**Guin, ** if all those strict Catholics were indeed so strict, there would be a lot less shotgun weddings and out-of-wedlock births, because they wouldn’t be having sex outside of marriage to begin with.
(And there are lots of other effective BC methods besides the Pill, anyway.)
I agree with you-I just thought I’d point that out.
And there are lots of other effective BC methods besides the Pill, anyway.
IAMAC (Catholic) but AFAIK the ONLY acceptable form of BC for Catholics is NFP. No Pill, no Norplant, no Depo, no nothin’. Just charting, temperature taking and celibacy during the “window of opportunity.”
I recently learned the circumstances of my good friend’s birth. Her family was poor. So poor that they were raising rabbits for food- in the city! They could not afford a single child, and yet they had three within three years. How’d this happen?
Kid one was born with a diaphram. Mom realized the diaphram wasn’t working.
Kid two born on the pill. Mom realized the pill wasn’t working.
Kid three was born with both condoms and the pill.
Three different methods of contraceptive. Three kids. One poor family. Most of the time, it’s pretty easy to not get pregnant. But some people are spectacularly unlucky. It takes a lot more than irresponsibility to get you in a mess that you can’t get out of.
Probably someplace you don’t want to be. Surely there are some third world countries that don’t try to collect income tax. Just look for civil wars and the like. Granted, it kind of sucks because there are no police, no education, and when people die theres nobody to drag their bodies off the streets. But, you get what you pay for. Quite literally.
For those of you who think the idea of the poor eating dishes of beans and rice and such things is a form of punishment for being poor…
I just finished eating a bowl of homemade red beans and rice. It was delicious. Now, excuse me while I load the crock pot up with a mess of great northerns and hamhocks…
Oh, and later this week, there will be homemade black bean soup.
Man, beans rock.
What a disingenuous argument. Guin was pointing out one group of people (actual strict Catholics) and making a statement about them, and your refutation seems to be to point at a different group (the non-strict Catholics) and say that they aren’t the same as the first group. Uh, yeah…
I don’t generally fault anyone for not knowing details of Catholic observances (why would they?), but it’s a little rude to go sniping at those observances like that when you don’t know what you’re talking about. (As SnoopyFan points out, any form of birth control is bad according to the RCC. Which is silly, but that’s a different argument.)
Some people can’t eat beans. My husband must avoid beans and a lot of other great nutritious foods because he has gout. They had too much in the way of carbs for me when I had gestational diabetes. There are many diet and lifestyle restictions, making someone prove that they need to eat something other than just rice and beans or whatever the diet that is decided appropriate for the poor will result in some not getting what they need.
I still have not seen a convincing argument that the poor should not be able to use their benefits as they see fit within the limits of food stamps for food. I certainly use common resources for other than just necessity, resources that I could never provide on my own. I don’t consult any other taypayers when I go out for a drive, even though the roads are paid for by others taxes in addition to my own. Food stamps started partially because the government supports prices for agricultural products. Food that otherwise would be affordable for the poor isn’t because the government has arranged for the price to be higher.
Why is it so heinous that someone on food stamps might be able to have a diet of their chosing that is somewhat more expensive than the cheapest essentials? We need some leeway because food costs vary per region any way. Why is that so much worse than someone using a VA loan for a house other than the cheapest one available? Why is it worse than anyone using common resources in excess of the minimum required?
by MLS:
even sven said it better than I could have so I’ll let his/her post speak for me:
Nobody has to be pay rent to Uncle Sam. Ain’t freedom grand?
Excellent point. I can go drive on roads built by other people’s money and go to the supermarket and buy gasp chips and ice cream. 
People are supporting my lifestyle choices!
Julie
even and You – OK, I was hoping that’s what you meant. Unless you want to live where there are no government services or facilities, you will pay taxes. I agree. I receive certain government services that others have paid for, and I pay for certain other service that others use.
birdgirl, you prying little snit, nitro doesn’t owe you an answer to your rudely-put questions. This is Great Debates, not “Answer Up For All Your Personal Choices, No Matter How Private.”
If you’d like to debate the issue at hand, instead of patting yourself on the back for being so much better than your friends and other idiots who don’t have 100% success with birth control, I’ll look forward to that. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the pit where your tone belongs.
Well, can we at least agree that there ARE some traditional “poor man’s” dishes that are cheap, nutrious, and absolutely yummy?
Guinastasia, we can, also, at least agree that every one of those “poor man’s dishes” is in some way unhealthy to at least some segment of the population due to specific medical need, right?
Sorry if I didn’t elaborate enough to make my point clearly, but I’ve been hacking my lungs up with bronchitis for the past 5 days, so I may be a bit off my best game.
What I meant to say is that if one is a strict Catholic, one would not be having sex outside wedlock. I’m not at all smiping at Catholicism (that would be a whole other thread), but at people who behave hypocritically. Like most Americans who pay attention to what is going on around them, I do have a basic understanding of the tenets of Catholicism, certainly enough to know that sex outside marriage is also considered a sin. Maybe not on a par with abortion, but still a sin.
If one is not a strict Catholic, or not a Catholic at all, one has a much wider range of B.C. options available than the Pill. And the Pill is available in other places than ones where you have to pay full price for it, so really it’s not as big a financial burden for a poor person as she might think, and certainly less of a burden than raising a kid. I’m just trying to point out options.
Well, d’uh. But the same could be said about every food, so what’s your point?
Eva Luna, when I spoke of strict Catholics, I was not referring to those who had sex out of wedlock. I was speaking in general, for those who are saying that people on welfare shouldn’t have kids. NOT the people birdgirl was talking about.
And a perfectly valid point you had, indeed.
But how many people who have babies while on welfare, or indeed how many people who call themselves Catholics, are themselves morally opposed to contraception? Is there any decent-sized subgroup that is morally opposed to contraception, but not to having sex outside wedlock? I’d guess that most people who accidentally get pregnant do so due to no, incorrect, or inconsistent contraception usage, not due to a religious opposition to artificial contraception.
I’m sorry about your bronchitis. Summer illnesses are horrible.
In references to what I quoted above… there are other birth control choices, but they aren’t as reliable as the more expensive and medically-controlled methods such as the pill, norplant, or an IUD. Where specifically were you thinking one could get the Pill cheaply? Poor women are usually served by Planned Parenthood, community clinics, and state health departments. These have been underfunded for decades and there has been over a 25% decline in real dollars in public funding for family planning for the poor since 1980.
And gasp I can’t believe I just acknowledged that funds for this are often PUBLIC, because this gets us back into the ugly position of using our precious, precious tax dollars to enable poor people to have sex without worry! That must be incredibly galling to some of the posters in this thread.
I know that in our state, volunatry giving (say, to United Way) has been down and so all funded agencies have been getting by with less.
This makes me wonder about how accessible free or reduced OCs truly are. Can all poor women who seek birth control get it for reduced prices? Title X funds require that women at the federal poverty level get their birth control for free, with the rest going on a sliding scale. I don’t know that other funds have a similar requirement–and not all of the clinics serving poor women get Title X funds. So I still have questions about access to such clinics, and affordability of what they offer.
Even working people–people who aren’t sucking on the public tit, as we might say–find that they have to pay for the most reliable birth control out-of-pocket. A number of insurance plans that cover all other prescription drugs specifically exclude prescription contraceptives. In 2001, a report cited that although 99 percent of people with employer-based health plans have prescription drug coverage in general, only 64 percent have coverage for oral contraceptives. It was a battle to get Federal Employees this benefit; one year Congress had to enact special appropriations to cover it because Bush himself excluded it. HMOs tend to be better than other large-group health plans, but even so many HMOs fall short. For example, only about 60% cover devices such as the Norplant.
Only that if we restrict food stamps to the purchase of “typically healthy foods” people with special needs will be screwed even worse than they already are.
Well, I’m not saying we should restrict food stamps to certain types of food (although in my state, pop is taxed so it’s out, as well as prepared foods).
I’m just saying that there are options that people should be taught-basic nutrition.