An Uninspiring Story

How many hours before a mother realizes that her 2 year old child is gone? This is the question on my mind right now as an incident near our place involves a 2 year old girl who fell in the Pasig River and was seen floating by the tanods 8 hours later. If this is your child, would you it take you even an hour to notice that she’s gone? How busy would you be not to notice? I pose this question as I cannot believe that any parent would be this careless. I live in an area in Sampaloc where one’s pastime includes people watching and tong-its. Where people wake up to mind everybody else’s business and gossip like they’re an expert on their neighbors’ lives while a lot of us work our ass off to make decent money.

I cannot excuse ignorance. Being a parent is a lifetime responsibility. You cannot turn your back on your children no matter what pathetic excuse you have. It’s bad enough that you allow them to go hungry, stay unclothed and not go to school. But to let them die because you are busy doing nothing is appalling. The most disgusting of it all is the seemingly unfeeling way that people look at the situation. They see a scene like this and just shrug their shoulders and continue living. Not bothering to question why it happened and who is to blame. Personally, I still can’t get over the fact that weeks after this, the parents could just go back to their normal, uncaring life of loitering the streets and making babies at night. Shouldn’t they be punished? If we are so keen on protecting fetuses regardless of its condition, why not more so on already living children? If we condemn women for aborting their children for fear of not being able to give them good lives then how about these unfeeling, insensible parents? It is unforgivable that we allow parents like this to continue to exist while criticizing those who make practical choices. I do not endorse abortion. I believe that it is morally and legally wrong. And I applaud people who continually fight for natural contraception. But sometimes we have to choose the lesser evil in a no-win situation. Rather than allow them to have hordes of children and lead miserable lives, continuing the cycle of poverty, prostitution and crime, I think that they deserve the benefit of at least having options. If these parents were given a choice, the power to at least be informed of their choices, I believe we could lessen incidents like this.

For as long as we continue to let unprepared, immature and irresponsible people be parents then we will continue to be fishing out children from rivers from now on.

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