Detroit News Opinion Piece: Too Many Poor People, Put Contraceptives in Water Supply
February 15th, 2012Via: Detroit News:
Since the national attention is on birth control, here’s my idea: If we want to fight poverty, reduce violent crime and bring down our embarrassing drop-out rate, we should swap contraceptives for fluoride in Michigan’s drinking water.
We’ve got a baby problem in Michigan. Too many babies are born to immature parents who don’t have the skills to raise them, too many are delivered by poor women who can’t afford them, and too many are fathered by sorry layabouts who spread their seed like dandelions and then wander away from the consequences.
Michigan’s social problems and the huge costs attached to them won’t recede until we embrace reproductive responsibility.
Eugenics movement is alive and well apparently!
@ scarletfire: very much so- 45 million abortions and counting since Roe v. Wade… and counting.
Of course the failure is to hold parents accountable and a society that thinks it’s none of their business because they are just as unaccountable.
Why bother? The stuff is already in water.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/09/21/great-lakes-threat-list.html
It is sick that people have and use babies only as a meal ticket, but the government creates the situation.
I must say that in the 15 years I’ve been working in social services — both in rural and urban areas — I have never met one client who viewed pregnancy as a “meal ticket.” I met a lot of women who have grown up knowing only one way to feel an approximation of love/acceptance, and that was through sex. I met a lot of men who have few ways to feel powerful in their lives, one being sex. There are many other ways to reduce unintended pregnancies (along with reducing violent behavior, abuse and neglect, and a host of other things that cost taxpayers $). These methods involve proper social supports and a strengths-based approach, helping people find resiliency within themselves and make responsible, healthy choices. It takes more effort than dumping nasty chemicals into the water supply, but the effects are further-reaching and don’t (further) pollute the water.
I think the fact that racism and misogyny are endemic to mainstream culture (and thus endemic to policy, law enforcement, etc.), binding together race and poverty among other things, is a bigger factor here than parents not being held accountable. I think the fact that mainstream culture is bent on converting all living things into dead things, that it thrives on each of us not holding *ourselves* accountable for our thoughts and actions, that it encourages us to look at each other not as individual human beings but as faceless numbers in a “situation”… etc. … I think these are bigger factors here.
None of this is to suggest that I believe we should all keep breeding to our hearts’ content; I think we’ve got some real overpopulation issues already. However, I do believe it’s lazy thinking for anyone even halfway aware of the insanities of our culture to summarize this issue by asserting that there are scads of people in poverty who are gleefully sucking off the system and that it’s all the government’s fault.