For parents who do not have options apart from institutional care, the increased likelihood that day care children will be sick and unhappy are facts of life. They are necessary evils, regrettable but far better than the alternative, which is no care at all. And yet the most curious fact in all our day care debate, one that brings us to a third and very interesting sort of harm being caused in all this, is that these problems are not seen that way by certain other adults - namely, the separationists dominant in the day care debate.These advocates do not see institutional care as a "necessary evil." They do not write of mother-baby separation with the ambivalence most mothers feel. They refuse to acknowledge that day care might cause damage of any kind to any child - unlike the many parents who must use it and who worry about just that. The least analyzed and perhaps also the weirdest dimension of our day care wars so far is the insistence by such advocates that what most people think is bad news - more sick kids and worse-behaved ones - is actually good and maybe even great. And this brings us to a third kind of harm in our experiment in separation: The ideological defense of separationism is further coarsening adult moral sensibility.