The title pretty much says it. What would be the positives and negatives for forcing people who are on welfare to take birth control. This is assuming that enforcement of this policy is 100% effective and completely safe for the people receiving it (eg a woman allergic to the implant device wouldn’t have one implanted, and a revolutionary new treatment has just come up for men that makes him sterile as long as he’s on this pill or something). Also, note that I said birth control, not sterilization. If a person pulls himself off welfare, he can stop taking the pill and is instantly able to make babies again.
One of the biggest negatives I see is that it would skew the population of society toward the richer end, effectively removing the poor class. I’m not sure what the long term implications of that would be.
Maybe it would just be better to have a limit on the number of children that the welfare class can have? 1 or 2 or something?
I’m obviously not too invested in this position one way or the other, but it’s something that’s been kicking around my head for awhile.
I think this is elitist, social engineering, and repulsive. Once the State starts removing reproductive control from one segment of society, it is inevitable that other groups will follow, maybe forced child bearing for wealthy, white, educated women will be the next mandate.
Do you favor subsidizing pregnancy terminations, free birth control, and child care for poor women? This seems to empower choice. Indecently, poverty is not a crime. I honestly don’t believe women have children to live the high life on welfare.
I think it should be a crime to have children you cannot support. Presumably those who are on welfare cannot support themselves without government intervention.
[edit]And I say it should be a crime, I suppose, in the moral sense. Locking people away for having kids while on welfare would likely make the situation worse.
I don’t know. However, presumably one who is seeking government assistance is doing so because they do not believe they can adequately provide for their children. So we can let them decide for themselves.
It would be an abrogation of article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - not that I’m going to try to argue that just because it’s written up as a right somewhere, it should never be considered - however, I think it’s written up as a basic human right, because it’s a damn good idea.
Governments simply cannot be trusted with that kind of power - or at least not any more of that kind of power.
Aside from the human rights issue, it would be almost impossible to enforce. How are you going to ensure that women take a pill? How do you punish them if they don’t?
Easy. You put a chemical marker in the pill. If the marker isn’t present in a sample of urine, you know the woman hasn’t been taking the pill. If you put a slightly different marker in each of the daily pills and then do random testing you could pretty much eliminate non-compliance. Alternatively, you could make it an implant which lasts a month or two, you’d have 100% compliance then.
I’m not sure if it is the law in New Jersey right now, but I have a hazy memory of Christie Whitman talking about a welfare law there. If you’re on welfare and you keep having children they take away your benefits. I’m going off memory here, so if anyone else can elaborate, please do.
As mean as that sounds, I kind of agree with that.
Overall I’d be against this, but for the interest of debate I can see one or two arguments in favour of it:
-It would be an incentive to get people back into work. In England at least, many people chose not to work because they get more money from benefits. Usually more children=more benefits.
-It would mean less children were born into poverty.
-It would cut down on the rate of accidental pregnancy (as would any scheme that required mandatory birth control for large parts of the population). If people who were on welfare wanted children they would have to plan them and go to the effort of getting themselves in a better financial situation. Generally I think that’s a good thing. Unfortunately I have seen too many people who have babies for all the wrong reasons- drunken one night stands, too lazy to get birth control, because they don’t really care either way- children deserve more than that. Yes, an accident can happen to anyone, but more people on birth control=less accidents.
-It would probably cost less to provide birth control that to pay for the raising of additional children.
However:
It seems like dangerous ground- if we start like this it’s only a small step to start making other restrictions on who can and can’t have children.
We might disqualify people who would make excellent parents but have just fallen on hard times. Likewise, some people might be wonderful parents but not have many workplace skills. Why should these people lose out?
It would be extremely hard to regulate.
Some people are on welfare through no fault of their own- should they be penalized for this? If my husband were in an accident and permanently disabled, I’d have to give up work to care for him, and we would have to apply for welfare to afford food. But who is to say I wouldn’t still be able to bring up a child in a positive environment.
Now if there were some way we could insist on birth control until the person took parenting classes and went through a vetting system in the same way potential adoptive parents do, I would be all for that (no I haven’t thought it through in any details and I’m sure it would cause a lot of problems too, but I’m generally in favour of people educating themselves and striving to be good parents, rather than being excluded on financial grounds). It wouldn’t necessarily stop all bad parents, but it would hopefully weed some of them out.
Also worth considering is the apparent wealth of ‘we were dirt-poor, but we were brought up right’ anecdotes - I think I will question whether it really is a bad thing for poor people, including those on benefits, to have families.
To quote Oliver Wendell Holmes’ : “Three generations of morons are enough”, when he authorized the sterilization of poor women ( who weren’t morons, and weren’t told what was done to them ). We’ve gone down this road before. You may not want sterilization, but sterilization is what you’ll get. Or poor people being executed. That’s what governments do when they have the authority to choose who does and does not have the right to have children. This sort of idea is just the economic class version of eugenics, and would end up doing the same sort of things if implemented.
Even without getting into the moral and legal repugnancy of the idea and its highly dubious value, the U.S. federal government does not need more things to spend money on. It’s living on borrowed money as is.
Plus it would either be hugely over-administered and therefore woefully inefficient, slow and fucked up (like the DHS is already here), or it would be subcontracted out to be handled by private companies, in which case it would be ruthlessly mercenary and would prioritise profit over actual function.
So, how much money do you have to have saved up before you can responsibly have sex? Birth control is not fool proof. Can you responsibly have sex if you don’t have health care? If you can, does not having insurance change the amount you should have saved before you can responsibly have sex?
Once you have successfully bred out the lower classes, who is going to clean my room when I stay in a nice hotel?