Choking children with smoke is not a right

As our elected representatives gather to pass laws that will affect our lives, the range of subjects is enormous. However some laws should be more important than others. Bills dealing with life and death, sickness and health and children and abuse should take precedence.

Limiting children’s exposure to secondhand smoke is one of those simple but important pieces of legislation. A bill was introduced last year that dictated a fine for smoking in a car in the presence of children. There was no language that pulled the child from the family nor anything about calling parents wicked for smoking. It just recognized that secondhand smoke, especially concentrated in a car, is harmful and dangerous to children and should be stopped.

The majority of representatives did not see it that way. There were speeches about parental rights or the invasion of government into the sanctity of the home. These principles I support, but the application in this case dirties the virtue behind those concepts.

We have rights with responsibilities. We have freedom of speech except in such cases as yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. Our right to swing our arms in the air ends at someone else’s nose.

Further, the rights of the parents terminate at the point of abusing a child. This is well established. This is good law; it is good social policy; it is something that all legislators support. They write the laws that reflect the community’s outrage at the pain of the victims and the betrayal by their parents who are supposed to protect.

Therefore, our law creators must understand that exposure to tobacco smoke is hurtful; it is abusive when imposed upon a child who has no choice. It damages all who inhale, even those not holding the cigarette. The surgeon general clearly reports the effects of secondhand smoke. There is an abundance of studies with important conclusions. These are divided between those conditions “where the evidence is sufficient to infer a causal relationship” and “the evidence is suggestive but not sufficient to infer a causal relationship.”

The third group is the evidence is inadequate to conclude anything.

The cases where the data say the damage is causal are bad enough, but when one gets into the suggestive it is truly damning. Leukemia, lymphomas and childhood brain tumors are in the suggestive group.

The facts demonstrate exposure to cigarette smoke increases crib death or sudden infant death syndrome, wheezing, coughing, phlegm, ear infections, pneumonia, decline in lung function and breathlessness.