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scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2026-09-23 02:34 pm
The Big Idea: Mary G. Thompson
As the great Whitney Houston once sang, I believe the children are our future — but in Precious Children, author Mary G. Thompson posits a very different future with some very different children… and some very different stakes.
MARY G. THOMPSON:
What if you could guarantee that your precious child would never die? What parent, if they had the means, wouldn’t do everything possible to protect their child from all the dangers of the world, especially if those dangers were growing, if other people’s children were dying at alarming rates? And what if you could help society along the way, allowing people who couldn’t have children of their own to share in the joy of being a parent?
Having yourself cloned four thousand times and adopting those children out to other families sounds like an act of charity, a benevolent gift from those who have to those who have not. If you need to take one or two of those children to provide a host body for the consciousness of your child, surely the hand of the moral compass falls toward good.
But what if you are one of the children who has been promised that your life will be saved, that you will be backed up in case of the death of your body, but you know that the technology to transfer those backed up memories doesn’t work exactly as advertised? Or, worse, what if you are one of the children who was created only to be adopted out, who must watch another child who is exactly the same be raised with immense wealth and protection from death, while you are left to suffer and die and sacrifice your own body?
The big idea of Precious Children is that what you think you know about your power, your moral identity, or your own children may not be true. Humans are capable of weaving intricate psychological protective webs to convince themselves that they are good, that they are smart, that they are in control. We are capable of choosing which truths to see and of convincing ourselves that what we most desire is possible.
Nothing is more important to human beings than our children, and yet whose children are precious, and under what circumstances, is very much in dispute today. In the near future I posit in Precious Children, the trend away from community and toward nuclear-family enclaves has continued, and the wealthy are the most able to separate themselves from others. With social services in decline, every family, rich or poor, must fend for themselves. And children without strong and/or wealthy parents are left unprotected by a legal system that is not too different from today’s.
I am an advocate for the rights of children. In my opinion, rights such as basic needs, education, and bodily autonomy should flow to the child and not the parent. Our legal system often treats children as property: children must abide by custody agreements, attend schools chosen by parents, and even endure or be denied medical treatments based on their parents’ choices. Another big idea in Precious Children is that parents don’t know their children as well as they think they do; they often project their own beliefs and needs onto their children rather than seeing their children for who they are.
But children are people just like adults, with interiority, needs, and knowledge. Sometimes they know things that adults don’t, and they have the same incentives to fight for their lives. Any time a system is designed to benefit one group, the people who are disadvantaged will rebel.
If you must kill a child to save a child, you may not get the child you were expecting. Technology can do amazing things, and money can buy technology, but nothing can teach you what you refuse to understand. Inside each of our minds, there is a fight: in Precious Children, the fight may be literally against another person for control of a body, or it may be your own denial wrestling with the truth. No firewall is perfect, and in every fight you must pick a side—and you make the choice at your own peril.
Precious Children: Amazon|Barnes &Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s