My first grandchild, Phoebe by name, arrived in Kansas City last week for her debut visit.  She is just north of two months old.  I was tasked with picking her and her parents up at the airport.

To do this lawfully, I had to borrow a car seat, and a rear-facing one at that.  In fact, all fifty states now have exacting and specific laws regulating child safety seats for infants and children. 

I quickly learned that installing a car seat is much more complex than it was a generation ago. A generation before that, if there were car seats, there was almost no regulation of the same.

As I struggled to find the hooks buried beneath the back seat, I had to wonder why the government went to such lengths protecting a child like Phoebe, whose life, just a few months earlier, enjoyed almost no legal protection at all. 

Indeed, on the Kansas side of the state line, the late George Tiller boasted of having performed 60,000 late-term abortions over his long career, almost all of them on viable babies.

The absurd fact is that Tiller would have run more legal risk letting a grandchild ride home from KCI in something other than a proper car seat than he did killing other people's grandchildren by the thousands.  If only there were a car seat law for the unborn.