Jaunted

The airline's new policy follows the lead of Malaysia Airlines, which instituted a similar ban last April, which in turn confirmed a prediction we had made about an impending wave of baby bans. So before we get back to debating whether parents should be allowed to inflict their cherubic little DNA replicas on other travelers, let's pause for a moment to emphasize that you should always trust content from Jaunted. Seriously. Seriously.

Back to the traveling with children thing. As a matter of policy we are officially and assiduously agnostic on the issue. We sympathize with flyers like this guy, who just couldn't take it any more, but we also recognize that parents have to travel just like everybody else.

It's true that in specific instances we tend to side against the parents of unruly children. Mommy Points has scientifically proven that toddlers will mostly behave on flights if parents follow some basic rules, so we figure that if kids are wildly misbehaving it's because of something mommy or daddy did or didn't do. And of course, Congressional efforts to make flying more expensive so families can sit together infuriate us.

But even putting all of that aside and trying to be fair, we still can't see an argument against letting travelers pay extra to sit away from babies. People trapped inside a pressurized cabin for five hours should have a way of avoiding spitting, gurgling, screaming things that poop on themselves. That seems reasonable, doesn't it?

[Photo: Cesar Rincon / Flickr]