ChanchanXI wrote:
gbaji wrote:
ChanchanXI wrote:
Even if one were to approach it from an economic instead of a humanitarian point of view, my guess it is less expensive to the government to continue to fund an organization issuing birth control, such as Planned Parenthood, than it would be to account for the tax breaks, welfare, other social programs were those same individuals to spawn. It honestly seems to me Daniels only signed this to earn "rep" with the Republicans.
To support this argument, you'd need to show that government funding for birth control actually decreases the rate at which children are born into the conditions you describe. While it seems at first glance like it must obviously be true, it's not really that cut and dried.
I agree, I would need data to validate my hypothesis.
Let's first recall that hypothesis. You are claiming that it is less expensive to fund an organization which provides birth control than it is to pay for the social services for the "spawn" which would otherwise result. Thus, you are assuming that a dollar spent providing birth control will prevent a dollars worth of social services on child care. More specifically, you are assuming that the money spent on funding for birth control will
cause a reduction in the number of children born needing those social services.
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The actual truth is very likely that not every case of removal of birth control would result in procreation. I think it's a pretty good assumption, though, that people are not going to just stop having sex at all. They may fill the birth control void with a different method of contraceptive, but (again, decent assumption) birth control via PP is usually aimed at those whose options are already quite limited.
This doesn't test or even address your hypothesis though. you're working backwards and asking if removal of birth control will result in increased procreation. That's the "at first glance it seems obvious" bit I was talking about. But the question should be "Does the introduction of readily available birth control to society as a whole via government funding actually
reduce the rate at which children are born in conditions of need within that society as a whole".
That's a completely different question. It's equally obvious that if we take away a welfare check to a needy family, that the family will suffer. But the counter is that the availability of welfare checks decreases the incentives to avoid needing them, and thus increases the number of people "in need" in the first place. Similarly, the counter argument is that the ready availability of birth control increases the likelihood that young people will engage in sexual activities in general and with people they wouldn't marry if they were to become pregnant with specifically. And since a percentage of those people will either not use the birth control or use it improperly (or it'll just fail), we actually end out increasing the total number of people in society who end up pregnant with no ability to support the child on their own without government assistance.
It's about the solution creating the problem.
In a previous thread (a long time ago), we got into a debate about sex education, specifically education including instruction on birth control use, and one which taught just abstinence. The liberals on this board crowed about statistics showing that the rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies among those who took the abstinence only courses were exactly the same as those who took the standard birth control courses. They argued that this proved that "abstinence only doesn't work!" since it didn't change the result.
But you can look at it the other way, right? Teaching about birth control didn't work any better either. The difference is that it costs nothing in terms of materials for someone to carry out the instructions about abstinence, but we have to pay to provide condoms and birth control for the other group. So... If the results are the same, why are we doing the one which costs more money? And remember that this is in a social environment where sexual activity is very much accepted and encouraged (and in some cases pressed on kids via peer pressure). I think it's quite safe to speculate that the availability of birth control options has had an impact on the social acceptance of sexual activity, which in turn creates the very problem we're trying to solve. One can absolutely argue that if we changed our government policies broadly and for an extended period of time, that those social behaviors might change as well.
Don't get me wrong here. I'm a hedonist. I want free love and casual sex for all. I'm just saying that we need to be realistic about the costs of those things and not pretend that our actions are perfectly safe just because we want to believe that they are.
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I also agree with comments echoed above regarding public health consciousness via STI screenings. I had not considered that viewpoint, but I agree with the sentiment.
It's really a side issue anyway. I would assume that the bill doesn't eliminate funding for birth control, and sti screenings, and cancer screenings, and whatnot. It restricts funding for those things to organizations which do not also provide abortions. It's really a wholly different issue going on. I just spotted what I saw as a really questionable assumption in your post and felt like challenging it.
