LA Times Writer Fails to Understand Ramifications of Unintended Pregnancies

You’ve probably read this sentence, or one like it, many times: If we want to fight poverty, we need to nudge poor women away from having children. It’s an old social Darwinist line that’s been rebooted lately by centrist thought-leaders such as Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution. But I have a better idea. If we want to fight poverty, we should provide a robust set of universal family welfare benefits so that even women with bad jobs can comfortably afford to have children.

Rallying behind the rhetoric of choice, the new opponents of poor people’s fertility no longer push for outright sterilization. Instead, they plead for the public to provide poor women with contraception – ideally long-acting reversible contraception that would require them to jump through hoops to undo. This, it is hoped, would cut down on poor women having poor babies, thereby reducing poverty and dreaded welfare spending along with it.

See original/source content: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1006-bruenig-contraception-welfare-20151006-story.html