{"id":3520,"date":"2009-12-20T12:04:05","date_gmt":"2009-12-20T20:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=3520"},"modified":"2009-12-20T13:08:29","modified_gmt":"2009-12-20T21:08:29","slug":"gee-thanks-pro-lifers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/gee-thanks-pro-lifers\/","title":{"rendered":"Gee, thanks, Pro-Lifers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The just-negotiated Senate health care bill <\/a>contains a big new pot of money to make it easier for pregnant teens to raise a child:<\/p>\n

The federal government would provide $25 million a year for a \u201cpregnancy assistance fund.\u201d The money could be used for \u201cmaternity and baby clothing, baby food, baby furniture and similar items.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fund is supposed to encourage more teens to bring their children to term, rather than have an abortion.\u00a0 I am not convinced that increasing the number of children raised by teen mothers represents a win for society.\u00a0 But if pro-lifers want to make sure that every pregnant teen gives birth to a child–a moral position that I understand if not share–they would be far better off trying to revalorize adoption as a solution to pregnancies for which the mother is wholly unprepared.\u00a0 (Of course this \u201cpregnancy assistance fund\u201d may be purely a Democratic ploy to expand both government and dependency, with no support among the Lifers.\u00a0 But the goal of persuading teens to give birth is unquestionably a Lifer one.) \u00a0 Public policy should not be enabling teen motherhood, it should be doing everything it can to discourage it, starting with turning off the money spigot that subsidizes it.\u00a0 Teen motherhood should be made more, not less, onerous, since the evidence is indisputable that being raised by a single mother (regardless of her age) is a high-risk proposition both for the child and for society.\u00a0 As Barack Obama himself noted in 2008, \u201cchildren who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Obviously, this \u201cpregnancy assistance fund\u201d is hardly the first taxpayer subsidy to single-parenthood; garden-variety welfare, despite the 1996 welfare reform bill, still pumps massive sums into single-parenthood, treating it as a sort of unforeseeable act of nature deserving of social safety-net protection.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Teen mothers don\u2019t need more taxpayer-funded \u201cmaternity clothing and baby furniture.\u201d\u00a0 They need to learn that having\u00a0 a child at their age is an irresponsible act for which they are emotionally unfit, however much saying so flies in the face of feminist \u201cstrong women\u201d propaganda.\u00a0 Adoption has virtually disappeared in the inner city as a\u00a0response to teen pregnancy, gone into the same black hole as stigma.\u00a0 Pro-lifers would do the country a service by bringing it back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The just-negotiated Senate health care bill contains a big new pot of money to make it easier for pregnant teens to raise a child: The federal government would provide $25 million a year for a \u201cpregnancy assistance fund.\u201d The money … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[55,346,418],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3520"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3523,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions\/3523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}