But the changes wrought by the sexual revolution that O’Toole celebrates have created new sanctioned tyrants — and children are their subjects. In the egalitarian future that he wants, parents are no longer forbidden by taboo, superstition, or law from selling their children’s claims in a flesh market desperate for orphans. Mothers are made free to abort their children in the womb. And the normalization of market-created children puts poor biological parents at risk of losing their children to richer strangers deemed more “competent” to act in the best interests of the child.
Baby Marie was left in a shopping bag by the side of the road, and the authorities are scrambling in blind, astonished ignorance to rebuild a family for her. This is the perfect image for a society that has let the market and state usurp the role of mother and father — in the name of freedom, and according to commercial logic.
And Baby Marie, to be sure, was perfectly free herself, sitting in that shopping bag: free from the authority of tradition that put parents and their children in the same home; free from the taboos that held families together; free to be abused by strangers; and free to die alone in a world that doesn’t really care either way.
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