Strollerderby

I don't think breeding is a right. It is a privledge. Raising a child is a privledge. If you screw it up, you lose that privledge.  It is hurting the child's rights when you let a parent who is not ready financially, emotionally, physically or mentally raise that child because they will do that child long term damage and the child will suffer.

My standards of good care for children are very high but that is not because I am a snob or hateful. It is because I care about children so much and so deeply that I only want every child in this world to have the best. No parent is perfect, but sorry parents who smoke, do drugs, have no money whatsoever to spend on their child, neglect their child, allow dangerous people around their child, abuse their child or even just make horrible parenting decisions constantly have no right being a parent.

I would happily happily happily submit myself to a parenting review or test as long as everyone else had to do one too. I think it would benefit society greatly.

No we don't & these two monsters would be a good example of why not...

www.huffingtonpost.com/.../stephen-e-quick-samantha-_n_174940.html

I agree with your first idea if you take out funding abortions. All the rest sounds bang on.

A couple of problems that I see would include women not getting adequate (or any) prenatal care because of their court order and more trash can babies. If you tell someone that if they get pregnant, they are in trouble then you are asking them to dispose of the evidence. Very scary stuff.

In our state when a family already has a child in foster care and then becomes pregnant hospitals are alerted to contact the state when the new child is delivered. A couple of problems here- hospitals don't always check the list daily and children go home with the abusive parent or the parents deliver out of state. The state does not have the time or man power to chase all these parents with children in state care.

I have said before that abusive mothers should get their uterus taken out and instantly know that is wrong. While it brings anger to most parents to hear of these abuses it is so hard to say what we can decide on another person's body.

On another point, my sister makes about $20,000 a year more than we do. I would argue that finances make good parents. Our children are better provided for and have far more stability than hers do. We make different choices and our children's needs come before our own. Finances should not be a factor in a parenting license. Maybe priorities would factor in better.

I have a second cousin who was offered a deal by the judge in her case.  Have her tubes tied, courtesy of the state or go to jail again.  She had her tubes tied.  Why?  She had 6 children by the time she was 30 years old.  Two conceived whie in court ordered rehab.  Three removed from her custody at the hospital after they were born due to high amounts of drugs in their systems.  All 6 are in foster care today.  She did not care if she got pregnant while trading sex for drugs.  She did not care about the children she carried or bore.  She never tried to get any of them back or make adoption plans for them.  There are many cases where sterilization is a viable alternative.  A homeless, mentally ill person should be offered this as well.  They have babies all of the time and leave them in dumpsters.  Not everyone who gets pregnant or impregnantes gives a shit about the kid.  I have another cousin whose wife drank and did drugs through out both pregnancies. He also let his pregnat teen girlfriend live in the house with them.  They were all hooked on drugs and he was a dealer.   They routinely left the infants alone in the house to fend for themselves, even when they were in their babies in cribs.  When the kids were 4 and 2, he strangled their mother during an argument and left her body lying on the floor of the living room all day while the kids played around it.  Do you think these people should have been allowed to have kids?

If you're going to make sure that persons who don't have the mental capability to parent, can't, that's one thing - but what do you do when those persons are raped (which they're at high risk for). What I mean is, if you're going to force sterilization on those persons, that's one thing - but if not, and a pregnancy results from rape, let's make sure to handle it in a way that doesn't additionally punish the victim.

Procreation is an ability, not a right or privilege.

As someone who has worked for both legislators and abortion providers, and whose spouse works for children services, I feel confident in saying that the notion of preventing pregnancy through legal restrictions is a ridiculous notion, regardless of the available programs or medical procedures to make it happen.

as awful as the story from the Huff post link on Quick & Light and their child molesting, that's more on an indictment against day care than bad parenting

Quick and Light ran the day care out of their home and are parents to a three year old baby girl who has been taken into state custody. The authorities have not released any information as to whether she was also their victim. Regardless of whether they raped their own baby daughter or the children of others in her presence they should never have contact with another child, biological or otherwise, again. It is most definitely an indictment against bad parenting. Their behavior defines depravity and inhumanity.

OK...I didn't realize they were parents, too...bad BAD parents

I agree with Gabriel and couldn't disagree more with April. My life has changed dramatically from when my daughter was born two years ago. In some ways I have "grown into" parenting. I also don't agree that children always suffer in the long run from what society considers bad parenting. My boyfriend and I both point fingers at our parents as being "bad" in one respect or another, but we are functioning adults. Sure there are extremes where children are being sexually abused or neglected, but I think if we applied sterilization standard only to these individuals they could still be abused.

I swear, only the people who believe *they* could never be poor enough, sick enough, marginalized enough, or stigmatized enough to be personally affected by policies like forced sterilization or immediate severance of parental rights advocate for this kind of thing. The minute you accept that YOU could quite easily fall into an addiction, lose your income and social safety nets, or become disabled in some way that leaves "normal" people doubting your parental fitness (a brain-damaging stroke or car accident, perhaps? A nice case of MS?), the thought of Someone Else implementing policies that require you to give up your ability to procreate or your parental rights to your children becomes really damn scary.

This kind of thinking has bitten the U.S. in the ass before. I sincerely doubt we're evolved enough as a nation or as individuals to responsibly handle the power to decide who gets to reproduce and who doesn't.

Although it is tempting to say having children is a privilage, I have to totally agree with Lula.  I'm sure there's someone out there that might consider me a bad parent even though I think I'm doing a pretty good job.  It's a slippery slope for sure!

If smoking cigarettes is bad enough to qualify you as unfit to procreate (as one poster above suggested), then both my folks would have been forcibly stripped of parental rights or surgically sterilized even before my mom became an alcoholic and my father became an abusive mofo. But you know what? Social services doesn't go banging on the door of families headed by a professor, so I doubt the snipper/stripper people would address that faction of society either. Unless everyone of reproductive age across the socio-economic strata (?) is regularly subjected to investigation and approval, such policies won't work to protect children anyway.

How about debt? How much debt should you be allowed to carry before your reproductive capacity becomes a threat to society, due to the increased risk of your family ending up bankrupt and on public aid?

One of our foster children was 8 months old when he came into the system. His parents' rights had been terminated for his older brother, and they knew he would be taken so they hid her pregnancy and his birth and his existence. They were homeless and lived in a shelter, and only after his father pulled a knife on his mother at the shelter did he end up in foster care.

Which is to say, nothing that could be done would work, even if it should be done. Which I don't think it should.

Decisions about who is and isn't fit to be a parent are currently made by all the wrong people. Case workers who have no training and judges who have never met the parents outside of short court sessions are frequently the only ones involved. If this is how we handle the current situation, should the powers that be really be given MORE say over families?

I also just flat-out think it's wrong to have parental rights being decided governmentally, without much much much more effective and extensive support systems in place (and fewer systems that actively erode what support someone might be able to put into place). And then only in the most extreme situations, which would be pretty rare.

There is no good option in our current societal anti-poor/anti-child/anti-family structure. My experiences with foster care and conversations with others in the area have pretty well convinced me that we are no more than breaking even by having the current type of Child Protective Services systems in place. Let's not add to that mess!

Thanks for your words and perspective, Emma!

Right on, Lulu!