Products or autonomous beings? The contradictory way the world views children

A new plan unveiled by UNICEF’s Executive Board endorses sexual autonomy for children, including access to birth control and abortion. For the first time, the strategic plan will include “sexual and reproductive health and rights” and “sexual orientation and gender identity” to the agency’s mandate, with agreement from the Biden-Harris administration.

This decision is the latest in contradictory views towards children by the world at large. On the one hand, children are considered mere products — existing solely due to a parent’s desire, with no rights of their own before birth. Abortion is the most obvious example of this, but IVF and the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry show disturbing evidence of this mindset as well. If an adult wants to have a child, they are treated as if they are are entitled to one, no matter what it might take to get that child. How that process affects the child in question is treated as irrelevant, because the parent’s wishes trump the child’s needs.

Yet as soon as the child is born, they are now somehow treated fully autonomous beings, able to have sex whenever and however they want, while parents have no say in the matter. If an 11-year-old wants to have sex, the prevailing message is that they’re entitled to make that choice. And if the same 11-year-old then gets pregnant, they’re not only allowed to have an abortion, but they should be able to do it without their parent’s knowledge or consent, with taxpayer dollars footing the bill.

Children as products owed to parents

Embryos, actual living human beings, are frequently created and then treated like meat at a grocery store: fresh or frozen, high quality or low quality, leftovers or surplus, items to be weighed, assessed, and selected. These children are commodified to an extreme degree, with would-be parents engaging in embryo trades to make sure they get the kind of child they want, or fighting over the embryos as property in a divorce. Embryos found to have disabilities can be destroyed — because after all, that isn’t the product the buyer ordered. If the child is already implanted in utero and is then found to have a disability or the parent decides there are “too many” babies, abortion is the obvious answer in the mind of the consumer.

Children are being treated like designer products to be bought and sold at will, and not as individual human beings with their own worth and value.

READ: ‘So sad and confusing’: IVF’s physical and psychological impact on children

Meanwhile, the effect that IVF and surrogacy have on the children themselves, who are increasingly speaking out as adults, seems to be pushed under the rug or silenced — even by some people who claim to be pro-life, who simply don’t want to hear that children created by reproductive technology are suffering because the desire for a child outweighed all other considerations.

It’s incredibly common for these children to be lied to for years and years about their parentage, denying them of their own heritage and background because it was easier for their parents.

One woman, Louise, spoke about the pain of her conception to Them Before Us. “I am still struggling with the self-hatred which I nurtured all the years when I thought I was my social father’s daughter,” she said. “I could never be like he was, do things his way, and concluded that I was therefore useless. Particularly in my working life I have a near constant struggle with compulsive over-performance, and intense self-criticism. I have a near mortal fear of being wrong in the way I work, and I guess addressing this pattern is my biggest personal challenge at the moment.”

“I am a human being, yet I was conceived with a technique that had its origins in animal husbandry,” another person wrote in a book for Anonymous Us. “Worst of all, farmers kept better records of their cattle’s genealogy than assisted reproductive clinics … how could the doctors, sworn to ‘first do no harm’ create a system where I now face the pain and loss of my own identity and heritage.”

Further still, children are traumatized when they find out that they aren’t actually biologically related to their siblings — or that they have dozens of siblings they never knew about through sperm and egg donation. In exceptionally tragic cases, people have gotten married, only to discover that their spouse is actually a biological sibling.

The needs and rights of children are taking a backseat to the wants and desires of adults.

Autonomous beings where parents have no say

Increasingly, children are being sold sex on all fronts: in culture, social media, and even their classrooms. There seem to be no boundaries as to what children can and cannot do, so long as they allegedly “consent” to the activity. The notion of sex being a human right, a questionable concept even for adults, is spreading to children in more and more nefarious ways.

One sex-ed curriculum, for example, is being used in over 100 school districts across the nation, and it blatantly promotes casual sexual behavior as a normal activity for children as young as four. As Live Action News’ Bettina di Fiore explained about the AMAZE program:

In Help Kids Learn About Their Bodies, for example, an adult female tells a juvenile boy and girl to take a bath (together). The boy reacts by saying, “Don’t look, I’m a boy!” The woman replies, “If you feel shy about it, we can play a game!” The game involves touching and asking questions about both the children’s genitals and the adult’s breasts.

Playing “games” involving intimate touching is a common grooming tactic used by pedophiles.

The curriculum further encourages masturbation, and for parents to allow their elementary school-aged children to have access to sexually explicit content, as long as they’re learning about it the “right” way. Once children reach the age of 10, they begin receiving messages that it’s acceptable for them to have sex, provided that both people want to.

This is hardly the only example; Planned Parenthood flyers have been given to middle schoolers promoting sex for 11-year-olds, while Planned Parenthood in Massachusetts has said they will distribute condoms to 12-year-old children for free. Planned Parenthood has even been allowed to teach sex ed in schools to children in fifth grade (age 10).

It should be noted that throughout the country, the minimum age for consent to sex is between 16 and 18.

READ: Want to help fight human trafficking? Pass parental consent laws for underage girls seeking abortion.

Monica Cline, a former sex educator for Planned Parenthood, has repeatedly warned that this overt sexualization of children is intentional. “The sex education grooms them for promiscuity. Grooms them for STD treatment, and grooms them for abortion,” she said in a previous interview. “Teens are being given false ideas that condoms will cover all the bases,” she continued. “They do tell them to get tested and treated – which means coming back to the clinic – and if they are pregnant they are encouraged to get an abortion.”

And meanwhile, organizations like UNICEF and the Biden-Harris administration are intent on pushing the notion of sexual autonomy for children as well. Parents are supposed to sit back and allow their children to have sex as much as they want, and if they get pregnant, then the children can just go get an abortion. Parental consent/notification laws for abortion are, likewise, slammed by organizations like Human Rights Watch. Parents evidently have no say when it comes to the sexual behavior of their own young children who, despite their age, are treated by certain entities as if they are capable of fully understanding what sex means and how it could possibly affect them. When it comes to sex, parents suddenly no longer get to be parents. Instead, in that case, parents’ authority must be usurped at every turn.

No matter what the sex and abortion industries might say, children are not mentally, emotionally, or physically capable of making adult decisions at such a young age.

Treating a child as a product to be bought, sold, and discarded is immensely harmful, as is treating a child as an autonomous being equal to an adult. In both cases, the will, thoughts, and intentions of adults — not necessarily for the children’s good, but for the adults’ own perceived benefit — are imposed upon children.

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