The fact that the children of teen mothers have hard lives is correlative, not causative, to the fact that the mothers are teens. Basically, women who become mothers as teens share a number of traits, on average, that are unlikely to go away so much once they grow up. Being part of a poverty-stricken underclass with no real hope of getting enough education or being enough of a financial success to escape that underclass is not the kind of thing that *most* women escape by just making it through their teens without having a kid. In fact, if most women in that situation could escape it by not having a kid, there would probably be vastly less teen pregnancy among women in that situation.

The reason middle-class girls who expect to go to college don’t get pregnant in their teens at nearly the same rate as poor underclass girls who expect to do nothing with their lives except work shit jobs and have babies is not because middle-class girls are smarter than poor underclass girls, but because the costs to the two sets of girls for having babies while teenage are not the same. The middle-class girl who has a child while a teen, thus derailing her college ambitions, is going to be seriously hurt by it. She may very well eventually work her way back into the middle-class, but for a while, she and her baby will probably be dirt poor… whereas if she had waited to get a college degree and get started in a career before having a child, she and the baby would be in much better shape.

However, the poor underclass girl does not have a career waiting for her. She does not have a college degree in her future. She has a lifetime of being a cleaning lady or working at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. It doesn’t matter if she has a baby *now*, and later gets a job at Wal-Mart, or gets the job at Wal-Mart now and later has the baby. In fact in some ways having the baby now makes more sense — she’s younger, at the peak of her health considering how bad the health outcome for being a poor member of the underclass is, and she can probably recruit help from her own mother. She’s not going to be able to support that baby on a Wal-Mart salary anyway, no matter what, so why not have the baby early and collect welfare and then go to work for Wal-Mart when the child is older and in school?

The proposal to “encourage” teen girls who see no good reason to use birth control to get on some form of long-term birth control basically assumes that the teen girls who see no good reason to use birth control are idiots who can’t see what wonders the future holds for them. But that’s a patronizing attitude that comes from privilege. When you’re a member of the poor underclass, education and work *don’t* hold wonders for your future. Having a baby, however, is a reliable way to get someone to love you, get some respect in your community, and establish yourself as an adult in a world where whether you’re a teen or an adult, you’re likely to have about equally bad, equally poorly paid jobs.

The solution here is to provide these girls hope for a real future. Not just to take away their ability to have children until they hit the magic number of 18. The stats that show that children of older parents do better are hopelessly conflated with the stats that show that people delay child-bearing the more education they hope to get in their lives and the better financially they expect to do in the future. If you give these girls a chance to get decent, good-paying jobs that will protect their future and the future of any children they have, and they need to delay childbearing in order to land those jobs, wow, I’ll bet they will suddenly find a good reason to use birth control.

i was all set to defend my proposition, when Parapondera came along and made it look all moderate.
by being a stupid asshole, i grant.
did ya catch that if we were “really” feminists, we would be pushing genetic manipulation to turn us into men? or that he seems to think (erroneous, as far as studies show) that men are smarter than women?

also, he says stupid people shouldn’t breed. and neither should anyone with any genetic defects. or anything else. maybe we need to have a eugenics board to pass first? is that what you mean, Parapondera? we are not “real” feminists because we don’t practice eugenics? is miscongeniation on your list of no-nos? how about reprodutive assistance? O.Bs? after all, some women would die in childbirth without medical assistance; should they die, and not pass on that faulty plumbing?

grrrrrr. i hate when i have a radical position and it is made moderate by something even more extreme…

Rights are things people have even when they use them in ways we consider irresponsible. Otherwise they’re not rights; then they’re privileges.

Right now, it seems very sad to me that, if he walks out the door and gets run over by a bus, I will not know about it and will therefore be deprived of the opportunity to rejoice at the departure of a very bad person from the world.

I believe that the ability to limit pregnancies is a fundamental human right, but not the inverse, and definitely not as long as taxpayers are forced to provide housing and subsistence to pregnant women and mothers who cannot provide these necessities for themselves.

If you don’t want to be told how many children you can have, or don’t want to be encouraged by the state to use certain forms of birth control, then don’t live in a council estate or be on welfare.

Parapondera is a joke right?

I’m hoping so, and I kind of liked the “I Don’t Like Mondays” reference, but I’m a little scared it’s not a joke.

I’m leaning toward satire, mostly because of this section:

And silly young girls could get on with the education that is meant to produce serious, responsible taxpayers, not benefit recipients.

Now, many people will see this modest proposal as little short of horrific – nothing less than state interference in our reproductive lives.

“modest proposal” makes me think of Jonathan Swift — his modest proposal was written totally seriously and fooled many. Also, “silly young girls” and the implication that education is not meant to benefit recipients both strike me as sarcastic.
– ————-
I think she is comparing two groups of people: serious-responsible-taxpayers on the one hand, and benefit-recipients on the other.

It didn’t seem like satire to me, just so off the wall that I was mostly interested in the Britishisms. Like “benefit recipients” instead of “welfare mothers” or “freeloaders,” and “jab” instead of “shot” or “injection.”

My satire button must be off…both of these things seem to real to me.

Trading one power structure for another is not freedom.