Concern for the unborn, not so much for the born but homeless

I don't fret over my children's learning waning over spring break — sometimes it seems Elliott and Miriam are too smart for their own good — but I do try to keep them busy, especially in activities that don't require the Wii. Yet our spring break has provided us with an education all the same, though not on academic subjects. Instead my children learned a painful lesson about current Minnesota values.

Early on the first Sunday of break, our family found ourselves inside the quiet St. Paul skyway system, eagerly awaiting the 9 a.m. opening of the Minnesota Children's Museum. Elliott and I left Miriam and their dad to wait in line while we wandered in search of an open coffee shop.

Not far from the museum, another line was forming outside the skyway McDonald's. These adults were accompanied by rolling suitcases or plastic bags, not small children, and all bore weary expressions of bone-deep exhaustion.

"Why are they carrying all that stuff?" Elliott asked. "Are they traveling?"

"Not exactly," I replied. I hoped I could delay a discussion of homelessness until I had a latte in my hand, but then we came to a skyway that was not only closed, it was the napping spot of a dirt-smudged man, his head resting on a stuffed Target bag. Elliott stopped and asked what on earth the man was doing there.

"He's there," I said, "because it's too cold to sleep outside."

And so began a discussion of homelessness in Minnesota, tailored to the understanding of an 11-year-old. I told him that for a complex tangle of reasons, including entrenched poverty and a frayed social net, there were hundreds of people in the Twin Cities without homes. I didn't know until I did my own research that the actual number of homeless Minnesotans is closer to 9,000, according to the Wilder Research Center. I mentioned that many of the homeless in our community were children, like him — but I didn't know Wilder had found that children make up nearly half our state's homeless population.

Though Elliott is now a tween, already mimicking the studied carelessness of his adolescent idols, he still has a child's sense of injustice. "That is SO WRONG," he observed, once out of the sleeping man's earshot. I told him I agreed.

The next day, I received word from my colleagues in the reproductive rights community about a hearing on HF 936, the so-called Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. I packed a bag of snacks and dragged my kids on another St. Paul field trip. They were the only children present as legislators argued over the bill's actual purpose: to define a person, for reasons for protection under Minnesota law.

While Miriam chomped a stick of gum and read a comic book, members of the House Civil Law Committee bickered with the witnesses and each other over whether life begins at conception, whether the truth can be decided by majority vote, and whether Soul Asylum should be summoned to testify. I'm kidding about the last bit, though Rep. John Lesch, DFL-St. Paul, did offer up one of the band's lyrics to make a point about opinion vs. fact: "The right thing changes from state to state."

Elliott usually asks to play Angry Birds on my phone as soon as he's placed in a room full of grown-ups, but to my surprise he watched attentively as a representative of the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life testified that fetuses were "part of our human family," and that their vulnerability obligated the state to protect them. The committee chair, Rep. Torrey Westrom, R-Elbow Lake, insisted upon referring to a fetus that could not survive outside a woman's womb as an "infant," a "baby" or a "child," whether at 20 weeks' gestation or two, as though it were interchangeable with my comics-reading daughter or my fascinated son.

I leaned over to Elliott and whispered: "Do you think the people we saw in the skyway yesterday are part of our human family, too?"

He looked at me like I had just lost my mind. "Duh," he said. 'Of course they are."

"So why aren't these important people talking about THEM, do you think?"

Elliott cracked his gum. "Because they smell bad?" I nodded. "Because they are ugly and no one wants to look at them?" I nodded again. Elliott shook his head and muttered, "That is SO WRONG."

Lesson learned.

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Shannon Drury, president of Minnesota NOW, is a writer, at-home parent and community activist. She writes a regular column for the Minnesota Women's Press, with additional work appearing in HipMama, Literary Mama and Skirt magazines. She blogs at www.theradicalhousewife.com and is a source in MPR's Public Insight Network.

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