Observers have remarked on the irony that a society so sensitive to the question of aborting unborn life is also a society that demonstrates surprisingly little regard for children. This observation points both to society's ambivalence toward children and a corresponding ambiguity in the relationship between children and society.
In the medical arena, a presumed obligation to safeguard children's welfare is taken with utmost seriousness. Joel Frader describes how parents are not granted complete authority to determine what is best for their children. Parents who are Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, are seldom permitted to refuse blood transfusions for their children when life is at stake.
In the case of child immunizations, societal mandates reflect a public health concern for children. Robert Wolfe and Lisa Sharp point out that parents who would refuse vaccinations for their own children create a perceived risk to other children: the risk of exposure to disease—a risk that, from a public health perspective, those parents may not legitimately impose. There is a clear sense that the prerogatives of some parents must be abridged in order to protect children other than their own.
Yet the flourishing of children is not a consistent social priority. Society assumes considerable responsibility for averting or removing significant harms to children, but less responsibility for children's well-being. This responsibility has been seen primarily as the obligation of parents, not society at large. The religious traditions would remind us that avoiding responsibility for children's well-being, their health in a broad sense, is not optional. They press us not to be content with the status quo, to keep striving at ways to create society in which parents and children receive optimal social support and parents are helped to foster their children's flourishing.
Most of our societal and parental concern about children is aimed at figuring out what we adults must do for our children. Only recently, as Frader points out, have we begun to acknowledge that there really are "mature" minors who, both ethically and legally, should be permitted to make health care decisions on their own behalf. We have been less able, or perhaps willing, to see that children have wisdom, indeed spiritual insight, from which we may learn. Diane Komp suggests that the religious traditions may be way ahead of us. They recognized long ago that children have something to teach. And what they teach is not knowledge as "content" but lived wisdom as a way of being in the world. It is a wisdom of the heart as well as the mind, and is easily missed unless we listen carefully.
