Like farm subsidies, but for babies

Louisiana state representative John LaBruzzo announced on Tuesday that he is considering a proposal to pay $1000 to poor people willing to undergo tubal ligation or vasectomy so they will not have any children in the future. (I heard about this on CNN, but found a link to the Times-Picayune article via Wonkette.) LaBruzzo says he is concerned that families on welfare have more children than families who aren’t, and thus sap the state’s resources in ever-increasing amounts.

This idea sounds revolting on face to most people. John LaBruzzo is surely not a politician I would trust to formulate reasonable policy, particularly after hearing him say on CNN that he didn’t expect Democrats to support this proposal because people on welfare are the Democratic base. Cute. More importantly, the statistics don’t support LaBruzzo’s fears. While I strongly suspect that LaBruzzo’s intentions are racist and/or classist in nature, and I acknowledge that there is no urgency of an out-of-control welfare budget, I don’t think that that visceral revulsion at the basic idea is really warranted.

The first thing I want to point out is that no one is being forced into this arrangement, unless your definition of “force” is incredibly broad. If a person would rather have $1000 than be able to have children in the future, I see no reason not to allow them to make that trade. Plenty of people seek vasectomies or tubal ligations on their own, so it’s clear they’re not inherently bad operations. No one else would be harmed by the fact of an individual receiving the surgery, so if that individual would prefer the money to their fertility, the trade makes everyone better off. Surely there are people out there who face both unwanted pregnancies and financial problems, and would find themselves killing two birds with one stone in a system of this sort. (I anticipate a claim that this is merely economic coercion, since some people really need the money — but this is a ridiculous argument. Is it coercive for a grocery store to charge you money for food? You need that to survive. Is it coercive for your employer to require you to work according to your contract before you get your paycheck? Clearly not.)

We can also think about the potential children that might have been conceived in the future by someone who signed up for this surgery. If $1000 is worth more to you than your own child, I’m going to hazard a guess that you either would not love and care for that child very much, or that you clearly do not have the financial resources necessary to raise a child in a healthy situation (I mean, with adequate food, clothing, shelter, etc.). In either case, the wisest choice would be to refrain from conceiving a child in the first place, which is what a program of this sort allows for.

I know any hint of eugenics makes everyone queasy, because of how easy it is to invoke a comparison to the Nazi regime. I am not contesting the badness of Hitler here. However — aside from the obvious differences in levels of violence and coercion — it is important to notice that while Nazi eugenics were based on ethnicity, religion, and other qualities having in reality nothing to do with one’s ability to raise a family, the eugenics in a program of this type are almost precisely equivalent to the sort we all employ if and when we look for someone to start our own families with. We ask, will this person be able to love and care for our children, putting their needs ahead of his or her own? Will this person take on the intense level of responsibility involved in raising a child? Will our combined salaries be enough to support a family of the size we want? It’s not exactly “eugenics” to choose to have children with someone you think would make a good parent, as opposed to someone you think would make a bad one — or, if it is, it’s not the hateful sort of eugenics that’s tantamount to genocide.

Claims of eugenics with respect to this program are based on the fact that the payments could only go to poor people. Either the goal is to end poverty by ending poor people, as the Wonkette headline read, or the goal is to diminish the numbers of ethnic minorities who are statistically more likely to be poor. These are legitimate complaints. I’d like to step back and look at the basic idea of paying someone not to have children, though, and ask: is it really necessary to restrict this program to poor people? Everyone’s children impose some burden on the state, since public schools must make room for them, they consume resources and contribute to scarcity, Social Security will (maybe…) make payments to them when they retire, and so on and so forth. Sure, wealthy people are probably less likely to take the government up an an offer like this (since $1000 has less marginal utility to someone with greater financial assets), but for the sake of fairness why not offer it to them as well? Would a plan structured in that way make you feel the same kind of revulsion? I doubt it.

My point is absolutely not that John LaBruzzo is a good guy, or that his particular proposal is a good idea. I simply believe that what I’ve been hearing and reading on this topic is missing a certain level of rational discourse. Of course, in the US we don’t suffer from such severe overpopulation as to make a policy like this worth enacting, and I definitely think we should steer away of programs with central and unavoidable discriminatory effects. If it became practically necessary, though, paying people not to have children would be a legitimate plan, not a reprehensible one.

September 25, 2008 · Written by
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