Pro-Life welfare is a bad idea
by David Talcott, Public Discourse.
Abortion is one of our nation’s saddest realities, so it is always welcome to see new proposals for how we can care for “the least of these” in our midst. However, Lenny Glynn’s recent proposal in First Things for a pro-natal compromise bill is misguided and would have unintended consequences that would further erode the foundations of the family. Glynn proposes a hypothetical “Women’s Right to Choose Act” that would “draw on policies suggested by both Democrats and Republicans, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s recent national child care proposal and the family and child tax credits advanced by Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio.” However, the problems of poverty, loneliness, and family breakdown will not be solved by larger public interventions, but rather by reducing the size of the federal government and allowing families to care for themselves.
Glynn rightly notes that financial factors play a major role in women’s decisions to have abortions. But, as we’ve learned from decades of misguided social programs, sometimes direct financial subsidies do not resolve underlying problems. In some cases, the actual consequences of a policy can be exactly the opposite of the authors’ intentions.
Over the past fifty years, family structures have gotten more dysfunctional, not less, even as social programs aimed at helping poor women and children have ballooned to massive proportions.
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