I'm pro-life and I would not let my 10 year old see this film - nor do I want him to see pictures of lynchings and genocide. 16 sounds about right.
What you can do for younger children is show them pictures of babies in the womb, teach fetal development. That way they will know what is being killed in an abortion.
And if they see pictures of aborted children later - they will see more than blood, that might be all the ignorant see.
Mrs VS
Excellent post. Teaching a respect for life is so important at an early age.
I agree, Mrs. VS.
The emotions are good, but they have to be cultivated carefully, so that emotions like joy, wonder, fascination, awe, reverence, courage and respect will be strong enough to counteract ugliness and brutality. It is very important for little children to be impressed with the beauty of human life FIRST, before they are exposed to horror.
That's one of the main reasons I strongly support home-schooling: the child's parents are best suited to knowing the child's level of maturity.
All this does is instill at a very young age a callous indifference to human life. One of the greatest indicators of psychopathic behavior in adulthood is that of cruelty to animals in adolescence or earlier childhood.
However, the protest would be made that the children are taught to have a reverence for animals, such as the seven-finned paisely striped ditch minnow, or the three-toed yellow-bellied mosquito, and that swamps and trees are sacrosanct living things entitled to legal protection under the penalty of law. If somebody cuts down trees, or fills in a swamp, on their own property, they rightfully can (and should) be sent to jail as the heinous and egregious lawbreakers they are.
However, a fetus is merely a parasitical clump of inconvenient tissue that can, and should, be excised at a whim under the pretense that the womb being part and parcel of the mother's body, and that an abortion is nothing more than a liposuction procedure for weight loss. It is utterly irrelevent that this mass of cells, the fetus, could develop into the next Einstein, or creator of the next wonder drug.
No, such thinking espouses a "love Nature" mentality, a cult of Gia if you will, that decries the "artificialities" whith which Man has spoiled 'Nature'; the beaver's dam is a part of Nature, but Man's artificacts are an abomination to it. This is actually nothing more than an attempt to instill a self-loathing for self and one's species. The "hidden" contradiction of this prima-facie absudity goes much deeper however.
Some time ago I heard Ted Nugent talk about his encounter with some animal activists while he was visiting his newly born son in the hospital. After a short trip in the elevator, the door opened and Nugent began to exit, and the woman that shared the elevator that rode with him said to him, "You know, I respect your opionion and all that, but I'm really sorry that you feel that way about hunting animals." After a short exchange, Nugent presented a
hypothetical situation:
"Supposing you were driving down the road, and you witnessed a young boy walking his dog along side the road in front of you. You witness a car hit the two, and speed off. The impact sends my boy and his dog into the ditch besides the road. You stop and notice that both are lying motionless in the half water-filled ditch. Which of the two do you go to assist first?"
After a short period of time, Nugent said you could really see the women struggling and racking her brains, she answered, "You know, that'd be a real difficult choice and I don't know I could give a clear-cut answer at this time."
Such a person would have no issues whatsoever with aborting a fetus using any means whatsoever at any time whatsoever. And most likely wouldn't be all that averse in advocating "late-term" abortions, i.e., at 10 years of age (or perhaps even later.
And the biggest question of all is: why can't Johnny/Jane read or write, or arithmetic? After all, the expenditures per student is at historical all time highs, and likewise educators salaries, benefits and pensions make UAW, AFL/CIO union members compensation appear paltry in comparision (which incidently makes the average U.S. union worker prohibitively expensive and thereby contributes to layoffs and job outsourcing). The answer the that question: they're not teaching what the children need to know to survive, but garbage such as this. And everybody is scratching their head's wondering why public education is such a collosal failure, and violence is increasing everywhere you care to look.
In all actuality the movie that was should is an incredulous absurdity. Showing a movie intending to demonstrate "Good and Evil" to a world that denounces that such concepts actually exist, and that all ideas have equal merit, and there are no absolutes and that everything is merely displayed in shades of grey is the height of lunacy.