"Every day we delay meaningful action to regulate environmental chemicals, more children are born into the world pre-poisoned" --Jean-Marie Kauth

“Today [February 12], my beloved Katherine would have been twenty-two years old. She wanted so desperately to live; when she realized death was inevitable, she asked, precociously, ‘But Mommy, don’t I even get to be the average age for men?’  I am miserable missing her every day. Every moment, her absence is a haunting shadow. I see her right now in our kitchen, dancing with her friends in pink and white gowns at her last birthday — our Queen of Hearts. I see her petite form pulling on the knob of the school door every day I drop off my surviving children. I measure her stature in the heights of her friends and see her face in the faces of my students, who now would be mostly younger than she. She remains the smartest, most original, most loving person I have ever known.

“What I want people to remember is that when children are poisoned, when children are diagnosed with these dread diseases, that is forever. Children like my Katherine don’t get a do-over; they don’t get a second chance. It would have been everything for all of us if she had lived, but even if she had survived the chemotherapy, radiation, and dual bone marrow transplants, she would have faced learning difficulties, stunted growth, thinned bones, altered hormones, and likely, future cancers from the treatment.

“The children of Flint do not get a do-over. There is no safe level of lead, and all of them have been exposed. Many of them will have to deal with life-long decreases in intelligence, changes in behavior, and other terrible health effects. For each of them, and for each of their families, that is a tragedy. Children with autism do not get a do-over. The darling children I know with autism are irrevocably altered by their disease, and all the evidence points to an environmental cause, like pesticides or heavy metals, combined with genetics, in processes so complex, we may never fully understand them. The children afflicted by birth defects, auto-immune disease, and asthma never get another chance at a happy, healthy childhood. And every day we delay meaningful action to regulate environmental chemicals, more children are born into the world pre-poisoned...”

For Jean-Marie Kauth's complete article, please click here.