Some of these comments are very disturbing and most do not really address the points made in the article.

I think it's quite reasonable to be concerned that there may be some kind of incentive for women, whether poor or not, to be having children outside of a stable marriage. This is never good for the children and public policy should always favour the natural family unit of mother, father and their children.

But when it comes to discriminating against families where there is unemployment, I am aghast, mostly because the gov't and our society have not taken the trouble to ensure that all families have adequate opportunities to work. When there is an unemployment rate above 0% then obviously some unfortunate people will be out of work and it is not their fault. The assistance they need should certainly not depend upon the use of contraception.

As the writer says, children are the future of our society and that is why all families should receive any support and assistance they need during times of duress. All families should do all they can to help themselves, but a society which will not support the weak and vulnerable deserves to be left in the dust bin of history.

Big nana

I've no idea what you are talking about. But I'm glad I gave you a good laugh.

Jay

‘Control over women's bodies and reproduction is an obsession of the Left’

No. The main reproductive concern of the left is that WOMEN have control over their OWN bodies. Your pithy and dubious examples of China etc pale in comparison to the extensive Western/Christian history of preventing women from accessing and using birth control at all.

‘there are lives not worth living and people not worthy of state support’

Typical social Darwinism, which has always found its home on the right of politics, as it’s definitely not welcome on the left. (And stop confusing the totalitarian communist regimes of the former Soviet Union and Mao's China with left-wing socialism. They occupy separate universes.)

‘How do you stop them having kids they can't and won't care for?’

I’m not totally opposed to having the state intervene to rule that a woman be sterilised in very extreme cases. Similar arguments are given for serial sex offenders to be medically ‘castrated’. This is something for the legislators and professionals to decide, not you or me.

What I’m TOTALLY against is using the welfare system as a weapon of social engineering in general, and contraception of undesirables in particular. Welfare is first and foremost a protective safety net for anyone in our society who falls on hard times. It should never be used for making political statements – even though, sadly, that rule has been getting ripped to shreds since circa 1980.

Malcolm paddy king, AKA Cheryl, is a constant troll.
So most would treat his posts with the contempt they deserve.

Runner I totally agree. But the run of the mill sheeple are not concerned as long as they have their macmansion and the obligatory fleet of gigantic TV's, at least two cars and all the other trappings of "modern" living.

Killarney,
Socialism and Darwinism go hand in hand, since when has the right accepted Darwin's theories?

Killarney, I think your point about women having control over their reproductive choices is a good one, the question is how that might inform social policies. For example, part of the argument in the piece to which this one is a response is that there is a perverse incentive for some women to choose not to exercise control over fertility created by the various well-intended welfare policies. While I don't like that article for many reasons, that point is a very valid one.

Do you have any suggestions about how to address that problem, so that when women make a choice to reproduce or otherwise it is a genuinely free one?

In earlier times fertility was largely a male responsibility, since female contraception was not generally effective. It can't be forgotten that the Pill has only been with us for 50 years

http://cwhgs.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/628385/Take_Away_Booklet.pdf

and other female contraception methods like diaphragms have significant drawbacks, not least poor reliability and intrusiveness.

{continued}

While there have always been scoundrels and opportunists of both sexes, it was a broad social norm that if a man did get a woman pregnant (or a woman got a man to impregnate her), it created for him a responsibility to support her and the child, usually by marriage, although not always, which could be either his or her decision and sometimes both. The woman, took on an obligation as well, which was to care for the child and her husband in return for that support. A shotgun wedding was not always a bad start to marriage, either.

My eldest (half) sister was born at the altar, so to speak, if I read the records right (it's never been overtly discussed) and he and his first wife went on to have 5 more in a long and by all accounts happy marriage that ended due to her becoming seriously ill due to the consequences of diabetes before the invention of insulin, although he stayed faithful to her during a lengthy period of hospitalisation at the Peat Island asylum as it was then.

He divorced and remarried, to my mother, only after several years and I know he always felt a little guilty that he had abandoned his obligation, but she would have been quite seriously mentally ill by that time.

Do you think it is possible to create such an ethic of responsibility today?

The enforcement of a financial obligation via the child support laws seems a pretty poor substitute and is potentially a part of that perverse incentive discussed above, as well as creating other perverse incentives that have been widely discussed elsewhere and don't need to be canvassed here.

How could we do it better? As a woman who is obviously both well informed and very interested, I think your ideas would be valuable.