I read little about children in the media drama around Roe v. Wade.

On any given day, almost 424,000 children are living in the U.S. foster care system and the number has been rising. Many of these children are unwanted. Will Idaho’s unwanted children numbers go up if Idaho’s anti-abortion bill SB1309 becomes law? Over 122,000 of these children are eligible for adoption and they will wait, on average, four years for an adoptive family. More than 69,000 unwanted youth in U.S. foster care live in institutions, group homes and other environments, instead of with a family. In 2019, 20,455 (8 percent) aged out of the U.S. foster care system, and a majority left without the emotional and financial support necessary to succeed in life that other children can receive within a family.

Who speaks for the unwanted child? What happens to unwanted children? Studies show that one in four will be incarcerated within two years of leaving the foster system, and over one-fifth will become homeless at some time after age 18. In addition, only 58 percent obtain their high school diploma by age 19, compared to the national average of 87 percent for non-foster youth.

To be wanted and accepted is a primary safety need of every person. We cannot progress far in our survival needs unless we satisfy basic needs of having connection with someone who safely helps us feel wanted and included. We are born and designed to be part of a family and a community, and find our place within these and with a sense of safety about life.

Psychologists tell us that the unwanted child essentially perceives or experiences their earliest life, from conception till birth and beyond, as a hostile reception where they were rejected not just in their own nature and humanity, but for existing at all. The unwanted child may feel threatened and unsafe and may have wanted to die rather than continue in life.

A former foster youth from Colorado said, "If you jump from foster home to foster home to foster home, if they just randomly move you … like they did us, it's just like, it throws you completely off balance and then like if you were feeling secure then you are completely insecure because you don't know where you are at or who you are with."

If there is some agreement that creating and sustaining unwanted children is not a good thing, then what are policy and action choices? My working theory on helping all children to be wanted identifies three options: prevent unwanted pregnancy; terminate unwanted pregnancy; or give loving care to develop and sustain a wanted child.

We know that unwanted pregnancy can be avoided by: sexual abstinence, surgical procedures like vasectomy and tubal ligation, birth control devices like condoms and medication, and other means. Little pro-birth rhetoric in the news speaks to the role of men in preventing unwanted pregnancy, yet in most cases men have played a role. Better education around how pregnancy happens and how unwanted pregnancy can be avoided appears effective. According to CDC reports the abortion rate in the United States continues to fall and is at its lowest level since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

I know no one who cheers abortion. I hope that the debate about abortion can evolve to place more emphasis on preventing an unwanted child situation. Unwanted children are substantially as voiceless as an unborn. Planned Parenthood work has helped reduce unwanted pregnancy and abortion as it delivers vital reproductive health care, sex education and information to millions of women, men and young people worldwide. What is the role and responsibility of men to create only wanted children? What are government, faith group and nonprofit organizations’ roles and responsibilities to facilitate adoption? Can the abortion debate lead to only wanted children?

Larry Gebhardt of Pocatello is a retired Navy captain and past president of the Pocatello Centennial Rotary Club.