AmericanHistoryMom brings up an important point:
I’m worried about the moms who take their babies to the tiny and depressing day care center with no outside play space around the corner from me. There are far too few adults to properly care for the kids and none of the developmental toys and activities necessary to nourish those little developing minds. I’ve read about moms in tears because they can only afford to leave their kids with elderly neighbors who chain smoke. I’ve read about moms on welfare who lock their kids in the apartment all day because they have NO child care options. We know that single women with children suffer poverty at higher rates than any other group. And we are all paying a price for the toll that poverty takes on kids, whether we know it or not. So should we think about pushing for policies to support these vulnerable members of our society? Or should we require that those without the means to raise children be sterilized?
I’ve always thought that the reason America hasn’t adopted the kinds of “child friendly” policies that are common in Europe is because of our history of racial and ethnic division. For too long, too many Americans have, on some level, believed that those other, swarthier Americans probably shouldn’t be reproducing at all. Certainly we shouldn’t adopt policies that would encourage them to do so.
Some of us may be struggling to have it all, but most are struggling just to get by.
Apt. 11d 
On the other hand . . .
Without sounded cruel, should not the poor be encouraged to only have as many children as they can afford? There was an L.A. Daily News article on Monday, “Population Forecast Falls: Drop in Latina fertility rates signals shift” that say that between 1998 and 2003, Latina fertility in L.A. County dropped from 3.3 to 2.5 per woman! That’s a huge drop over just five years.
“Diaz, the CSUN professor, said Latinos likely are expressing a combination of middle-class aspirations and a “working-class logic” that recognizes the high cost of living in California.
“Newly forming families are starting to take a serious look at what they can seriously afford.”
I was not in favor of the cut in welfare benefits in 1996, but is it possible that the cuts are causing people to take the economics of childbearing into account?
Everyone should, of course, be free to have as many children as they want — but there is something to be said for living within your means.
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as american history mom no doubt knows, but it bears mentioning in this thread, the u.s. has a history of forcing sterilization on poor people, especialy raical and ethnic minorities. and poor people and racial ethnic minorities are still being coerced into sterilization by their so called health care providers.
wrt the daily news article, it might not have too much to do with what diaz called working class logic. the idea of “working class logic” being related to fertility rates is problematic in and of itself. it frames the issue in terms of what in mainstream demographics is a normative white response to working class situations. secondly, working/class poor people generally have higher fertility rates than those in the middle classes. thirdly, this drop in fertility may not have anything to do what families can afford, it may have to do with birth control being more available, or the catholic church having less influence over people’s choices around birth control. fourthly, it may have soemething to do with the current cohort of chicanas of childbearing age from families that have been in the states for generations putting off childbearing while going after some kind of post secondary ed. only time (or alot more qualitative research) will tell if this is a temporary lull in fertility or not.
there is something to be said for living within one’s means, but what if those means change, as they have for so many people over the last couple of years? and of course we shouldn’t institute a sort of nouveau eugenics where poor people are induced to hold on to their eggs and sperm until their paychecks reach a size that allows the payment of what good quality child-care currently costs. whether or not we see more social supports for poor families, including increased availabilty of good cheap childcare, depends on how the issue is framed in the media and how much of a reproduction of the working class the ruling class wants. the social democracies of northern europe with the great social supports for parents have made that support a priority where in the u.s. the priority is corporate welfare and subsidies that don’t trickle down to the poor.
i had kids young, i dropped out of school to stay home with them until the youngest got into grade school. (that’s what my family taught me to do.) their dad split and i was dirt poor for a while. then i picked up my education and lived off of student loans, arranging my schedule so that i could be home when the kids were home. i’ve been looking for a decent job for years(!) now. i continue to be very poor. i could have used a little help, still could, but there’s not enough available.
so anyways, my rushed lunch posting time is over, and yeah, i agree with american history mom, it does have to do with the special kind of racial and ethnic divisions present in the u.s., – but it also has to do with pure class divisions t
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