Child Free Flying?

Excuse me if this post makes no sense as I am filled with incandescent rage right now.

Apparently 70% of people polled by the Telegraph would like to see child free flights, and one airline in Malaysia now has a quiet zone where children under 12 cannot sit.

Forget all the anecdata about how groups of hen parties/teenagers/business men etc etc are often louder than children, there is a very basic human right at stake here.

Children are people. Discriminating against them is discrimination.

The seat my daughter sits in costs as much as the one that I sit in, why is she treated as some kind of lesser person? Why, if I am travelling, is that lower status extended to me?

Can people really not see any parallels when they nod along to consigning the children and (almost inevitably) women to the back of the bus ? Seriously? 100 years after Rosa Parks was born, we are now in favor of segregation? Well, so long as it's only the lesser people - what does it matter?

'Women and children first' was sexist because it treated certain parts of  humanity as different. It made them 'other'. Now we are saying that children (and there is plenty of fact to back this up) and women should not only be treated as 'other' but actually 'lesser'. 

Of course, plenty of two parent families will be affected by this, even some one male parent families, along with the one female parent families. But in every case, children - who are people, not some kind of subspecies - are affected. Having a child may be a lifestyle choice, but it is also a necessity for the human race. Being a child, travelling with a child, parenting a child, are not some kind of dirty act which we should be ashamed of and accept being relegated to the cheap seats. Treating children as a kind of disgrace doesn't only segregate them, but also has an implied criticism of the women who gave birth to them. We should be celebrating them, not shoving them to the back out of the way.

What can we look forward to next? Less toilet facilities? Lower pay? Greater physical abuse?