Congress must choose families over airline special interests 

This year, Congress will need to reauthorize and reform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the government body that oversees all civil air transportation in America. The process is normally a sleepy affair dominated by lobbyists and industry stakeholders, but sky-high levels of consumer complaints indicate this reauthorization will be different. Americans have witnessed the fragility of our air traffic control system—radar blinking out, multiple near-miss collisions in the air, planes sliding off runways, unexplained, cascading delays—and they want something done about it.  

Ignoring them or simply pretending to address their concerns could prove disastrous. There is a long list of problems to solve, from funding issues to market consolidation to inadequate workforce training. I am hopeful that Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Maria Cantwell (Wash.), the Republican and Democrat charged with leading the Senate reauthorization effort, understand the stakes. Unfortunately, not everyone does. 

One proposal is particularly disturbing to me: a policy to ban “lap-babies” on commercial flights. For those unfamiliar with the term, “lap-baby” refers to an infant who is held on his or her parent’s lap rather than in a car seat that requires the purchase of an extra plane ticket. This practice is legal under current FAA regulations, which state, “A seat and an individual safety belt are required for each passenger and crew member excluding infants.” But the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA wants lawmakers to ban it, insisting on “a seat for every soul.” 

Lobbyists claim such a ban would increase safety. They cite rare cases of turbulence that could cause a parent to lose hold of his or her child and point to two airplane crashes, one in 1989 and another in 1994, which resulted in the deaths of infants. Any child’s death is a tragedy, but there is no evidence that prohibiting lap-babies would decrease the number of such deaths in America. What’s more, parents can already purchase seats for their infants if they want. At best, the only thing this special interest handout would do is inconvenience millions of families. 

In fact, enacting a ban could increase America’s annual infant death rate. One study that considered the implications of “a seat for every soul” found requiring child-restraint systems on airplanes “might cause an increase in motor vehicle deaths if many families switched to travel by car rather than paying additional fares for their young children.” Ben Hoffman, the president-elect of the American Academy of Pediatrics, echoes those concerns. “If [families] travel by car instead [of by plane], they will actually be putting themselves at a significantly greater risk, because car crashes are so much more common than airplane incidents,” Hoffman explains. 

There is another problem here, though, one that goes beyond statistics. The way we structure airline seating may seem unimportant, but it actually signals a lot about our underlying values. There’s a reason we welcome active-duty military service-members to board planes first. And there’s a reason we defer to parents with strollers in the boarding process. From one perspective, these decisions don’t matter all that much. But from another perspective, they’re crucial. These gestures serve as a daily reminder of what we value and the kind of society we want to be. 

Our culture is constantly sending other signals that children are a burden—that the good life ends when you become a parent. Whether carried by the hysterical rhetoric of the pro-abortion lobby or ads that subtly promote hyper-individualism, such signals have a corrosive effect on our nation. According to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, only 23 percent of Americans under 30 believe having children is very important. That is a near-death sentence for our society, which is built on the institution of the family and relies on children for its future existence and strength.  

In response, we should be doing everything in our power to promote parenting and support child-rearing. In other words, we should be breaking down obstacles for families, not erecting barriers to make things even harder. Forcing already-struggling families to pay an extra $500 or $1,000 to board a plane, on the contrary, would reinforce the message that children are a burden and an unwelcome nuisance in the public square. 

In the end, despite all the controversy, this should be a no-brainer. Banning lap-babies would not reduce overall infant deaths and has the potential to actually increase them. We cannot let this important reauthorization of our nation’s air safety system get bogged down by this special interest nonsense. Our focus must be on fixing systemic flaws in the airline market and preventing literal plane wrecks, not arbitrarily increasing the burden on working families. If Congress allows the latter to distract it from the former, it will show a greater loyalty to lobbyists and unions than to the American people. 

Rubio is the senior senator from Florida.