[QUOTE=unconventional]
BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed, my original response to your post was reactionary. This is an extremely relevant and important topic. Your proposal is grounded more in reality than ideals.
Mandatory birth control for welfare mothers is an idea rooted in eugenics and stereotypes. It perpetuates the belief that welfare recipients, poor women and children, are not valuable, lazy, and deviants. It also places blame on women for the perceived Welfare state.
I agree that poverty and welfare dependence are not the best conditions for children. There are socially responsive ways to reduce welfare. A good start would be a comprehensive sex educated for all young women and access to a variety of affordable or free birth control. Controlling fertility is a narrow approach to a complex social issue.
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Hm, just to reiterate, because I see it’s already come up from other posters, I didn’t focus on mothers. I hold fathers just as responsible, and right from the start noted that men on welfare under this hypothetical system would be required to be on BC. I think the reason people have been talking fairly exclusively about women is because the government doesn’t provide assistance to men who have babies (or maybe they do; I don’t really know the statutes, perhaps herownself can comment on this), so the most visible people who can “benefit” from having a child are women. This does not mean I don’t hold men at least as, if not more responsible because women can at most have 1 child per 9 months (excluding twins, etc, of course) while men can have countless.
All that being said–
[QUOTE=BlinkingDuck]
I to am a bit appalled by the classism in this idea.
Look…people want to have sex. They want to reproduce and leave offspring…that’s what animals do…and we are all animals. To go to a group of people and insist that they not get assistance unless they not reproduce is going against one of the strongest drives people have. What will happen if you do this is that people will go on assistance and cheat on it, or, if they cannot cheat, they will not go on it.
So…say you come up with a system that is cheat-proof. So, most people would stay off of it GREAT! you say…less of my tax money being spent on lazy people.
Well…
What about the starving children? Will you let them starve? If not, you just broke your cheat-proof system…so you have to let them starve or people will just not go on the system, have kids and the state will feed them.
Do you think most parents will let their kid starve? …especially with an abundance of food around them? Hell no…they will do whatever it takes to feed their kids. Crime skyrockets? Put those parents in jail…ok…what about their kids? Let em starve and freeze?
See…this gets at one of the benefits of welfare. It is not just for the welfare recipients benefit but also for the people that pay money to welfare recipients. You get a more stable society…with less desperation, crime, hell even less REVOLTS. It is for all our benefit - rich, poor and middle class alike.
Now, you don’t want to make welfare too attractive but you don’t want to make it too unattractive as well. People will have kids…it is a driving force of our existance. Things like not being able to afford kids actually might drive this more than people who can afford them. You will not stop the poor from having kids.
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Again, I’m talking about a hypothetical system which is 100% effective. I’m not sure what to do if people don’t go on this system and have kids. Maybe the kids should be cared for by being removed? I mean, doesn’t the state already have a function in place to remove improperly-cared-for children? If the kids are removed and the parents don’t gain any further welfare benefits, it would remove the incentive. Of course, I think this is a terrible solution, but I don’t have answers to the current societal problems, let alone my hypothetical ones. People starve on the street every day.
I agree that you’re removing one of the basic instincts that people have, which is to reproduce. That’s why I suggested that the state agree to pay for up to 2 (or 3 or whatever) children before the birth control is instated.
I mean, call me crazy, but I think anyone, whether they can afford it or not, is acting irresponsibly by having enormous numbers of children. It was one thing when we had farming families that needed 16 kids to go till the land to survive, but now we’re rushing toward an overpopulation problem (and yes, I realize that this is a geographical problem more than a worldwide one). I think it’s acting selfishly against the entire human race to simply have as many kids as you want. However, like I said when I touched on this the first time, my views on how many kids anyone can have are somewhat outside the scope of this thread-- I just wanted to give some background as to where my thinking is coming from lest people just assume I’m coming from a “damn those welfare people’s huge families! Only the rich white folk get to have a Warren Worthington the 18th!” position.
[QUOTE=herownself]
Hey Captain. Not trying to pick a fight with you here - you’re just a convenient starting point, but the government sure will allow you to walk around nude in public, in designated nude ares with a whole bunch of other nude-enjoying people, and you can put your clothes on and walk right back out any time you want. Kind of inconvenient, I’ll admit. But we do have a strong cultural norm against nakididity in front of other folks.
The US government won’t let you put narcotics in your body at will, but hop on over to Mexico. Or Canada - they have these great pills with codeine in them that you can buy over the counter. So that one is certainly not universal. And I’m all for legalizing the drug market, taxing the crap out of it, and maybe having fewer people die over the whole thing. But that’s just me.
Forcing upon you the decision of whether or not to conceive (or self-abort, depending on the mechanism of this perfect birth control) doesn’t really fall in to this class of control. Or not unless you’re a drug addict, maybe. But then you are ill, and that’s all different. It is a violation of personhood. Of liberty. Of privacy. Of don’t you damn Redcoats come into my house and look through my stuff and insult my wife (or my sister) and scare my kids and take my food without paying for it just because you don’t like me and you can.
I don’t advocate women on income assistance having more children. But I’m sure as heck against taking that freedom away from them. As much as I’m against having it taken away from me. Maybe the gut reaction is a “do unto others” thing.
Generally I think that in our common culture, we have the idea that “your government stops at my skin.” And the two exceptions we have are military service (we will force your skin to do anything we damn well say!) and criminality (you made a crime and we are locking your skin up, and it will have to do pretty much anything we damn well say!).
However, we have not defined poverty as a crime. Other, historical cultures have done so. And looking back we find their practices to be appalling. And we instituted reforms.
One of the reasons for those reforms is we figured out that poverty is not, generally speaking, a result of “bad behavior”. People who are poor do not ‘deserve’ to be deprived of their rights because they have been ‘bad’. These reforms were carried out in the early 1900s (I think).
We are speaking here, I realize, of preventive action. But it is still choosing a population subgroup to deprived of their rights, and to be prevented upon.
And it may just be me, but we seem to have turned against large preventive policies in the US. The Iraq War was our last big preventive policy, and I don’t know anyone who could really say it’s been going just great.
We could possibly change our culture and decide that “the poor” have indeed given up their rights, to the extent that they may have contraception-preventing/self-aborting agents forced upon them. But I think that it would be a big cultural change.
[/QUOTE]
I understand your point about how we haven’t defined being poor as a crime, and so they shouldn’t have to give up any rights. I’m still not clear on how you reconcile that against the cases of drugs and the military.
To look at the draft first, I would say that in many ways, the government forcing you to potentially give up your own life is more sinister than forcing you to give up the lives of potential children. You noted how mandatory BC would be forcing preventive action against a population subgroup. But isn’t the draft the same thing? As far as I know, the only people who can be drafted are men ages 18-X. This is arguably more unfair than taking action against the poor, because there are some people who are poor by choice. It’s not the majority by any stretch of the imagination, but the point is some people can take certain actions to cause themselves to no longer be poor. There are no actions that men ages 18-X can take to cause themselves to no longer be men (ok, barring sex-change operations) ages 18-X (bar none).
The drug thing I can see more clearly how it’s more of a fundamental right to have kids, and less of one to want to smoke weed (for example). So less to argue against this point and more to just provide food for thought, what if there are people who would rather have the right to toke than to have kids. What about Rasta, for example (and I’m not saying that Rastafarians would rather smoke up than have kids, I’m just citing it as an example of a case where people feel so strongly to the point of religion about a drug. This would work for whatever Native American (?) ceremonies involve peyote. I’m not clear on any of this stuff, which is why it’s just part of an example, not an in-depth laid-out argument), where there are probably some Rastafarians who don’t want children, but they definitely feel strongly about weed. They (again, the hypothetical subset of Rastafarians, not all of them) would certainly give up their rights to have children if it meant the right to smoke weed.
My point in all of this is that although I recognize that this program would never actually work because of the government corruption involved in removing fundamental human rights such as this one (hello, China? I’m looking in your direction), isn’t it irresponsible to want to bring children into a situation where you can’t properly care for yourself, let alone someone who needs even more care? And since we’re regulated on so many other things that we are irresponsible about/are bad for us (drugs, sex, trans fat-- NYC, I’m looking in your direction), why is it such a stretch to want to regulate this kind of irresponsibility as well?
Also:
Really?! Why the hell don’t they receive assistance? So if both parents lose jobs and need welfare, they have to divorce before they can get it??
Plus: I recognize the inherent difficulty on forcing men to take BC after they’ve had their 2 (or 3 or X) child limit, but like I said, I’m still on the hypothetical system without these obvious flaws.