The Value of Children?

At my age there is little you haven't heard before, although there are certainly parts of things that I might have not known. I just finished reading Dan's recent post at Cerulean Sanctum and I have to admit he has brought up some things that I didn't know. The core of the post is the transition of the role of children from the 19th to the 21st century. The interesting point is the fact that children were needed when the farm and factory were kings. But recently, children are not needed to support their families (except perhaps in the inner city), so what is their function then? I was thinking (although Dan didn't mention abortion in his post) that abortion might be one result of this phenomena--that is--children are not needed so much today. Today, unless you either want children, or a woman gets pregnant and decides NOT to have an abortion out of guilt, religions reasons, etc., why not have an abortion. But if children are needed, as the Romanians were told by their communist ruler in the last years of the cold war, to build up the society, then children are born--wanted or not. Thousands of them ended up in Romanian orphanages, mainly because the parents couldn't afford to take care of them. But in other countries, like China, where there are too many people, parents are told to limit children to one or two. Abortion then becomes the norm. I think this is importan --- to see the roots of abortion, rather than to present arguments that really don't mean much to those who either believe in abortions and/or get abortions. Anyway, lots to think about after reading Dan's post. I hope you will go over to his blog right now and read his post, Youth Ministry Problem--Part 2.