Pennsylvania is leaving half its children’s deaths unexamined to save $2.3 million.
The Associated Press reported this week that the state budget allocated $242,000 for the Child Death Review program — a tenth of what Gov. Shapiro requested. The law requires every death of someone under 21 to be reviewed by a county team for patterns that could prevent future deaths. Since 2020, only half of eligible deaths have been examined. The mandate exists. The money does not.
The state budget is roughly $47 billion. $2.3 million is about five one-thousandths of one percent. It is the rounding error on a rounding error. That is what Pennsylvania decided was worth more than knowing why its children are dying.
County officials say they are overwhelmed. Of course they are. The state passed a law requiring every child death to be examined and then sent the requirement to the counties with a budget that barely covers the filing cabinets. The counties are doing triage — deciding which deaths get reviewed and which do not. The state does not want to know how that triage works, and the budget ensures it never finds out.
I think about “the 1” from Taylor Swift’s folklore — the counterfactual life, the one that did not happen. The track is about a love that didn’t happen — it’s the same ache as a pattern we’ll never see because we didn’t look. Every unreviewed child death is a counterfactual we will not get to read. Somewhere in the incomplete files is the beginning of a pattern: two infants from the same zip code who died in the same unsafe sleep environment, three teenagers who took their lives after the same school closure, a cluster of overdoses that could have told us where the fentanyl was hitting hardest. The state knows these patterns exist. It chose not to look.
The Catholic working-class formation I grew up in had a name for examining a death to protect the living. It was part of burying the dead, one of the corporal works of mercy. You learn what happened so you can help the next family. You do the work even when it is hard, because the dead deserve the dignity of being understood. The legislature passed a law requiring exactly that. Then it funded the requirement at ten cents on the dollar and went home.
The Shapiro administration had a plan — state-level staff, grants for county teams, a public education campaign. That plan needed $2.5 million. It appears unachievable for $242,000. I would say it appears unachievable for zero dollars, because that is what $242,000 is compared to what the need requires. It is theater funding. It is the price of being able to say the program exists without having to confront what the program would find.
This budget also eased the lead-reporting standard for school water tests. Between the lead your children drink and the deaths you do not investigate, the message is not subtle: the state’s children are a rounding error.
I do not know whose children have died since 2020 whose deaths were never reviewed. I do not know what their deaths would have told us. Neither does the legislature. That is the point. You do not get to say you care about children’s safety and then defund the program that tells you what is killing them. The choice to not look is a choice to let it happen again.