Every decent human being is grief-stricken at the horrendous murder of 19 fourth-grade children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In the wake of the targeted atrocity, the usual commenters jumped to make the usual arguments about the need to restrict gun ownership or, on the other side of the political spectrum, to train and arm teachers to protect against intruders. It’s all so predictable, depressing, and banal.
The time has come to analyze the causes of this event through a wider lens and understand that a society in which schools are attacked repeatedly is profoundly unhealthy for children in ways that extend far beyond the very slight risk of becoming the victim of a school shooting.
Let’s start with abortion. Whatever one thinks about Roe v. Wade, there’s no denying that more than 60 million nascent human beings have been killed in the womb since the Supreme Court conjured a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. That isn’t morally inconsequential.
What’s the connection between abortion and Uvalde? Mother Teresa would tell us. At the National Prayer Breakfast in 1994, she said: “It is really a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”
I used to think of such statements as pro-life hyperbole. But I now realize that isn’t what the saint was getting at. I think she was saying that the ubiquitous resort to abortion has created a general cultural atmosphere that’s both anti-child, and at the extremes, promotes violence.
Think about the dehumanizing arguments we often hear that the unwanted gestating baby is a “parasite,” akin to a tumor that needs to be excised. Such dehumanization of offspring has attitudinal consequences within the culture that extend well beyond the issue itself.
I understand that argument. But her current joy still came at the cost of an innocent’s death. Abortion rights may allow women greater freedom, but regardless of legality, it seems to me that Mother Teresa’s thesis that it also unleashes dangerous nihilistic social forces can no longer be ignored.
But even if Mother Teresa was all wet—after all, other Western countries that allow abortion aren’t as violent as ours—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to consider our country “pro-child.” Think about the toll inflicted on children by our anti-COVID policies, under which children in many states were locked out of school—even though COVID-19 poses little serious risk to their health. The consequences were devastating. As studies have shown, our children weren’t only severely stunted in their educational advancement, but the loss of socialization also severely increased childhood depression, opioid abuse, mental illness, and youth suicide rates.
Wait, it gets worse. Some girls who identify as boys are even being mutilated with mastectomies while children of both sexes may receive “bottom” surgeries that leave them sexually dysfunctional and physically sterile—this despite there being no objective medical test that can tell doctors which patient is experiencing “persisting gender dysphoria” and which are experiencing “transient adolescent dysphoria.”
Advocates for these radical interventions say they want to prevent suicide. I’m sure they do. But I suspect other more adult agendas are also at play. What else explains the angry objections made by activists and President Joe Biden to a new Florida law that merely prevents these issues from being discussed in kindergarten through third grade?
There’s far more to worry about than I can detail here. What about the breakup of families that leads to so much childhood misery? And the ubiquitous number of “fatherless” homes that leave boys at particular risk of anti-sociality and even severe mental illness—which, not coincidentally, seems to have been the case with the Uvalde shooter. Good grief, if we really cared about children, the country would be in an uproar at the number of youths murdered on the streets of Chicago, a toll that far exceeds the number of children killed in schools.
And what are we to make of reports that at Robb Elementary, as at Parkland High School in Florida, police refused to enter the building even as children were being shot? If you had told me when I was a boy that law enforcement officers would put their own safety above mine in such a circumstance, I wouldn’t have believed it.
So, yes. let us grieve the victims of Uvalde. Let us debate how to prevent a repeat of the carnage. But we must not stop there. If we want to make our country a healthy place for children, we also need to reassess our priorities as adults and take a hard look at what our culture has become.
