(no subject)

[which_chick]

I'm sort of torn on reading this. My first, knee-jerk reaction is that it's dumb as shit to try to convince people to not have teh hawt s3x0r, particularly once they're not teenagers anymore. My second, slightly less knee-jerk reaction is that maybe the state has some vested interest in seeing to it that children are brought forth into reasonably financially-stable households with the resources to rear them. (This doesn't necessarily mean married households but it does set the bar as high as the be not a burden upon the state line.)



First, it should be trying to achieve the end it actually wants instead of the end that it says it is trying to achieve. I hate it when the fucking government does this sort of thing. Honestly. It's like the abortion mess. If abortions are MURDER and we should have fewer of them, then the way to do that is to see to it that people do not get pregnant unexpectedly. Offer people sexual clue, contraception, counseling, and whatnot other services that they need to (a) know how to not-get-pregnant and (b) have the means to SEE TO IT that they do not get pregnant. But the government doesn't do that. It says, "Dude, pregnancy results from sex. So, NO SEX." Yeah. Like that's going to work. They need to get their stated want in line with the solution they are suggesting. (For the abortion mess, I rather think that they're more attached to their solution than they are to solving the actual problem. What they really WANT to solve is that women are having nonreproductive sex and GETTING AWAY WITH IT!!! but that doesn't fly very well in the political arena.)

So it is with this. If the PROBLEM is people having chilluns without a sufficient support structure to raise 'em up, then we need to fix that problem. As with the abortion problem, telling people not to have sex is pretty fucking useless. Telling people that if they're over eighteen and get knocked up, that they are on their own? I don't think so. Telling people that if they're over eighteen and get knocked up, they have to identify a father and at least go through the motions of getting support from him (difficult, obviously, if he's in jail or something) before they qualify for state aid? Probably not a bad idea. I don't really like the idea of making the innocent babies pay for the gather-ye-rosebuds behavior of their parents, so cutting off all gov't programs to help out poor families isn't something I'm in favor of. However, I also don't want the parents to be able to breed with impunity and trust that the state will take care of their children. I'm not sure that it's profitable for the state to pay for the raising up of children. (Children are only a benefit to the state when they're raised up to become tax-paying members of society. Persons who grow up to be druggies or criminals or unwed mothers on welfare are not particularly profit centers for the state.)

Anyway. I don't think that telling the 19-29 year old cohort to not fuck is really going to solve the problem of People are having children without the resources to support them. It looks to me like they're trying to solve the people are having SEX for FUN problem. Is that really a problem? Why are they trying to solve this non-problem?

Comments

[brni.livejournal.com]

if the state is really concerned with the "people having children without the resources to support them" problem, then they really should be taking steps to increase opportunity for everyone to earn a living wage. this might include raising the minimum wage, and certainly includes making sure that there is available affordable day care so that people can actually have jobs to support their families, and most likely includes there being available affordable health care for both the chilluns and the parents so that an illness doesn't bring the whole family to ruin.

of course, when you have a prominent government agency (possibly THE most prominent?) whose primary task is preventing the unemployment statistics from dropping too low, its unlikely that we'll see much change on that front.

i'm less sure of the "telling people they must identify the father" bit - sometimes a kid's better off if their father doesn't know abt them. no matter how hard lawmakers try to formulate a well-crafted law, the law is a cudgel, not a fine surgical tool, and is very poor at making reasonable exceptions in a reasonable way.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

And make good pre-natal care available to all women, not forcing them to go to religious based centers that will push an agenda. No wonder women don't want to go there. Actually enforce those laws that state that fundamentalist groups can not molest women going to the clinics that are actually free and doing some good. Make sure that they are punished to the full extent of the law if they break it. Make the extent of the law enough to give them second thoughts.

Making it less of a crime to have a child out of wedlock, or a novel idea - not a Crime at all. It's wrong to make a woman feel that her sexuality is a crime, absolutely. Especially when we *still* make a positive attribute of men having sex.

Finding a cure for aids would be another positive step here, and some of the other more nasty forms of stds.

I do not support abortion. For one thing because I believe in responsibility for your actions, and because I know people who are desperate to have children but are not fertile. Making contraception available and understandable to people would be a darn good start to preventing it, though. Keeping in mind that I've worked with pregnant teens.

And in discussing The Talk with other adult Librarians found out that the majority of them never had an adult talk to them about sex or birth control Outside Of School. This is both male and female librarians, here. And it's ridiculous. These were not people living in the dark ages, most of them are in their 20s and 30s.

My opinion. Not everyone is expected to agree.