In an editorial, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch says the newspaper’s troubling investigation of a willful lack of government regulation of daycare providers prompts a common-sense question: “Should it be the public policy of the state of Missouri to do as much to protect the lives of young children as it does for unborn children? Or, to put it another way, if we can’t agree on when life begins, can we at least agree that infants shouldn’t be allowed to die without lawmakers giving a damn?”
Last week, the paper published a three-part series that examined the deaths of infants while under the supervision of child-care providers. Since 2007, at least 45 children in Missouri have died for reasons other than natural causes while under the supervision of day-care providers, most of them unlicensed, in a state that has some of the most lax child-care regulations in the nation. The editorial continued, “Compounding these tragedies is the abject failure of Missouri lawmakers who, over the over the past few years, have refused to pass very basic child-care regulations that would allow state or local officials to shut down illegal facilities or homes.().And there is very little the state can do to either stop the deaths or inform other parents about them.”