Child Left Behind

Nebraska is sort of the opposite of "No child left behind."

A splendid article in the NYT talks about how the state of Nebraska has unfairly revised one of the greatest laws in the history of the United States. Basically, there's a safe haven law in every state. What this sort of thing does is gives parents a way out when they realize that they should punt. This is a great law that's a bit limited in scope, generally. Most states were smart to write in some maximum age that you could return your kids to the stork. Not Nebraska. Wanting to leave things to the imagination, their law just said that you could dump your "child" whenever you wanted.

So what would any sane parent with a lousy kid do?

You slip some sedatives to your ritalin-depending kid, and leave him at the hospital. You may have to fill out some paperwork, but it's so much easier than monkeying around with some loser kid. What can you say? Someone takes a shot at parenting, realizes that they suck, and then punts. This is entirely better than being a lousy parent, and then being oblivious to that fact, and then raising some sociopath. What's cool is that "child" means anyone under 18. So you were legally able to dump high school seniors for acting up. No questions asked.

Of course, this is only a stopgap measure, like putting a band aid on a serious wound. To really fix the problem of defective kids, you need to go to the source.

The Freakonomics answer is that we abort more kids. Particularly more kids from the poor, black/hispanic populations, since they're statistically more likely to become criminals. But I can't promote that. Especially since roughly 117% of my readership is Westy, who is definitely against abortion, but apparently, for woolly mammoths. And since I'm still making pennies per month on AdSense, I definitely don't want to jeopardize my revenue stream.

(Aside for Westy - if we genetically recreate a neanderthal, does it have a soul? And would a cloned human have a soul?)

Now, a while back my buddy Dino (at least, I think it was Dino) had the great idea of sprinkling RU-486 in people's drinks when you want to make sure that certain people don't reproduce. But it turns out that RU-486 isn't just something that you pop, like Flintstone Vitamins. You actually have to go to a doctor. And there's some controversy, since RU-486 is used for killing live fetuses.

So we need another plan. So we'll go to Plan B. Literally.

Paraphrasing my pharmacist buddy, you (the girl, actually, not "you" in the generic term - though that would be interesting...) just pop a double dose of birth control the morning after, and then another double dose later that day. No pregnancy. No killing fetuses. No need for personal responsibility, beyond remembering to pop a couple pills, twice the day after risky sex. Of course, even that may be too much, given the prevalence of once-a-week (or even once-a-month) contraceptives.

Now, what's interesting is that Plan B doesn't really kill a fetus. It just keeps one from forming. I'm not big on science or facts, but the Plan B website makes a big point of this. Of course, I have a suspicion that the anti-abortion folks aren't fond of Plan B, either. But we'll see how that plays out. But in any case, it seems that putting Plan B in the water supply may be a better way of controlling thing, at least in comparison to Nebraska's old safe haven law, and would be more tasteful than using RU-486.

-Chairman