Why does a third party have to do anything to either encourage or discourage anyone from having a baby? Both are wrong. Especially something as specific as paying a woman to get an IUD. Now that’s political suicide.
That is to say, why should the government do anything like that. If some patronizing “philanthropist” wants to pay women to use contraception, that should be allowable. It’d offend my sensibilities a bit (EDIT: a lot, actually), but that’s better that the state doing something like that.
Prolly only me :smack:.
But there’s nothing guarantying such a plan is going to produce better results or cost less.
You really think institutionalizing a generation of children is going to produce a generation of healthy well adjusted adults?
Why stop with the poor then? Why should the children of the struggling middle class be denied this wonderful opportunity?
Moreover do you really want to live in a country where losing your job or the death of a spouse can result in losing your children?
Everything I’ve ever read on the subject says that Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen is a fiction.
CMC fnord!
No, when Scrooge talks about decreasing the surplus population, he is talking about existing poor people starving to death, whereas here we’re talking about refraining from increasing the surplus population. A subtle difference, maybe, but a significant one.
[url=http://nowhere.null.nothing]Incidentally, your habit of wrapping url tags around an entire paragraph is one that I personally find visually jarring if nothing else. Could I politely ask you to knock it off, just as a favour? It’s not that there’s anything objectively wrong and it’s a simple preference on my part, I admit, but I would find it agreeable if you could see your way clear to accommodating me.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=8312607#post8312607)
Out of curiosity, what do you think causes this inherent, uneducable ignorance? Are there any other traits which you see as being generally connected with this large subset of people who are too stupid or willful to learn not to be poor?
There still is some kind of “emergency housing” available for kids. I’m not quite sure how it works though. A college roommate of mine spent about 8 months in one. He lived in Ontario, Canada and was a kid in the 70s and 80s.
His mom got divorced/abandoned and was in a really, really tight spot. The situation was quite hopeless (it’s tough to couch surf with two kids in tow). Somehow she contacted either a social assitance program or Children’s Aid to ask for help. Her two boys were put in this temporary housing situation (it was kind of like a cross between an orphange and a shelter), while their mom worked to get back on her feet. Once she got a place to live and a job and things seemed stable enough, the kids moved back in with her.
I’ve driven past the facility a couple of times, but I don’t really know much about it other than what my old roommate told me. For some reason, foster care wasn’t an option. He and his brother weren’t going to be in the system long enough and they hadn’t been taken away from their mom by the courts or anything. It was voluntary. She’d gone and asked for help and was none too happy about the whole idea.
Tom said it wasn’t really fun but not particularly traumatic, but he wouldn’t want some other poor kid to have to go through it. He said it was more like a prolonged stay at really bad summer camp for them.
And this would be a positive thing? :dubious:
I have a husband who used to be a juvenile prosecutor in a really bad, poor area, and a best friend who used to be a foundation grant writer for a county-run large “transitional” childrens home (it’s often not transitional at all, but it is meant to be a temporary home providing children shelter and protection. Children from newborn to 17 years of age usually stay there from a few weeks to months, while awaiting Juvenile Court decisions concerning their welfare and future).
Between those two things, I have an extremely dim view of child placement.
Sometimes it’s not ignorance, which is a product of the will, but simply plain old stupidity, or lesser intelligence. My mother works with women in prison and teenage mothers. I’ve asked her about the teen moms; “What kind of life do these girls think their children will have? How will they be able to provide another person with food and shelter and stability for 18 years, and then a college education with no education of their own and no skills?” My mother replies;
“They don’t think about that.”
Me, incredulous: “They don’t think about the long-term consequences of having a child.”
Her, wearily: “They think very little about consequences at all.”
Wow.
About the women in prison, Mom talks about how they describe getting so angry that they black out, then committing the assault that landed them in the pokey.
What a gather from this is that these women don’t think about consequences, have anger problems and can’t control themselves, and generally make the same bad choices over and over. If part of intelligence is knowing how to assess a situation and act appropriately, then the persistent lack of that ability must be lack of intelligence.
I have never heard that prisoners are only permitted to use toilet paper if they first have earned cash working inside of the prison with which they pay for it. Does that mean that a female prisoner who has pneumonia for 5 weeks and cannot work gets to lay in her own tissue and blood because she cannot afford tampons? What about prisoners who are new to a facility? They must scrape their bottoms on the wall until they have gotten assigned a job, worked for 2 weeks and had the pay deposited into their prison accounts so it could then be used to purchase toilet paper?
Cite for your statement, please. Cause I call bullshit on this one.
Cartooniverse
Theres a difference between people who have a history of working for a living, who are parents and who are unfortunate enough to lose their jobs and those who have at best a patchy(here in the U.K. we have grown adults who have NEVER had a genuine job in their lives) work record but numerous children.
Anyone who has been unemployed for any reason for 9 months or more and is
claiming Welfare and THEN gets pregnant is quite simply an irresponsible parasite
and people like that usually do not make good parents.
Coincidentally here in the U.K. there was a B.B.C. tv news item about a report on overcrowded housing .
They interviewed a woman in what appeared to be a council house (subsidised rent if they’re working rent paid if they’re not).
She had I think 6 kids in a 2 or 3 bedroom place ,when asked what it felt like she said “its like being in prison you cant get out”
To repeat a previous posters comments .Then why do you keep having fucking kids then ?"You stupid, lazy, self pitying bitch.
And you think this is because of inherent qualities that cannot be change with education and other adjustments to circumstance, as the poster I was replying to does?
Well, yeah. Not everyone can be Einstein. In a perfect world, everyone would grow up to be a responsible and prudent citizen, but some people are just plain stupid. Their stupidity means that they can’t get ahead, because they can’t take advantage of opportunities to better themselves (like education), or they just make bad choices that end up screwing them over (circumstance).
I have no cite–mr.stretch no longer works in support enforcement, and even if he did I can’t cite to their policy and procedures*. However, I assure you that they will take every fucking bit of a prisoner’s money. They get reports every morning of who has been arrested and held, and the cops will turn over any cash if they have an outstanding child support debt. If you have money while in jail or prison, the state can take it for debts that have judgements and child support is one of those debts by default in our state.
The prisons and jails may provide some personal items to the inmates. However inmates also make and are given money to buy extra stuff including more toilet paper, soap, etc. I guess if their family wants to make sure they have that stuff, they give them that instead of money that my husband’s former co-workers will happily take away from them.
Washington State support enforcement officers have designated authority to garnish wages; place liens; seize entire bank accounts (including business accounts); take IRS returns; take prisoner’s money; and other stuff, too. The only thing they can’t touch is your SSA disability, and sometimes they accidently grab that as well and the paying parent has to prove that all the money seized was SSA funds. The federal government, and by extension Washington State, takes the financial support of children very seriously.
*if you insist, I will call one of mr.stretch’s former co-workers on Monday and see if they can fax me something I can scan for you.
It’s not inherent and the people themselves are not uneducable. However, education that goes against their cultural norms won’t likely stick from what I’ve observed. The problems are a result of a culture that doesn’t value long-term thinking and instead values short-term gratification. A lot of peole in poverty make bad choice after bad choice. It seems pretty simple to tell where they go wrong time after time, but they cannot see it because it’s simply the way things work in their world. A guy’s an unemployed ex-con who already has three babies with two different women? Women with middle class values look at this kind of guy and run away. Women in the culture that breed poverty, however, think that this kind of guy is a catch.
Oh come on, unbunch the panties already.
Where did I say that a man has no obligation? Where do I say that a man shouldn’t worry about it.
Now take a look the fuck around and tell me you don’t see a whole lot of single women raising kids because their baby-daddies took off on them. In that situation, that happens all the goddamned time, who is getting screwed? Is it the man who takes off once he finds out he’s going to be a father or the woman who is stuck raising the kid for the next 18 years?
I’m not saying that it’s right or that is how I live my life, but the fact of the matter is that a woman has a lot more to lose from lack of birth control (ladies - if the guy you’re about to fuck tells you he’s had a vasectomy so there’s no reason to worry, do you just take him at his word?). Disagree with me? Fine. Just point out all the single fathers raising kids after the mother vanished - all you have to do to convice me is show that it’s 51%, but I’ll admit I’m wrong if you can come up with 20%.
Personally, I never trusted someone else to “take care of it”. Oh, and look, no kids until I wanted one.
-Joe
OK, but it wasn’t Scrooge that I was quoting,
How can you have a “real threat of starvation” without a real threat of starvation? If this “pick yourself by your own bootstraps” program doesn’t work, what then? A safety net of government programs so we don’t have to step over dead bodies in the street?
The root complaint I hear is “not with my money”, but I don’t see anyone offering solutions that don’t involve the spending of those same taxes to implement. Orphanages ain’t free.
BTW, I’ve yet to hear that there’s always private charity to provide a safety net. If that worked historically there wouldn’t have been the need for these government programs, would there?
That difference would be what exactly (other than a difference in work history)? If I choose a career in a field that doesn’t guarantee steady employment, say seasonal work like construction or landscaping, am I one of “those people”?
Great, is this going to happen to the folks just “unfortunate enough to lose their jobs” or only to those with the patchy work records?
I’m sure you won’t have any objections if those “irresponsible parasite(s)” chose to have abortions, right?
CMC fnord!
[ QUOTE=Malacandra ] Incidentally, your habit of wrapping url tags around an entire paragraph is one that I personally find visually jarring if nothing else. Could I politely ask you to knock it off, just as a favour? It’s not that there’s anything objectively wrong and it’s a simple preference on my part, I admit, but I would find it agreeable if you could see your way clear to accommodating me.[ /QUOTE ]
You called me on this before. I use Firefox, and what you did (wrap url tags around a text block) doesn’t look like what I did (wrap url tags around a quote), so I didn’t understand the problem. Having looked at the posts in IE I can now understand your complaint.
So, just for you, no more url tags around a quote!
Yeah the underlining of the whole quote box looks like crap, thanks for the heads-up!
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What culture are you talking about? How are its members defined? Where are they from, and what are their customs, and so on?
Thanks. Perhaps I should try Firefox!
Exactly.
When I got pregnant with my first (and only, so far) child a little over a year ago, my husband and I both had good jobs, we had a small nest egg, and we were very financially prepared for a baby. Fast forward a month - my husband lost his job, and was unable to find another one for eight months - a week and a half AFTER our son was born. It doesn’t pay nearly as much as his old job, so we still haven’t quite built up the nest egg that we had before he lost his job. However, we are doing fairly well because we’ve learned to budget. And most of the time, we don’t buy things for ourselves, but just for our son (not out of any sense of martyrdom, but the basic rundown is that we can watch the DVDs we already own or read the books we already have - he needs things like diapers and formula, and yes, I want to buy him cute clothes.). We do things like Netflix and I buy books at the secondhand bookstore. With some gift cards from Christmas, we can get new clothes for ourselves. We’re not really clothes horses, so it works out well.
Having a child is EXPENSIVE. Yeah, there are things we’ve bought him that he really doesn’t NEED, but as long as it’s not taxing our budget, it’s fine. However, we pay out of pocket for everything. Insurance (I do have insurance through work for him, but our part is fairly costly), formula, diapers, baby food (and I fully admit that he eats organic food, but with coupons I get, it actually costs less to feed him organic than it does to feed him regular old Gerber), etc. We knew we were getting into this when we had him, although I don’t think any parent realizes how much it actually costs until you’re paying for it all.
We would love to have a second one soon, but we’re waiting until my husband finishes his schooling and gets a better job. We COULD afford a second child, but not comfortably, and that’s important to us. My one true luxury(at least by my standards) is the 2005 PT Cruiser we just bought a couple of months ago. But the main reason we bought that was because we wanted a safer car than my tiny little Kia.
Meanwhile, I know several women recently who are on WIC (Women, Infants, and Children). Both drive nicer cars than my husband and I do. Both live in nicer houses than we do. Their children are outfitted in Gymboree quite often. And both decided that they wanted to have a second child while on WIC so that their ‘children would be close in age’.
You know what? Fuck that. They don’t pay for their child’s name-brand formula while we buy the Wal-Mart brand formula to save money (which, to be honest, I don’t really give a shit about - it’s essentially the same thing - but it’s the principle of the matter). They get free, healthy food from WIC while I am very careful about how I shop so that I can buy healthy food. I’m sorry, but if you can afford a second child, if you can afford a brand-new Toyota Sienna minivan, if you can afford to dress your daughters in brand-new Gymboree clothing, then why the fuck do you need WIC? Take the fucking $14 hat off of your child’s head, return it to Gymboree, and buy a goddamn can of formula with the money.
To me, WIC and welfare are there for people in case of unplanned events. Hell, we would have appreciated a little help when my husband was out of work, but I made about $400 too much a year to qualify. We were already pregnant at the time, but had he been laid off before I’d gotten pregnant, you can be damn sure our attempts to get pregnant would have been put on hold until he’d gotten a new job. The fact that people purposely get pregnant while on these programs irritates the ever-living fuck out of me.
I don’t believe in mandatory sterilization, but I do believe in taking some godamn responsibility for your actions. You want to keep your WIC benefits? You want to keep your welfare benefits? Then don’t fucking PLAN another child while you’re receiving them.
Yeah, I’m a little bitter. Bitter because we have worked our asses off for everything we have over the last year and a half, with no help from the government, and being responsible means we put off having the second child we definitely want, and we will more than likely never afford the third child that I would like. Yet others can have all the kids they want as long as they have the government to help them out.
E.
Buh-wuh?
Sorry, someone earning less than a living wage should remain childless. That’s sort of the way that “living wage” is defined – if you aren’t earning one, you can’t afford to provide for a family.
Feck, I’m hustling my ass right now to increase my salary to the point where I can think about starting a family. Minimally, I want to earn another 5K per year, and I have a savings goal to be met before the condoms are dispensed with.
I’m not living in poverty, but I can’t afford to provide for a kid today, and until we’re feeling a bit more economically secure, forget about it.
Because, you know – we’re not irresponsible.