On an alcohol ban

Chief Robert Whitehead says he sought an alcohol ban on Yellow Quill First Nation after a series of what are suggested to be alcohol-related suicides. A majority of the band voted in favour of the ban in 2005, but it was blocked by Indian Affairs.

The deaths early this week of 1-year old Santana and 3-year old Kaydence Pauchay are beyond tragic. But these children did not die because of bureaucratic red tape gumming up an alcohol ban. They were dropped in the snow in t-shirts and diapers when their drunken father set off to run 400m to his sister’s, a short distance equivalent to once around a standard track. They died because their father was indisputably unfit to care for them, and no one in his large family was willing (or able) to step up to the plate.

More than a few commentators have already pointed out that Chief Whitehead’s alcohol ban is passing-the-buck. In communities with alcohol bans, residents can turn to dirtier intoxicants- gas, alcohol-based cleaners and disinfectants, etc. Or they can just smuggle in alcohol and have their bottled solace-seeking criminalized. So I will not dwell too long on the ineptitude of such a ban. But what solution can we propose? A law that parents put clothes on their children in -50 degree weather? A law that we not leave infants in snowbanks? A law that we not drink ourselves into oblivion when acting as the sole caregiver of babies? Do people really need such common sense legislation? Or do they need help avoiding a role they don’t want?

Every day we are involuntarily updated on the drunken, disorderly, unfit-to-parent escapades of Britney Spears. Perhaps Britney is mentally ill, even experiencing post-partum depression. Perhaps she is simply too young and self-involved to be ready to parent a one year old and a three year old, and her moody rebellion is typical of any adolescent who swats at responsibility like a cloud of midsummer flies.

Yesterday a woman dumped a baby in a parking lot at a Toronto-area mall. It wasn’t a barely-viable preemie neonate, but an 8-month old. Not much is known about the infant, but we have to accept that this baby was not a wanted baby.

Parents who want their babies swaddle them up and hold them close.

What these news stories all have in common is child neglect. More rules, surveillance, and force will not cure these parents of their tragic flaws and make them eager, capable parents. We cannot require families and communities to notice and pick up the slack. We can support the decisions of women to terminate pregnancies they do not want. We can legislate top-quality, publicly-funded sex education, contraception availability and abortion services in this province and nationally. Medicare-covered abortion insures that every baby born is wanted. It insures women who choose to go through a pregnancy and give up their offspring for adoption are doing so because they really and truly want to, and have not been railroaded into being a womb-for-hire. It insures parents choose to be parents. It improves the chances that parents have straightened their oxygen masks on their own heads first, and are ready to help their kids with theirs...