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NPR: States with Toughest Abortion Laws Have Least Support for Mothers and Children

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2022 //
91

Nearly two dozen states have moved to restrict abortion or ban it altogether since the reversal of Roe v. Wade — meaning more people, especially those with low incomes and from marginalized communities, will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

So are states prepared to pay for the infrastructure needed to support these parents and children? The data paints a grim picture for many families: Mothers and children in states with the toughest abortion restrictions tend to have less access to health care and financial assistance, as well as worse health outcomes.

Stuart Butler, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, calls the end of Roe “a double whammy” for people who live in these states, which are mostly in the South.

“They are far less likely to have assistance for themselves and their children, and they are far less likely to have health care available to them when they are pregnant and for their children,” he tells Morning Edition. “And that means that there’s going to be not only more hardship, but greater health problems and maternal deaths and so on … unless there is a fundamental change in political behavior in those states.”

As NPR has reported, a large body of research shows that being denied an abortion limits peoples’ education, time in the workforce and wages, with the economic consequences extending well into the lives of their children. One groundbreaking project called The Turnaway Study spent a decade comparing the experiences of people who had abortions with those who wanted abortions but were denied them, and found that those who were denied treatment experienced worse economic and mental health outcomes than those who received care.

Dr. Diana Greene Foster, the demographer behind the study, told NPR in May that the findings show that pregnant people who are unable to get a safe, legal abortion and end up carrying the pregnancy to term will experience long-term physical and economic harm.

“We haven’t become a more generous country that supports low-income mothers,” she added. “And so those outcomes are still the outcomes that people will experience when they are denied a wanted abortion.”

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Extremism, Funding, Health

Jan Resseger: The Child Tax Credit Is Not Dead Yet

By dianeravitch
July 28, 2022 //
5

Count on Jan Resseger to follow the news that matters most for the well-being of America’s children. West Virginia Senator killed President Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better plan, an effort to reverse climate change, invest in education, reduce child poverty, and much more. But the child tax credit, which directly helps children, is not dead yet, she writes.

It would appear that Senator Joe Manchin’s sabotage of the expanded Child Tax Credit as part of Build Back Better has killed the restoration of last year’s extraordinary but temporary improvement of this federal program as part of the American Rescue Plan COVID relief bill. But America’s child poverty advocacy coalition has not yet given up and neither have the experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Democratic leaders in Congress—Senators Sherrod Brown, Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Ron Wyden and Raphael Warnock—and Representatives led by Rosa de Lauro are still in conversation with Republican Senators Mitt Romney, Richard Burr and Steve Daines, who have offered two versions of their own Republican Child Tax Credit proposal.

It is urgently important for America’s public school educators and child advocates to keep on pushing for expanding the Child Tax Credit and making it fully refundable. The educational damage of child poverty cannot be solved through school reform. While teachers can support children whose lives are ravaged by our society’s alarming economic inequality, public schools alone cannot undo the stresses and privations that poverty imposes on America’s poorest children.

Much of the ongoing conversation this month has been about the Family Security Act, proposed by Senator Romney and other Republicans, which would replace the Build Back Better Better version of the Child Tax Credit that was rejected by Senator Joe Manchin. Last week a coalition of national child advocacy organizations, the First Focus Campaign for Children, wrote a letter to Senators Mitt Romney, Steve Daines and Richard Burr to explain why their recent version of the Family Security Act isn’t good enough: this most recent version will leave America’s very poorest children in worse straits than a version Romney proposed in 2021.

Here is the First Focus Campaign for Children: “The good news is that we know what works to reduce child poverty.” A 2019 landmark National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) “study finds that a child allowance, operating as an extension of the Child Tax Credit, is the most powerful tool we have to combat child poverty and narrow the racial poverty gap. Extensive research shows when households with children receive cash transfers, they spend it on resources that support their children’s healthy development—improving their physical and behavioral health and educational outcomes and leading them to earn more as adults… The first version (2021) of the original Family Security Act proposed by Senator Romney would have cut child poverty by an estimated 32.6%… Households with the least resources would have been eligible to receive the full (newly increased) Child Tax Credit… Unfortunately, as the Family Security Act morphed into version 2.0, changes focused on adults were made to the Child Tax Credit and significantly reduced the positive impact it would have on millions of children. The ‘best interests of children’ became an afterthought as the focus shifted to some sort of ‘deservedness’ standards for adults that has the effect of punishing children. As a result, the Niskanen Center’s updated analysis shows that the Family Security Act 2.0 would only reduce child poverty by just 12.6%.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities details the primary reason why the latest version of the Family Security Act would punish children in families with the lowest income: “To qualify for the maximum credit for each child in the family, families would need to have earned at least $10,000 in the prior year… Families with earnings below $10,000 would receive a proportional credit. For example, a family earning $5,000 would receive 50 percent of the maximum credit for each child.” Families with no income would no longer qualify, but couples earning up to $400,000 per year would qualify as would single parents making up to $200,000 annually.

But, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities further explains: “The $10,000 earnings requirement to receive the full credit would apply to all families, including parents with babies and young children, retired grandparents caring for their grandchildren, and parents with disabilities that may limit their ability to work. It would also newly require caregivers not only to live with the child but also to have legal custody of the child, which is stricter than current law and may disqualify many grandparents or other relatives who care for children from claiming the credit. And it would impose a new restriction for families that include immigrants: under current law, children must have a Social Security number (SSN) to qualify for the Child Tax Credit, but the proposal would impose an additional requirement that a parent also have an SSN, denying the credit to children who are U.S. citizens if their parents lack an SSN.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains another serious problem when several of the provisions of the newest version of the Family Security Act, are computed together: “The Romney proposal… (would require) families with low and moderate incomes to pay for more than half the cost of expanding the credit… The Romney plan would dramatically cut the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) a credit that provides an income boost for workers with low and moderate incomes, and eliminate the ‘head of household’ tax filing status, which millions of single parents who work at low-paying jobs use when they file their income tax returns… For example, consider a single mother who has a toddler and a daughter in second grade and works as a home health aide, making $25,000 a year. Her family’s Child Tax Credit would grow by $3,640 under the Romney plan, but they would lose $4,105 from the EITC cuts and the elimination of the head of household filing status, for a net income loss of $465. If both children were age 6 or older, the net income loss would be even larger: $1,665.”

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities summarizes what would be the primary effects of the latest Family Security Act provisions: “Denying the full credit to children based on their parents’ earnings would do virtually nothing to boost parental employment and would withhold help from the children who most need it….

Open the link and read the rest of her important analysis.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Poverty

Lies About the 10-Year-Old Child Who Was Raped in Ohio

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2022 //
80

I had not planned to write anything more about the child who was raped in Ohio, became pregnant with the rapist’s semen, but had to go to Indiana for an abortion. But then someone wrote a comment here implying that the whole story sounded like fake news. As I showed in my original post, there have been many reports of children who were raped and impregnated. Some got abortions. Others did not.

I’m old-fashioned. I don’t think children should be raped. If they are, they should not bear a child. It’s monstrous. The rapist should be found and punished. In my limited view, those who want a 10-year-old child to have a baby are sadists.

In the Ohio case, Republicans jumped all over the story and called it fake news. It was not. The right showed themselves to be heartless, cruel fools.

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times reports how the Right humiliated themselves in their eagerness to discredit the story and the child.

She writes:

Not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, an Indiana obstetrician and gynecologist named Caitlin Bernard told The Indianapolis Star about a call she’d gotten from a doctor in Ohio. The Ohio doctor had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. An Ohio law banning abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected — usually around the sixth week of pregnancy — had just gone into effect, so the girl needed to cross state lines for care. The report, being illustrative of the ghoulish impact of abortion prohibitions, went viral, and Joe Biden mentioned it in a speech.

The right, however, quickly convinced itself that the tale was dubious and probably false. The conservative website PJ Media claimed, last Friday, that the account had “many of the elements of a hoax.” On Monday, Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, went on Fox News to say that he knew of no police reports about a 10-year-old rape victim. “The more you learn about this, the more unbelievable it becomes,” said the host, Jesse Watters.

A Wall Street Journal editorial on Tuesday described the report as “fanciful,” noting that “no one has been able to identify the girl or where she lives,” as if that information should be public. “Hey, so did they catch the guy who raped the Ohio ten year old yet?” the National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted last week, seemingly sarcastically.

The answer to Dougherty’s question is now yes. Officials say that a 27-year-old named Gerson Fuentes was arrested on Tuesday and has confessed. The children’s services department in Columbus alerted the police about the rape in June. Rather than apologize to Caitlin Bernard for calling her a liar, many on the right have started attacking her for not reporting the rape herself, even though the police already knew about it by the time she saw the girl.

On Wednesday, Watters displayed a photograph of Bernard and said, “According to reporting from PJ Media, she has a history of failing to report child abuse cases.” Then Indiana’s attorney general, Todd Rokita, appeared on Watters’s show, describing Bernard as an “abortion activist acting as a doctor,” and announcing she was under investigation.

It looks like the only thing Bernard did wrong, though, is to embarrass Republicans. On Thursday afternoon, The Star reported that Bernard reported the abortion to the Indiana Department of Health and the Department of Child Services, as state law requires. In a statement, her lawyer said she’s considering legal action against Rokita and others who have “smeared” her.

This whole hideous episode has demonstrated the extent to which conservatives are unwilling to grapple with the reality of the abortion regime they are imposing on much of the country. There is nothing wrong with seeing a single-source news report and deciding you want to withhold judgment until more information emerges. But that’s not what happened here. Instead there was sneering incredulity, as if a raped 10-year-old being denied an abortion wasn’t an inevitable consequence of an abortion ban without a rape exception.

Surely right-wingers, who love to accuse their enemies of pedophilia, understand that children are raped in America. The Columbus Dispatch, which broke the news of Fuentes’s arrest, reported that there were 52 abortions performed on children 15 and under in Ohio in 2020, roughly one a week in just one state.

In countries that have banned abortion, there have been a number of high-profile cases of very young pregnant rape victims. In Nicaragua in 2003, feminist activists fought to help a 9-year-old obtain a therapeutic abortion. When it emerged that she’d been raped by her stepfather, the activists faced legal harassment over accusations that they’d helped cover up the crime.

Just this year, a judge in Brazil tried to block an abortion for an 11-year-old who had been raped. “Do you want to choose the baby’s name?” he asked her. “Would the baby’s father agree to give it up for adoption? Would you bear it a little longer?” Why would anyone think that similar laws won’t lead to similar results here?

It’s been especially maddening to see people on the right smugly insist that the girl in Ohio could have had a legal abortion in her state. In a New York Post column casting doubt on the story, the law professor Jonathan Turley wrote, “Ohio says abortions are allowed ‘to prevent a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman,’ which would certainly be the case for a 10-year-old.”

His certainty is entirely unearned. The Ohio law actually saysthat abortion is permitted only in cases of “medical emergency” requiring the “immediate performance or inducement of an abortion” in order to prevent death or irreversible bodily harm that “delay in the performance or inducement of the abortion would create.” This language is vague and open to interpretation. It’s obvious to me that a pregnant 10-year-old is an immediate medical emergency. But if you were an abortion provider in Ohio, would you stake your career, and perhaps your freedom, on prosecutors like Yost giving you the benefit of the doubt?

“If states write laws that are completely vague about what the requirements are, they can still have abortion on the books, but have an environment in which no physician is willing to provide it,” said the N.Y.U. law professor Melissa Murray.

Roe has been gone for less than three weeks, and the utterly predictable outcomes are already apparent. Today.com reportedon a woman in Arizona who learned at 21 weeks that her wanted pregnancy was unviable, but whose doctor is unable to induce an early delivery because of the Supreme Court’s decision. “I really can only describe it as feeling trapped,” she said.

As The Los Angeles Times reported, some patients are being denied methotrexate, a drug used to treat certain cancers and autoimmune conditions, because it’s an abortifacient. Medical professionals aren’t necessarily wrong to worry; according to the newspaper, “In Texas, dispensing methotrexate to someone who uses it to induce a miscarriage after 49 days of gestation is a felony.”

Abortions after about six weeks have been illegal in Texas since S.B. 8, the so-called abortion bounty law, took effect last year, and women have come forward to speak about the trauma they’ve had to endure. NPR reported on a woman named Anna whose water broke on her wedding day, when she was 19 weeks pregnant. The fetus had no chance of surviving, and Anna was at high risk of hemorrhaging or developing sepsis. But doctors said they couldn’t terminate the pregnancy until either the fetus’s heart stopped or her condition worsened. She ended up spending thousands of dollars to fly to Colorado for an abortion, sitting in the front row so she could reach the bathroom quickly in case she had to deliver.

If none of this is what anti-abortion lawmakers intended, nothing is stopping them from amending their laws. Ohio’s statute includes examples of medical emergencies in which abortion is permitted, including pre-eclampsia and prematurely ruptured membranes. If Republicans think “being a child rape victim” ought to be included as well, they should add it.

But they’re unlikely to, because the anti-abortion movement would object. On Thursday, James Bopp, general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, told Politico that under model legislation he’s written, the Ohio girl would have been forced to carry her pregnancy to term. “She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” he said.

This is, at least, honest. The fury directed at Caitlin Bernard suggests other conservatives aren’t as willing to admit what their laws do.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Fake News, Hypocrisy, Lies

Ohio Denies 10-Year-Old Child an Abortion

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2022 //
59

Ohio adopted a strict abortion law, banning the procedure. When the parent, parents, or guardians of a 10-year-old sought an abortion, the child was rejected. According to doctors, she was six weeks and three days pregnant. She is now in Indiana, hoping to get an abortion before the law there changes. If she can’t get to the right state in time, she will be a 10- or 11-year-old mother. The story doesn’t say who fathered the child or what will happen to the baby if she carries it to full term.

I remembered seeing this case on Twitter, but couldn’t find the link. so I googled and found that there were many cases of children who had been impregnated. Often, the culprit was the mother’s boyfriend. The impregnated child was not protected by her mother. What happens to the children who become mothers? What happens to their child?

In about half our states, these child victims will no longer have the option of terminating a pregnancy that is the result of rape and/or incest.

As I googled, I was shocked to discover many cases of pregnant children. Most of their pregnancies were discovered too late to abort the baby. Who will care for it? Will the mother drop out of school?

In Missouri, an 11-year-old gave birth in a bathtub at home. Her mother was charged with endangering the welfare of a child. The father of the baby was a 17-year-old cousin.

In Florida, a 46-year-old man impregnated a 10-year-old girl, then fled to Haiti, where he was arrested by US marshals and returned for trial.

In Dallas, a man sexually abused his daughter (not his biological daughter) from age 7 to 13, when she became pregnant. He also abused her younger sister. The man got a jail sentence and the girls and baby were put in foster care.

In Marion, Indiana, a 10-year-old was impregnated by her mother’s boyfriend. He was sentenced to 160 years in prison.

In Spartanburg, South Carolina, a child was impregnated twice by her pastor. He was sentenced to prison.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, a man was convicted of impregnating a child twice, once when she was 10, again when she was 11. He began abusing her when she was 7.

A man in Maryville, Tennessee, was convicted of taping and impregnating an 11-year-old girl. Her condition was not discovered until she was eight months pregnant. When he was arrested, he was in Florida with a 9-year-old girl.

In Oklahoma, the family of a 12-year-old girl gave a baby shower for her and her rapist. He was arrested.

In Oklahoma, a 12-year-old girl was impregnated by a man twice her age and gave birth to his child. The girl’s mother was arrested and charged with child neglect.

In Abbeville, South Carolina, a 26-year-old man was arrested for raping and impregnating a 9-year-old girl.

In Ascension Parish, Louisiana, a 35-year-old man was convicted of raping and impregnating an 11-year-old girl.

Then I discovered a medical abortion that was shocking. It is a rare medical condition (one in 500,000 births) called fetus-in-fetu. In these cases, a twin or triplet absorbs the bodies of the other sibling in utero. As a newborn, they have a mass in their stomach, which is the portions of their sibling. It can be confused with a tumor. It must be medically extracted. I wonder if this procedure would be banned in the states that prohibit any abortions.

What do I conclude from these horrible stories? Children need more protection than they have now. The decision to abort a fetus should be made by physicians and patients, not legislatures.

Columnist Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post believes that the cruelty of the new abortion laws is the point.

Two Republican governors, Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota and Tate Reeves of Mississippi, were asked on Sunday news talk shows about the case of a 10-year-old girl impregnated by her rapist. Are they really insisting that, regardless of the physical harm that giving birth could cause someone so young, the child be further tormented and forced to have the baby? Yes.


Reeves said these are such a “small, minor” number of cases. He wouldn’t say there should be an exception. Noem defended forced birth, insisting, “I don’t believe a tragic situation should be perpetuated by another tragedy.” The tragedy of forcing a 10-year-old to undergo a pregnancy and the pain of childbirth does not register with Noem.

These are not anomalies. Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn (R) said, soon after the decision overturning Roe was announced, that, in his view, a 12-year-old impregnated by incest should be forced to complete her pregnancy. Herschel Walker, a Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, would agree apparently since he wants no exceptions. Not even to save the woman’s life. Ohio state Rep. Jean Schmidt has called forcing a 13-year-old rape victim to give birth an “opportunity.”


Indeed, the number of states contemplating abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest might shock you. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a Democrat — just signed an abortion law with no exception for rape or incest. In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) seemed open to making an exception, but its absence won’t slow down implementation of the abortion ban in his state.

The New York Times reports, “There are no allowances for victims of rape or incest in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee or Texas.” In Idaho, a woman would have to file a police report to obtain an abortion, something virtually impossible for incest victims and others who live in fear of their attackers.

The monstrous cruelty of such bills shows how little many conservatives care about the well-being of women and girls who have already experienced the unbelievable trauma of sexual violence.

But it gets worse. Many states no longer consider exceptions for the health of the woman or create dangerous uncertainty that puts her life at risk. In the real medical world, where doctors and patients make decisions based on probabilities, the result of such abortion laws can be deadly for women. If abortion is legal only with the “imminent” risk of death, women can be left in peril, facing what can become fatal complications later in pregnancy — when the chances of survival have declined.


In Tennessee, for example, doctors are supposed to prove the woman couldn’t have lived without an abortion. (They must prove “the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”)


NBC News reports:


Arizona’s 15-week abortion ban provides exceptions for emergencies when continuing the pregnancy will “create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” for the mother. Oklahoma’s recent ban, the most restrictive in the country, is focused on life-threatening situations. Mental health is almost never seen as enough of a reason to justify an abortion under the laws, said Carol Sanger, professor of law at Columbia University and the author of “About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in 21st-Century America.”


Republican candidates for governor in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin joined with antiabortion groups to seek bans “that would not allow the procedure even if the mother’s health were endangered,” The Post reports.

So, yeah, these Republicans care about the life of the unborn, but not the life of the mother. And as soon as the fetus is a child, they forget about him or her too.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Failure, Parents

Videos Attacking Disney and Pearson for Sexually “Grooming” Children

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2022 //
17

The same organization that produced the Glen Beck video in the previous post also produced videos attacking the Disney Corporation and Pearson for their alleged role in “grooming” children to change their gender identity.

With the recent rash of horrific school shootings, you would think that these zealots could think of better uses for their time and resources.

How about making videos about the need for gun control? Reduced class sizes? Health clinics in school for families?

No, these people are obsessed with sex. That’s all they think about.

The good news is that parents are on to them. They don’t love Pearson, but they love their teachers. They are not fooled by nutty propaganda.

The Destroy Public Education crowd is in league with some seriously whacky people.

Categories Childhood, Curriculum, Education Industry, Parents, Pearson, Students

Confession! How I Was Groomed by My Elementary School Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2022 //
36

The Intercept published a stunning confession by a young man about his “grooming” by an elementary school teacher.

Jon Schwarz writes:

Anyone following the news knows the U.S. right is now obsessively accusing public school teachers, especially ones who are LGBTQ+, of being “groomers” — i.e., pedophiles. It’s both astonishingly vile and horrifyingly cynical.

This kind of propaganda — that some minority group is plotting to harm our children — has always been the specialty of history’s most vicious political movements. Today’s version is just one step away from the Taliban’s violent loathing of education, and two steps from declaring that teachers are using the blood of children to make their unleavened bread. Ignorant audiences have always been vulnerable to these fairy tales, which is why the abuse of children is a popular theme of literal fairy tales.

At the same time, the right-wing figures who spew out this sewage are absolutely indifferent to the actual sexual abuse of children. For instance, one of the most hateful proponents of the groomer narrative is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo recently proclaimed on Twitter: “The public school system has a child sex abuse problem.”

That’s all you need to know about Rufo. He has no interest in the sexual abuse of children in private or charter schools. Nor did he mention churches. For that matter, he has nothing to say about the Republican Party: Its longest-serving speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a child molester, and the next GOP Speaker of the House may be Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused by eight former studentsof helping cover up the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University.

That’s because, for Rufo and his compatriots — such as the playwright David Mamet; Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; andDonald Trump Jr. — the victims of genuine sexual abuse don’t matter at all. They and the lifelong pain many experience are simply useful tools in the right’s centurylong attack on public education. Rufo and company understand that democracy is impossible without public education and so are willing to do anything to destroy it.

We know where this path leads, and we must step off it immediately. The people doing this are cruel and sadistic, but they’re also mewling cowards — and with pushback now, they will slink back into the holes from which they emerged.

At the same time, we should be telling the full truth about public school teachers. The one good thing I can say about this awful current phenomenon is that it’s made me remember all the beautiful teachers I’ve had, and how much better they made my life. Here’s my story of how my elementary school teacher.

Please read his memories of teachers who taught him to love learning.

He says:

From encouraging me to read and write, to nudging me to think for myself, their pernicious influence burdens me to this day.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Childhood, Teachers

Chris de Vinck: What My Mother Taught Me

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2022 //
6

Christopher de Vinck taught English in New Jersey for many years and lives there now.

The following lovely piece appeared in The Dallas Morning News today:

Time ran out. My mother was ravished with arthritis, often tired, but always filled with optimism and joy.

She read The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times. She was an author of many books. (Her next collection of poems Journey to the Morning Light will be published by Paraclete Press in September.)

My mother continued to write every day. She had just finished reading Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, the extraordinary novel written by Jung Chang.

Time ran out. My mother was 99 years old and said one afternoon a few months ago “Always keep in mind the secret name of beauty.”

My mother remembered that a few hours before I was born she was baking a peach pie. She was my first teacher: introducing me to the color of the autumn leaves, and reading aloud Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. We collected wild flowers together in the spring. In grade school my mother gave me Kenneth Grahame’s book The Wind in the Willows. In middle school my mother placed on my pillow Sterling North’s book, Rascal. In high school she introduced me to the books of Loren Eiseley and William Carlos Williams. When I met a girl, my mother gave me her engagement ring to pass along to my wife of 45 years.

My mother endured Nazi occupation in Belgium for four years, nearly died in Dunkirk bombing raids, raised six children here in American…including my brother Oliver who was born with no intellect, was blind, mute, unable to chew.

Time ran out.

“Day by day, we cross over into the future,” my mother wrote in a poem. My mother is buried beside my father in a small Benedictine cemetery in Weston, Vermont.

When I visited my mother at the house where I grew up we sometimes sat on the terrace just outside her bedroom. In spring the wisteria dripped those beautiful purple flowers. In the fall the green leaves protect us. Often a chipmunk joined us on the terrace as my mother and I reminisced about weddings, vacations and peach pie.

“This terrace is a fragment of paradise,” my mother said as the brave chipmunk scurried up beside her chair. As she leaned over, the chipmunk sat up and gently took the peanut from my mother’s hand. A blue jay swooped down from the pine tree and grabbed a peanut that my mother had tossed onto the terrace floor.

We laughed at the quick chipmunk. We talked about the sorrows in the news and about the deer she saw sleeping in the yard at the edge of the woods. We even spoke about God.

“Isn’t it lovely that we are here, at ease, loving the world?”

We are living in a world that is being ravished with war, fires, and hurricanes, political upheavals, hunger, violence that is loose upon the world. It has always been so. But these things are news because they are stains that attempt to mar the beauty of our souls my mother would say. Goodness isn’t news because it is so common.

On the terrace, as my mother fed her chipmunk, she looked up at me and said “You don’t think of it, Christopher, but far ahead yet closer than a heartbeat something immense, wild, holy grabs you and won’t let go.”

Yes, time ran out. My mother’s heart gave up in December. Flowers perish, trees shed their leaves, and fields shrivel into brown stalks and frozen earth.

As my mother and I slowly walked back into her bedroom, as we took our last steps off the terrace arm in arm she looked up and said, “We can always return to a life of simplicity and peace.”

My mother was 99 years old and time ran out. She saw my sadness and then with a sigh and smile as she struggled back onto her bedroom chair she whispered “Christopher, we do not die forever.”

Happy Mother’s Day.

Christopher de Vinck’s latest novels are “Ashes,” (HarperCollins) and “Mr. Nicholas” (Paraclete Press).

Categories Character, Childhood, Goodness, Love

Love the Unborn, Neglect the Born

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2022 //
117

Caitlin Huey-Burns writes for CBS News that the states most likely to ban abortion are the states LEAST likely to provide resources for children. Their politicians love the unborn. The born and living, not so much.

The expectation that Supreme Court is about to scrap decades of federal protections of abortion rights is highlighting another issue: the lack of resources and support available for women to have and raise children.

More women living in states without abortion access, should Roe v. Wade be overturned, will likely carry to term. Yet, not one of the two dozen states with laws on the books restricting abortion access offers paid family leave.

Eight of them have opted out of expanding Medicaid coverage under the health care law, which covers pregnancy through postpartum for low-income Americans.

And Mississippi, whose abortion restriction law is at the heart of an impending Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, ranks as the state with the highest rate of young child poverty and low birth weight and among the highest when it comes to infant mortality rates.

It is also ironic that the states with the most horrible history of racism are likely to see an increase in their black population, since impoverished black women are not likely to have the money to travel to a state where abortion is protected by law. Over many years, the black population in Mississippi may grow large enough to demand a change in the political order.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Evil, Mississippi, Poverty, Shame

David R. Taylor: “Anti-Abortion” Is Not “Pro-Life”

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2022 //
2

Retired Texas educator David R. Taylor reminds his readers that to be anti-abortion is not the same thing as being pro-life.

Those who are actually pro-life treasure each child after they are born by making sure they have good nutrition, good healthcare, good public schools, and a secure home.

In Texas, the anti-abortion forces lose interest in children as soon as they are born.

The Governor, Greg Abbott, the Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and the two senators demonstrated after the Uvalde massacre of School children that they were sorry as could be, offered lots of thoughts and prayers to bereaved families, but would do nothing whatever to restrict the sale or possession of military-grade weapons to civilians. The 18-year-old killer in Uvalde bought two AR15s on his 18th birthday. The AR15 is not for hunting. It’s for killing. Anyone who enables killers to have easy access to military-style weapons is not pro-life. They are pro-death.

Categories Childhood, Early Childhood Education, Equity, Health, Justice, Love

San Antonio: IDEA Charter School Vice Proncipal Arrested for Punching 5-Year-Old

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2022 //
18

The vice principal of an IDEA charter school in San Antonio was arrested for punching a 5-year-old child.

Betsy DeVos, when U.S .Secretary of Education, gave the IDEA chain more than $200 million from the federal Charter Schools Program to expand.

SAN ANTONIO – An area elementary school vice principal is in custody and charged with assault after she “lost control” and attacked a 5-year-old student in her office, according to Sheriff Javier Salazar.

The incident happened April 22 at an IDEA elementary school in the 10100 block of Kriewald Road, but the sheriff’s office wasn’t made aware of the situation until Wednesday, April 27.

According to Salazar, a mother told deputies that her five-year-old son, who attends the school, was assaulted by the school’s vice principal, 53-year-old Tara Coleman Hunter in her office..

The child admitted that he became “unruly” while in Hunter’s office and struck her. However, the situation escalated further when Hunter “lost control” and attacked the child, Salazar said.

“This was handled way inappropriately,” the sheriff said during a news conference Thursday.

Hunter punched the child in the face or head and pushed him into a file cabinet, according to the sheriff. This caused the child to develop a bump on his head and bruising.

The child was out of control, but the adult should know how to deal with an unruly child without resorting to physical assault.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Discipline, Education Industry, San Antonio, Students, Texas
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