Heartless Government or Heartless Parent?

David Frum has the rest of the story on the tragedy of the boy who died from an infected tooth.

This is the price of the nanny state---parents who feel no obligation to provide for their children.

My parents household income was less than this woman's most years (my father was a bricklayer, my mother a housewife) and they raised FIVE children, none of whom ever missed a dental appointment. We certainly didn't have the best dentist, but we went every six months like clockwork, and we did so on my father's dime, not the taxpayers'. We also had a roof over our head and food on our table, because my parents put the priority on these essentials first.

This was nothing new to my parents, who themselves had grown up during the Depression. My grandmother used to tell us how she and my grandfather would feed their children potatoes while they ate the skins to survive. They knew something about priorities too.

There is no one more obligated to provide for the needs of a child than their own parents. Allowing your children's teeth to rot out of their head is parental neglect, not societal neglect. My parents would have sold their very organs before allowing that to happen to their children.

Is there a church that would not have helped this woman and her children had she gone to them? Is there a dentist who would not have donated his services to save this boy's life had he known? Is there an American who would not have gladly opened wallet and heart for the good of innocent children?

What warped sense of entitlement leads one to seek out a lawyer instead of the above?

And is there anyone in the Left Wing Media who would have the moral conscience to question why a parent didn't see to the minimum medical needs of her children before they condemn the rest of America as heartless?

Bill Bennett was once on a discussion panel with a strident liberal who claimed that she cared deeply about his children as a justification for some government nanny state boondoggle. "Okay," he responded, "What are their names?"

The responsibility for the well-being of children rests first and foremost upon their parents, not some bureaucrat to whom they are a faceless abstraction.

It doesn't take a village to raise a child. It takes responsible parents.