It’s late. I need a minute because I have too much to say. Childhood cancer is the number one disease killer of kids. The number one. And yet, here we are, watching as $190 million for pediatric cancer research gets ripped away like it means nothing. Right now, all I can do is sit here and puke my guts out because this is such a fucking slap in the face to every family who has lost a child, to every parent who is holding on by a thread, to every kid fighting for their life.
Do kids with cancer mean nothing? Are their lives worthless? Because that’s what this feels like. It feels like the people in charge looked at the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program—a program that has done everything to push pediatric cancer research forward, to give families hope, to save lives—and decided it didn’t matter. Like the work of researchers, doctors, and advocates—people who are pouring their hearts and souls into fighting this monster—wasn’t worth funding anymore.
I’m sobbing in the dark, gutted. Devastated. Furious. All of us—parents, advocates, and the people in the medical world who actually care—we are doing everything we can to fight for these kids. And this? This is the thanks we get. This is the message being sent: “Your children’s lives aren’t worth the money.” That’s the truth of it, isn’t it? Childhood cancer isn’t profitable. It doesn’t line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies. And because of that, the government can’t be bothered to care.
If you’ve never held your child while they withered away in front of you, if you’ve never begged for one more day, one more hour, one more fucking minute, you don’t know what this feels like. But let me tell you, it feels like someone just ripped out my heart all over again. Because I’ve seen what happens when there’s no funding. I’ve lived it. My child is cremated because there weren’t enough resources, enough treatments, enough anything.
And to the people who voted for this, who support the ones who made this decision: is this what you wanted? Is this what your “pro-life” stance is about? Because if it is, then fuck your slogans. Fuck your hypocrisy. You fight to force life into the world but couldn’t care less when that life is a child battling cancer. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” when you just told thousands of families that their kids don’t matter. You fight harder for embryos than you do for actual, living children. You march and scream and legislate for cells, but you sit in silence when it comes to the kids who are wasting away in front of us. If you cared half as much about the lives of these children as you do about controlling women’s bodies, maybe families like mine wouldn’t be outliving their babies.
This is a slap in the face to every parent, every child, every doctor, every researcher, and every advocate who has been screaming into the void, begging for more. And now, instead of more, we’re left with less. What happens now? What happens to the kids who needed that research to survive? What happens to the families who were holding on to that one thread of hope? Are they supposed to just accept this?
But how do we accept this? How do we tell our children, the ones still fighting, that their lives weren’t worth the cost? That the money that could have saved them was cut because someone decided their futures didn’t matter? We can’t accept this. Because to accept this is to give up on them, and that’s something no parent, no advocate, no human with a shred of compassion could ever do. This isn’t just a betrayal—it’s a death sentence for children who deserve so much better. My child should still be here and this is beyond unacceptable.
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