PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL POLICY : More Birth Control, Less Abuse : Taxpayers who aren’t touched by the plight of 120,358 suffering children might consider what these crimes cost.

Picture the stands of the Los Angeles Coliseum filled with babies and toddlers. Now picture all of the children crying. This is a picture--and only part of the whole picture--of child abuse in Los Angeles County.

A county inter-agency study released this month found that 61 children had been killed by their parents or care-givers in 1991, and 120,358 were victims of physical or sexual abuse--roughly 86,000 of them under the age of 2. Another 2,551 were babies born addicted through their mothers’ use of drugs.

Suffering on this scale is staggering to imagine. What can be going on in the heads of adults who would do such things? More to the point, why do such people have children in the first place?

Apart from humane concerns, we all have an interest in this problem because it has become a major cost burden for our society.

It is likely that a great number of these abused children were born at public expense in county hospitals and housed and fed through welfare programs, either at home or in foster care. The county also pays for law-enforcement and social-service personnel to investigate the allegations of child abuse--now running at 10,000 calls a month, 4,000 of which turn out to merit full investigation. The county will pay for the judges, prosecutors, counsel and courtrooms where charges of criminal abuse will be tried. The county will pay for lawyers to represent all sides in custody claims involving these children--including the county itself. And the county will pay for the incarceration of the adults found guilty, while continuing to support the children, not just in foster care, but probably with extensive medical and psychological support as well.

If children who grow up in these circumstances encounter problems of their own with the law, the county will pay all over again.

What can be done?

First, we need to put some of the money that is currently going into general welfare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medi-Cal and food stamps into family planning services. We must fully inform everyone of the methods of birth control and make birth control devices and pharmaceuticals as widely available as possible.

In addition, we should spread the word in a public information campaign that parenthood should be planned and that financial responsibility and psychological maturity are essential to parenting.

If we continue to sow unplanned children, we will continue to reap children who are ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, abused and badly educated. We will continue to see an increase in the number of children born into poverty, and thus born into the cycle of poverty, welfare, dependency, ignorance and violence.

If this sounds like I am advocating state-mandated birth control, birth quotas, eugenics, selective breeding or forced sterilization, I am not. I do not believe that government should make such decisions, nor would I like to live in a country where the government does make such choices for its citizens. However, government can provide information about family planning to its constituents so that people can make rational choices.

If the county can pay for maternity wards, it can pay for birth control clinics.

A widespread and rational birth control education policy coupled with full-service birth control clinics might have saved some of the 120,000 abused children found in the county’s survey. Fewer children, planned children, mean fewer abused children, children who are better fed, better housed, better clothed and better educated.

Anyone who has personal objections to birth control can think of this suggestion as simply providing better chances for other people’s children in our community. Think of it as providing better lives for the next generation of our own children. Or just think of it as a tax cut.