I'm **almost** to the point where I'd advocate for free (OK, taxpayer-subsidized) NORPLANT for any female student in school. And remain subsidized to age 21 or 25. Because it's FAR cheaper than teen mothers . . . .

I'm old enough to note that in general teens that are not concerned about getting pregnant do not take birth controls precautions seriously.

Cost and/or availability is not an issue for the majority. They simply do not get refills as needed or take the prescriptions as prescribed.

It's a similar mind-set to stopping completely at a stop sign ("Usually nobody is coming.")

A totalitarian state could solve this problem since personal responsibility is not working.

"What we need is free birth control of the highly preventative kind..."

Won't do any good because they won't use it. Reasons: (1) the thugs that father the kids want their women barefoot and pregnant; (2) the women regard having children, as soon as they are physically mature enough, as the ticket to what passes for the good life in the ghetto/sticks.

Cousin Dave,

1 series yay or nay?

Maybe it is poor lighting or whatever; but, that "meal" still looks very gross and most unappetizing.

Yea, I know - I'm stating the obvious.

I dunno, I often shop at the mall. A mall-like center that had your essentials all in one spot makes sense to me.

Could somebody maybe say, "Yoohoo, don't do that?"

Raaaaaaaaaaaaaacist! H8er!

(and that meal? I'm pretty sure it would be rejected by starving people the world over)

"What we need is free birth control of the highly preventative kind -- IUDs, injections, etc. -- provided to young women in risk groups, so they can get on in the world and get some earning power and -- radical idea...tell them it's awful to have a child without a family situation to support it -- before they start having babies."

And while you are advocating that, the government, at pretty much all levels, is is subsidizing the exact opposite.

It is the latter days of the Roman republic, and those votes are being bought with *bread and circuses*.

Are the serving lutefisk for school lunch??

That meal pretty much looks like what I imagine Jesus' "free lunch" looked like as he and the apostles fed the multitude.

"1 series yay or nay?"

Sorry, I'm not grokking... my brain must still be burned out from last weekend.

But yeah, that stuff in the tray over on the right looks like cat food. Not the good kind either.

Free long term BC to girls (and to boys if that ever comes into being) should be the thing. Free long term BC to girls at risk, while good intentioned runs the risk of being called racist.

I don't have a problem with a taxpayer paid for school being used after hours as a public community center if that's what the local population wants to do.

I doubt that free (to the user) birth control will make any difference.

Four Madison schools could soon leave their doors open far beyond the school day to bring services like doctor checkups, extra help with homework, parenting help and meals to students and their families.

Government overcreep always sounds like that.

Sounds more like parental abdication of all responsibility.

Feeding their FAMILIES? It's not enough my taxes pay for your kids' school, transportation and food? I gotta pay for the parents to eat, too??

People bitch about being punished for working hard and doing well. I think they should start bitching about being penalized for knowing how to work a condom or a birth control pill.

there may be a few bits of truth from Dalrock on this...

essentially everything is working to spec.

https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2015/04/26/debtors-prisons-are-an-essential-tool-of-our-new-public-policy/

hard to say "no, it can't be that." when the outcomes point that direction...

Swiss, it has seemed to me for a while now that a main goal of post-modern feminism is to give women (at least women of the favored classes) access to the resources and influence of very-high-status men. That way, they don't have to "settle" or otherwise associate with men of their own status level. What Dalrock writes about is a sort of way of accomplishing that, witht the government acting as a means of conveying that to women. (After all, the upper levels of government are largely composed of ultra-high-status men.)

The women are all in favor of it, because it gives them most of the benefits of marriage without any committment. The high-status men are in favor because it allows them to, in effect, assemble harems -- they can have their pick of attractive women, using money earned on the backs of lower-status men. Said lower-status men of course aren't going to like it, but since they will be cast into servitude, their opinions won't matter.

I doubt that free (to the user) birth control will make any difference.

Would be if we cancelled welfare payments to pregnant teens

So long as poor women (and even teenage girls!) can collect enough to live on from the welfare department (or from a man she tricked into having sex) just for having a child, they'll keep on doing it. The only solution is to end that subsidy and put the child in foster care instead, so he/she will have healthy role models and a future.

Keith: In Michigan, Norplant is free under Medicaid (women on welfare, and I presume their children). The ones who need it most refuse it - or dig the capsule out of their arm with a knife a year or two later.

"Would be if we cancelled welfare payments to pregnant teens"

But then it isn't the birth control making the difference.

Birth control is already 'free' or highly subsidized through Planned Parenthood and many other agencies.

The problem is that too many women figured out that you can make a living with a few kids from different fathers, between the child support and the many programs for people who make bad reproductive decisions.

Too many women are making the rational, (even if highly selfish and destructive to their children), choice of becoming a single mom of multiple children.

We will continue to have a problem with single moms so long as we pay women to be single moms. When the perverse incentives are removed, that sh!t will stop.

I'd happily trade our current welfare state, and the other hundred programs that exist solely to encourage women to make bad decisions, for 'free' birth control.