A Violation of the Rights of the Parent

dget — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:25:00 GMT

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way. But it’s got to get done.” -- State Attorney Glenn Ivey of Prince George’s County, Maryland, on the vaccination of 2300 children whose parents object to the county’s policy of forced immunizations.

According to an article published by the Washington Post (Get Kids Vaccinated or Else, Parents Told), parents in Prince George’s County, Maryland, have been provided with an ultimatum by the state: let us inject your children or go to jail. This is the message delivered by Maryland State Attorney Glenn Ivey and the Prince George’s County School Board in their quest to immunize 2,300 children whose parents have chosen not to submit to the paternalistic demands of the state.

As the school system's chief of student services Betty Despenza-Green puts it, "It hurts us when any child is out of school because he needs to be immunized, and so we felt we needed to be creative. We need those students immunized. We need them in schools."

It would appear as though the school system has quite a few needs, including the need to strip parents of their right to make decisions about their own children.

But the overbearing comments would not end there, as school board chairman R. Owen Johnson Jr. would add "This is an educational crisis. This is a public health and a children's rights issue."

Additionally, in a letter to the non-conforming parents, State Attorney Ivey noted that "unexcused absences by your child may subject you to a criminal charge."

What an astonishing trio of statements. Green appears to imply that the Prince George’s School Board’s need to protect their system of compulsory education supersedes a parent’s right to rear their own children.

And Johnson’s statement, even more outrageously, asserts that it is not the job of the parent to make decisions for their child, but rather it is the job of the government. This is an issue discussed by Murray Rothbard in his brilliant essay, Education: Free and Compulsory.

“It is obvious that the natural state of affairs is for the parents to have charge of the child. The parents are the literal producers of the child, and the child is in the most intimate relationship to them that any people can be to one another. The parents have ties of family affection to the child. The parents are interested in the child as an individual, and are the most likely to be interested and familiar with his requirements and personality. Finally, if one believes at all in a free society, where each one owns himself and his own products, it is obvious that his own child, one of his most precious products, also comes under his charge.

“The only logical alternative to parental “ownership” of the child is for the state to seize the infant from the parents and to rear it completely itself. To any believer in freedom this must seem a monstrous step indeed. In the first place, the rights of the parents are completely violated, their own loving product seized from them to be subjected to the will of strangers. In the second place, the rights of the child are violated, for he grows up in subjection to the unloving hands of the State, with little regard for his individual personality."

What we have in the case of Prince George’s County is the latter. The state has effectively told these parents that thier childen must go to school and they must be vaccinated or they will be subjected to the force of the state. Essentially this means that any rights parents might enjoy regarding the rearing of their children are subject to the discretion of the state.

The State, it would appear, now owns America's children.

dget : Paternalism, Forced Vaccination

A Violation of the Rights of the Parent