If you expect for kids to know that children are worth raising, first you will have to convince them that a child is something worth being.Photo by: Pedro Klien
At the same time, we are told that abortion rates are at the lowest they’ve been in 40 years. Some of that drop, I expect, is Fad Mechanics, a math that should exist if it does not. It’s sick to think that abortion could be a fad, but, if it was, I’m glad that part is waning. What remains, we can hope, is the growing awareness that rhetoric cannot trump reality, that you cannot shout down remorse no matter how hard you try.
I am over being dismayed by the silence of the libertarians on abortion and its consequences. With each funeral they excuse themselves from attending, they underscore their enduring irrelevance: No fathers, no families. No families, no future. The ideas may live on. The people – and the movement – are simply temporarily unexpired.
There is obviously only one ontologically-consonant stand on the self-willed slaughter of one’s own offspring – true of organisms, true of mammals, true of men. People will let themselves be lied to, but we all know better. Accordingly, if you want to do something to prevent abortions, eight of the ten ideas in that article can have real-world efficacy.
But the real challenge is to change the minds of the people who might at some point consider having an abortion, so I can give you a more comprehensive – more leveraged and more scalable – solution to the problem:
Make children feel welcome in the world by showing the world how wonderful children make it.
Our children kill their children because we have taught them that children have no value in the world, that they are a burden and a curse, a booger to be flicked away when no one is looking. This is hugely false to fact – false to the fact of the infinitude of human potential – but it is too much the way too many children are raised, and it is what virtually all children see of the adult world: The young and the old are to be indulged to some degree but otherwise are to be commanded and/or neglected.
Cultivation is expectation. The very best children – the children who grow up to be the surgeons you trust with your life when you cannot possibly defend it from malice, for example – grow up with the very best expectations from their families, especially from their fathers. Every other kid is growing into smaller expectations, perhaps into none, perhaps into nothing but predictions of future frustration, failure, even evil. (Listen for it and you’ll hear it all the time, god help you not out of your own mouth.) Every one of those kids could use a boost, and you can give it to him.
Children are wonderful. Notice them. Play with them. Have fun with them – their kind of fun, but your kind, too. Induct them into the adult world by celebrating their emerging humanity. Include them in your surroundings. Welcome them to the world.
Here’s a visibility game that will work wonders if you play it just at the right time: When you see a child achieve a personal triumph – when you see that ‘Rocky’ look in his body language – just that that moment say, “You’ve discovered the key to life, kiddo: Thrive!”
Every little thing is huge to a child: They have no experience to compare with their experiences. Put a word like thrive into a two-year-old’s mind, and the resulting twenty-two-year-old will be very different from the kid who learned to wither, instead, at the same age.
What will happen with each of them when a tiny cultivation comes along unexpectedly? How does each one foresee the future for that brand new life aborning? How likely is each one to try to exterminate his own past?
Do you want to do something vitally important to stop abortion? Start by smiling and waving at every child you see – and by welcoming, celebrating and cultivating their humanity in every way you can think of. If you expect for them to know that children are worth raising, first you will have to convince them that a child is something worth being.
