Nebraska, what becomes of thy children?

Parents in Nebraska are hurrying to dump their children at emergency rooms before the "safe haven" law is clarified to limit these abandonments to include only infants. The parents, who can anonymously donate their failures to an already stressed and overcrowded system of social services, are presumably doing this so that these problem children can have a "better life" by being moved from one foster home to another. Meanwhile, their rejected offspring, old enough to be secure in the knowledge that Mommy and Daddy did not want them anymore, can spend the rest of their difficult youth coming to terms with being part of a welfare system that has neither the time nor the resources to monitor their upbringing, or even the personnel to monitor the foster homes in which they are placed with any degree of regularity.

Get real, folks. The people who are actually getting a "better life" out of all this are the biological parents, who get to drop off all their responsibilities at the emergency room front desk, then walk away and have a life without all the unpleasantness and expense of raising the children that they conceived. They won't have to be concerned with the annoyance of looking into programs that might help these children, or waste their time taking parenting classes, or learning how to deal with children with behavioral difficulties. They won't need to lose any sleep wondering if they will be able to get a babysitter, or if they might have to take the kids on vacation with them. They can simply throw up their hands, say "I give up. YOU take them!" and leave the kids with strangers. These kind of "parents" are probably the best argument I can think of for birth control.

Children are not a throwaway item. They are not a disposable commodity, they are not toys to be discarded when they are broken or when you become tired of them. If you can't handle the adult responsibilities involved in raising a child into an adult, then don't breed them in the first place. And, if you stupidly go forth and multiply with no thought of the consequences, don't try to rationalize your own selfishness by saying you're dumping your kids so THEY can have a better life.