From: M18611@MBVM.Mitre.Org (Kathy Wilk)
Subject: Re: Hillary Clinton - Family Values?
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, Bedford MA 01730
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 15:52:37 GMT

In article <92203.191552JLB155@psuvm.psu.edu>
Jennifer Brown <JLB155@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
 
>In article <1992Jul21.182938.7985@athena.cs.uga.edu>, heath@athena.cs.uga.edu
>(Terrance Heath) says:
>>          For example, a child who is sexually or otherwise abused
>>might exercise her right to divorce her parents. At least this way the
>>child has a say in her own life.
>So (back to a common subject), why can't the parents divorce their
>children??  Oh, I guess they're not allowed to have a say in their
>own life.
>
>-Jennifer
>
>PS.  Child(ren) means after birth.  No abortion.
>
 
  They can 'divorce' their children and do.  The way they do it must vary
from state to state, I guess.  For example, a friend of mine was born to a
mother who married 4 times and had 5 daughters.  Only one father paid any
child support for his children (twins).  When my friend was 12 years old,
her mother, who had trouble holding a job and relied on her own mother (with
whom she had a rocky relationship) for food and shelter at times, told my
friend that she was giving her and her next-youngest sister up to foster care
because she just thought she had too many kids.
  Needless to say, my friend, who was the oldest, and I think felt responsible
for many things in the family, was devastated.  She and her sister cried for
days and days.  Eventually, the grandmother stepped in and convinced the mother
not to give up the two children.
  Then, there are the more 'casual' divorces.  For example, the neighbor who I
knew who gave her son to her parents and left for the West coast with her lover
who didn't want kids.  Her parents were so enraged that they punished her by
making her promise never to see her son again.  She promised.
  The woman who hired my mother to baby sit her 3-month-old infant and then
dropped out for a couple years and died of a drug overdose.
  And the fathers I know who decide relationships are too taxing and 'walk'.
And don't pay support and don't stay in touch.
  C'mon, you must have some knowledge of these situations, too.  And you
must also know that the relationships of child to parent and parent to child
are uniquely different.  The vulnerabilities of a child in society are not
comparable to those of a parent.  Children die from being abandoned.  Parents
survive.  These differences are so obvious, I think you must have just popped
off your comment without thinking it through.
  Giving a 12-yr-old the power to 'divorce' his or her parents does not
mean it would be accomplished easily.  I think someone has made the point
that it would still be up to the courts (a judge) to do this.  Why do
people go off on a tangent about the abilities of a 12-yr-old to judge
for him or herself whether to divorce?  It is still up to a judge to grant
or deny, as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong about that).  This
type of argument gets as bizarre as the usual discussions about who should
be licensed to carry a gun - a question of individual freedom in the end.
And in the case of a 12-yr-old accomplishing something within the legal
system, I simply don't think it would be easy for anyone.
  By the way, to the man who said that this looks to the U.K. like another
case of U.S. society swinging to an extreme, there are lots of things in the
U.K. that look weird to us!  E-mail me and ask me - you'll get an earful!
 
 
                        K. Wilk
                        M18611@MBVM.MITRE.ORG
 
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 'Thrusting my nose firmly between his teeth, I threw him to the ground
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