It is with relief that I see this article goes to the heart of Gary John's mischief. Eugenics.
It's not as if it hasn't been tried before. Nazi Germany had a well documented eugenics program which led to the Holocaust.
Margaret Sanger and her eugenics-oriented Planned Parenthood organization had a “Negro Project” in black Harlem in the 1930's which was trying to develop ways to eliminate the black population.
One very pertinent reason to support children, and then care for them, is that without population growth, the human race is facing an erosion of its base. The end of that will be the dying out of our species.
http://journal-neo.org/2015/01/01/world-overpopulation-hold-on-buddy

As an educator the author fails totally. If you wish to bring indigenous women into this debate you need to firstly learn what happened to unwanted children prior to white settlement.
They were killed! Infanticide was a common practise, widely documented and recognised even as recently as 30 years ago. In fact only 15 years ago I nursed a baby in Darwin who had been rejected multiple times by not only her mother, but the whole community, and put out to die.
Indigenous groups didn't raise children as a community unless times were extremely good, food wise, and even then certain children,like wrong skin babies or one of twins, were automatically put out to die.
It was recognised that a woman couldn't breastfeed two children successfully, so if she gave birth whilst breast feeding a toddler the new baby was killed.
In times of famine babies were killed simply because the women couldn't produce enough breast milk to sustain them whilst on starvation rations. This wasn't considered eugenics, it was simply a practical tactic to prevent women having to raise children who would otherwise starve to death and put pressure on the tribal economy,
Having your children supported by strangers is a totally foreign concept in indigenous life, as in every other culture until recently. My parents and grandparents had to support their own children, as did everyone else at that time. That is why birth control was hailed as such an immense benefit to families. No longer did they have to produce children they couldn't provide for.
Anyone who can't see the dangers of allowing women to reproduced multiple children they cannot provide for, either financially, physically or emotionally needs to get out more and study the lives of some of these children. These kids break my heart.

There is a eugenics movement in Australia. It's called Sustainable Population Australia, although its had so many name changes, I can never remember if that's correct. They heartily endorse John's article.

Big Nana,
<<Anyone who can't see the dangers of allowing women to reproduced multiple children they cannot provide for, either financially, physically or emotionally needs to get out more and study the lives of some of these children. These kids break my heart.>>

Surely then the solution is to ensure they CAN be provided for?
Reducing the available support, in the hope that it will somehow prevent people having more children, will cause far more harm than good.

Seems like it is difficult to have a discussion on population without being labeled with some pejorative or other.

Hows about we face up to the reality there are too many of us and solutions should be discussed with some maturity instead of.

I would rather see it applied ubiquitously, that is, no tax breaks at all for having children but realise that impacts the child. So not having the child in the first place seems like a better solution.

Big nana,

Thanks for the anthropological history lesson.

However, these people are products of 20th/21st century social dysfunction.

It might be useful to address that as a point of departure.

And still I can't see how such a proposal could be implemented without a huge backward step in our social inclinations...I'm assuming any such proposition would be universal.

Would there be some kind of adjudicator who passes judgement on who should be made to submit to contraception in order to collect the dole?

He or she might classify some women as slags or alcoholics or meth-heads, etc - obviously they would be candidates for contraception?

But what happens, in the case of universal legislation, when an ordinary "upstanding" (white?) family finds the daddy out of work and they find their application for the dole refused unless the female undergoes contraception?

And can you tell me how many years it would take to clear the backlog of children affected by their mother being refused the dole. How would that sort of penury improve the lives of the children in the years between implementing this proposal and successfully stopping poor people from reproducing if they're on welfare?

I do like this:

"Having your children supported by strangers is a totally foreign concept in indigenous life..."

You have got to be joking, if there is one thing indigenous people understand in a traditional setting, it's that the whole community is there to nurture each other...It takes a village to raise a child.

Within an indigenous community, there are no "strangers".