Do you remember being nine? As it happens, I don’t much remember being nine. But ten was a big year for me. Golly, I had a Schwinn bike. I weighed 76 pounds. We put up a basketball hoop. The downside of that year was coming down, precociously, with “mono.” Cuidado, los microbios están por todos lados!

But Violet, a nine-year-old student at Berkeley’s Thousand Oaks Elementary, will surely and sadly remember being nine. She’s being tutored in the Berkeley legacy of Kamala Harris, who was once a Thousand Oaks kid. The tutoring is taking hold.

Violet is already anxious about her future. Featured on the front page of the local rag (Los Angeles Times, Oct. 26), she frets about the possibility of another Trump presidency. “It’s scary,” Violet says, “how abortion could not be a thing anymore.”

What’s more than scary, what is grievously grotesque, is the betrayal of Violet’s childhood. She is being kept ignorant of the truth that abortion is the deliberate destruction of a pre-born human being. She is learning, instead, that the “strong” woman puts autonomy first, no matter the price. Has she ever connected being a mother with joy? With a special pride? Has no one told her that it is possible to love both mother and child? It seems not.

Please note, gentle reader, that it’s not nearly enough to say that Violet’s worry about abortion access is “age inappropriate.” It is this, of course; so too is the tutoring that prompts it. But what’s really at issue is the innocence of a child and the innocence of her classmates.

Here a note of caution is in order. There is an ersatz innocence to acknowledge and put aside. It is the innocence of a romanticism that turns children into cherubs. By way of contrast, St. Augustine was a forthright realist.  “I have myself,” he writes, “seen a small baby jealous; it was too young to speak, but it was livid with anger as it watched another infant at the breast” (Confessions, Bk. I, Ch. 7). In his teens or “extended childhood” he pilfered pears just for fun.  “It was foul, and I loved it,” he admits (Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. 4).

My own classmates and I made our first confessions when, our parents thought, we’d reached the age of reason: seven, not nine. In my case, there was already lots of anger, lots of jealousy, and a measure of general sneakiness to confess. Then we received First Holy Communion.

But at seven or nine or ten there is a different, and genuine, kind of innocence. In the ordinary course of events, this innocence is a matter of not being aware of a range of sins and sorrows. They are sins and sorrows which—at that age—one could barely fathom, much less with which one could manage to cope.

In many countries, to be sure, the decently ordinary has succumbed to terrible tragedy. War destroys such innocence. In Gaza and Ukraine, as in Yemen and Sudan, we witness the betrayal of innocence. So, too, if in a different key, does the willful fracturing of a family betray the innocence of children. And despite its license and even celebration, so also is abortion—a slaughter of the innocent—a betrayal of childhood.

As adults we often deny the tragedy to which we contribute. When we do so, we can become complicit in the betrayal of our own children. Sometimes we cloak the tragedy with the mantle of vice decked out as virtue. Yet in the end the future is in God’s hands. Is it not a sober fear of this that is the beginning of wisdom? Miserere nobis.