The difficulty with pro-life is that “give me more welfare or I’ll murder my baby” is the basically what a lot of this boils down to. I’m not sure giving into that sort of hostage taking is healthy, and anyway the state provides an absurd amount* of welfare to single moms already.
I think at the end of the day the pro life movement is just going to give up on the politics. If democrats want to kill their babies, at what point do you stop losing elections to try and stop them.
Pro-life will become more something that individuals and communities try to teach to their kids, getting schools vouchers passed would go a long way there.
There is of course a roll for pro-family policy making including more money, but the kind of responsible middle class taxpayer families that make up the Republican base should probably focus on child benefits that help them rather then targeted at the underclass.
*A single mom household will have its effective consumption topped up to something like $50-60k a year by various government subsidies. On top of that there will be about $17k or so per kid in k-12 spending. So if she’s got two kids government assistance is bring her consumption up to 90k or so.
Sure, it’s mostly in kind services whose quality she might not like (mediciaid, ghetto schools), but it costs the taxpayers the same whether the recipients value it that much.
Under these circumstances, I’m not sure paying even more blackmail is really the path to convincing people not to get abortions. And anyway in Vance’s example the real problem is that she’s choosing to get pregnant by an abuser, seems like a self goal I can’t do anything to prevent.
The difficulty with pro-life is that “give me more welfare or I’ll murder my baby” is the basically what a lot of this boils down to. I’m not sure giving into that sort of hostage taking is healthy, and anyway the state provides an absurd amount* of welfare to single moms already.
I think at the end of the day the pro life movement is just going to give up on the politics. If democrats want to kill their babies, at what point do you stop losing elections to try and stop them.
Pro-life will become more something that individuals and communities try to teach to their kids, getting schools vouchers passed would go a long way there.
There is of course a roll for pro-family policy making including more money, but the kind of responsible middle class taxpayer families that make up the Republican base should probably focus on child benefits that help them rather then targeted at the underclass.
*A single mom household will have its effective consumption topped up to something like $50-60k a year by various government subsidies. On top of that there will be about $17k or so per kid in k-12 spending. So if she’s got two kids government assistance is bring her consumption up to 90k or so.
Sure, it’s mostly in kind services whose quality she might not like (mediciaid, ghetto schools), but it costs the taxpayers the same whether the recipients value it that much.
Under these circumstances, I’m not sure paying even more blackmail is really the path to convincing people not to get abortions. And anyway in Vance’s example the real problem is that she’s choosing to get pregnant by an abuser, seems like a self goal I can’t do anything to prevent.