If you read the article, this is coming from a very frustrated government official who is upset about women who are either serially promiscuous or who serially choose men who lack the capacity or the will to be even decent husbands. Furthermore, these women, having chosen men that predictably won’t be any kind of a parent, are not getting their children to school…that is, she specifically says:
*Miss Casey warns that the state must start telling mothers with large families to take “responsibility” and stop getting pregnant, often with different, abusive men.
“The responsibility is as important as coming off drugs, coming off alcohol, getting a grip and getting the kids to school.
“So for some of those women the job isn’t to go and find yourself another violent, awful bloke who you will bring a child into the world with, to start the cycle all over again.” *
and elsewhere:
“There are plenty of people who have large families and function incredibly well, and good luck to them, it must be lovely,” she said. “The issue for me, out of the families that I have met, [is that] they are not functioning, lovely families.
She is saying that stopping drug addiction is not enough, and she’s right. Women have to realize that they are the default parents. No guy has ever been left pregnant with the mother of his child nowhere to be seen. That’s just the reality: that is, that females have a greater biological stake in being choosy about their mates. Biology only forces males to be choosy when the option of multiple female partners is not there, either in practical terms or in terms of some other cost. The only other factor is morality. Even without any of us assigning culpability for that, we have to admit that she’s seeing a population where moral action is in short supply.
She’s also saying that there are parents on the public dole who are doing their part when it comes to getting their children in school but who otherwise have total chaos at home are still failing their kids. She’s right. She’s saying that the government needs to hold these parents responsible.
That is the goal. How you do that without punishing the children is something else again. The parents that are driving her nuts are the very ones who p*** away whatever opportunity and gain that life has handed them, which in some cases is very little to start with! If the children are simply taken away, well, we are talking about very chaotic lives here…have any of their other losses slowed down the chaos? And that is the issue: If the chaos of these women’s lives has not already been incentive enough, is perhaps lack of incentive not what is causing the problem? Is lack of will even the problem? Is it perhaps that other issues in these women’s lives are causing a defect of will?
I’m not looking to remove culpability, but only saying that blame doesn’t do any good when the person who could take the blame is in a state that leaves him or her a moral glob of jelly. You can point out that a jellyfish lacks a spine, but that doesn’t give them a spine. There is wrong-doing, but if there is no reliable capacity to do better, all the blame and punishment in the world won’t help matters.
I don’t know how you force someone to be a decent parent, but that is what she wants: if you’re going to be a parent, be a parent. Don’t keep piling one child after another into your house, each with a diffferent absent father than the others before him or her. Totally understandable.
I mean that she is saying this, to tweak an old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over again…can no one step in and rescue me from myself? When there are innocent children in the mix and when the childbearing that you are trying to stop is childbearing that is clearly outside a valid marriage, that is a hard question.
We have DNA testing now. The government might want to start using science to even the playing field when it comes to the consequences doled out by biology, and start holding father-and-run men to some natural consequences, too. Other than that, there are not any nice effecient ways to handle people whose lives are utterly out of control. There are only choices to be made between many problematic options.
I will say this: Shaming those in this situation is not the answer. It is not as if there are many people so clueless that they are proud of living in chaos. I would wager, instead, that these women feel plenty of shame, and that is just exactly why they are willing to accept the first “violent, awful bloke” who comes down the pike. If they are going to do better, many at least will need to be convinced that they deserve better. Shaming will do exactly the opposite.
