Payday Babie$

It amazes me what sometimes gets my mental juices flowing and yesterday was no exception. I had just gotten out of the shower and Allie had the bathroom door open as she got ready to go to my parents’ house to watch my niece. She had the TV on Montel Williams who had Judge Judy as a guest.

I really have no clue what it was that they were talking about but one thing that Judge Judy said pierced the background clutter of the hair dryer, dogs playing, and sink running. She said something to the effect of, “People need a license to cut hair, to do your nails, and to do the most trivial things and yet the one thing that is the biggest thing a person can do, that being procreation, can be done by anyone.”

For years now I’ve been a bit of an “anti-procreation” advocate, but since I realize that the vast majority of people will never see things my way because they like kids and want to have them, I’m willing to settle on a compromise.

There are millions of people in this once great country of America who are on welfare. Of those millions, there are a few who simply use it as it was intended-as a safety net when a series of unfortunate events strikes in a person’s life and they stay on it only as long as they need to until they can make it on their own.

Then there are thousands, if not millions, of others who simply suck up social services because they are worthless, lazy motherfuckers who actually think that everyone owes them and they take the money because they can.

I heard on a talk radio show not too long ago how there are lots of single mothers out there who are on welfare and public assistance who, even though they already can’t make enough money to support their kids and themselves, go out and purposely get knocked up so they can have another baby and thus get MORE money each month from the government. They call it, “Having a payday.”

There really aren’t words to describe how mad this makes me.

My solution to this is to make permanent sterilization a REQUIREMENT for anyone who has children and applies for, or wishes to remain on, any kind of government assistance program. For those without children, they will lose all benefits if they become pregnant or father a child while on such programs.

I think there is a plethora of problems that this country faces that could be solved just by this one little change.

First of all, there would be no more “payday babies.” The days where single women go and purposely get pregnant in order to have a baby that they wouldn’t otherwise want just so they can get more money each month would be over. In the rare case where the sterilization might fail and a woman would end up getting pregnant again, she would have the option of getting off of welfare or giving up the children she already can’t take care of in order to stay on it.

“But wait!,” you might say. “What about people who start out married but become single parents due to divorce and then need to be on public assistance?”

I say leave the law the same straight across the board. Why should someone, who has shown that they don’t have the ability to stay with someone they promised to be with forever, be allowed the opportunity to have more children if they can’t take care of the ones they have without government help? The government was never meant to be a parent and in the cases where it tries to it does a shitty job.

Perhaps knowing that getting married, having children, then getting divorced could have serious potential financial hardships would make people think much harder before getting married and therefore drive down the divorce rate. Maybe people would suddenly see the value of good premarital counseling after hearing horror stories of how people who had children and got divorced had to get sterilized in order to get welfare and then got remarried and couldn’t have more kids with their new spouse.

There is a certain percentage of people who are on welfare and government assistance who live their entire lives on it. Their parent(s) were on welfare when they were born and while they grew up, they got on it once they dropped out of school and couldn’t get a decent job (if they ever really even tried to get one), they are on it when they go and have children that they can’t support in the first place, and they will be on it until they die.

Now, suppose my sterilization idea had been made law 60 or 70 years ago. Those people who were payday babies back then and who are having payday babies now, who will in turn grow up to be leeches like their parents and have payday babies of their own, would have never been born. People who refuse to try and take care of themselves and who wield the power to create life like a club to rob the working, tax-paying members of society, would slowly die off. Those who have babies they don’t really want to raise simply because they want a payday would not have children to spread their ideas to and a large portion of that parasitic element of society would die off and not be replaced by another generation of people who would be sucking the tit of government from birth to death.

I’m very sure that the majority of people would consider this a rather extreme, drastic measure and would consider my ideas insensitive at the least. But I think what most people fail to think about is the fact that the ability to procreate is one of the most powerful things a person can do, and can also be the most damning.

Is it not the very pinnacle of selfishness and recklessness to create another person, a human child, who you cannot provide for or take care of? Even for those who may have good jobs and be able to provide financially, but perhaps both parents work and the child is raised by day care and the public education system-why are you having children if you aren’t going to raise them?

It has been proven over and over again by study after study that, in general, children are much more stable, happy, and prepared for adulthood when they are RAISED (as in actually taken care of and taught and loved and supported) in families where both parents are involved and take an active role in the child’s development and not just in providing for physical needs.

Is life not quite challenging enough for kids these days? Is it fair to the kids, who have no choice in who their parents are, to be born to people who stack the deck against them? If people really love their kids shouldn’t they do everything possible to try and change that and stack the deck in the child’s favor?

As I’ve said in other entries I think that people see the ability to procreate as a right simply because they have the power to do it. Yet, anyone also has the power to go out and kill someone but that doesn’t mean they have a right to do that.

Having children should be a privilege that is only enjoyed by people who can provide for a child’s mental, physical, emotional, and developmental well-being. And if people want children and aren’t in a place where they can do that, then they need to show some fucking restraint and work their asses off to get to a place where they can do that so that each child can be born into the best situation possible and so that no one has to grow up knowing they were only a payday baby.