I didn’t need a new federally funded research program to figure out that little boys think differently than little girls. Simply raising a few of each is all it takes to quickly see this in action.
If you tell a little girl that her mommy has a baby in her tummy, most will believe it without question, and some will even give a quick tummy kiss to the baby hiding within.
It was never as easy to explain the whole baby in the tummy thing to my boys when they were little. One particular child all but called me a liar and a thief.
I was sitting on the couch with my then two-year-old little boy, Tommy. He was nestled under my arm snuggling in as I was trying to lure him into a nap, when he shot up with wide eyes and pointing at my large, round tummy he exclaimed, “Ball! My ball!”
“How cute” I thought. “No sweetheart, that’s not a ball that’s a baby.” You could almost see the thought process as it flashed across his chubby little face. His big blue eyes wide with excitement quickly narrowed to a scowl as he crawled onto my large lap, stuck his nose up to mine and proclaimed loudly, “BALL! Mommy eat my ball!”
He didn’t need a large vocabulary for me to fully understand what he was thinking. His logical little male brain had weighed the evidence before him, the facts were clear: His ball has been missing for over a week. Mom has been eating everything in sight. You can practically see it… right there. Logical conclusion, “Mommy eat my ball!”
It took months to regain my creditability with that boy.
Perhaps it’s because children have not fully developed their reasoning abilities that they tend to see things in black and white, and gray seems to be very suspicious to them.
More and often, what was once black and white has blended into almost unrecognizable shades of gray. The newest shade of gray on the horizon comes in the form of an economic stimulus plan– Hundreds of millions of dollars are slated for contraceptives.
John Boehner, the House Republican leader, told Fox News: “Regardless of where anyone stands on taxpayer funding for contraceptives and the abortion industry, there is no doubt that this once little-known provision in the congressional Democrats’ spending plan has nothing to do with stimulating the economy and creating more American jobs.”
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, makes no apologies for the provision; claiming instead, that we “have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.”
Let me get this straight. The contraceptives are distributed to low income families without health insurance. The state’s budget is helped because the states can’t afford to take care of more children in their systems.
So then shouldn’t the state just take some kind of “control” to stop proliferating programs they can’t afford to fund? Or do they plan on requiring all women on public aid to use the contraceptives, to stimulate the state’s economy?
The abundance of illegitimate children the states are burdened with trying to provide for are not the “consequences of the downturn in our economy,” they are the consequences of the downturn in our morality. Let’s help those who need it. But let’s not normalize, legitimatize, and promote poverty.
Under the bright lights of public scrutiny, the provision was pulled in the end. Nevertheless, there is a blurring of the lines between family planning and social economics that has emerged as a dangerous and slippery slope. If you believe that the government has the responsibility to provide healthcare and a multitude of other services to families. Then, of course too many children would be a burden on the government and, ultimately, the tax payers. Socialist countries have always had to deal with these kinds of problems.
We need to be very careful of a government who, like my little boy, can’t see past the outer shape and circumstances and understand that there is a human life inside; nor comprehend that life is not sustained by an umbilical cord attached to a political party.
