People old enough to remember the Before Time – i.e., the time when in most everyday matters, people who weren’t causing harm were generally free to do as they liked – know what it was like to be a parent or a child and go for a drive in those times.

As opposed to what it’s like now. More finely, – what it requires you to have and to pay for now.

J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice-president pick, got heckled for saying out loud that government-mandated “safety” seats for kids are an effective form of birth control. But he’s right. For at least two reasons that have nothing to do with the cost of the seats, themselves.

The first is the disincentive to have kids knowing that if you do, you’ll have to deal with “safety” seats for years to come. In some states, until the kid is a near-teenager. That is a long time to have to spend every day strapping a kid in and out of a “safety” seat every time you drive somewhere with a kid in the car. It makes you not want to drive anywhere. It makes you not want to have kids.
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It is dreary to have to deal with these got-damned “safety” seats all the time. Even to watch some other poor bastard dealing with them makes you not want to deal with them. But the only way you can avoid having to deal with them – legally – is to avoid having kids.

Voila!
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There is always a degree of danger when riding in a car. It may be hypothetically greater to ride in car not buckled-up or not strapped in (if you’re a kid). But just because something might happen does not mean it will. And obsessing over the might is . . . neurotic. In the Before Time, only neurotics strapped their progeny into “safety” seats. Just as in the Before Time, only neurotics walked around in public wearing “masks.”

But that was before neurosis metastasized and became normalized. In this time, a parent who does not strap the kid in is regarded much the same as one who who refused to “mask” the kid.

It is a different manifestation of the same illness.