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People decide to have children or not based based in part on economic viability.

I know that this is a common defense of why social program spending is "encouraging" this problem. I'm not disagreeing on philosophical terms, just to state that up front. I think that it has been addressed with research, however--

what that research shows is that if you make family planning methods free/affordable to poor WOMEN, then birth rates plummet in that cohort. More reliable birth control methods which the WOMAN controls... are expensive.

My apologies for not digging out the original article--

live-science review of research study on providing free contraception

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Between 2006 and 2008, 49 percent of all pregnancies in America were unplanned, according to the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth. About 43 percent of these unintended pregnancies ended in abortion. Meanwhile, a 2011 study in the journal Contraception estimated that unintended births cost U.S. taxpayers about $11 billion a year.

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To see if access to free contraception could budge those numbers, Peipert and his colleagues recruited 9,256 women ages 14 to 45 living in the St. Louis area through flyers, doctors and word-of-mouth. They also recruited patients from the city's two abortion clinics. Participants were given the option of using any reversible birth control method, from the birth control pill to a hormonal birth control patch to a long-lasting IUD or hormonal implant. [7 Surprising Facts About the Pill]

More than half of the women chose IUDs, 17 percent picked hormonal implants (tiny rods placed under the skin that release hormones), and the rest chose pills, patches and other hormonal methods. As a result, the researchers found, both teen births and overall abortion rates plummeted.

Among women in the free contraceptive program, the teen birth rate was 6.3 per 1,000 women, a huge difference from the national teen birth rate of 34.3 per 1,000 women.

That is a truly astonishing result. HUGE difference.

Hormonal methods are the most reliable-- but they are simply out of (financial) reach of many poor women.

But that is FAR cheaper than welfare for a series of accidental children, medicaid for the mom and those kids, and later, prison for some of them.

That sounds pretty stark, but it's also realistic.



Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.