HOLY SHIT. This board has gone insane. The rampant classism is killing me, though I realize it’s not yet declasse to treat “lower” class people like animals or untouchables or whatever. Get a grip people, how is eugenics even a consideration in this day and age? Who’s going to decide what’s the proper socioeconomic level for childbearing? Is it you, because you are in a “safe” group? Believe me, the right circumstance comes along and you could be taken from whatever high-and-mighty place you’ve gotten to (which you think you somehow deserve) and put right into the ranks of the begging. At that point, d’ya want someone saying “come along now, it’s time for your vasectomy, you undesirable”? I wish this was in the Pit.
I see you are suffering under the common delusion that most people on welfare are on it for life. While there are a few of those, MOST people in the US on government assistance (welfare, food stamps, etc.) are on it for, if I recall correctly, an average of 2 years.
All it takes is housefire to render one of the self-important suburbanite middle class families homeless and destitute. Or a hurricane. Or a tornado. Or an earthquake. Or the main breadwinner becoming seriously ill or injured. People are not lazy due to bad luck, nor is it moral to punish people for ill fortune.
If you did have a family where, for example, there’s a fire, they lose their home and possessions and they already have children should those children now be summarily taken away forever because they are now poor and require assistance? Isn’t that the next logical step, since the parents are (temporarily) unable ot care for those children without help? How dare they have bad luck!
That sounds to me like the whole point of such a policy.
It’s a horrible idea to get the government involved in determining the makeup of the population it governs, period. And this idea expressly devalues the lives and rights of people on welfare.
I support free abortions and free contraceptives for those on welfare who wish to make use of them, but that’s as far as I go.
It looks to me like the idea proposed by the OP is not exactly recieving a warm welcome from anyone else in this thread. If you think it’s a terrible idea, then the board, far from being “insane”, seems to largely agree with you.
Um, get a grip yourself. So far NO ONE has agreed with the OP.
And as for the OP, while in my more cynical moments I’ve wished EVERYONE was on mandatory foolproof no-side-effect birth control, in reality such a thing doesn’t exist and probably never will. Medical science is great, but reproductive health is a tenuous system, and once you start mucking with it, bad things happen sometimes.
I can see limiting benefit increases when additional children are born, I can get behind mandatory parenting classes and state funded childcare during school and employment hours. But sticking that wedge into reproductive freedoms is just beyond what I’m comfortable with. I think this is one area where the slippery slope concept *is *applicable. First the poor, then the “unfit”, then maybe me…
I’m sorry WhyNot, you’re obviously not feeling well. You need to report to building 57G for retraining. All hail the glorious leader.
So are you ready to condemn at least 3/4th of humanity and nearly all of human history? The vast majority of humans wern’t raised with minivans and Baby Eienstein videos. In fact, most of human history involves lots of teenage mothers, mud huts, no schooling, etc. To claim that some sort of American middle class living standard is a moral requirement to give birth is so shortsighted and un-grounded from reality that it is absurd.
To throw out another problem:
How would you deal with people who object to birth control on moral grounds? Are they all banned from state support? Would a Catholic who believes birth control is sinful be rejected for welfare and public housing?
wow, that’s a scarey proposition.
So what if there is a current culture of welfare recipients who use pregnency as a way to collect welfare; as their way of surviving.
If there’s mandatory birth control? What will become of them? Will they have to get jobs and pull their own weight now?
Well, they could always choose not to have sexual intercourse with anyone who is potentially fertile, that is what I do when I want to avoid getting pregnant. Not that I think the proposition is good, reasonable, or sane.
And I still want an answer to my question. How much do you have to have saved before you can morally have sex?
I’m not sure if anyone else mentioned these issues (didn’t read every post), and maybe I’m an ass for thinking this, but my concern is that you wind up with ALOT more people with STDs. You might also wind up with ALOT more prostitution. I’m thinking this might happen since alot of people might take advantage of the free birth control. They won’t have to worry about having a baby, but they might not think about the other consequences.
If this program is big enough to need government involvement, it’s too important to trust to the government. I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea if it was applied perfectly efficiently - but if it’s going to be administered by government bureaucrats, you just know that it’ll end up looking like the DMV.
Would it be? The birth control referred to in the OP is really voluntary…it’s a condition to participate in the welfare program. The person is free to say he or she won’t participate in the welfare program. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a Hobson’s choice, but there’s no fundamental obligation for a government to provide welfare or poor relief, so it can certainly condition it’s provision of such.
Aren’t all or most welfare recipients on Medicaid anyway? So we already have the birth control available. (I’m thinking something like Norplant.) And we already have a bureaucracy in place (God help us) to administer welfare.
Failing that, we could require a Depo-provera shot before handing over the check.
And I don’t see why we would need the random testing. If someone turns up preggers while on welfare, as long as it could be shown they had received the shot or had the Norplant in place, we could assume it was a contraceptive failure.
Of course, we could achieve the same thing by simply telling welfare recipients that they could have as many children as they wanted. Just bear in mind that you aren’t getting any increase in your welfare check.
That’s assuming we wouldn’t save any money by a reduction in the number of children on welfare.
[nitpick]
But we aren’t exactly living on borrowed money. Total US budget for 2008 is 2.5 trillion and change (cite) and the total deficit is something like $400 billion. So, more accurately, about 6.25% of our spending is borrowed. [/nitpick]
And welfare is a state-level series of programs, as you doubtless know.
Hard to give an exact figure. How about “enough so you don’t have to live off the government”? Of course, that doesn’t have to be saved up - a stable job, marriage to someone with a stable job, gullible friends, things like that count too.
The idea is to be able to support your own children, without relying on the charity of strangers. Somehow or other, most adults manage it. Why so many welfare recipients react with horror to the suggestion is an interesting topic of thought.
Regards,
Shodan
I would say the best answer to this question would be that you have enough money to have sex when you can handle the ramifications of having sex without effecting other people financially. If you aren’t exactly flush but you know that if you got pregnant you could budget and make decisions to support your family without outside help then yeah, climb right up on that cock if you want. If you got an STD but you have insurance or money enough to pay for the doctors visits and medication without asking the taxpayers for it then do whatever you like.
I realize that this is absolutely never going to happen and people will have sex early and often with no regards to the future but this is my personal standard. This is why I waited until I was 18 to have sex and when I did start having sex made sure I used 2 forms of birth control. I didn’t want to be that person who has a baby they can’t take care of without food stamps. I don’t expect everyone else would adhere to the same standards that I do either so I completely understand why there might be a 15 year old girl and her 17 year old boyfriend in need of assistance because they had a kid.
Sometimes people fall on hard times and they need help. Often the people who need that help have children. I don’t think you could morally refuse to help women for having kids or force them to use birth control but I think perhaps offering incentives for women on welfare who are willing to get the birth control implant wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.
I personally know at least two women who have considered abortions before learning how much their welfare benefits would increase. I don’t think you have a good idea of what actually happens in poor communities.
Why not just change the amount of welfare benefits per child, then?
And I personally know at least three women who would have aborted regardless of how many millions of dollars welfare would have offered them.
Do you have any actual data?