“Your body is a battleground.” That was the message seen on an eye-catching poster prominently displayed on Washington D.C.’s National Mall at the April 9, 1989, March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives, a march that attracted nearly 500,000 people.Footnote ¹ Forty years later, that message continues to ring true for women in the United States. Increasingly, it also rings true for young people.

In 1989, the fight was for abortion rights, which were being whittled back by newly enacted laws at the state and national level. While that battle continues today, it has been joined by fights over the rights of children to read certain kinds of books or to receive certain kinds of medical care. Like the bodies of women, the bodies of young people are critical battlegrounds in America’s political and cultural divides.

A few months after the Women’s March, in November 1989, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The CRC guarantees a number of rights to young people, including the right to be heard on matters that affect them (Article 12), “the right… to freedom of thought, conscience and religion” (Article 14), the right to freely access information (Article 17), and “the right…to the treatment of illness and rehabilitation of health” (Article 24).Footnote ²

The CRC is both simple and radical. It says that children are not the property of their parents or their governments but are distinct people with rights that need protecting just as much as the rights of adults. The United States signed the CRC in 1995, but the Senate has never ratified it, making the U.S. the only UN member nation not to have ratified the Convention.Footnote ³ Current political battles in the United States highlight the tension between the promise of the CRC and the reality of children’s rights in America.

Take, for example, the 2025 Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, where, by a six-to-three vote, the Court determined that parents could opt their children out of school curricula that contradict the parents’ religious views. Central to the case was the inclusion of LGBTQ-themed storybooks in pre-K to fifth-grade classrooms, books which were presented as supplemental—not required—readings. The court’s majority felt that the district’s approved reading list was a form of “ideological imposition” that went against parental rights to shape the morality of their children through the parents’ religious views. In contrast, the dissenting minority argued that “the books were designed to instill tolerance” in a pluralistic society.Footnote ⁴

The decision pitted two dimensions of First Amendment rights against each other—freedom of expression and freedom of religion—and settled on religion as the more important right, centering it on the parents. As one observer put it: “The Court’s decision…sacrifices students’ First Amendment rights in the name of parental control. This enables parents to compel the speech and beliefs of students rather than let students develop their own thoughts, views, and beliefs—free to conform or disagree with the beliefs of their parents and classmates.”Footnote ⁵ The children in those classrooms have their own interests, and the CRC says that those interests should be protected instead of being overridden by their parents.Footnote ⁶

If the conservative majority on the Supreme Court was consistent in siding with parents over the state in matters involving children, observers—even critical ones—could point to a coherent judicial philosophy of parental rights. This is not the case, however. In another 2025 decision involving young people, the same 6–3 split sided with the state instead of with either children or their parents. In this case, United States v. Skrmetti, the Court held that Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The reasoning the majority used is that Tennessee’s law did not target sex—a protected status under that Amendment—but was based on age, which is a constitutionally unprotected status.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor (who also wrote the dissent in the Mahmoud decision) highlighted what she saw as the absurdity of the Skrmetti decision, noting that the state did allow gender affirming care for cisgender youth. For example, while a cisgender girl could receive medical treatment to prevent the growth of unwanted facial hair, a transgender girl could not. As Sotomayor noted, the only difference between these two young people is their sex as assigned at birth.Footnote ⁷

The Court sided with parents in one case and with the state in the other, but both decisions ignored the voices and the rights of the young people they claimed to protect—protecting them from ideas in the Mahmoud decision and from medical treatment in the Skrmetti decision. The dissenting minority in both cases argued that the results of these decisions stripped American youth of their civil rights, an argument that closely aligns with the CRC.

If these two Supreme Court decisions indicate a narrowing of what young people can learn and who they are legally permitted to be, a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in February 2026 takes that effort even further. Cosponsored by 22 Republican representatives, House Resolution 7661—officially named the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”—would prohibit any school or library that receives federal funds from providing, promoting, or hosting materials for those under the age of 18 that contain what the bill calls “sexually oriented material,” which includes anything involving “gender dysphoria or transgenderism.”Footnote ⁸ If enacted, any book, program, or resource that acknowledges the existence of transgender people could be banned from public schools and libraries across the country.

PEN America (an advocacy group that fights to protect the freedom of expression in the United States) “has documented nearly 23,000 book bans in public schools since 2021.”Footnote ⁹ To date, those bans are at the state and local levels; H.R. 7661 would nationalize such bans. Critics note that the bill’s language is deliberately broad, offering would-be censors wide latitude in terms of what they could target. Authors, librarians, and civil liberties organizations argue that the bill’s goal is to erase LGBTQ+ people from the educational lives of young Americans.Footnote ¹⁰ The bill has not yet passed, but its existence reveals a growing political appetite to further restrict children’s rights that should not be ignored.

The current legal trajectory in the United States is not inevitable or unstoppable, and there are models for protecting and extending children’s legal rights that do not rely exclusively on the CRC. Such models operate within existing American legal frameworks but resist the “authorities framework” of “adult control over children and their development.”Footnote ¹¹ One recently-developed model, called the “New Law of the Child,” rebuts the argument that children need “adult control” in order to flourish. Its aim is to “further children’s broader interests as children” without wading into the “longstanding debates over dependency and autonomy.”Footnote ¹² Among the rights it would protect are the right to read books children want to read and the right to access the medical care they seek, rights also protected by the CRC.

Although embraced by many legal scholars, the New Law of the Child has so far had little impact in court decisions or legislation in the United States. That can change. The battle for civil rights does not progress in a linear fashion, and movements toward change frequently begin with new ways of looking at things. The CRC is an international model, and the New Law of the Child shows how it can be implemented in the U.S. without needing to ratify the CRC.

In 1989, Barbara Kruger made her poster with the face of a woman on it. Today, she could just as easily make it with the face of a child on it. While Kruger’s image was about abortion rights, at the heart of that battle is the argument that one’s body belongs to oneself. This goes for young people, too. The bodies of young people should not be considered as the possessions of the state or of their parents.

Each of us is our own being and each of us has the right to read what we want to read, to think what we want to think, and to be who we know we are. If those rights are not currently being afforded to you, it does not mean they do not exist. It only means that the battle to secure those rights is ongoing.