EDITORIAL - How well do we really know our children?

Two related news items last week attracted scant attention from readers, not only because they were buried in the inside pages where they would not compete with the hot political issues, but because they were hardly news to most people.

One news item involved the early morning discovery of a freshly aborted fetus inside a public elementary school in one of the component cities in Metro Cebu. By the way it was found, it was clear the "delivery" occurred right inside the school the night before.

The other news item involved the latest official statistics that said up to 23 percent of the young people in this country, meaning those between the ages of 15 to 24, are engaging or have engaged in premarital sex.

Those two news items may as well have been written as one since they are clearly part of the other, two elements of the same picture. And while it does not necessarily follow that an abortion is always the result of premarital sex "gone wrong," more often than not it is.

But this is not about the fetus or the premarital sex but the public apathy that has descended on both issues, which is pretty amazing considering that young people 25 years old and below make up more than half the Philippine population.

This means that it is very likely there is a young man or woman belonging to that category in each and every household in this country. This means further that the essence of both stories ought to have been a big issue in every family.

Apparently, it is not. For whatever reason that only sociologists and demographic experts can fully appreciate and comprehend, the twin issues of abortion, or in all likelihood youthful abortion, and premarital sex have come to be accepted as part of modern family life.

Thankfully that, by accepted we still do not mean acceptable but only in the sense that it has become sort of taken for granted. But modern life or not, whether in urban sprawls or in rural domains, deep in our guts we know that is not enough, that it is never all right.

For we are talking here not of strangers in the news whose names do not ring familiar to our ears, we are talking here of a generation that could very well be our daughters and our sons, loved ones in our very own homes.