NBC TV showed a clip of U.S. Sen. Rand Paul defending parents who refuse measles vaccination for their children because "the state doesn't own your children, parents own the children." He used the word, "own." That's what he said.
Actually, here in America, parents do not "own" their children. As parents, we have the major responsibility for our children's health and well-being and we have substantial rights to decide how to raise them. But parental rights are not absolute, and children are not property to be treated as a parent pleases. Children cannot be sold, beaten or sexually abused, even if a parent decided to do those things, for example.
Children are not owned but have individual rights including the right to remain free of infection, suffering or death by exposure to a preventable disease. One would hope that Senator Paul, a doctor, a man who apparently has ambitions to be president of the United States, would have the moral courage to acknowledge publicly what he knows to be true — that measles vaccinations are safe and effective — instead of pandering to the misguided notions of a few voters for political advantage.
Bradley Alger, Baltimore