We spend a lot of time seeming to care about what happens from conception to cradle but not hardly enough as a community after children are actually born.
Judging by how many children are abandoned, beaten, tortured, sexually mistreated, addicted, uneducated, jobless, homeless, hungry, lost in our society to prostitution or pornography, and flat out killed in cold blood, we’re shamefully indifferent once we’ve encouraged everyone in creation to have children – and as many as they can.
My twin aunts Honora and Alma Flannery had a vocation to help children and spent a lot of their time at the New York Foundling Hospital starting in the 1950s.
The Foundling found its mission after the Civil War when children showed up abandoned at St. Peter’s Convent on Barclay Street. The good sisters opened a house especially for these abandoned children in 1869. The very first day they formally opened, an infant was abandoned, left at their door step. They tried from that day forward to care for these children, to supervise them and place them in good homes. My aunts joined those that had gone before them in that effort. But it was like trying to empty the ocean with a tea cup. There were too many children.
Years ago, in the 80s, I met a red-headed high school student, then in Loudoun County. His father, who suffered from schizophrenia, abandoned him before he was born, and his mother left him at the hospital once he was born. You might think he got a break because he was taken in by his grandparents, except for the fact that they kept him in a closet, fed him animal food, and he developed lifelong disabilities from his confinement, abuse and malnutrition. He also suffered from the onset of childhood schizophrenia – a genetic “gift” from his absent birth father. I met him, after he’d been adopted by a good family, but also when he was charged with murdering another young man in Sterling. We managed to avoid his execution on the murder charge, to save his “life,” and he’s awaiting parole in our Virginia prison system, meaning that he may never be released from custody. This young man is not so exceptional among unwanted children.
We might like to salve our collective conscience with the thought that some charity or government agency like the Foundling has got this covered and foster care and adoption are meeting the need. Think again!
When I lived in the Bronx in our family’s best neighborhood ever, in the Throggs Neck section, a family next door served as “foster parents.” They had new kids in and out so often it would make your head spin. The adults that hosted the children were paid for their foster care “services.” I suppose they did the best they could.
These kids in foster care often came from homes where they were abused physically or mentally or neglected – and the foster care system “succeeds” when it can return these children to the family that beat them, mistreated them, neglected them – “reunification” it’s called – with assurances from the birth parents that they are never gonna do that again – until they often do (and are found out).
It is chilling to consider that the youngest children are at the greatest risk, both infants and toddlers, higher than any other age group, and the number of serious injuries has quadrupled among these children in recent years.
You can judge the results of foster care by what happens when these young men and women “age out” of foster care – and are on their own. 84.8% have no High School Diploma or GED. 22% are homeless. 16.8 % are on public assistance. 33.2 percent are involved in crime. 54.4 % have behavioral and emotional, school related, and mental and/or physical issues. 50% of the young women repeat the cycle that brought them unwanted into the world – as they have early pregnancies.
If you want to help, discourage unwanted children with birth control and better parenting advice to our children, than “just say no,” become a father to the fatherless (Psalm 68:5, and James 1: 27) and adopt a child (if you can), or help other good families adopt, or read about the plight of these children and what some are doing (try Jill Duer Berrick’s book, “Take me Home”), or write to learn more about what to do to help those “aging out” of foster care (projectagedout@aol.com), as that’s how I got my stats for this column, and, if you care that much, start a “project aged out” in our own community – heaven knows, we could use one.
If America wants to continue to breed with abandon, then it has a responsibility to these unwanted children that it now completely ignores.
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