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Why do people choose to have children that they cannot afford? Who is ultimately responsible for the care of that child?

I've often wondered about why there is so much poverty. Even as a child, the idea that to have kids or not was the sole discretion of the woman, but if she did choose to have kids, the responsibility and expense of raising the child belonged to me as a taxpayer, seemed unfair. Does that sound fair to you? Is that the cost of me living in society, to pay for an unlimited number of children that other people decided to have? It sure doesn't seem very fair to me. And yet, the poorer people become, the more children they elect to have. "There's nothing better to do," is the excuse I always hear. You could strip the entire 1% of the U.S. population of every dime they have, throw them in a concentration camp and forget about them, and you still would not put a dent in this problem. In fact it would continue to get bigger. By the way, if you made more than $33k last year, you're already in the top 1% of the world's population.

When I consider the prodigious cost imposed upon my parents to get me to a point where I could make a living, it's more money than I can count. But the people who are having more children now, are not like my parents. Many of them are children themselves and nothing says they can't do it.

So why do they do it? I think they do it because they want to and to satisfy the human drive to reproduce. There is no "education" panacea answer that will change this. And if someone else is going to have to pay for it, why not? So why don't we stop them? Why is it that the only right we have is to pay for the expenses other people impose upon us?

You're living in a world of "shoulda'", which isn't productive or practical. Yeah, people "should" only have children when they're ready and able, but we all know that's not the way the world works, nor has it EVER worked that way.

So the reality is people have children they're not capable of supporting/raising without help. So what do we do, as a society?

The question isn't "why" we should have to pay for it. The question is how. Because we will pay for it one way or the other. I'd like to pay for it in a way that hopefully, in the end, results in those unplanned children having a chance to grow into productive adults. But there are others who'd rather pay for it in future prison sentences and other costs to society. Ignored children grow into angry adults who have a way of exacting revenge from a society that neglected them.

And, of course, there are those who want to pretend we can choose to not pay for it at all, but I think that is choosing to ignore reality and making an inadvertent choice anyway.

this may interest you Ajax.

Many people don't exactly choose to have a child in the sense of deciding and planning to have one, but rather get pregnant as a consequence of sex and go through with having a child.

Some people aren't aware of how expensive a child is. Maybe they have no idea or maybe they just imagine the can get by somehow without having a intelligent plan. The real expense and difficulty should be obvious to people, but it really isn't to a surprising amount. I think that's a combination of naïveté and socially irresponsible ignorance depending on the age and circumstances of the person. Some people are able to reasonably afford a child at the time they have one, but something happens in their economic circumstances that changes that.

Education is helpful for some of the reason, but not all of it. Availability and awareness of how to use birth control is a huge factor. It's no coincidence that the wealthiest and best educated countries have the lowest reproduction rates and the segments inside of those countries are the most wealthy and best educated even lower.

Not that I'm accusing Ajax of this, because I don't know his stance at all, but it has always bothered me when the right decries having to pay for other people's children, and then turns around and insists no one should get an abortion. Hey, if you're going to encourage everyone to give birth no matter what their circumstances, then you lose the right to gripe about paying for it somehow.

People would have fewer children into bad situations if they had more available access to birth control in all its forms. They also would have fewer children if they would have more honest education about birth control and stop shoving abstinence down their throats.

It's no coincidence that the wealthiest and best educated countries have the lowest reproduction rates and the segments inside of those countries are the most wealthy and best educated even lower.

I guess those people won't be around in the gene pool long will they.

Bond James Bond wrote:People would have fewer children into bad situations if they had more available access to birth control in all its forms. They also would have fewer children if they would have more honest education about birth control and stop shoving abstinence down their throats.

How much fewer? People have gotten better access to birth control. Has it reduced the number of children in poverty? On the contrary, poverty among children has continued to rise. A growing number of women are having these children on purpose, bottom line.

This is a serious problem and I believe it's one of the biggest reasons we will all progressively be dragged down into deeper poverty as a country. Living off the state sure isn't a good living, but as the state expands and the problem continues to increase, that will become the new standard of living for more people, and every last dime seized from the few 1% isn't going to change that a bit.

beastie wrote:Not that I'm accusing Ajax of this, because I don't know his stance at all, but it has always bothered me when the right decries having to pay for other people's children, and then turns around and insists no one should get an abortion. Hey, if you're going to encourage everyone to give birth no matter what their circumstances, then you lose the right to gripe about paying for it somehow.

Agreed.

But it was wrong as soon as people were forced by the government to give up their money to charity. The person who earned the money should have had the right to decide if they would give or not give.

How is it that a woman has sole authority to decide to have a child or not, but society ultimately bears the responsibility of her decision. That's not right either. If you have the right to make the decision, it should be your responsibility.

ajax18 wrote:I guess those people won't be around in the gene pool long will they.

I know that is a concern for you, because you are a massive racist, but it's unclear to me why that matters. As a technical matter it depends on who "they" is. For whole nations teetering a little below the replacement rate on reproduction, their genetic imprint isn't necessarily going to fade. That's jumping to conclusions. For the specific people who choose not to have children at all, then yeah. So?

The point here is that you seemed to be skeptical how education would impact people having children without having means to take care of them. That education correlates strongly with reproduction rate suggests your skepticism is misplaced.