Babies In Locked Cars

[Whizbang]

This is not intended to be funny.  I have for many years believed that government really messed up in trying to protect children by the over-zealous requirement that small children and babies be placed in restraints in the back seat of vehicles rather than be allowed to be restrained in the front seat.  Yet another incident has occurred where a woman forgot that the baby was in the car seat restraint in the back seat and left the baby with the windows rolled up while she was at work for 8 hours, with obvious consequences.  We, as a nation, have become so zealous about "protecting" our "born" kids that we have removed parental responsibility to the point that accidents such as this are becoming increasingly common.  If these innocent children had been restrained in the front seat, the deaths would not have occurred because the parents would have been sitting beside them and would never have overlooked them.  Government mandated air bags to protect adults are now increasing the risk of killing children by requiring that they be restrained out of direct sight in the back seat because air bags also can kill small people.  My daughter-in-law would pass as one needing to be restrained in the back seat.  She is 4' 7" tall and susceptible to air bag injury at that height.

I speak from experience as to how easy it is to forget.  I once took my elderly mother, now deceased, to the store and forgot that I had taken her, only to have my wife meet me at the driveway when I returned home asking me if I had forgotten something.  The experience was humiliating and was so horrifying to me that I cried over the matter.  PEOPLE FORGET!  Now a federal prosecutor has decided to prosecute a woman who forgot, as though the eternal memory of her agony is not enough punishment.  It sickens me all over again.

What I am proposing sounds callous, but it is still a much better alternative to what is now happening.  Let parents restrain their children in the front seats rather than in the back seats.  Although the risk of injury or even death in an accident may go up, any caring parent would rather take that risk than to know that his/her child was cooked alive because of forgetfulness following compliance with a very dangerously implemented law.