The [working] poor you will always have with you, part 3: family planning

Last updated on: April 24, 2015 at 6:41 am by Jane the Actuary

The [working] poor you will always have with you, part 3: family planning 2015-04-24T06:41:45-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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I’m going to throw some ideas out, half-formed, while I’m thinking of them, and pose some questions, even though I don’t really have any answers.

But right now I’m in the middle of Our Kids by Robert Putnam, which will merit a separate post once I finish the book. Here is the quote I want to think about with you, though, from page 205, describing a girl (contrary to stereotype, a white girl) who became ensnared in substance abuse, until pregnancy (and the attention shown her via a special high school intended to help mothers graduate) turned her to the straight-and-narrow, a straight A student headed for college.

“Pregnancy changed my life,” she says. “I wouldn’t even be going to college if it wasn’t for my son.”

And IUDs for teens and young women is again in the news, this time in The Economist. Back in October, there was another spate of stories, which I wrote about and linked to here — the bottom line being that a new generation of social planners were keen to aggressively push teens onto IUDs and implants, with the rationale that any potential side effects were better than pregnancy.

Also a week or so ago, an article called “When a Pregnancy is Planned but Not Planned” was making the rounds, describing the fact that, for many pregnant teens and young adults, there was an in-betweenness to the pregnancy, in which middle-class concepts of planned pregnancies or contraceptive failures just didn’t exist; there was much more of an indifference.

One last link: my post from last summer on the official rationale for requiring insurers to cover all contraceptives. The stated objective of the mandate is to move women onto IUDs and other long-acting no-user-action-required contraceptives. And their further objective is to eliminate “unplanned pregnancy” as an unhealthy condition (that is, they’re careful to say that pregnancy itself is not a disease), because women who get pregnant without having first formed the intention to conceive first are less likely to get early prenatal care, more likely to continue smoking or drinking in the early months, more likely to give birth prematurely or to a low-birthweight baby, etc. — thought the studies they cite for these impacts didn’t necessarily seem to control for the fact that there are other, correlating factors which may be just as likely to explain the identified issues.

So this is what I’m thinking:

I suspect most readers of this blog are uncomfortable, to say the least, with the progressive social planners’ objective of making IUDs and similar contraceptives universal, especially when it’s accompanied by the approach that women and even teens (with no identified lower age limit that I could tell in my prior reading of articles and comments) should feel free to have as much sex as they want, whenever and with whom they want, as long as its consensual. I don’t like it either.

But let’s set these issues aside for the purpose of thinking about this. What if? What if the progressive social planners implement their vision?

What would happen — to the birth rate, to our society, to the women themselves — if teens and twenty-something women, and anyone who isn’t financially set, is persuaded to use an IUD?

In the ideal case, the girls and women, freed from the risk of pregnancy (or, in some cases, the near-certainty of it), would finish high school, go to college, and live the sort of perfectly middle-class life that the social planners themselves live, maybe choosing to get pregnant in their 30s, say. After all, they argue, they’re not trying to practice eugenics by reducing the number of births poor (black, Hispanic, or white) women have; they just want these women to wait until they’re established financially.

But I don’t think Amy’s story is all that unusual. From a distance, we see unplanned pregnancy and teen pregnancy as destroying a bright future, but “in the trenches” (from what I’ve read), poor teen and young mothers don’t always experience this. Instead, being a mother motivates many teen moms who, prior to getting pregnant, simply weren’t going anywhere anyway.

So what happens to the girls in these IUD-promoting studies? Do they in fact, freed from the need to care for an infant, meet the social planners’ expectations for them, go to college or learn a skill? Or are they just as impoverished, just as stuck in low-wage jobs or trapped in substance abuse? (I googled IUD + longitudinal study, but no luck.) I don’t know, but consider this: poor men, even though they are generally not trapped by the need to care for a baby, are not doing particularly well either. The mere lack of a baby doesn’t guarantee you success in life.

And — this is where the “working poor” piece some in — when are these women “allowed” to get their implants removed? Social conservatives, of course, would much prefer that (even again, taking as a given the overall context, above) they find a husband first; progressives will say that poor men are generally unmarriageable anyway so you might as well be a single mom.

But in either case: not every such prospective mom (or prospective parents) will be working at a nice, respectable, well-paying job. They won’t all be nurses and electricians. Are we comfortable with saying, even without the excuse of an unplanned pregnancy, that, as a general case, parents working at low-paying, even minimum wage jobs, should, as a routine matter, be given the necessary subsidies to fill in the gap between their earnings and their family’s financial needs?

Or, if we are saying that, freed from the burden of too-soon parenting, every young man and woman can indeed be expected to prepare themselves for, and land, and succed at, the sort of job that does indeed support a family, or perhaps make their way there by means of promotions over time, from, say, line cook to shift manager: in that case, who will work the minimum wage jobs? Oh, sure, eventually they’ll be replaced by robots, you say. But, even if so, what about now, not the future? Are the day-shift McDonald’s workers, and the personal aides for the elderly, and similar low-paid workers simply to be consigned to lifetime childlessness? (And the answer is not: “we’ll import migrant workers.” Do they not deserve to have families?)

Just questions. I don’t have answers. And these are, ultimately, all just hypothetical. But I think framing the question in this way is useful for thinking about jobs, minimum wages, and welfare benefits.

Oh, and I didn’t get to birth rates and the impact on society of every child being carefully planned, or not born at all. So there’s that, too.

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