By now you’ve heard all about Nadya Suleman, the unemployed, single woman who recently gave birth to eight pre-mature children via in-vitro fertilization. This is in addition to the six she already had. The hospital where the eight were born has requested reimbursement from Medi-Cal for their care, which averages $164,273 per infant.
Suleman is just the most extreme example of something we commonly see these days, which is young, single women having children for whom they are unable to care without outside help; this includes both government aid and help from parents to meet needs such as babysitting and financial support.
Two things come to mind here: First, like many single mothers Suleman still lives with her mother. What makes her think that her parents want to take care of her children while she goes to work? Isn’t it completely immoral to burden others in that manner? Why do so many single mothers have this sense of entitlement?
The second concern is that when you provide something to somebody such as welfare payments, you create a class of people that live off those payments. These services rob them of the necessity of supporting themselves, such as is plainly seen with alcoholics and drug addicts that receive welfare payments.
Why should they support themselves? Their needs are being met.
Government policy should be to make single motherhood as untenable as possible — just as it should be for drug addiction. Doesn’t it make sense that young people would be much less likely to have children they cannot afford if they knew that their parents or the government would not be there to care for them?
Single mothers perpetuate the cycle of poverty because they are often unable to get educations due to work schedules, consequently limiting themselves to low-wage jobs. In turn, their kids are much more likely to become pregnant while single and indigent because that was the behavior modeled for them.
Obviously, a young-person without children to care for is much more likely to attend college or vocational training.
If welfare benefits were no longer given to expectant or single mothers, it would create hardship for the current generation. The long-term effect, however, would be to reduce the number of young women having children they cannot afford because the “window of opportunity” would then be closed. In other words, if you take away the benefit, the class of people that live off the benefit wither away.
Can you really have a prosperous society if the half of the population being responsible about childbearing is supporting the other half that is not? Is it really asking too much for people to refrain from having kids if they cannot afford them?
I once saw an interview in which the father of porn-star Jenna Jameson was asked what he thought of his daughter doing porn. “I support Jenna in whatever she does,” he replied. Maybe that is the problem. Maybe we shouldn’t support our kids in some things, such as doing porn or having kids they cannot afford.
Maybe all this stuff about “unconditional love” is a bunch of nonsense. Maybe our love for our children should instead be contingent on them acting in some sort of honorable and self-respecting manner.
Christopher Herrin is a Religious Studies graduate student and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.