Nope. It’s reality at its worst.
You say “If they quit the handouts and paying by the baby, the birth rate would go down.” That’s true, but it is an incomplete thought. The birth rate would go down, BUT NOT TO ZERO. It would decline, but there would still be a lot of babies born. Remember, we are not talking about abolishing abortion here, so the babies we would be saving would be ones that are not born right now.
Anyway, let’s cut to the chase: quit the welfare and the birth rate will probably drop, but not to zero. There are CURRENTLY no women or children starving in the USA BECAUSE OF the handouts. Quit the handouts, and there WILL BE women and children starving in the US. That is a guarantee. Yes, the starving women and children will be a deterrent to other women having children out of wedlock, but by no means a COMPLETE deterrent. Look at India. Look at Bangladesh. Look at Latin American or African cities. Children DO starve in those places, but a certain substantial number of poor and irresponsible women spit out babies anyway.
That’s just reality. It cannot be changed or willed away.
To cut off the payments means to cut off the means of sustenance of a certain number of women and children, condemning them to die in our midst of hunger. That is not Christian. We cannot do it. It goes too far. There comes a point where, like it or not, our basic morality and ethical belief system COMPELS us to provide assistance to people EVEN THOUGH it is subsidizing immoral and irresponsible behavior (to a degree - it’s still no prize to be on welfare and in the Projects, and few people with other options will choose that; having welfare for the past 50 years has not converted a large portion of the population to welfare cases, because welfare is sustenance. It’s not comfortable.).
You say “let them learn to be responsible”. The babies? The babies of the irresponsible mothers cannot learn anything for many years. They can’t work. They cannot do ANYTHING for themselves at all. They are dependents. If we abolish abortion, there will be more such babies. And if we cut off the aid, a certain number of them will starve because their mothers are idiots, drug addicts, mentally deranged, etc. That’s what cutting off the aid means, in the final analysis.
And we cannot do that. We simply cannot do it. It is immoral and wrong, and Americans won’t vote for it in numbers to keep it viable, precisely because it is unChristian. There comes a point where you have to support people who don’t deserve it, because there are other innocent young people dependent on them, and in the final analysis we are Christians, we are not barbarians, we don’t have to let irresponsible people live in the lap of luxury or have any of the finer things in life, but we absolutely cannot let them starve. And that means social welfare. And it is not liberal at all. It as old as the Ten Commandments, and the command to do it is contained in the same book.
We cannot lay aside that duty. We have to buck up and do it. And if we abolish abortion, we’ll have to do a lot more of it. That’s just the way it is, like gravity.
My view is that we have to abolish abortion to save the babies, and then we have to pay for the additional welfare to raise them. It’s expensive and it’s too bad. We can concentrate education and other efforts to try and break that cycle, but we can neither allow the abortions, morally, nor cut off the food.
Those *parents* don’t feed those kids anyway. If it weren’t for free breakfast and lunch deals at the schools, some of those kids would hardly eat. I knew these families and fed their kids. Those kids talked to me and told me things I didn’t dream of. It’s not the money.