NEWS
Abortion debate eclipses a child abuse epidemic, USA Today, 20 December 2004

Police have charged Kenya Hill, the girl's mother, with aggravated child abuse and first-degree murder. Kai was killed by blunt-force trauma to the head, according to the autopsy.

Hill is 27 and has six children. Police who went to the motel said her oldest son, a 5-year-old boy, also had been beaten the day Kai died. Then there is this gut-wrenching detail: The police said that when they showed up at the scene, the boy still had the imprint of the shoe his mother allegedly beat him with on his face and head.

Law enforcement officials said this wasn't the first time Kai showed up on their radar screen. Two years ago, Hill and her 25-year-old husband, Nathan Gadison, pleaded no contest to charges of beating Kai, who was a year old at the time.

Too many cases

What happened to Kai didn't generate a lot of media attention outside of Florida — but it should have. Nearly 900,000 children in this country were abused or neglected in 2002, the last year for which such data are available. The vast majority of these youngsters (more than 80%) were victimized by their parents, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families.
Even so, when it comes to children, the great political debate in this country is over what to do about abortion, not child abuse. Much to the detriment of children already born, it is the ideological tug of war over the unborn that dominates our national discourse.
Elected officials are defined by the position they take on abortion. U.S. Supreme Court and other federal court nominees are either embraced or harangued for the side they are expected to take on this issue from the bench.
Largely lost in all of this national wrangling over abortion is the awful fate that too often befalls children like Kai — and that's hard for me to understand.
Both sides in the abortion debate ought to view as common ground the goal of keeping troubled parents from having children, or — failing that — helping them to cope with the stress of parenting.
Instead, the dogma of the left and right seems to get in the way of a rational response to the nation's child abuse problem — a failing that Frances Kissling, the president of Catholics for a Free Choice, acknowledges.
While abortion opponents usually place a strong emphasis on abstinence-only sex education, abortion-rights supporters are almost exclusively focused on a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, Kissling says.
Bottom line: The children
"It would seem to me that both people who are pro-choice and pro-life consider themselves to care about children," she says. But, she adds, neither side is doing enough to reduce the level of child abuse in this country.
That must change.
At the very least, women like Hill need parenting classes. Giving birth to six children in quick succession without sufficient means of supporting them is not only bad judgment, it also likely fueled the conditions that led to her acts of child abuse.
Forty-eight percent of all pregnancies are unintended, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit group focused on reproductive rights, reported in January 1998. While 47% of these "unintended pregnancies" were aborted and 13% ended in miscarriages, 40% of them produced live births.
It's safe to say that these children are born into — at best — difficult circumstances. Does this mean that they'll suffer at the hands of their parents? Not necessarily. But the challenges and anxiety that these families will face often trickle down to the children. This too often means child abuse — either emotional, physical or both.
One act of child abuse is too many. But 900,000 in a single year ought to be viewed as a national crisis.

I don't know when or how the ongoing fight over abortion will be resolved, but I hope both sides in that struggle will come together to save other at-risk children from the fate Kai Gadison met.
DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.

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