Who ‘owns’ children? And who should step in when parents fail?

By David McElroy · September 16, 2013

Over the weekend, a woman in California killed her two children in a motel room and then wrecked her car in an attempt to kill herself. She then tried to choke herself, but she was rescued. On the way to a hospital, she told police where to find her dead children. We don’t know much about her other than that she lives in Arizona and was driving a car with Georgia license plates.

Stories such as this are gut-wrenching for most of us, because it’s one of our most basic instincts to protect children and save them from harm. We tend to assume this is just a snap decision by someone who’s mentally ill. But other stories are even more horrific — and long term.

When Jonathan Adleta’s girlfriend, Sarah, got pregnant, he wouldn’t agree to marry her until she agreed that he could engage in “daddy-daughter sex” with the girl after she was born. They married and Adleta abused the child. His wife was expected to engaged in sex with a son when they had one in the future. The pair are on trial now after their crimes were discovered. (That’s their mugshots above.)

Parents fail in horrific ways all the time, some of which are criminal acts, but most of which are legal, but still damaging to children. For those of us who reject the legitimacy of the state, this brings up an uncomfortable and difficult question. If we reject the state, who is to protect children? Who is to step in when monsters such as the Adletas hurt their children? And who is to make decisions when parents are making crazy decisions that damage their kids?

I started thinking about this last week when a friend shared an article from a medical journal about a 3-year-old girl with serious health problems because her parents refused to feed her the kind of food she needed. The parents “diagnosed” the girl with multiple allergies and chemical sensitivities. They restricted her diet to chickpea milk, bison meat and salicylate-free vegetables — resulting in a serious vitamin A deficiency.

The parents of this child tried to prevent doctors from giving the girl what she needed and continued to claim she had chemical sensitivities which they couldn’t prove. Against the parents’ wishes, doctors treated the child and then released her to a state child protection agency. Since it’s a medical journal and not a newspaper or court record, we don’t know who the parents are or what happened to the child.

It’s easy for any of us to say that we would try to stop a mother from killing her children if we could. Likewise, it’s easy for us to say that we would stop a father from sexually abusing his daughter if we knew about it. But what would any of us do about parents who claim — without medical foundation — that their daughter has allergies and sensitivities? Wouldn’t most of us simply say the parents have the right to make that decision, unaware of the damage they were doing to her?

Those of us who oppose the state have a serious problem here — and I don’t know the answer. I don’t want to live in a world where stupid or uncaring parents destroy children, but I also don’t want to live in a world where government agencies hold all the power to dictate things to parents.

I can’t claim to have a good position about how to handle such things. As a human being, though, I know I’m not willing to sit idly by and just accept parents doing this to children. I just don’t know the right intellectual framework for justifying the actions that need to be taken to save the children. It’s a conundrum to me.

What are we to say that children are, philosophically? Many people act as though they’re the property of parents. (And I think that was the literal position of society for many years in the past.) I don’t think any of us would say that parents own children today, but what rights do children have? Do they have no rights of their own until they reach some magic age that the state arbitrarily chooses?

Out-and-out socialists seem to take the position that we all belong to the state, so they don’t have a philosophical problem. Progressives tend to believe in government to make decisions for the best interests of children, so they don’t have any problem allowing the state to step in and take children away or make decisions for them. Even conservatives generally believe that protecting children is a core function of government, so it’s acceptable for coercive government to step in, although many of them would argue about when that point is reached. Many libertarians (of the “minarchist” type) would take the same position — that this is a legitimate function of government.

So that leaves those of us who oppose the state without a logical solution. Do we leave abusive parents alone to terrorize and possibly kill their children? Do we trust private community vigilante groups to decide on an ad hoc basis when parents aren’t taking care of their children and assume they’re going to step in with force if necessary to protect kids?

I don’t like those alternatives. They don’t seem realistic or fair to children or parents. But what do we do?

Let’s be honest and say that the state isn’t going away in the next few years, so we’re unlikely to face the issue immediately. But if the state does collapse — as I think it inevitably will — are we going to have an intellectual and practical framework within which children can be protected? Or will it be a terrible time for children in some families to be alive?

The state does a horrible job of protecting many children. The system we have is horribly imperfect. The law is messy and is applied unequally. And much abuse is never reported. So what we have is lousy. My concern is making sure we don’t end up with something that’s even worse.

I don’t have an answer to this. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for years and it has me stumped. I’m not sure what rights to say that children have and when to say that they have the right to be independent if they want to be. I’m not sure how to hold parents accountable. It’s all a mess of issues that make me very uncomfortable — but they’re issues that must have answers.

If you oppose the state as I do, what’s your solution? How are we to solve this in a post-statist world?

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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