Are you one of those people who think government welfare policies have little or no effect on the choices people make in life? If so, the following article from the Independent just might make you begin to reconsider your position.
Teenage girls who get pregnant are deliberately "planning" to become mothers in the belief that a baby will improve the quality of their lives.An extensive study published today reveals that girls as young as 13 are making a "career choice" by deciding to have children, since they see parenting as preferable to working in a dead-end job.
The findings from the Trust for the Study of Adolescence challenges the assumption that schoolgirl mothers are all irresponsible adolescents who are ignorant about using contraception. The revelation that teenage girls are actively choosing motherhood is backed up by official figures obtained by this paper which show that nearly a quarter of pregnancies to under 18s are second children.Something for both the "We just need more sex education!" and anti-abortion brigades to consider:The research will have huge implications for government policy, which gives little acknowledgement to the fact that some girls see motherhood as the right decision for them. Britain has highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, with an estimated cost to the Government of at least £63m a year. The parts of the country that have most teenage births are areas of poverty and high unemployment; girls from low-income families are 10 times more likely to become teenage mothers than those from affluent backgrounds.
The research, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was based on interviews with 13- to 22-year-old mothers living in six deprived parts of Britain who had either taken a fatalistic attitude to getting pregnant by stopping taking contraception or who had actively planned to have a child with the support of their partners.
All the interviewees were well aware how to protect against pregnancy and were strongly anti-abortion. Nearly three-quarters were in steady relationships with the father of their child. Only a handful of girls said they regretted getting pregnant. The vast majority said their lives had improved after having children, that having a baby had "corrected" their deprived childhoods and turned them away from destructive behaviour such as drink and drug abuse.I think the above statements by Ms. Marsh inadvertantly touch upon two fundamental facts which are left unmentioned in the course of this entire article despite looming so large in the background.Experts say that the truth about planned teenage pregnancies has been masked until now because health workers often assume they happen accidentally and because young girls tend to keep their true motives secret.
The study's authors are calling on ministers to use sex education classes to highlight the fact that fertility is at its highest in adolescence. They hope to target girls who leave pregnancy to chance by offering them alternatives and to use those who have had negative experiences to educate others about the downsides. But they also pose the question whether teenage pregnancy should always be avoided, given the positive experiences of the girls surveyed.
Aimee Marsh did not intend to get pregnant at the age of 15 but had discussed the possibility with her 18-year-old boyfriend, Lee. Their baby daughter, Demi-Leigh, was born 13 days ago and Ms Marsh, now 16, is planning to have three children in total, though she intends to wait until she is 25. "It is not as hard as I thought it would be," says Ms Marsh, from Plymouth, who hopes to go to college to do a hair and beauty course. "There is still some prejudice around young mums, but you can have kids at any age as long as you enjoy life and it brings you happiness."
The first issue is the exact reason why single-motherhood "is not as hard as I thought it would be" for an uneducated 16-year old girl with a no doubt similarly underqualified 18-year old boyfriend: in developed countries, children are expensive to raise properly, so why is it that two people with such poor prospects of decent employment are able to contemplate having three with equanimity? The answer, in case you haven't caught on by now, is that Britain's welfare system lavishes free housing, healthcare and spending money on girls who get knocked up as to make it worth the while of particularly unambitious types to choose pushing prams over stocking shelves in the local Sainsburys. The British government heavily subsidizes teenage motherhood, so it's no surprise that Britain gets so much more of it.
The second issue touched upon in the utterances of Aimee Marsh is the question of social disapproval as a means of controlling wayward behavior; in particular, when she says "There is still some prejudice around young mums", what she's also saying in the background is that such "prejudice" [sic] as exists is nowhere nearly as strong as it used to be, rendering the choice to get knocked up at 15 a much more palatable option than it formerly was. Ms. Marsh is clearly aware of something those who try to lift the banner of "you can't disapprove of anything" hedonism under the label "libertarianism" don't: that people want the respect and approval of their acquaintances, and to get it they'll often forgo all sorts of nasty temptations even without the heavy hand of government to threaten them. Societies and cultures which admire learning and erudition will tend to produce scholars, those which glorify thugs and drug dealers will breed future prison inmates in profusion, those which hold up swindlers and thieves as heroes will bring forth lots of crooks, and those which, like Britain, have almost completely destigmatized teenage pregnancy, will get lots of ignorant teenagers with council-house facelifts pushing around prams carrying tomorrow's loitering, uneducated and crime-prone "youf". Furthermore, it is pretty much impossible to argue in a welfare state against handing out council flats and unemployment benefit to 15 year old girls with babies without making a moral argument that there's something inherently wrong with their situation: the choice to suspend all judgment of personal choices in the name of "libertarianism" entails the suspension of all judgment in who gets subsidized for what, once one accepts in principle that the very idea of subsidizing certain behaviors or states of existence isn't inherently wrong - as essentially all politically pragmatic libertarian movements must in our day and age.
At its worse it leads to terrorists living in the west trying to breed their own tax payer funded armies.
http://www.occidentalism.org/?p=249
(Abiola, your site is not accepting links for some reason)
Posted by: Matt | July 16, 2006 at 03:03 PM
I had to switch to manual approval of trackbacks to deal with all the spam I was getting.
Posted by: Abiola | July 16, 2006 at 03:51 PM
Abiola:
I think it somewhat a stretch to represent the attitude of the welfarists as "it will have little or no effect;" rather, their public pronouncement is that it will have litttle or no NEGATIVE effect and very definite positive effects (including, privately, that dependence will forge present and enduring political hegemony).
I note that the quoted source has a somewhat different interpretation of "libertarian" than would be recognizable over here. But, then, everything's relative, I'd suppose.
Posted by: gene berman | July 16, 2006 at 04:20 PM
Given Europe's fertility rates, why would we complain? Besides, parenting is more profitable to the community than them getting dole payments for nothing.
Posted by: Oliver | July 17, 2006 at 12:48 PM
"Given Europe's fertility rates, why would we complain?"
Who's "we", Kemosabe? *You* may want to support the breeding of chavs with your own funds, but leave me and other taxpayers out of it.
"Besides, parenting is more profitable to the community than them getting dole payments for nothing."
I don't know how you can even call what uneducated 16-year old mothers do "parenting", but to say that these breeders of future ASBO recipients, juvenile court attendants and incapacity benefit supplicants are more "productive" than simply beeing on the dole is laughable. In any case, here's a radical suggestion: how about simply not allowing teenagers to collect welfare at all?
Posted by: Abiola | July 17, 2006 at 03:27 PM
Isn't welfare in the U.K. somewhat stingier than in Scandinavia? Because if it is, I'd say that there are other cultural factors involved in the U.K.'s teen pregnancy than just the money that comes with it.
Posted by: Andrew Reeves | July 17, 2006 at 04:08 PM
I don't know about Scandinavia, but the big difference *does* seem to come down to welfare benefits at least as far as differences with the Netherlands are concerned (though differences in stigmatization also seem important):
http://www.famyouth.org.uk/pdfs/LDM.pdf
These girls know *precisely* what they're doing, and given their lack of ambition, firm parental guidance or any real countervailing communal pressures, it's no surprise they take what seems to be the easy option - pop out a rugrat and go straight to the front of the queue for free council housing for life and child support for the next 18 years.
Posted by: Abiola | July 17, 2006 at 04:33 PM
It's interesting that Blair's stated desire to eradicate the "yob culture" is not going to extend to the incubators of said yobs. I can only assume that he was told by a focus group to express "concern" over this "issue", and that he doesn't really give a stuff about the disastrous effects of teenage-welfare-pregnancies - especially as they are likely to spawn a whole new generation of Labour voters.
Posted by: Steve Edwards | July 17, 2006 at 04:51 PM
"but leave me and other taxpayers out of it"
I would gladly do that if said taxpayers did their reproductive duty. Europe needs European babies. Europeans no longer have the luxury to worry a lot about quality.
One might argue that the taxpayers are not reproducing due to taxes needed to support welfare dependents, but is there proof? Looking at French and German birth rates which are far apart while taxes rates are comparable, this seems not to be the case. If anything they support the conclusion that more state intervention in child rearing is working.
Posted by: Oliver | July 17, 2006 at 06:11 PM
"Europe needs European babies."
To do *what*, exactly? You just say this like it's obvious, and there's some magical benefit to be had by the sheer existence of "European" (I suppose you really mean "white") babies which can't be had by either importing qualified labor or exporting production through foreign investment. What gains are there to be had by the existence of Tracey and Kev collecting Jobseekers Allowance down at the local welfare office which can't be had by buying shares in firms in Mumbai and Guangdong? Why am I supposed to prefer the subsidized breeding and raising of layabouts and illiterates when the world is teeming with highly qualified and ambitious people who'd be willing to come to Europe if given a chance - simply because the local spongers are "European"?
The idea that Europe is so desperately in need of babies that taxpayers ought to shower money on every lazy dropout willing to part her legs for the first horny young idiot to come along is a preposterous belief only unthinking nativists can swallow. If the sorts of people most likely to respond to such incentives were the kind to raise highly productive offspring, they wouldn't be responsive to said incentives to begin with.
Posted by: Abiola | July 17, 2006 at 06:22 PM
"Why am I supposed to prefer the subsidized breeding and raising of layabouts and illiterates when the world is teeming with highly qualified and ambitious people who'd be willing to come to Europe if given a chance - simply because the local spongers are "European"?"
If you don't like UK's tax and welfare system you are of course quite free to leave...
Posted by: Delmore Macnamara | July 17, 2006 at 07:39 PM
And if you don't like my discontent with it you're free to take the same damn option yourself: it's as much my country as yours, asshole ...
Hell, why am I even humoring the conceit that your statements are worth a pitcher of warm spit? Your "love it or leave it" bullshit is the last line of the thin-skinned nationalist jughead without anything by way of a meaningful response to make to whatever's injured his fragile pride. Newsflash for you, buddy: there is absolutely *nothing* wrong with people criticizing even countries that aren't their own, nor does doing so entail any obligation on them to move somewhere else, so you can go stuff your nonsense where the sun don't shine.
Posted by: Abiola | July 17, 2006 at 07:47 PM
"What gains are there to be had by the existence of Tracey and Kev collecting Jobseekers Allowance down at the local welfare office which can't be had by buying shares in firms in Mumbai and Guangdong?"
The perpetuation of European or specifically English culture. That needs a minimum percentage of people raised in that culture. (not necessarily related by blood, but raised from a very young age).
Posted by: Oliver | July 18, 2006 at 03:14 PM