Prior to FDR, the primary reason the federal government went into debt was to finance war. Since then, the government has made it a habit of going into debt to finance peace. When in power, liberals have created numerous financial incentives for women to bear children out of wedlock. These incentives have caused an explosion of illegitimate but certainly not unplanned births among the poor, requiring the federal government to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars against the future productivity of America’s middle class children. This situation is unsustainable.
One of the left’s most energized voting blocs is college-aged women. After the Democrat’s poor showing in the 2010 elections, and with President Barack Obama’s approval rating dropping, it became evident this group of important voters was losing interest. In response to their lack of political enthusiasm, the Obama administration reinvigorated this important cohort of coeds by providing free birth control to all, paid for by taxpayers, many of whom are morally and religiously opposed to the practice of birth control, and/or philosophically opposed to government-funded premarital sex. This has resulted in a firestorm as Catholic institutions and religious freedom enthusiasts have responded harshly to this raw demonstration of government overreach.
The argument for providing middle-class college women with free birth control is it will reduce the tax burden created by unwanted pregnancies; however, this is an illogical argument. The poor, not the middle class, can’t afford to bear children out of wedlock, and the poor already have access to free contraception. The outcome of paying poor women to have babies and middle class women not to have babies is predictable by following the incentives: poor women will continue to have babies out of wedlock; and, as HHS Secretary Kathy Sebilius predicts, middle-class women will produce even fewer babies. What Secretary Sebilius doesn’t tell us is middle-class babies are America’s future cash cow, as children born to middle-class families pay the lion’s share of America’s social security taxes.
We are at a point of constitutional crisis. If we allow our federal government to become strong enough to: (1) take from productive, intact families to incent poor single women to bear children; (2) force citizens to pay for the birth control of single, middle-class, and sexually active college women; and (3) borrow the money necessary to pay for both of these unconstitutional initiatives, what will be our unconstrained and strong government’s logical response when there aren’t enough middle-class workers being born to pay back the money the government borrowed to implement them?
Welfare and birth control are not proper functions of the federal government, and trying to solve the problems created by our unconstitutional welfare policy with an unconstitutional birth control mandate is absurd. As long as Americans continue to furlough our federal government from its constitutional restraints, we can expect our future prosperity to be limited and civil liberties less than secure.
Joseph Coco
Whitefish