What about the children?

In my mind I am a psychiatrist. In my bones I am a pediatrician, a legacy of the child welfare and settlement house movements.

I am disturbed by two stories in today's news. The first was on CNN news quoting a report in Time, link, on a nation-wide rise in pregnancy associated mortality.  Actually this is more than disturbing. It is shocking. I recall my early days in medicine when I worked in volunteer and state and city supported charity clinics. We provided pre and neo-natal care, well baby care and mentoring of mothers.  We believed we were there to nourish a stronger healthier and happier people.

If you want to feel really important and really wise work in a well baby clinic.

I still cannot imagine such being considered optional or a "give away."

It is interesting that the child welfare movement arose in late Victorian England as the signs of the enfeebling price of empire were becoming obvious.  These were the massive loss of young men's lives, the plummeting birth rates and slums filled with the poor, the hungry and the ill. They  began to fear the extinction of what they called the "English race."

The second news article is in the New York Times recounting massive public school closings in Kansas City, link. The local news in most if not all states is replete with decreases in public school staff, hours, days even, as suggested in Utah, whole years. The poor who will most need skills to overcome the limits of poverty are those who are being most deprived.

My first impulse is to call for the women to activate and agitate for the children and for peace.  Why the women? History seems to tell us it is by far more often that it is the women who recognize or at least are moved to activism by those signs the late Victorians saw.