could make it possible for certain types of government subsidies to be paid on behalf of a child to would-be parents who had the courage and persistence to take such courses and excel in them. Perhaps we could give them financial incentives to offer part-time childcare to other parents in return for an assumption of their childraising expenses by society at large.

All I know is, I don't want to see one more kid have their head chopped off with a hoe, or their eyes bitten out, or their leg broken because these fucking pro-forced-birthers want to put a padlock on a woman's uterus while baying like pie dogs about the sacred right to fucking reproduction. You lot, the world would have been better off if alla youse had been aborted. Unless you're willing to do something about this type of domestic tragedy, shut your fucking pie-holes.

We need real solutions.

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