British mother Susan Ingram is fighting what she considers “child cruelty”–but it’s not what you think. Rather than fight abortion or child abuse or sexual abuse, Ingram has started a petition to stop… baby ear piercings.
She released a petition to U.K. Minister for Children, Edward Timpson, saying that ear piercings for babies should be banned and a minimum wage law should be enacted.
“It is a form of child cruelty,” Ingram said, as part of the petition. “Severe pain and fear is inflicted upon infants unnecessarily. It serves no purpose other than to satisfy the parent’s vanity. Other forms of physically harming children are illegal–this should be no different.”
I think most sane people–whether you agree with piercing babies’ ears or not–would consider baby ear piercings to be at all on par with “other forms of physically harming children.” Unlike the physical and emotional scars that children who suffered abuse carry for the rest of their lives, an ear piercing is completely socially acceptable–and many women (and some men) who don’t get ear piercings as a child will at some point of their life. That’s just a part of society.
Of course, logic doesn’t really have much bearing in the world of Susan Ingram–but that hasn’t stopped supporters from lining up behind her.
Some supporters claimed that parents were “inflicting unnecessary pain on a child” or even posited that since “smacking a child is abuse… how come sticking metal rods through their ears is not abuse??!!”
The comments like that go on and on, with a few incredulous voices of reason sticking out among the ridiculousness.
As pleased as we all should be that the women signing this petition were apparently never victims of actual child abuse (and, thankfully, that none of their children were as well), it defies logic that they would take something so trivial and turn it into a saga.
But so is the story of the liberal Left–where aborting a baby at 39 weeks of pregnancy is a laudable right, but giving the same baby just weeks later a routine ear piercing is somehow the worst thing that any of them could imagine ever happening to a child.
There’s no word yet on how seriously Ingram’s petition is being taken by the British government–but, with the Conservative Party having one of their strongest elections in history in 2015, hopefully it’ll go where it belongs: nowhere.
