The old expression is, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” dating back to the medieval practice of sharing bathwater in a household (since there were no electric water heaters, nor any running water), starting with the father first, and ending with the youngest child. By then, the water would be so full of dirt from all those bodies that it just might be possible to lose sight of the little one in the murkiness.
In Namibia today, however, the saying is abbreviated to, “Don’t throw the baby out.” Period.
According to a report from New Era Online (“Newspaper for a New Namibia”), the Namibian government “has embarked on a campaign to discourage young mothers from throwing their newborn babies away.” Yes, you read that right. “Do not kill the babies,” the government’s Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare, Sirkka Ausika, was quoted by the article as saying last Thursday.1
The two arguments most frequently used by proponents of U.S. ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child are that “[i]t’s embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land,” and that by failing to ratify the treaty, we are losing our status as a world leader in human rights.2 The fallacious nature of the first argument has already been addressed in our “Standing Alone” article. The second issue is the one in question here.
Would Convention supporters really have us believe that, because they have acceded to the treaty and we have not, Namibia is now ahead of the U.S. in terms of human rights? If we accept their assertion that treaty ratification and human rights leadership are inextricably linked, then we must answer, “Yes, they would.” But when is the last time an American news agency had to report that, although statistics don’t fully reflect the issue, “the number of babies flushed down the toilet systems that end up at the sewerage works show that this is a serious problem”?3 Thankfully, that is not an issue in this country.
Namibia’s government believes the increasing trend in “baby dumping” is attributable to “fear of rejection by their parents and partners, lack of knowledge on foster care and adoption, fear of HIV positive women that their children will be infected and die and also the fear of leaving school.”4 That the trend is increasing at all, or even that such a trend exists in a nation that has been part of the UNCRC for 15 years, demonstrates that participation in the Child Rights Convention does not make a nation any more or less advanced in human rights law. All it means for nations like Namibia is that they’re willing to play along.
What it means for nations like ours, where Article VI of our Constitution would make every word of the treaty “the supreme law of the land”, even over existing state and federal legislation, is much, much more. If nothing else, taking the decision-making right in family law cases away from both the parents and the states, to hand it over to an 18-member U.N. panel (enforced by our own federal government), would constitute the greatest authority shift in our nation’s history. And why should we, the People, submit to such a power grab? Because we’ll fall behind Namibia as a human rights model if we don’t? Somehow, I don’t think so.
What makes us a leader in human rights is not accession to some over-reaching international treaty; it is the precepts of moral decency already enshrined in American law. Self-governed Americans, responsible to write, implement, and enforce our own laws, became a model for human rights, not because we will surrender our sovereignty to the United Nations, but expressly because we won’t. Historically, we have valued human life in America, from giving “unwanted” babies up for adoption to preserving the rights of the people, individually and through their states, to govern themselves as they see fit, and while we argue amongst ourselves over whether that life begins at conception, at birth, or somewhere in between, we cannot stomach “disposing of” live-born children as Namibia’s mothers apparently do, and I hope we never will. Nor would we sell our children as prostitutes, like those in Burma and Thailand, nor torture them in our prisons as the North Koreans do.
In no way do we wish to make light of the plight of the children in any of these countries, including those in our own country who slip through the cracks. But the idea that we can save these children by ratifying this dangerous convention is simply wrong; the notion that our refusal to ratify is a national human rights failure is a grievous error; and the implication that accession to this treaty will restore us to some “human rights leader” status from which we have presumably fallen is a subtle lie. Yes, Namibia, save the babies, with or without the U.N.’s help. But babies in America will be far better served without the treaty, thank you very much.