How new laws will affect children and parenting
"Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too—all his lifelong. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions…Suggestions from the State!," Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932.
Brave New World opens inside the Central London Hatchery where babies are not born, but rather “decanted.” We are told by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning how hypnopedia, or the repetition of recorded phrases every night is used to condition children in their sleep. Such conditioning shapes the minds and desires of human beings in the World State. These repeated phrases determine how the child behaves for the rest of his or her life, guiding their decisions and behaviors. Naturally, all the programming comes from the state.
In Huxley’s dystopian future, there are no parents. No mothers or fathers. No brothers or sisters. There are no families and there are no marriages. No one is a son or a daughter. Whereas the population appears to be sterile, sex is trivial. There are no relationships, and despite there being five castes, everyone is considered to be equal. No matter who you are, everyone has an important role to play in service to the World State.
“Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one,” Brave New World.
Now it appears that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), being prodded on by a radical leftist arm of the Chicago Teachers Union, the CORE caucus, has taken Huxley’s warning as an instruction manual. In CORE’s dystopian future — which is now — your children do not belong to you; every child is a ward of the state.
Naturally, there are numerous pieces to this puzzle. (Hat-tip to James Holderman for putting them together). When assembling any large puzzle, it is best to start with the corners and the edges and work your way to the middle.
In 2022, Governor J.B. Pritzker and the Democrats in Springfield quietly snuck through a piece of legislation lowering the age of medical consent in Illinois to 12. As described by CPS in Section 3.1a of the 2023-24 Student Rights & Responsibilities booklet:
“In Illinois, children age 12 and over can give their own permission (consent) to receive specific health services (including sexual health services, and mental health care).This means a parent or guardian does not have to be notified in order for a student to get this care. Also, for students who have public health insurance (called Medicaid), no bill/explanation of the care can be sent to the parent or guardian.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if your sixth-grade daughter wants to have an abortion, CPS is happy to facilitate her undergoing the procedure. More troubling, you may never even know about it. Given the rate of sexual assaults within CPS, you can be assured that if your daughter was raped at school at the hands of a faculty or staff member and became pregnant, then CPS will do its utmost to prevent parents from learning the truth.
Sadly however, this is not the end of it. In sharp contrast, it is just the beginning.
A new law in Illinois, the Wellness Checks in Schools Program Act, is going to mandate annual mental health screenings of all students starting this fall. While the details are still being fleshed out, the plan is that every student will be required to have a one-on-one interview with a school employee every year. No one has yet to determine the training requirements for these school employees, but we are told the interviews will be conducted by “counselors.”
It is important to keep in mind that anything shared with these “counselors” will likely be considered Personal Health Information. So if your child is 12 or older, parents have no legal right to know what was discussed in these interviews.
While other schools are scrambling to develop and implement their plan for mental health screenings, CPS is a little bit ahead of the curve. For the last several years CPS has provided Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital with access to students to perform mental health research and evaluations.
Under normal circumstances, it would be reassuring to have one of the premier medical institutions dedicated to the care of children performing evaluations on students at CPS. However, these are not normal circumstances.
It just so happens that Lurie Children’s Hospital is at the forefront of what counts for “gender affirming care” in this country. “Affirming” is an interesting choice of words. It means: Something declared to be true; a positive statement or judgment. In other words, the child is right. The role of the adult is to affirm the opinion of the child.
If your rambunctious seven-year-old son believes he is Superman and wants to jump off the roof, under the rules of “affirming care” parents should allow it. If your precocious tween thinks she is a dentist, parents should go ahead and let her pull that tooth for you.
In January of last year, a group of physicians affiliated with Lurie Children’s Hospital touted the results of a research paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine. A statement of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, January 18, 2023, claimed:
“Transgender and non-binary youth experienced significant improvement in appearance congruence (or the degree to which physical characteristics align with [perceived] gender) and sustained improvements in depression and anxiety over two years after starting treatment with gender-affirming hormones, according to a multicenter U.S. study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.”
There are at least three major issues with the study.
First, the idea that someone with gender dysmorphia would feel better about themselves after taking counter sex hormones is not novel. Consider that there is the placebo effect; people feel good taking pills that they believe will make them feel better. Then there is the affirmation effect; crazy people feel better when they are told they are not crazy. If your five-year-old wants a cookie, they are happy after you give it to them, at least for a little while.
Second, there is the question of timing: Researchers only studied the subjects for two years. What occurred after was not addressed in the study. How many went on to commit suicide, or become drug addicts? We are not talking about 85-year-old cancer patients here. We are talking about adolescents who have their whole lives ahead of them. We should make sure that they were happy, and well-adjusted, for more than two years.
Finally, there was no control group. This to say, researchers only studied patients who received hormones. Where is the comparison to a patient group that did not receive hormones? (Hint: There is one.)
When you put the puzzle pieces together it makes an unholy image.
Make no mistake about it, the state is coming after your children. The state is going to interview them as it sees fit, draw its own conclusions as to their mental health, and provide medical care without your consent.
Remember: “Everyone belongs to everyone else.”
