"We own our children" but the state owns our bodies

This conservative doctrine is a nightmare even beyond the parental rights movement

It has been pointed out by more than one dutiful reader that ownership of human beings, including children, amounts to slavery.  This is indeed the case, and it bears examination in light of the Republican Party’s continuing push towards authoritarianism.

The obverse of “we own our children” was charged last year in an opinion column in the conservative Washington Times by Tammy Bruce, a Fox News contributor and host of “Get Tammy Bruce,” which airs on the Fox Nation streaming service.  Titled, “The State Wants to Own Your Children,” the column was a broadside against a proposal by the state of California to allow children as young as 12 to get a COVID vaccination without the consent of parents. 

“Politicians have been working at taking complete control of your children for decades and have made significant inroads,” Bruce wrote.  “This includes providing birth control, abortion, mental health services, sexual assault treatment, drug and alcohol treatment, treatment for infectious diseases and more. Make no mistake, none of this has anything to do with children’s health and everything to do with stripping away the natural and expected and legal right of parents to have first and final say over what their minor children will and will not do. Hillary Clinton’s ‘It Takes a Village’ narrative wasn’t just thoughtless rhetoric. The left and other power-hungry politicians know they can only capture the next generation if they have more control over them than you do.”

(Tammy Bruce morphed from being president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) into making appearances on and guest-hosting the Laura Ingraham show on Fox News.  After President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Bruce said, “We’ve got trash in the White House.”  Interestingly, before that outburst, Bruce identified herself as a “pro-choice lesbian” in an interview on C-Span.  Go figure.)

So there it is, folks.  The battle lines have been drawn over who gets to control children.  The absolutist position of the parental rights movement, that “we own our children,” appears on the surface to be supported by Supreme Court jurisprudence.  In cases before the court,  the 14^th Amendment has been cited to recognize the parental rights: “the liberty interest…of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children…is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this [Supreme] Court…It is cardinal with us that the custody, care and nurture of the child reside first in the parents…” (Troxel v. Granville, decided 2000). 

But rubbing against this all-encompassing judgement is the “best interest of the child” doctrine, often invoked in custody disputes during divorces or the denial of medical care for children in cases involving the exercise of religious rights of parents who are Christian Scientists or belong to other religions that frown on medical intervention in disease.

Underlying all the parental rights business is of course the conservative doctrine of who gets to control the bodies of women.  The parental rights people contend that children are “owned” after birth.  The arch-conservative anti-abortion movement has contended from the beginning that before birth, the fetus is owned by the state.  While Roe v Wade established a woman’s right to decide whether or not to carry a fetus to term or to abort the fetus, the Dobbs decision infamously returned decisions about abortion to the states.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, since the Dobbs decision, 24 states have banned abortion or are planning to do so.  Some states, like Idaho, are seeking to pass laws forbidding women from traveling – from moving their bodies – across the state line for the purpose of getting an abortion. Another state, South Carolina, is considering a bill that would punish women who get an abortion with the death penalty.

While parents, including women, “own” their children after birth according to the parental rights movement, some 24 states have now passed laws declaring ownership of women’s fetuses before birth.  After that, as a parent, your rights of child “ownership” come with obligations the states that have passed anti-abortion laws want no part of.  There are still 10 states, all of them with anti-abortion laws freshly on the books, that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, thus denying health care to poor pregnant mothers and to their newborns after birth.  Mississippi, with the highest infant mortality in the nation, is one of them.  All of this while the Republican Party has vowed to cancel school lunch programs that come under federal regulations – that’s “the state” by the way – through the Department of Agriculture.

The parental rights movement contends “we own our children” after birth, and they seem content with the concomitant doctrine that the state should own both the fetus and the bodies of women before giving birth.  If that sounds like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” you are correct.  This isn’t just a battle over school boards and control of curriculums.  It’s a battle at this point over the enslavement of women for the purpose of birthing children.  All praise to the Women’s Movement, which in “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” saw this coming long ago.