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very now and then, one reads a story that makes it unequivocally clear that things need to change. The R. J. Feild story is a case in point. Perhaps you know the story by now. But it is worth briefly summarizing. Feild was born addicted to heroin, because his mother was a drug addict who was on welfare. Upon his birth, she abandoned him. He beat the odds in every conceivable way. His vision is so bad that he can barely read; only one hand is fully functional; and on a daily basis walking has is a formidable challenge for him. In a single day, perhaps even a single moment, he experiences more adversity than most of his experience throughout most, if not all, of our lives. But he is now 16-years old.
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Instead of wallowing in victimhood and self-pity, however, R. J. Feild has systematically forged ahead; and this 16-year old young man is now the brainstorm behind a new law that is being proposed in California.
At the heart of the proposed law is an exceedingly simple principle, namely that insofar as people are on public assistance, then the state should ensure that they are bringing children into the world in a responsible way. His proposal has three simple points:
(1)All welfare recipients should be randomly tested
(2) If they test positive, they should be offered help
(3) If they refuse to enter rehabilitation, then they should
lose their benefits
This sounds an awful lot like commonsense. The proposal is a marvelous mixture of both commonsense and compassion.
It seems fair enough to say that the State should help those in dire need. This counts as the virtue of appropriate compassion; and compassion has a proper place in a good society. But in the absence of responsibility, the virtue of appropriate compassion becomes the vice of misplaced compassion. Need does not constitute an excuse to be irresponsible. And this holds all the more so when it comes to parenting.
For many, the right to bear children stands as a fundamental natural right. But that right cannot possibly entail the right to be so irresponsible that one is free to do what will knowingly cause irreparable harm to the child to be born into this world or, in any case, the right to makes it highly probable that the newborn will be so harmed. Reproductive freedom does not override the right to well-being that every newborn surely has. Accordingly, the State should not be complicit in this so harm. Criterion (3) effectively ensures that the complicity of the States is eliminated or, in any case, substantially reduced. And that is a very good thing.
But for anyone who would dare to think otherwise, the very life of R. J. Feild’s stands an incontrovertible example that the State needs to change its policy. Whatever reproductive rights his mother had, she most certainly did not have the right to bring him into the world physically damaged. And this he can say while staring anyone and everyone squarely in the face. No morally decent person would ever accept that. Such an assertion on his part would have a moral efficacy that cannot be overshadowed or trumped by any liberty that individuals should have.
What is most disconcerting, though, is not that R. J. Feild is proposing this California bill, but that there should, in the first place, be a need to for him to do so. After all, the three propositions of his proposal are manifestly straightforward and reasonable in every conceivable way. What is more, these three propositions are revealed by the most modicum of foresight. Not only that, the proposition (3) makes good budgetary sense in terms of spending public funds.
Unfortunately, there are those who will have children no matter what; and we know that the State will step in to help those children. Just so, if every now and then Feild's proposal should result in one less child being born in circumstances similar to his, then the law is well worth having on the books. And if people were to rally behind the law, occasioning a sense of public responsibility, then the law might very well be more efficacious than one might suppose.
It is a simple truth that what we think about what do can be considerably influenced by prevailing social attitudes regarding our behavior, as fashion and the efficacy of political correctness make abundantly clear. People wear nearly dysfunctional clothes in order to be in style and people are constantly tripping over themselves to say what fits in with the perceived norms.
So who knows how much good would be done if there were a prevailing public sentiment at every turn that people should not do what will result in their bringing into the world children have severely damaged. If the winds of social approval were to shift just slightly from the stance of entitlement to the stance of responsibility, all sorts of people might find themselves reflecting upon their behavior as it pertains to adversely affecting a children.
This, in effect, is none other than one of the deliverances of commonsense: Freedom without responsibility, far from being a panacea, turns out to be none other than a way of cultivating cruelty and so a form of hell on earth. The life of R. J. Feild is at once a testimony to the hell occasioned by state-sponsored irresponsibility and to the will that human beings can have to flourish even in the bowels of hell. The latter truth, while surely no justification for hell should occasion our admiration and appreciation for the good that is wrought by the lives of such individuals as R. J. Feild.
