Maggie's Farm

@Daphne:

"Excuse me, but we're not supposed to have a negative opinion about teen pregnancy and parenthood? Isn't that the planned part of Planned Parenthood?.....But to say that we shouldn't shame pregnant teenagers is different from saying that it's a shame anytime a teenager gets pregnant. It is, and the squeamishness about saying so does teenagers no favor."

The unspoken and unwritten truth here is that the issue of children born out of wedlock is much more serious for the black community than it is for the white community, which is still playing catch-up on the rate of unwed mothers. But if you mention that it would be racist. The position taken by Planned Parenthood is especially interesting. PP does a good job of hiding the fact that it was founded by someone who believed in eugenics for the non-white races. And then, of course, there is the cost to the rest of us of all these illegitimate kids born to teen-age mothers who depend on social welfare programs instead of the support of the baby fathers. When government subsidizes out-of-wedlock births and supplants men as husband and father, you know the kids born into that situation are doomed.

I think I read your comment more carefully than you wrote it. You said, "it is not the government's place to stigmatize young mothers," by which I presume you meant the growing number of unwed CHILDREN (!) who are having babies of their own. And I offered a quote from Ruth Marcus's article that said, in effect, hate the sin, not the sinner. The disintegration of the family structure in various communities, most notably urban black ones, has reached epidemic proportions. Bloomberg's campaign, according to Marcus, is intended to educate (not stigmatize or shame) underage girls, to make them aware of the enormous problems they will face should they become pregnant out of wedlock. The hope is to discourage them from acting so foolishly. And just to be clear, my further point is that the government would help matters considerably if it stopped subsidizing such bad behavior by our children. Government charity is doing more harm than good.

Oh dear, you seem to have a reading comprehension problem. You must be a product of one of our nation's failing public schools.

No commenter here (certainly not I) has offered support of "government control" or of Bloomberg's (alleged) educational campaign, which is what Ruth Marcus wrote about. What several of us have written above is that government social welfare programs actually make the dual problems of teenage pregnancy and unwed motherhood worse, thereby encouraging young children to have babies out of wedlock. If I favor any government action, it is that the government should STOP intervening because, even if offered with good intentions, the government's current welfare programs end up doing more harm than good.