by Kate Q
Who suffers from Roe being overturned? The working class. Who else suffers? Children who are unwanted and the families who can’t adequately feed and care for them. Millions of children were forced back into poverty after the Child Tax Credit expired. With no new stimulus check in sight, families will be forced to continue stretching themselves even further to make ends meet. This is the inhumanity the right-wing wants us living in.
The litany of America’s abandonment of care for our children is long and worsening:
- Historic baby formula shortages due to the greed of
monopolistic corporations - The end of the Child Tax credit, which could have alleviated a significant amount of child poverty and hunger had it become permanent
- No paid parental leave
- No national health care system
- Childcare options that are few, far, and expensive
- The impact of Covid and other infectious diseases on young children
- More than 140,000 U.S. children lost a parent or primary caregiver to a pandemic-related cause
- The takeover of school boards by the far-right
- Family separation due to the prison industrial complex and ICE
- Thousands of children, disproportionately black and indigenous stuck in the foster care system
- A child welfare system that is better understood as a “family policing system” that targets Black communities
- More cops in schools than social workers
- The return of corporal punishment in a Missouri school district.
- Continued mass school shootings and the trauma inducing drills that accompany them
- Ensuing climate catastrophe
The overwhelming reason people seek abortion is because they lack the financial and material resources needed to raise children. The majority of people who get abortions are those who already have families and intimately understand what is needed to provide children a safe, healthy, secure and loving environment.
A notable study conducted in the 70s called the “Turnaway Study” details some of the effects on children whose mothers were denied an abortion:
- Women who were denied abortions were more likely to not have enough money to cover basic living expenses like food, housing and transportation and increased the number of their negative public financial records, such as bankruptcies and evictions.
- The children women already had showed worse life outcomes when their mother was denied an abortion
- Children born as a result of abortion denial are more likely to live below the federal poverty level than children born from a planned pregnancy
- Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term is associated with poorer maternal bonding, such as feeling trapped or resenting the baby, which can cause deep psychological problems for both the parent and child
The raising of loving, healthy children is critical to a healthy society. America’s system fails horribly and is the worst of the industrialized nations. How many children’s lives must be sacrificed to the failing conditions of capitalism?
The growing right wing assault on abortion not only harms the rights of women, people of color, and those in the LGBTQ community; it also harms children directly. Do children have the right to safe drinking water, to be born into families that have adequate resources, to a free and high quality education, to schools without mass shootings? Or are they only fodder for ongoing & future wars, for consumerism and to provide the ruling class with a future class of laborers?
Our only hope is to get involved and fight like hell for free abortion on demand, for a future children will want to/be able to live in and breathe.