Liberals will often deride conservative policy, like 1996 welfare reform, as “blaming the victim”. A recent CNBC headline takes a different tack, blaming the symptom:“More Abandoned Children as Austerity Wears On”
As the euro zone debt crisis deepens and austerity measures take their toll across Europe, the number of young children and babies abandoned across the region has increased, according to local charities.
The rise in the abandonment of infants across Europe is most visible in the spread of “baby hatches” or “boxes” across Europe, where unwanted infants are left anonymously.…According to SOS Villages, a European charity that attempts to help families in financial hardship before abandonment occurs, in the last year alone 1,200 children in Greece and 750 in Italy have been abandoned. That is almost double the 400 children abandoned in Italy a year ago, and up from 114 children abandoned in Greece in 2003.
“We are really afraid that in the future we will have a big number of families that cannot manage to keep their own children because of these problems. We are trying to be ready for this,” he said, but the government must keep on funding social welfare services.”“[The government must] stop downgrading services in the name of the austerity measures.”
“Article 7 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, states that every child has ‘the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents,’ he said.
“When a child is abandoned, this right is violated”, he said.
You mean positive rights are worth the paper they’re printed on? Don’t tell the “Obama is gonna pay my mortgage” lady.
After bleeding the private sector dry, Europeans are learning Margaret Thatcher 101, that the problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other people’s money. Their once vibrant populations are so accustomed to and in turn weakened by government guarantees that they’ve been rendered incapable of the basic self-reliance necessary to care for one’s own children. Not surprising, because the path to a nation’s financial bankruptcy always includes a stop at moral bankruptcy first. Government workers in Greece violently rebel at minimal cuts to their benefits, and orphaned children bear the brunt of it.
But maybe those unfortunate kids will beat the odds, learn by necessity to care for themselves, and then revive the private sector by starting businesses like my empathy t-shirt suggestion. Nah, scratch that last part, the licensing and permit process is too damn cumbersome.
BIASBREAKDOWN 