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Roe v. Wade in peril

The government should be held civilly responsible for the cost of raising 'children of the state'



By Darryl Taggerty

I was thinking that the expected Supreme Court ruling upholding state laws overturning Roe v Wade creates generations of literal “children of the state.”


No less than children raised to adulthood in collective nurseries and boarding schools in Marxist-Leninist societies, children saved from abortion will owe their lives to the state, which has imposed its overriding interest in protecting life over the liberty interests of the merely biological host. Each child thus brought into this world has a third, more responsible parent: Uncle Sam.


Please don't jump to conclusions about my preference for choice, either the mother’s or the child's. I've trod that heartbreaking road, and would still gladly have borne the real-life responsibility as a father had I been part of the decision.


Under Roe v Wade and applicable state laws, I was blocked from imposing my preference as the biological father. Ah, life.


Today, American governments assert our parental interest in bringing a fetus to term. This is not the personal right or choice of a woman citizen. This is not the collateral responsibility of the biological father. This is not a free choice of citizen-parents to have and hold a child until adulthood—it is the state’s.


And so the state should be held civilly responsible for the cost of raising the child, who should acknowledge the state for its very existence. Lawyers, awake!


By the numbers, there are over 630,000 reported annual abortions currently performed under the Roe v Wade legal regime. In a generation, that would mean roughly the same number of people who would owe their very lives to the state.

After a lifetime of Uncle Sam’s parental support, would their “uncle” provide preference for jobs in the family business of governing, or guaranteed advancement in military academies and officer ranks? Again, by the numbers, 630,000 per year of children enrolled in paternity-supported healthcare, adequate nutrition, foster home-type inspections and adequate housing, to clothe, nurture and raise in accordance with government standards, because the state declared itself to be, by policy and judgment, the most responsible (and financially-able!) adult in the land.


Of course, the state is you and me. As citizens, we pay our taxes and elect leaders to draft laws and manage our commonwealth. We are soon to be collectively responsible for a new generation of children. Why? Because our interests have been asserted by representative state legislatures and upheld by the Supreme Court.


Children conceived against the wishes of biological parents are coming, thanks primarily to our political representatives. Get ready, because we are the über-responsible Uncle Sam.


Here on Guam, despite the virtuous effort by our church and elected officials, abortion remains available. The technology of the abortion pill and telemedicine, and relative prosperity, place abortion within easy reach.


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Our senators’ effort to legislate morality over the rest is mere virtue signaling. Abortions were performed before Roe v Wade, and will continue to be accessible afterward, by those who can afford it. Those who cannot already rely on public assistance.


And we on Guam eagerly embrace the most perverse national incentives affecting our land, welfare, politics and future. Why not offer up the children of our poor?


So, when the Supreme Court upholds the state’s interest in the life of fetal-aged citizens, unwanted pregnancy will practically become a fulltime government job and career. In our name, our government civilly insinuates itself into a woman’s most intimate calculus of childbearing. “It’s not a choice, it’s a child!”


By affidavit or other civil procedure, any woman, married or not, “with child” could declare her intention of living without it, were it not for the state’s decision to compel her to carry the child-citizen to term. Then, lawyers arise!


Perhaps, Congress will formally declare poor and underage expectant mothers’ civic dedication as a new patriotic virtue, like so many governmental Virgin Marys. Will the babies be named after heroes of American political tribes, such as Donald, Ronald, Nancy, Barack, Anghet or Hurao?


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These are, after all, matters of conscience enshrined in law that prioritize our preference, as citizens at large, over hers or theirs, who were merely individual citizens (and even some undocumented immigrants!) biologically caught in the act. We know what's best, and so in our name the state acts.


So again, by the numbers, do you expect the numbers of children who owe their lives to the state to organically rise from 630,000 a year? Perhaps, in clear-eyed recognition of economic incentives trumping intrinsic values, we should expect this number to at least double. It might triple, depending on how well Uncle Sam fulfills his parental responsibility under civil law.


Congratulations! It's a boy or girl, or a child of indeterminate sex! Step up, Uncle Sam, it's a Brave New World. It’s 1984. Who would have thought American conservatives would foster future generations of children of the state?


Darryl Taggerty is a former senior policy analyst at the Guam Legislature.



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