Culture of Life Hates Children

Back on my old blog I did a number of posts on the culture of life. I haven’t really done any at ScienceBlogs, however, today I feel the need to rant. Eschaton has been following a story of a DHS raid on a meat packing plnat in Colorado. The reason for the raids keeps changing. Today the DHS is saying it is to break up an identity theft ring – even though only 65 of the 1282 people arrested have been charged with identity theft related charges. How is this identity theft? From TPMmuckraker:

“[H]undreds of these illegal aliens may have illegally assumed the identities of U.S. citizens,” the press release goes on the explain, “and improperly used their Social Security numbers and other identity documents in order to gain employment at Swift facilities.”

Since when is having a fake ID identity theft? Unfotunately, there is a human cost to this action on the part of DHS. Firedoglake points out that many of these 1282 people had children – one mother was in the process of nursing her baby and has been separated from the child. From Firedoglake:

And, in one case, a mother who was nursing her child is dragged off and cannot be located, while the child is left to deal with the consequences of being weaned against it’s will by governmental agents. Which, as someone who has breastfed a child, is not something that should be done aburptly — and can have serious health consequences for the child, considering those first few months of breastfeeding provide the best portion of immunity protection and DHA for the child’s developing brain. It can be incredibly difficult to get a nursing child to switch to a bottle — which can result in very adverse health consequences for the baby at a time when nutrition is crucial. Plus, if the mother and child are not reunited, and soon, the mom’s milk will dry up — not exactly an easy, pain-free process, let me tell you, when you have to deal with an abrupt change like this — and the potential for her being able to even nurse her child after a few days of this goes down substantially. Stress can also have substantial adverse consequences.

Nice to see family values on display by the DHS…But there is more:

If they were truly concerned with these childrens’ welfare, they would have coordinated with local authorities and social services supervisors so that mechanisms were in place for temporary foster care placements and other service implementation, including the mound of paperwork that will now need to be processed to get these kids medical cards, temporary food and clothing assistance and other help — because they are US citizens and CHILDREN, and ought not be simply left standing outside their homes with no one to care for them. That is unconscionable and yet another example of piss poor planning by the DHS. Heckuva job, Mikey!
Beyond that, though, background checks, priors checks and other considerations will need to be taken into account for adults who are, at least temporarily anyway, caring for these children who have been left behind. The last thing you want is for these kids to be taken in by some seemingly caring adult…who happens to have a long history of pedophelia or violent tendencies or what have you. (Yes, I have been down this road before in abuse and neglect cases…and you do not even want to know what can happen to children in a placement that turns out to be a nightmare.)

An even bigger problem is that no one knows exactly how many children are missing their parents because of this raid, nor do we know how many of the people arrested are actually american citizens. None of the officials at the meat packing plant, however, were arrested. Merry Christmas!
So, what does this tell us about the culture of life and the family values of those responsible? To me it says they are a bunch of hypocritical scum. One of the first things the Democrats need to do, come January, is reign in this kinds of heinous excesses on the part of DHS…