Shaming is a crazy idea, along with all ideas of the form "Let's have this result". No practical method is proposed to get to that result. Run from any proposal which begins with "I wish ...". Wishing is not a plan.

The shame of teen pregnancy in the past came from parental pressure. Teens had to impose their errors directly on their families. They became dependent on their families, and their pregnancy delayed their path to personal independence. Their peers saw this as a stupid move. There were real incentives not to become a teen mother.

Those incentives have been changed. Teen girls are paid to have babies with no personal ability or partner to offer support. This has been policy for many years. They get food cards, their own apartments, medical care, baby sitters, and independence from their parents.

Instead, fund orphanages and facilitate adoption, where the unfortunate children of teen mothers will find a better life. Further, make the teens pay a portion of the support for their children over the next 20 years.

Those unfortunate children will have better opportunities, and teens (and some who are older) will quickly learn to stop having children as a way to early independence. Bill them, don't pay them. They can complete school or training and work for their living without a child to care for, and pay towards that child. By all means, also bill the fathers.

I don't see how state orphanages would be more expensive than paying the teen mothers. But, even if somewhat more expensive, it would be worth paying more for a while to set the correct incentives, to pay less and less as the number of such unfortunate children decreases.

Even more important is having an environment where these children receive support, education, and avoid abuse. The mothers have been irresponsible. The children are innocent and must be saved, if only out of the enlightened economic self-interest of society.

Consider the objection that the state cannot substitute for a mother's love, and that the state will do a bad job of raising these children, so we must support the natural mothers.

If you join in that objection, you would have to believe that people and institutions supported by the state would be generally worse than having teens raise children on welfare. Is that possible? Just what would the state be competent to do, if that were true?

There are ethical and legal issues with forcing people to pay child support for children they have no legal relationship with, which is what would happen if we forced teens to pay child support for kids they have put up for adoption. Never mind that it could also dissuade parents from adopting if they knew there would be a continued relationship with the birth mother.

Even more important is having an environment where these children receive support, education, and avoid abuse. The mothers have been irresponsible. The children are innocent and must be saved, if only out of the enlightened economic self-interest of society.

I do object to the idea that the state is qualified to give children support and love and education where their parents have failed.

I was raised in a home that took in foster kids. I was a foster kid myself for awhile. I had one of the good homes, but it was the exception. A few kids were removed from abusive homes to be placed in abusive foster homes -- homes headed by people who were screened by the state to be allowed to take in foster kids.

Most of the other parents were indifferent, and trying to raise the kids as cheaply as possible because they were doing it for the money, and not much money at that. We don't have the collective will to spend the kind of money that would be required to make orphanages and foster homes actual homes instead of holding pens for broken children. Not to mention the kinds of attachment disorders we'd be promoting by not allowing children to develop relationships with attachment figures. The research seems to indicate that even insecure attachments with subpar parents are better than none at all.

Parents on welfare don't get much money per kid. It would be far more expensive to build homes and create the kind of infrastructure necessary to take even adequate care of children.

I don't have a good answer. Neither does anyone else.

We live in a society in which consequences have largely disappeared. Everything is someone else's fault, someone else's problem. Piggybacking on Andrew's comment, when my former sister-in-law had a baby at age 16, she had all the help in the world. Not just from her family, which is the only help she should have gotten given her choice to raise her son rather than have him adopted, but from We the People.

As a single teen mother she was part of a program wherein she received cash, food, medical care, child care, housing, and a free college education. The program is administered through a nonprofit which makes it seem like private charity, but that nonprofit wouldn't exist without funding from government grants.

Shaming teen pregnancy? I'd settle for not rewarding it.

I accidentally read "libertarian" as "librarian" in the title. That really confused me for a moment.

There are ethical and legal issues with forcing people to pay child support for children they have no legal relationship with, which is what would happen if we forced teens to pay child support for kids they have put up for adoption.

You said people, I'm sure you meant to say women, cause society seems to have no problem bilking men for money for kids that have no relationship with

I was stationed in South Korea (Republic of Korea - ROK) for a number of years. I didn't get every in and out of the culture but I had a decent grasp.

A few things I noticed: The ROK pharmacies were nominally off limits to US Military. The reason is that they sold narcotics over the counter. With the language barrier, a number of GIs had been busted in pee tests in the past.

But for all the narcotics available, the pharmacists had a little responsibility to say "Do you need this?" The other was that the number of stoned out druggies on the street was very low because the Korean police would drop the druggy off at the house the first few times. After that the druggy would be delivered home after a few months of hard labor. The long term loser types end up in missionary districts, that have soup kitchens and they can live in tenements if they can get a day laborer job. But Seoul, for a city that covers 233 sq mi. and has a population of about 10 million, has probably less than 100K bums. There is something about shame in the culture.

Saying all this, you look at the U.S., girls get paid to have children. Serial unemployment is acceptable. Repeated trips to the jail is a way of life for some. You get the unintelligent wanting their Obamaphone and Obamacash, not realizing that people work every day to make money. Then the politicians say those who are working are exploiting everyone else.

Bullshit!

I'm willing to give someone a hand up. I'm tired of giving handouts. Why should 1/4 to 1/3 of my life be spent paying for people who should be trying to support themselves?

> We don't have the collective will to spend
> the kind of money that would be required to
> make orphanages and foster homes actual homes
> instead of holding pens for broken children.

I recognize the sincerity of this assertion. I further respect the authority of it, as you've had so very much more experience and thought for the topic than I.

Thang is...

What solves these problems, what solves MOST (soluble) problems (on the spiritual plane), is loving intimacy. Government and taxation and policy do not and cannot make people care for each other in these ways.

So I despair.

And fear...

> I do object to the idea that the state is
> qualified to give children support and love
> and education where their parents have failed

...that you do as well.

> Shaming is a crazy idea

Shaming is underrated.

Not magic.

Not the solution.

Just underrated.

I'm pretty much with Andrew on this one. If I have to pay to support a kid, I want it to have three square meals a day, an education, and a safe place to sleep at night.

Any behavior you subsidize, you encourage. I think we see where that's gotten us.

Like Jim said, hand up? Yes. Hand out? NO.

And, frankly, to be a libertarian, you need to be a thinker, and I don't remember ever talking to a libertarian who didn't have a set of "moral judgments."

Which is why the founders, who built a very limited, secular government, were so adamant about the role of religion in society. They understood that small government requires strong moral judgment in private life. In the 18th Century, that meant religion.

The reality is, it can come from religion, shaming, and even books that call out rude people.

But the more we move away from small government, the more voices we hear demanding that we "judge not."

A return to a small, constitutionally-limited government requires individuals, groups, media, churches and society in general to police itself.

You said people, I'm sure you meant to say women, cause society seems to have no problem bilking men for money for kids that have no relationship with

No, I meant people. Society does not regularly force men who do not have a legal or emotional relationship with a child to pay up.

What solves these problems, what solves MOST (soluble) problems (on the spiritual plane), is loving intimacy. Government and taxation and policy do not and cannot make people care for each other in these ways.

Agreed. Foster homes and orphanages can never be more than terrible second best to what the child should have had.

If it were purely economics, we'd see teenagers from healthy, intact families having kids young at the same rate as we do teens from broken, dysfunctional families. We're not.

There are (at least) two problems:

1) Hope. Kids from healthy families have it. If you have every reason to believe you could become a doctor someday, having a kid at 15 is a terrible idea. This requires parents to guide you toward the future when your hormones are living in the now.

Kids who don't believe they're ever going to do better than work the cash register at Walmart have no reason to plan for the future. They're going to be poor no matter what they do. Americans might have opportunities to be upwardly mobile, but it doesn't matter when no one you know has ever actually done it.

2) Teen girls from broken homes are at much higher risk of pregnancy than girls from intact families. A lot of these girls want love and think all they have to offer to get it is sex. They are damaged children making more damaged children. You're not going to eliminate that problem by cutting off the $60 a week they're getting when what they're trying to do is replace Daddy.

Please read Megan, however you feel about teh gays and our chidwin.



> Society does not regularly force men who do
> not have a legal or emotional relationship
> with a child to pay up.

Yes! That is a crazy-important point. Enforcement of child support sucks. It sucks garden hose. Many men will weep, righteously, that they're being financially brutalized on behalf of a family from whom they can take no warmth. But I'd bet that in the vastly larger number of cases, men simply walk away from their children and their mothers, marriage or no.

That's not merely ironic. I think it means that society understands –perhaps in some non-verbal, shameful way– that a man who isn't in the house caring for his children isn't their father. That percentage of men who do pay support are just a fig-leaf for this deeper, perhaps unspeakable, insight.

Wallerstein made a great point of this: Men who divorce are much less likely to pay for their children's college educations. I forget the numbers, because they're stunning. I try to forget that moment I was in a car crash, too. Everyone should read Wallerstein... There's a copy in your public library.

This was an interesting thing to say—

> But the more we move away from small government,
> the more voices we hear demanding that we
> "judge not."

Because as polices and their enforcement grow like cancer, the consequences of judgment become ever-more blinding and constraining.

And speaking of cancer, did anyone see this cancer movie? It was pretty good! At one point this stylin' young woman is taking a guy for a ride in her car and it's got a bunch of trash in it and she says "Don't judge me!" And it's a great moment, because what "judgment" could there be, except 'Lady, I judge your car to be full of trash...'?

It's easy for middle-aged men (ahem) to get too cranked up about this kind of language.

I saw an interview with Drew Barrymore on a daytime talk show once, and the feminine audience was eating it up. She talked about all the troubles she'd had, rehab in sixth grade or whatever, but how she'd been able to bounce back... 'Because you didn't judge me!' Well, the women in the audience just went apeshit, they all applauded and wept, swaying back & forth in their chairs, then they joined hands and everybody ovulated at the same moment, then there was a wide shot, then some music and they cut to a commercial, and I was appalled.

And then I saw her in another interview a few years later, and she was judgmental as Hell. I forget the details, but she was humble and savvy and clever, and it was obvious that she knew exactly what other people and their feelings were about. Her judgment was superb, and she was proud of it.

Fashionable things, including language, are often scary, but they don't mean much. I loved these shoes as a teenager, but that doesn't mean I wanted to walk through life with my toes pointing up.

Please read Megan, however you feel about teh gays and our chidwin.

Great column. A few people, after hearing about my experiences with foster care, have said they want to adopt foster kids. I don't want to dissuade them, but I don't think they understand what they're signing up for.

They need more than big hearts for such a task. They need the ability to deal with a kid who likes to set things on fire; a girl who might have sex with other teens in the home; kids who steal and fight; and on and on. These kids are often profoundly screwed up. Foster care isn't full of kids who need a glass of milk and a bedtime story to make it all better. Taking a child out of his home and placing him in foster care isn't a decision that should be made lightly.

Yep-my dad paid older bro's college. Then divorce, and "sorry girl you're outta luck, ask mom for the money, she certainly took plenty of mine".

All I can say is the nursing home's coming, and it ain't gonna be a nice one.

Can't help it... Sometimes, I admire bitterness.