Child Mortality rate in Iraq is staggering.

Child mortality in Iraq has spiralled because of the tense security situation, deteriorating health services and lack of medical supplies, say experts.

According to a report released in May 2007 by aid agency Save the Children, “Iraq’s child mortality rate has increased by a staggering 150 per cent since 1990, more than any other country.”

The report, entitled State of the World’s Mothers 2007, said that some 122,000 Iraqi children - the equivalent of one in eight - died in 2005, before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of the deaths were among newborn babies in their first month of life.

I am always so confused by how zealous some people can be about the abortion issue (I just saw some picketers outside of a clinic yesterday on my way home from work), but remain unfazed by news of children in other countries dying by the thousands.

Is it because they are not American children?

Is it because they are not Christian children?

ALL children need the protection of the adults around them, and that includes the adults living across the oceans from them. And that especially includes the adults whose country's policies are killing them!

We have a moral obligation to care for these people whose world we have decimated. We should be providing health clinics where these parents can bring their children. If I were to support a surge it would be a surge of humanitarian aid. And if these clinics needed to be protected by our military, then I would have no problem with that as well. But we must do something to ease their suffering.

Every time I see this kind of article I just wonder what happened to our soul? How can one of the most humanitarian countries on the planet have allowed this holocaust to have been visited upon these people? Are we really that frightened?