Dialogue: Parental fitness should be tested

By ROANNE PARKER

There should be a rule that you can't breed if you are stupid. Why let genes filter down willy-nilly if they aren't worth the DNA strand they are written on? If you are too brainless, careless or uninterested to care for your children, you can't have any.

Child abuse can be defined simply as getting too much of the wrong kind of attention and/or not enough of the right kind. It scars for life, however long or short that life may be.

I have been stewing over yet another child abuse story. It involved lack of care that in the real world - that is if an adult had inflicted the same treatment on another adult rather than a child - would have surely resulted in a criminal conviction. In this case, only the child got the life, and death, sentence.

It is interesting to ponder how much overworked and underpaid case workers can achieve when a child is exposed for years to an environment which belittles and devalues them.

I wonder if we can accept that while accountability is crucial, we shouldn't point the finger at the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

Maybe after a certain degree of abuse, whatever the point of intervention, it wouldn't have helped. Maybe the child would have died anyway, maybe hit by a car while he played in traffic, maybe in a fight, or at his own hand 10 years later because he knows no one gives a toss whether he lives or not.

Hopelessness, and the anarchic hatred it produces, isn't hard to understand. Hands up who else fears for their children, knowing they are joining a world where they will live side by side with the unloved offspring of losers whose only legacy is the ability to not give a toss.

And what of the mothers? In the case of neglect or cruelty, it's clear that they didn't deserve those children they have hurt and they don't deserve the rest of them that they will no doubt have.

People who care little for themselves, and let life and pregnancy just happen over and over again, should not be able to flick the immeasurable cost of their sloth on to those children, and on to the rest of society.

If you can't be bothered with the effort it takes to prevent a pregnancy that you are in no fit state to be responsible for, how do you think you are going to cope with the years and years of slog that follows?

You can't just blame your own sad past and sit on your backside, having little souls delivered into your life of indifference.

And you certainly can't stick your hand out for my taxes to pay you to stay at home. My taxes are busy enough paying fat guys to sit in diggers holding me up with road works on the way to work.

I propose a solution. When you are a 12-year-old girl at intermediate school, you get an injection with the antibody needed to prevent German measles, saving your future unborn children from the horrible effects this infection can cause.

So here's the idea. When you stick your arm out for the rubella shot, you get a double whammy of inoculation - no German measles and no fertility.

That's it - so simple it is amazing it hasn't been touted before. Think of the savings we could make in the justice and welfare systems.

We'll do away with the entire menstruation/ovulation thing for a few years as a bonus, saving years of embarrassment at having tampons in your school bag.

Then you need to pass a warrant of parental fitness before you get the antidote delivered to restore your fertility.

What's so radical about that? You need a licence to have a dog. And let's test for really tricky stuff. Not just the absence of drug dependency but the presence of mind to know what you are getting yourself into.

Not only that you can hold down a job, but that you realise that you can't make a school lunch with just a flat bottle of Coke and an empty pizza box in the fridge. That while it's cool to kick a ball to a child, it's not cool to kick a child at a wall.

In the final test, you would have to show a total understanding of the concept that it's a privilege to have a little somebody to love you unconditionally. And you are a bastard if you take the love to make yourself feel better and then hurt them, just because you can.