Earlier I mentioned part I of Daniel Patrick Maloney’s series at Public Discourse on reducing poverty by reducing the number of poor children. In part II, Maloney, a former FT associate editor, looks at transcripts from Senate Finance Committee hearings in the 1970s and argues
that the committee enacted these policies out of racist, eugenicist motives. While the motives behind the American welfare system were originally idealistic—providing temporary assistance to needy families while they climbed out of poverty—the committee hearings show that the senators believed that the mostly black welfare population was incurably lazy, promiscuous, intellectually substandard, and a burden on public schools, and, moreover, that they probably would remain so indefinitely. Birth control, therefore, was in their eyes a way to reduce the number of these undesirable people.
Read the rest of part II and look for the final part in the coming days.
May 8th, 2009 | 2:44 pm
[...] Earlier I mentioned parts I and II of Daniel Patrick Maloney’s series at Public Discourse on reducing poverty by reducing the number of poor children. In part III, Maloney, a former FT associate editor, examines the Medicaid policies that result from this belief and how they could be changed. A sample: In 1993, the Clinton Administration approved a plan whereby states could expand Medicaid’s free family planning services to those who were too rich to be eligible for Medicaid. There was a catch, however—a state could have access to Medicaid’s contraception money only if it could promise that it would save the government money in the long run by “averting births” of children who were likely to be a drain on the welfare system. The Guttmacher Institute had been publishing papers since the 1970s arguing that averting the births of the poor would save money set aside for helping the poor; now the federal government was demanding that the states adopt this perverse argument in order to have access to more of Medicaid’s millions. . . . [...]