You didn’t have any sex as a teenager, did you? It’s really easy for you, sitting at your computer, to make that judgment. When you’re a horny teenager, and things are getting really heated, it’s a different story. Not to mention that around here, the stores keep the condoms locked up. Sure, a pharmacist will open the case for you if you ask, but that really discourages teenagers from getting them, since it turns into a whole production. Plus, if the pharmacy’s closed for the night, no condoms.
Edited to Add. Suddenly rising in popularity due to the addition of the editing feature. 
Don’t Call Me Shirley, I don’t know, but the impression I have is that most of the posters in this thread are thinking about adults who’ve had multiple children. Sex ed isn’t just something that affects teens - it’s where most people get their life-long attitudes towards sex and sexual responsibility. So, while there is a lot of talk about sexual maturity and responsibility, I’m not so certain that people are thinking of the large families as being an effect of teenaged sex.
And if that’s the case, I, for one, have no sympathy for an adult who won’t think about the potential consequences for the night’s nookie. On that point I have no arguements at all with pizzabrat.
On preview: Thanks, SpoilerVirgin!
How do you see that as relevant?
Thanks OtakuLoki. I don’t find that surprising at all. My uncle is seriously mentally ill (paranoid schizoaffective), court mandated to take his medication in the interest of public safety. He’s a great guy and very intelligent, but he’s fuckin’ crazy and there’s no way in hell he could hold down a job. He lives a very marginal life, frequently going in and out of the hospitals (8 times one summer) and destroying property in fits of paranoid rage-- but because of new state policy there are no real options for having him institutionalized. I know he vehemently resists the idea of being in an institution, but I feel in the long run it would be better for him–he has no consistency and no stability and he needs strict supervision and a predictable framework IMHO. I feel so helpless to do anything to help him. It’s just a damn shame.
I’m irritated with people who have lots of kids they can’t afford myself. I hesitate at implying that all welfare recipients are irresponsible freeloaders. I find it problematic when people claw their way out of poverty and then almost instantaneously assume that this was due to some magical character endowment on their part–instead of a good portion of blind luck. I think it’s a very ingrained part of U.S. culture particularly to assume we actually live in a meritocracy and that people who are poor deserve to be poor, in general. The few people who develop upward mobility, instead of honestly addressing the unfair situations they had to endure, conveniently forget the social injustice and focus on all the hard work they did as evidence that the American Dream is still alive and kicking. It doesn’t jive with my life experiences at all. Most people work hard all their lives and never get anywhere.
Drop the judgment hammer on overbreeding idiots by all means, but please don’t assume all welfare recipients are like them.
My parents live and own a general store in one of the shittiest suburbs in Victoria. Most of the houses are ugly and unkempt, the people lack intelligence and teeth,and it’s the sort of place where most are deadbeat no-hopers because anyone who has any sense gets the hell out of there.
The parents regularly neglect their kids - about a month ago a 5 year old had his leg broken when he was run over while playing unsupervised on the road. And yet a significant number of parents (I say “parents” but I don’t know whether a girl and the guys who pass her around like a bong count as “parents”) have anywhere from 3 to 7 kids, all of whom will probably grow up to be thieving, foul-mouthed, deadbeat brats like the other kids in the area. When they’re not torturing stray cats, they’re breaking windows or beating each other up or shoplifting. I can’t fathom the line of reasoning that says “hmm I’m on welfare, my partner is on welfare, we have no education and no job prospects, we have 3 kids that we can’t afford or take care of … let’s have another!”
We all lack sympathy for the adults. But it is not the kids fault. Do we ignore them because their parents lack logic. The kids have to be supported enough to have a chance to succeed. Hating the adults doesn’t make the children go away.
I agree with the OP 100%. I think that if you are getting welfare, food stamps or medical assistance, you should be required to be on birth control, plain and simple.
In a similar vein, two bills recently introduced in New Mexico have a similar requirement, although it’s targeted at women who have drug addicted or fetal alcohol syndrome babies, and requires them to get contraceptive injections. Now why couldn’t they apply this requirement to mothers who keep having kids when they can’t support them? Make the contraception free, and make it a requirement to keep getting welfare benefits. Want your food stamps? Then take this shot.
Here are the NM bills:
New Mexico SB 1175 – requires that parents of drug-addicted babies or babies with fetal alcohol syndrome be sterilized. Women get depo-provera contraceptive injections after the first kid, and if a second one is born, she gets permanently sterilized.
New Mexico SB 1166 - requires women who give birth to a drug- or alcohol-addicted baby for a second time to get depo-provera contraceptive injections every month.
Well, I can’t speak for other countries, but the “agricultural worker’s unemployment subsidy” in Spain is a way to get the collective cow to pay for Socialist votes in the South.
Who, me? Understand the northern farmers who’d rather hire a moor than an andalusian, because the moor won’t leave them hanging once he gets his “30”? Nooooooo!
People who are convinced that party A will keep them housed, fed and scratching their asses, will vote for party A. Specially if they know there’s going to be snacks at the voting college.
I want to be clear that I have no problem with people who have mental health issues or health issues being on welfare, or indeed anyone who finds themselves in a temporary situation where they need government assistance, including parents who find themselves unexpectantly single without means or those who have lost their jobs.
pizzabrat, our 5th grade sex-ed day included talk of contraception. When some parents complained that it was too early to be talking about contraception, the counter arguments posited by the nuns and by the nurse who’d given the class were:
- we’re having sex-ed because we know they’re thinking about sex already.
- if we’re having sex-ed we’re having it all the way.
- the youngest mother I’ve encountered was 12. Your kids are turning 11 in the next few months. Can you count?
Or, as my grandmother put it “this is a hot country, teens gonna have sex so long as boys have pipis and girls have slitties”
Yeah, you guys are all right. Only rich people should be allowed to have kids; poor people should just die without any descendants at all. Just die out! Having children should be a privilege limited to the wealthiest people. Fuck yeah!
Strawmen! Fuck yeah!
:rolleyes:
Tired of being a video store clerk, and moving into being professionally offended for a living? :dubious:
But you’re right of course. “You shouldn’t have kids if you can’t feed, clothe and house them” is exactly the same as saying “You should only be allowed to breed if you’re insanely rich!”.
Really? Look at places like sub-Saharan Africa - the places that go through real feast/famine cycles. They know it’ll come sooner or later, but that doesn’t stop them from having an outrageous number of kids so that some of them will make it through the famine cycle. And then it becomes a vicious cycle.
As for the availability of birth control, I guess we’ll have to disagree. People will have sex. Just because various idiot groups refuse to accept that doesn’t make it any less true. Since they’re going to be doing it anyway, I’d rather they not be popping out offspring every two years. Take care of the contraception and then let them fuck all they want.
-Joe
I work in rental property management, and I see this practically every week. People with large families and on welfare, coming in looking for a place to rent. Some are homeless, some are living in one or two bedroom apartments. The record was a one bedroom apartment with one mother and her ten kids (hell, you can’t legally have ten cats in a one bedroom apartment). They get all annoyed if we can’t find them something or even worse, if what we can find them doesn’t meet their standards. One couple who was living in a car with their five children in February rejected an apartment because, when told what street it was on, “I’m not living there.”)
I have no answers, but I do wonder who is forcing them to have all those children. It’s really sad when the second generation comes in–children raised on welfare who are now raising their children on welfare. It’s a vicious cycle. I think raising children on welfare is a form of child abuse–you’re teaching your child that living on welfare is the way to go. PLEASE NOTE: I said raising children while on welfare, not being on welfare while trying to get on your feet. Long term welfare does nobody any good.
Well, I for one am glad I was raised by my loving family and not in an orphanage, even if my mother didn’t have enough cash to meet your approval when I was born.
I guess you guys also arn’t down with, for example, the entire country of Cameroon. Most of my neighbors live in mud and thatch huts with no furniture and ten kids sleeping on mats on the floor. They don’t have diaper bags or playpens or baby mozart tapes or high chairs or baby monitors or car seats or any of the things we consider “essential” for having children. Mostly they just tie the baby to their backs and get on with their lives. Yet they manage to have healthy, happy children that grow up to be productive adults. It really doesn’t take as much to raise a kid as we like to think it does. Child bearing in America has gotten commoditized to a rediculous degree. What children need is food, a place to sleep, and above all- love.
People are not irrational, even poor people. People don’t have a lot of kids for no reason. Around here, people have a lot of kids because they need to them to work on the farm and they will likely lose several children to disease and cannot risk losing all of them because they will rely on those children to take care of them when they are old. Most the families I know have lost five or six kids. When facing odds like that, it makes sense to have a few extra. Maybe they will be running the risk of famine tomorrow, but without their kids they run the risk of famine today.
If you are really interested in solving the problem, look for the reasons why people have too many children and work towards changing those things. Looking down your nose at people you know nothing about won’t help a single thing.
What does your location’s economic situation of having multiple children improve a person’s situation have to do with ours where the opposite is true?
(Edited to juxtapose a couple of sections that rub up against each other a little oddly.)
I guess the people who are talking about the inadvisability of having kids you can’t afford are judging by the standards of a society in which it’s not expected that most families will lose five or six kids - nor will need many sets of hands to put to work at subsistence farming as soon as they’re big enough to pull weeds. If that’s “looking down {my} nose” then guilty, m’lud.
(Or what pizzabrat said, and less wastefully of words.)
I went to a high school that was well known in the area for a high teenage pregnancy rate. We had plenty of sex education and there was no excuse if people didn’t use birth control. They didn’t, though. I’m really unsure why. Calling for more birth control or free condoms won’t do much, at least from what I’ve seen. These kids made a bad choice, usually only one in a series. They had no thought for the long-term consequences of their actions.
This is a mindset that is pretty prevalent of people in poverty, and that is why we see people in poverty continually making bad choices. How to fix that? I don’t know. One way may be to start cutting off public benefits for them. Right now, if you live in poverty you can get free medical care, subsidized housing, welfare benefits (if you are a single woman, at least), food stamps, etc. The incentive to make a good choice is lessened because you are not bearing the entire cost of your poor decision. If you make bad decisions more costly to them, then perhaps they would be a little more prudent. Then again, these bad decisions wreak havoc with their lives, so there’s already a huge disincentive not to do them. Who knows?
And, of course, there are people who choose to have kids even though they can’t afford them (as in, they didn’t get pregant by accident). My brother-in-law just had a baby. He’s 16, his girlfriend is 19. She decided she wanted a baby and, without consulting with him, set out to get pregnant. Now he bears responsibility for not using protection, but she is a fucking retard for wanting to have a baby at 19 and for not consulting with her boyfriend about doing it. There are a lot of women out there like this who become pregnant on purpose in order to keep a boyfriend, have someone to love, etc. They can’t afford it, but who cares, right?