Do Teenage Mothers Save Taxpayers Money?

[Agnapostate]

DO TEENAGE MOTHERS SAVE TAXPAYERS MONEY?

What a disgusting question this is, one which expresses the American hostility toward the young, poor, and dark. The notion that babies—selectively applied to poor people’s babies—“cost too much money” is an appalling question on many dimensions. It reduces human beings and human potential to a predetermined red or black bottom line. It is almost impossible to calculate in unbiased fashion. And, in the case of teenage mothers, the calculations have been warped by academic fraud and rank bigotry to produce a politically pleasing result. And so it’s not surprising that this reactionary throwback to long-discredited eugenics has become the central argument for preventing what we call “teenage motherhood”—advanced by liberal lobbies.

On top of all that, the latest, most widely respected study of the social costs of teenage motherhood shows they may well save taxpayers money compared to poorer women who wait until their 20s to have babies. In short, the argument against teens having babies is really a veiled attack on poorer people reproducing that liberals are too craven to state openly.

Beginning in the 1980s or ‘90s, he liberal family planning movement has split into the good and the ugly:

· The health rights and access advocates: Storefront, high school, and community programs that provide professional, personal family planning services in the interests of health, youth access, and reproductive choice.

· The eugenics lobbies: State and national lobbies such as the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, California Wellness Foundation, Family Research Council, Advocates for Youth, major foundations such as W.T. Grant, and other high-dollar interests that invoke moral lectures, condescending myths, and “social cost” claims that accuse, in effect, black, Latino, Native, and poorer teens of costing richer folks money.

The crux of the argument made by modern eugenicists against “teenage” motherhood is the same one its predecessors made against “excessive breeding” by darker and immigrant underclasses: that privileged academic and political authorities have determined that poor, young, mostly minority women are engaging in self- and societally-destructive reproductive behaviors and must be educated, cajoled, or punished into cutting it out. The crusades of the eugenics lobbies have become so ugly and dishonest that better motivated health rights and access groups should join in denouncing them.

(Continued...)

Sociologist Mike Males utilizes several of the same sources as myself, so I thought this might make an interesting read and a controversial challenge to a popular idea.