Vox: Talk to your children about abortion! But leave the rest to the schools
June 17, 2022
Vox thinks that parents should talk to their children about abortion. We agree, of course. How are values to be transmitted across the generations if it isn’t families that do the transmission? If we all waited for schools to do that work then the values would be whatever it was the schools thought were those values – rather than we ourselves thought they were.
This is exactly the point Vox makes, much to our surprise:
If we don’t talk to our kids about hard topics like abortion, “then we’re just essentially ensuring that they’re hearing about them from other people.” Parents may find that what is being communicated to their kids is inaccurate or doesn’t align with their family’s values. “It’s better if you can start with a blank slate,” Wenner Moyer says.
Well, yes. Although we might differ a little with the direction they’re taking this.
“Talking about abortion with kids and young people is a long-term project that helps secure the future of reproductive justice.”
The base concept is obvious. If we ourselves don’t teach the kids these moral concepts, then it will be some others out there who do — and who the heck knows what their morals are?
The surprise for us though is that apparently, it’s only upon this subject that this might be true. For when we touch upon such things as race – given the critical race theory discussions about school curricula at present for example – or history as retailed by the 1619 Project, or other moral thoughts about such things as teaching 7-year-olds about sex, this idea of families inculcating their values independently seems to be put aside, doesn’t it? Then it’s the pure responsibility of the teaching establishment as to what should be learned and parents – and their family values – aren’t supposed to get a look in.
There seems to be a certain bias to that stance really even if we find it difficult to exactly and wholly put our finger on it.
Vox markets itself as “explaining the news” and is within the top 100 US news media sites as it does so. It gains some 20 million visits a month as well. We’ve no argument at all with the aim, seems sensible enough to us.
The problem is that Vox is all too often a partial – in both senses, not complete and biased to one side – explanation of that news. Should families talk to their kids about abortion? Of course, for otherwise how are those family values to be taught? But that’s also true of all of those other moral issues which Vox seems to want the teaching profession to have control over – which really isn’t the point at all, is it?