I-who-want-no-children naturally have personal feelings about the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
And as a woman without traditional conservative values, a woman who was once married to a man with so/so traditional conservative values and whose “right” to have a child justified, in his mind, an episode of (let’s say) “coercive” sexual behavior, I also have strong feelings about anyone telling anyone else what they should and shouldn’t do with their bodies.
And as an everyday human being, I also have strong feelings about the importance of Roe v. Wade for the same reason I have strong feelings about parents circumcising male or female babies, one’s right to decide whether to undergo sex change procedures, or a person’s right to die:
Your life, your body, your choice. Not your parents’, not the government’s, not Karen’s— yours.
However.
Where most debates about Roe v. Wade continue to fail, in my opinion, is in their lack of attention to what “Everyone must and will have children” could mean for the children.
First, a caveat: “Stop having sex if you don’t want a baby” is not, I know, a solution. And anyone should be permitted to terminate a pregnancy.
That said, those of us old enough to feed and clothe ourselves do have the ability to at least try to fight back against reproductive rights restrictions. We have the ability to protest, rebel, vote. We can use birth control (assuming it stays legal), work around reproductive sex by doing other fun things, or avoid sex entirely with someone who would insist on that sex leading to a baby. (*Rape is a separate issue, obviously.)
Potential children have no such power. They have none at all.
Our demands that abortion remain not only accessible, but easily accessible, should direct more attention to the truly vulnerable casualties who rarely get a mention in the recurring Roe v. Wade debate and in the scuffles over the importance of Planned Parenthood:
the products of unplanned or unwanted pregnancies.
THE IMPACT ON CHILDREN
Almost half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and children born to parents who didn’t plan to have them face a higher risk of experiencing “negative physical and mental health outcomes.”
Whether a child was planned is actually one of the first factors considered when predicting the risk of child maltreatment in the form of neglect (usually the mother) or physical aggression (usually the father). In 2018, about 60 percent of the 678,000 maltreated children were neglected. Just over 10 percent were physically abused, and seven percent were sexually abused.
Fifteen percent experienced more than two “maltreatment types.” Abuse and neglect killed 1,770 of them.
(See this Atlantic article for a deeper look into reports of maltreatment.)
Some children will stay with their emotionally or physically abusive parents, but others — nearly half a million — will be delivered to foster care by some service or other and will spend, on average, two years there (others have spent five or more years in foster care).
Ironically, foster care is often worse than the original abusive home environment. According to an Indiana study cited in an Issue Paper released by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, children in foster care experience a three times higher risk of physical abuse and a ten times higher risk of sexual abuse while there, whether child-on-child or foster-parent-on-child.
For a zoomed-in look at what that means to a single person who makes up one of the numbers used for those statistics, Rodney Humphrey shares his foster care experience in a personal essay published on the website Children’s Rights. He writes, in part,
I spent 17 of my first 20 years in Child Protective Services. While in state care, I experienced my share of ups and downs — some worse than others. I had physically and verbally abusive foster parents. Sometimes my body was bruised by belt buckles. When I was just 6, I got whipped with switches from the rose garden — with the thorns still intact. I was moved about nine times. I lived in foster homes, shelters, group homes and a couple of hospitals. I felt unwanted and became a social outcast and an introvert. When I was 12, my sister Serenity and I were separated…
Figures, if they’re small enough, will usually invite a shrug, no matter how devastating the individual story. Yeah, but that only happens to a few. It’s not the majority, so…
Here are other “small” figures for perspective:
0.4% : Americans actively serving in the United States military. [We as a country are very vocal in our commitment to our troops, no matter how small their numbers.]
20,000 : Americans at any given time who have ALS. [Remember the ice bucket challenge? It was a pretty big deal.]
6,000 : American babies born every year with Down Syndrome. [We care very much about children with Down Syndrome.]
Compare to:
678,000 (about 1%): Children abused each year in the United States.
The world as they think it should be: Anyone who doesn’t want a child but ends up having one should automatically embrace and love parenthood.
The world as it is: “The United Nations estimates 60 million children and infants have been abandoned by their families and live on their own or in orphanages in the world. In the United States, more than 7,000 children are abandoned each year.” — Encyclopedia of Children’s Health
No parent will admit they don’t love their child. But it happens more often than it should. […] There are many reasons a parent may not give love to their child. One of the biggest is if the decision to have children wasn’t a conscious or well-reasoned desire. There was no space in their heart for that child, and it was impossible to make any.–Exploring Your Mind
“What is the fate of an unwanted child whose mother is unable to obtain an abortion she so desperately desires? A long-term study provides a grim answer: The child faces psychological suffering that continues well into adulthood and may set the stage for problems in future generations.” — Washington Post
“[A]bortion legalization led to a reduction in the number of ‘unwanted’ children; such a reduction may have improved average infant health and children’s living conditions.” — Guttmacher Institute
“The incidence of the unwanted child could be drastically reduced by extending to all families the wide variety of modern contraceptives now available and by offering medical abortion services to those who want them.” — NCBI
Children born to people who don’t want or can’t properly care for them might end up being a relatively small percentage, but each is a unique person whose life is shown shockingly little concern in the conversation about reproductive rights.
We should — and can — change that.
*Originally published on Medium.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my novel The Age of the Child.
“Something interesting and endlessly thought-provoking that The Age of the Child captures are the multiple sides of pregnancy — wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to be pregnant, and what right the government has in controlling pregnancy. This isn’t the first piece of dystopian fiction to consider these questions. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however, The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Rebecca Maye Holiday, author of The Beaches
“This is like no other book out there.” — Amazon Review
“Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review