With a lot of these kids, the only reason they’re even surviving to the age where they’d start going to Head Start is because of all the government programs that have been subsidizing their parents, both before and after they had children. People graduate from high school (if they graduate) with at least a $100,000 debt to society JUST for their public school education (and it’s closer to $250,000 in many areas). Then they start popping out babies and stick them in the public schools 5 years later.
I’m not in favor of ANY of the government programs, but we have to get rid of them in the right order. All the housing, food stamps, “job training”, Medicaid, etc, that’s enabling these people to even think for a second that they can afford to have a child, has got to go FIRST. We can’t subsidize everything except the children’s education, because they’ll go right on breeding them, and then the children grow up with no clue what to do except breed some more.
People who aren’t even fully supporting themselves need to get a loud, tough message that having children is absolutely 100% out of the question. Instead, when some teenager shows up at a hospital in labor, to get her free medical care for the delivery, she gets a free epidural too! Hey, we wouldn’t want it to *hurt*. And she knows in advance from her friends that she’ll get this, and she knows the housing subsidy and food stamps and AFDC/WIC will follow quickly. We’re sending the message loud and clear to go ahead and have babies, regardless of your ability to support them. From the “conservative” end of the spectrum, the only modification to the message is “Make sure you get a piece of paper from the government saying you’re ‘married’ first”. Once they’re born, we might as well pay to start getting them out of the house a few hours a day, before their brains are too hopelessly atrophied to be educable, or we’ll just end up paying more later on, to house them in prison. But we need to focus a lot more on preventing from them being born to parents who aren’t equipped to support them, financially or logistically.
I don’t believe in government interference into child birth (except that I believe it should be against the law to murder a baby via abortion), but I believe if you quit enabling a behavior with “safety nets,” girls will once again start telling hot-and-horny Johnnie in the backseat to back off because she wants to take no chance in getting pregnant. Also, you would have parents watching their teens again because, rightfully, mama and daddy would be responsible for the teen daughter’s pregnancy and the costs related to it until she’s at least 18. Of course, these costs should be shared with Johnnie’s parents too.