A post-Roe America has work to do. It’s not easy being a kid here.

A Comfort Inn in suburban Maryland will no longer be a home for some of the roughly 1.5 million American kids in public schools who experienced homelessness last year, right?

Surely those who champion the sanctity of life will turn their attention to protecting children beyond the womb who need safe, permanent shelters.

It’s a breeze if you take care of children. Studies show that children born into homelessness are typically underweight, chronically ill and underdeveloped.

America doesn’t care about its children. The evidence is all around us.

“Homelessness is both a symptom and a source of trauma for children, youth and families,” says a policy statement from First Focus on Children, a Washington-based advocacy group. “Half of all homeless school-age children suffer from depression and anxiety. The earlier and longer a child experiences homelessness, the more dangerous it is for their healthy development.”

And even when they are housed and stable, too many children in America are hungry. Do you have space on your signs to talk about this?

“Many of the food queues that formed at the beginning of the pandemic still haven’t gone away, and rising prices are now stretching families’ budgets beyond their limits,” said Children’s Defense Fund director Marian Wright Edelman, who said has been working on America’s food insecurity problems for decades.

It hasn’t improved much.

In 2020, 6.1 million American children went hungry. I’m so glad this is on everyone’s agenda now because a nation that spends $1.5 trillion on the F-35 should feed its kids too. But we can’t stop here, can we?

Unfortunately, a full belly doesn’t always guarantee health in a child’s world. They’re petri dishes and they get sick by the ton.

So while you’re writing your congressmen — remind them — America needs to make paid sick leave mandatory so mom or dad can stay home from work to care for Missy Snotsalot without missing another day of pay and hers Spreading germs around the world.

“Our country’s failure to provide a standard for paid sick leave has never been more evident, and workers and their families are paying the price,” according to the National Partnership for Women and Families. “More than 32 million people – more than one in four private sector workers – cannot earn a single day of paid sick leave. No one should be forced to choose between their health or that of their family and a paycheck.”

Now that we’re all talking about children, it’s time to make affordable, accessible health care a priority, not a political talking point. Furious. Because that was getting tiring. We have an embarrassingly high maternal mortality rate – the highest among wealthy nations. In 2011, the United Nations called it a human rights issue. With more than 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, America is already there a dangerous place to have a baby.

Pregnancy-related deaths skyrocketed in the first year of the pandemic.

Once you have that baby, we need to talk about child care, which is a total patchwork system held together with duct tape and cobwebs — regardless of socioeconomic status. My son, who just graduated from high school, is still on at least one kindergarten waiting list.

That used to work in America. We’ve done it before: successful, comprehensive and high-quality childcare. When all Rosies had to rivet during World War II, the government created a network of universal child care centers to enable all those mothers to work. child care during the war.

child care during the war. We used to do that well.

The children were educated and entertained in centers where a curriculum was designed by academics that maximized best practices in child development. They even sent working moms home with hot dinners so they wouldn’t have to cook after a hard day’s work. Hallelujah we’re going to do this again with all the extra babies we’re going to have!

The American foster care system has more than 400,000 children; about 117,000 of them, many with special needs, are sure to be adopted soon. Right?

Because today’s American youth is also a war child. If an American child managed to avoid starvation and homelessness when Mom is alive and the family has childcare, it’s still dangerous to grow up here.

The #1 child killer in America is gunshots. It’s exciting to know that the people who worked so hard to get abortion criminalized are now dedicated to ensuring the safety of children already born.

Wait. What are you saying?

The people dancing in the streets celebrating their victory aren’t working to make life better, safer and healthier for American children?

We thought it was about the kids.