Time for this REPOST on birth control and poverty: How the Christofacists are making us all poorer: [View All]

[Elspeth]

How the Christofacists are making us all poorer: the creation of a Permanent Under Class


Family planning is one of those issues that always gets seen as a "women's" issue, and men make the mistake thinking it doesn't affect them. But the Christofacist assault on family planning--birth control and abortion--as well as its insistence that women should be at hme, DOES affect men who marry or live with women.

Family planning allows women and the men they marry or live with to LIMIT the number of children they will have. This allows people in the working and middle classes to control at least some of their economic destiny. Family planning services allow couples to delay having children until they can afford them; it allows couples to decide on how many children they think they can afford. It allows couples not to spend their entire lives in debt paying for children they can't afford.

When choices about family size are taken out of the hands of couples and put into the hands of government, which at the moment seems inclined to deny this kind of control to couples, the working and middle classes are denied any control over their economic destiny. Unplanned pregnancies abound and poverty can be the end result for many working class people who cannot afford them.

In addition, the prejudice that women "should be in the home" affects how women are regarded in the workforce. If a company's personnel believe that a woman should not be working anyway, they don't have any qualms about paying her less or limiting her choices of profession in the workplace.

This is not just a woman's issue: If a man is married or in a committed relationship with a woman, his own lifestyle will be affected by his SO's lack of choices in the workplace. If there are children, the welfare of these children is at stake because of the prejudices against women.

In other words, guys, "women's" issues are your issues. It's about dollars coming out of your pocket. It is about having no control over your economic life as a couple. And, when "the rich get richer and the poor get children," children that they cannot afford to take care of, an increase of poverty, a permanent underclass with no control over its destiny, is the result.