Readers React: Should women with children get more welfare benefits?

To the editor: Are you kidding me? Is this a serious article or a joke? (“Eugenics by another name,” Opinion, Oct. 6) Who, pray tell, is to fund these programs? And why should women, no matter their financial circumstances, not be able to decide for themselves how many, if any, children they desire to have? This should be a personal choice and has nothing to do with Denmark’s and Finland’s policies.

I think all women welcome having the option of birth control if they wish to avail themselves of its benefits. It should be their choice. Expecting the government to take financial care of one’s children is ludicrous.

Coral Norton, Port Hueneme

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To the editor: How would being guaranteed a life of ease and security not encourage women to embrace unwed pregnancy, which has become a growing scourge on American society?

Being the child of an unwed mother — ill-equipped to function independently in her own life — is no advantage, even were it to be accompanied by a bunch of government checks.

Denying poor women the right to choose by slandering the people who advocate for birth control on their behalf as neo-Nazi eugenicists cuts off debate on the role of the government in providing for its citizens.

Janet Weaver, Huntington Beach

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To the editor: While I am not a researcher of poverty, inequality or of the welfare systems (as is the writer of the Op-Ed piece), I am a wife, mother and hold a master’s in social work.

I have seen firsthand the consequences of women on welfare continuing to have children they cannot care for. They are not

“disempowered,” as is suggested by the subtitle; they are barely surviving.

For Matthew Bruenig to write that more welfare benefits would allow women with “bad jobs” the ability to “comfortably” afford to have children is oxymoronic and ill-conceived at best.

Why should childbearing be a “genuinely attainable choice just like any other choice” if someone cannot afford the outcome of that choice? Would a person buy a house or a car — or own a pet, for that matter — if that person couldn’t afford the mortgage payments or the vet bills? To suggest that eugenics are at play here is unfair and a cheap use of the term.

Michele Adashek, Los Angeles

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To the editor: Bruenig is missing the big picture. There should be no incentive for any couple to have more than two children.

We are already beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth because we waste resources producing animal food products, and because just about everybody on the planet aspires to an American standard of living.

Deborah Elliott, Pacific Palisades

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To the editor: I’d like to own a single-family house in a good neighborhood. But I don’t have that choice, for the simple reason that I can’t afford it.

But I don’t expect the government to subsidize my residential choice. Nor do I want the government to subsidize the reproductive choice of someone who wants children but can’t afford them.

Life isn’t fair. We aren’t all wealthy, and we don’t always get everything we want.

Joseph Devlin, Anaheim

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