Person:

Bartholet, Elizabeth

This article takes seriously the idea of intergenerational justice for children, and takes as starting premises that child interests count as equivalent to adult, and that we owe justice not just to existing children but also to the next generation. It argues that intergenerational justice demands a major restructuring of policies throughout the world governing adoption, reproduction, and child welfare. We now encourage the reproduction of more children than we can care for, provide limited child welfare enabling poor parents to care for their children, and discourage adoption of existing children who need homes. These policies are perverse, unfair not just to children but adults as well. Societies that damage their children will have to live with those children when they grow up, children at high risk for crime, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty and for mistreating the next generation. We need to reverse the perverse. We need to change the pronatalist and anti-contraception policies that encourage the reproduction of children who won’t be born healthy or receive nurturing care, and we need to encourage adoption both domestic and international.

An intergenerational justice perspective requires that we look at the condition of the existing generation of children and those to be born in the future. Many millions of the existing generation of children are now in trouble and at high risk of never fulfilling their human potential. These children are in turn unlikely, if they live to produce children, to be capable of providing the nurturing parenting that the next generation will need.

The article’s starting premises are that we should count child interests as of equivalent value to adult interests and that we do owe justice not just to the existing generation of children but to the next generations as well. Justice to the next generations means encouraging the creation of children who will have a good chance to enjoy the pleasures of life, children who will be born healthy and will be brought up by nurturing parents. Given these premises, there is much wrong with current reality and related policy.

We now encourage the reproduction of more children than we can care for, provide limited child welfare enabling poor parents to better care for their children, and discourage adoption both domestic and international. We should reverse these policies. We should change the pronatalist and anti-contraception policies that encourage the reproduction of children who won’t likely be born healthy or receive nurturing care. We should provide child welfare so that poor parents who want to keep and raise their children can do so. We should encourage adoption, both domestic and international.

Differential Response (DR) represents the most important child welfare initiative of the day, with DR programs rapidly expanding throughout the country. It would radically change our child welfare system, diverting the great majority of Child Protective Services (CPS) cases to an entirely voluntary system. This article describes the serious risks DR poses for children, and the flawed research being used to promote DR as “evidence-based.” It puts the DR movement in historical context, as one of a series of extreme family preservation movements supported by a corrupt merger of advocacy with research. It argues for reform that would honor children’s rights, confront the problems of poverty underlying child maltreatment in a serious way, and expand rather than reduce the capacity of CPS to address child maltreatment. It calls for a change in the dynamics of child welfare research and policy so that we can avoid history endlessly repeating itself.