Welfare Sluts Gone Wild

 

Since I’ve been doing some work for an organization that serves homeless women, many of whom have children, I’ve done a lot of thinking and reading about poverty in the last few months, particularly as it relates to women.  Like many middle class people opining from comfortable couches in warm houses in safe neighborhoods, I have wondered why on earth, in a country where condoms are handed out on street corners and abortions are still legal, sort of, for the time being, a woman in precarious circumstances would choose to have a child. 

 

One of the books I picked up challenged a previously unexamined tenet of my belief system: Homeless Mothers: Face to Face with Women and Poverty, by Deborah R. Connolly.  The author, doing a stint as a social worker with an agency serving homeless families, presents the stories of some of the women.  She details their circumstances by way of debunking the narratives around poor women who have children.  The political right’s view of poor mothers as irresponsible welfare moochers touches only a tiny corner of the truth.  The left’s view, according to Connolly’s analysis, only covers another bit of corner.  In particular, the left’s insistence that poor women and girls get pregnant and have babies they are ill-prepared to care for because they lack access to sex education, contraception, and abortion fails to consider certain realities of life in poverty and underestimates the agency of those who live it.

 

Delaying childbearing until one is better prepared to take on such an immense responsibility is an inherently middle class concept.  A 17-year-old who expects to go to college if she doesn’t have a baby has a reason to get an abortion.  A 23-year-old who knows she will be promoted to Regional Manager if she puts in 80-hour weeks for the next two years will decide not to have that baby.  In contrast, a woman who sees no particular opportunities available to her, who expects next year and the year after to be same as last year and the year before, does not have the same motivation to wait to have a child.  There is no reason to delay childbearing if you’re poor and are likely to always be poor, and that is true of millions of women in the United States.

 

Allow me a brief digression.  The woman’s prospects are actually of little importance anyway, because in the US, women with children are supposed to be dependent on men.  The structure of our cultural, political, and economic world is predicated on this expectation.  Mothers belong at home, tending to the daily, hourly, or minute-by-minute needs of the children.  The work world demands unencumbered adults, also known as “fathers,” to put their whole, undivided attention into their jobs.  School occurs a measly 180 partial days per year.  And no one (except me, apparently) seems to think that we, as a society, ought to have universal, affordable, high-quality childcare available.  Why should we?  Children should be home with their mothers.

 

That tending children and supporting them are incompatible is okay, because women are supposed to be dependent on men.  And that works, in an uncomfortable sort of way, for middle class women who have access to men with good, family-supporting jobs.  It sometimes works for lower class women who manage to marry “up.”  But for large numbers of poor women, the future includes neither college nor career advancement nor a husband on whom one can depend. There may be a husband who is prepared to help support the children, but men are notoriously unreliable about helping.

 

So here we have a conundrum.  Most women want to have children, but we, the smug ones on our couches, have decided that an entire population of women ought not do so, because they are poor.  And while America is the Land of Opportunity ™, escaping poverty is exceedingly difficult and for many, impossible.  (Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed for an examination of life on the minimum wage.)  Poor women cannot reasonably believe that if they just wait a while, things will be better and then it will be time to have a baby.  Things, most likely, are not going to get better.  Telling a poor woman she should not have a baby because she’s poor is tantamount to, no, is identical to telling her that she is not good enough to be a mother and that she will never be good enough to be a mother.  To which anyone with an ounce of self-respect would say, “F&^% you, I’m having this baby.”

 

Since the women in question do not have men upon whom to be dependent, and the world is structured in a way that prevents mothers from supporting children themselves, mothers in marginal economic circumstances often find themselves depending on Uncle Sam instead.  In exchange for the assistance, they must accept the scorn and derision of others. 

 

At this point I must note that the most scornful among us are also those most likely to oppose reproductive freedom in the form of abortion.  The message to the woman who has the unmitigated gall to be both pregnant and poor is clear. 

 

If you have a baby without a man to support you, you are a bad, bad person. 

 

If you terminate your pregnancy, you are a bad, bad person.

 

And so it goes.  More recently I read Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform, by Sharon Hays.  (Check my friend OBL’s site for some discussion of this book.)  Hays notes the contradictory demands underlying the current “workfare” system.  Women are supposed to care for their children while men support them.  In the absence of supporting men, women are supposed to support themselves and the children.  But the way the world works makes it impossible to do so, because women are not supposed to support their children, they are supposed to be dependent on men.  And so it went.

 

This is the concluding paragraph in which I’m supposed to write the solution to the problem of poor women having babies when they can’t afford them.  But I don’t have an answer.  I am writing this only to say that the problem is not women, or babies; the problem is poverty.