Australia solved this differently - it's illegal to have an unfenced pool precisely because young children wander and fall into pools and drown. We understand that kids shouldn't die. If your fence is neglected or the kid was otherwise somehow able to get in, you're liable. Have a fence up to code, and you're not liable.

Did a lot of kids die in pools before that law was introduced?

NB I'm in Scotland so outside pools aren't a big risk but I also grew up in a small fishing village on a very wild and rocky coast with high cliffs and the idea of anyone trying to "protect" kids in that kind of environment seems very odd to me.

There's considerably less unsupervised kids running around rocky coasts with high cliffs than around neighbourhoods and backyards.

Note that Australia also has plenty of coasts and does not mandate a fence around them all.

Of course. These laws don't just come out of nowhere. Kids drowning in pools is a real thing.

Of course, it's also a real thing that the home builders' and contractors' association lobbies to make every pool be legally required to be enclosed by a fence, which naturally needs to be built by a licensed professional.

What? No it's not. That's simply not true. That wasn't how any of those laws developed historically.

And that would just be a nonsensical thing for the construction industry to lobby on. There are things that are actually highly profitable for them to lobby for. That's not one of them.

I'm confused why you can't just accept the obvious that it's an effort to save lives. Like seatbelts.

~60/year of <5yo Australian kids in the 90s, down to ~25/year in the 10s. That's a death rate reduction of ~3/100k, which is about the rate of <5yo deaths from cancer. 50% of the <5yo drownings in '93-'18 were in pools.

https://www.royallifesaving.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/00...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/causes-of-death-in-childr...

If you are required by law to put a fence around your pool and include a child-safe door, and you fail to do so, and a child drowns — why shouldn't you be liable?

(Although I think many from the US may interpret a "fence around a pool" to be an overreach of government regulation. But in Australia, "barrier laws" exist in every state/territory to avoid accidental drownings.)