Stop Telling People to Have Kids

Concerned with dropping "fertility rates", there are people who encourage others to have (more) children. This is one of millions of examples of why that's a terrible idea.

Hannah Fry reported in the Left Angeles Times...

The city of Napa and Napa County will pay $5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the father and grandmother of a 3-year-old girl who was tortured and killed in 2014.

The City of Napa and the Count of Napa. That means the taxpayers of Napa. That's because they were supposed to somehow only have government officials and employees who would have prevented this.

Kayleigh Slusher died in a Napa apartment in January 2014 after being neglected and abused by her mother, Sarah Krueger, and her mother’s boyfriend, Ryan Warner. Both were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, according to court records.

They should have gotten the death penalty.

After Kayleigh’s death, the girl’s body was stuffed in a duffel bag and stored in the freezer for three days before she was placed in her bed, where police ultimately found her. The girl’s cause of death was multiple blunt-force injuries to her head, torso and extremities. She had suffered a broken rib and damage to her small intestine and was covered in bruises before she died, authorities said at the time.

Don't you tell me that lethal injection is "cruel and unusual". The people who wrote and adopted that phrase into our Constitution would have done far worse to her murderers.

Kayleigh’s father, Jason Slusher — who was serving a prison sentence when his daughter was killed — and her grandmother, Robin Slusher, filed a lawsuit against the city and county in 2015 alleging that despite obvious signs of abuse and neglect, police and child welfare officials did not intervene or remove Kayleigh from her mother’s home.

Why was her father in prison? Was he wrongly convicted? Or was Sarah Krueger just that good at picking men? Whichever it was, Jason made a terrible mistake in knocking up Sarah. And his mother... how did she raise that guy? All that being said, I do recognize that there are legal principles that apply here that say they could be rotten people (not saying they are, but they COULD be) and they still have standing to get big bucks because of what happened to their daughter/granddaughter.

The lawsuit said that in the three weeks before Kayleigh died, Napa police and child services had been called to the girl’s home five times regarding possible abuse and drug use.

When officers visited the home, they “would have seen that she was covered in bruises and in excruciating pain from a broken rib and the intestinal infection that was slowly killing her,” but they did nothing, according to a statement from Slusher’s attorneys.

Is anything being done to the people who responded to these calls? Demotions? Loss of jobs? Criminal prosecutions? Stuff like that has been pursued in SoCal after a highly publicized torture-murder of a boy. Or is Joe Taxpayer the only person who's paying?

I have no idea if the responding personnel were simply callous or jaded or secretly hate little girls, or if they made genuine mistakes, or if they were sincere but completely incompetent. I wasn't there. I wasn't in their heads. It certainly looks like they failed to take action when they clearly should have. It's a terrible position to be in. If you make mistakes, kids die or you take kids out of a loving home, at least for a while.

But let's not forget who put that little girl in that position in the first place. Her own parents. When parents can't or won't protect their children instead of torturing and murdering them, how do we expect a bureaucracy to do it effectively on a consistent basis? Answer: It can't. Which means horror stories are inevitable.

Stop telling people to have children. They really shouldn't, unless they're prepared and willing to be good parents.