Word: parentes
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Reform welfare. Confident single mothers can be terrific parents. Unfortunately, there are as many irresponsible single mother households as there are incompetent two-parent households. Not surprisingly, many single mothers are young and unskilled...
...irony is that one area where TV espouses unmistakably conservative values is the very one that Quayle chose to focus on: the family. Though single-parent households are common on TV (as they are in real life), the family bond is nearly always portrayed as strong and indispensable. If TV has any prevailing sin, it is its sunny romanticizing of that bond: no matter what the conflicts or crises, family love makes everything come out all right. If Dan Quayle were to look at TV a little more closely, he might find the stuff of Republican dreams...
...flash-frozen at 12 and thawed out as college juniors, a technological advance that surely will start a new service industry, Rosellen Brown's plot can be counted on to grab a mother or father by the ventricles. Lying awake in sweaty sheets at 3 a.m., any parent of any teenager ! sees an immediate future more or less like Brown's melodrama: a 17-year-old New Hampshire boy named Jacob, no sulkier or more hostile than the next kid, suddenly goes septic and gets himself into hideous trouble. The cops, in fact, think he has bludgeoned his pregnant girlfriend...
...take drugs during pregnancy, even shooting up after her water broke. Nonetheless, the State Supreme Court ruled that since the fetus was not legally a person, it had no legal rights. In fact, it wasn't even legally a "child" yet, and the mother was not yet a "parent," so she couldn't be penalized for child abuse...
Because of these difficulties, "fetus abuse" is not a viable legal concept. But this doesn't mean that children born with a parent like the Hartford cocaine addict must be left at the mercy of their dysfunctional families forever. If a pregnant woman is observed shooting up in the delivery room (or some such egregious action), her name can surely be referred to social workers who will check in on the family after the child is born and see if the parents are still incompetent. Sadly, they will generally find enough grounds to remove the child anyway...