Childbearing, childrearing, and welfare

The first article written by Chris Hafner-Eaton and Laurie K. Pierce is entitled, "Birth Choices, the Law and Medicine: Balancing Individual Freedoms and Protection of the Public's Health." This article focused on the debate between whether it is better to give birth in a medical setting, usually a hospital, or to give birth at home with a midwife. The common belief is that giving birth at home with only a midwife is much more dangerous and increases the risks for the mother and the baby. This is not the case and leads into the reasons why some prefer to give birth at home with the assistance of a midwife.

According to World Health Organization officials. "Every single country in the European Region with perinatal and infant mortality rates lower than the United States uses midwives as the principal and only birth attendant for at least 70 percent of all births," (813). This shows that giving birth at home with a midwife does not increase the risk of infant mortality. In fact it seems to lower infant mortality rates. "Furthermore, the introduction of hospital-based and physician-attended births was associated with a dramatic increase in the rates of puerperal fever and maternal death" (815).

There recently has been an increase in the number of parents is the United States who are choosing to have their babies at home. "One frequently cited reason that has paralleled this is the increase in obstetrical attempts to manage and augment childbirth in a "medicalized manner" (814). "20 percent of mothers delivering in the hospital setting reported that they would have preferred a nonhospital delivery" (814).

"The midwife has been labeled the "guardian of normal birth" and reaffirms the mother as the active, rather than passive, participant in home births" (816). Some parents now prefer this idea of a more interactive birth, one that they can truly get involved in. This is a big reason for why parents are opting for home births. "Lay midwives have a special body of knowledge, gained through experience and familiarity with the female body, that they pass along to women, their partners, and families during pregnancy and birth. The combination of these aspects appeals to the segment of the population that desires control over their bodies" (819).

I believe that either choice is correct and that it just depends on the individuals. Some people have the type of personality where they would rather be in a hospital, in every medical setting because it makes them feel more comfortable, even if it is no more safe. On the other hand, there are those people who would rather be in a more casual environment. Given the fact that both methods seem to be equally safe, my opinion is that neither is better but that it just depends on what you personally want.

The second article written by Lawrence Friedman is entitles, "Who are Our Children? Adoption, Past and Present." It addresses the changes in legal ties between parents and children, as well as how adoption laws have changed.

The first issue is the legal ties between parents and children. "At one time, parental control over children continued as long as the children lived; for example, parents arranged their children's marriages" (272). "In those aspects of law that deal with children, there has been a strong, long-term trend toward emancipating the child from its father and from the family in general. The separation is absolute for adult children. Adults are now under no duty to obey their parents or to take account of them in any way; even the duty to support aged and infirm parents has been evaporating" (272). The law more and more recognizes the child as a distinct individual, even when the child is just a baby or very young. "The law punishes abusive or neglectful parents. It can take children away from a bad family and give them to a good family. It has the ability to act in place of the parents. In effect, children have legal rights as against their own mothers and fathers. If the children are too young to do it themselves, the state enforces these rights" (272). "However, even though the authority of the family is weaker than it was, it is still extremely strong. The state can take a child away from the family, but it does so reluctantly and in extreme cases. Law and society clearly recognize that in general the rights of parents are sacred. Parents have less control over their children, but parent's are still at the center of their young children's lives" (273).

The second issue addressed in this article is historically, what the purpose of adoption was. "In many systems, adoption was recognized as a way to guarantee that a family with no blood children would not die out. Adoption was a well-known feature of ancient Roman society" (273). "In France, adoption allowed for even adults to be adopted in order to carry on the family name. Until 1976, parents with children were not allowed to adopt" (273). "In colonial America, adoption could be seen as children who were bound out as apprentices, which meant that from a fairly young age they were living in somebody else's household" (274).

Over time, the laws regarding adoption have changed as well. In 1851, there was a strong movement to create adoption laws. "These laws rejected the common law understanding that blood relationship is crucial, and that people are joined by blood or marriage or not at all" (274). "However, in the beginning the procedure for adopting a child was not much different from procedures for buying or selling a cornfield" (274). "More and more though, the rules and procedures expressed the idea that the welfare of the child was the paramount interest" (275). "Informal adoption was the norm in England and the United States before more advanced adoption laws were set. Nobody needs a court decision or a formal document to take a child into a family, feed it, raise it, and love it" (275). "Demographic change has had an important effect on adoption and adoption practices. In the nineteenth century orphans were in plentiful supply. Women died giving birth; plagues and accidents carried off fathers and mothers alike. Those who had no relatives to take care of them were sent to orphanages" (276). "Mainstream adoption in the middle of the twentieth century was quite different from nineteenth century adoption. Middle-class people were living longer. Death in childbirth had become a rare event. In the age of antibiotics, plagues and epidemics did not take nearly as many people. Because of this, in the twentieth century adoption became more and more the destiny of children whose parents did not want them or were unable to resist social and legal pressures to give up their children" (277). "It was no longer about the parents dying and leaving children orphaned. More recently, the nature of adoption has changed again, in response to changes in social norms and in demography" (278). Today it is childless middle-class couples who wish to adopt and are fairly willing to pay good money to get a baby. Now there is a shortage of babies to adopt in the United States and people are going to other countries in order to adopt (278).

The third article written by Sharon Hays is entitled, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the age of Welfare Reform." This entire article focuses on a few different aspects of welfare. The first aspect is the conservative and liberal views of welfare. "The conservative critics of welfare offered the primary fuel for negative public sentiment" (12). "They accused welfare recipients of being lazy, promiscuous, and pathologically dependent, and they argued that the welfare system encouraged those bad values with overly generous benefits and "permissive" policies that provided incentives for family dysfunction and nonwork" (12). "They believed the welfare system not only perpetuated poverty, but by promoting laziness and single parenting, actually cause it to increase" (12). "Liberal scholars have agreed that there were problems in the old welfare system and among the poor. But they have argued that any problems of morality that existed among poor families were primarily the result, rather than the cause, of economic hardship" (12). So while conservatives claimed that the "value-orientation of the welfare system and the welfare poor needed overhaul, liberals emphasized that welfare policy needed to focus on providing better economic supports for the poor" (12).

Another thing to look at are the differences between the new welfare reform and the old. "Nineteenth century poor laws established the moral distinction between the "deserving" poor and "undeserving" poor" (13). "In the old system, the benefits were so dismally low that almost all recipients had to come up with additional sources of help just to cover the cost of their most basic needs. Its policies operated to make it all the more difficult to climb out of poverty, and its recipients were stigmatized" (11). "Further, despite the crucial importance of paid work and family ties in American culture, the old welfare system did very little to help recipients manage employment, to subsidize childcare, or to include poor fathers" (11). New welfare reform came in 1996. "This established the absolute demand that mothers participate in the paid labor force, offering no exceptions to the more "virtuous" or more vulnerable women. Most significantly, by ending the entitlement to welfare benefits, this law suggested that the nation no longer believed that women and children deserved any form of special protection" (15). Women were no longer seen as the dependent of men. They were now seen as beings who can be held responsible for their own lives and breadwinning.

There are two visions of work and family life embedded in this legislation. One vision is the Work Plan. "In the Work Plan, work requirements are a way of rehabilitating mothers, transforming mothers into women who are self-sufficient, independent, productive members of society" (19). "The Family Plan, on the other hand, uses work requirements as a way of punishing mothers for their failure to get married and stay married" (19). A"ccording to the Family Plan, work requirements will teach women a lesson; they will come to know better than to get divorced or to have children out of wedlock" (19).

Hays writes, "The two competing visions embedded in welfare are directly connected to a much broader set of cultural dichotomies that haunt us all in our attempts to construct a shared vision of the good society - independence and dependence, paid work and caregiving, competitive self-interest and obligations to others, the value of the work ethic and financial successes versus the value of personal connection and community ties" (19). "Depending on one's angle of vision, welfare reform can be seen as a valorization of independence, self-sufficiency, and the work ethic. On the other hand, it can serve as a condemnation of single parenting and a reaffirmation that women's place is in the home" (20). "In conclusion, if you get rid of all the controversy and contradiction of welfare reform, at the bottom one can find a set of honorable moral principles. The worthy ideals represent collective and long-standing commitments to the values of independence, productivity, citizenship, family togetherness, social connection, and the well-being of children" (21).

The fourth article written by Fred Block and others is entitled, "The Compassion Gap in American Poverty Policy." "Our society recognizes a moral obligation to provide a helping hand to those in need, but those in poverty have been getting only the back of the hand. In reality, they receive little or no public assistance" (14).

The first question to be addressed is how countries such as Norway understand poverty. "Our government's official poverty line is quite stingy by international standards. If we used the most common international measure, which counts people who live on less than half a country's median income as poor, then almost 20 percent of the American population would be considered poor" (14). "Children in single-mother households are four times more likely to be poor in the Unites States than in Norway. These other countries all take a more comprehensive government approach to combating poverty, and they assume it is caused by economic and structural factors rather than bad behavior" (17). This is the key difference in our understandings of poverty.

The second issue to be addressed is the prevailing theory of why poor people are poor in the United States. "The common theory is that the real source of poverty is bad behavior" (16). Block writes, "Since African-American and Hispanic women and men, as well as single mothers of all ethnicity's and races, are disproportionately represented among the poor, this theory defines these people as morally deficient," (16). "Its proponents assume that anyone with enough grit and determination can escape poverty. They claim that giving people cash assistance worsens poverty by taking away their drive to improve their circumstances through work" (16).

This leads to the next issue which is how this theory operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who lack compassion have made their own predictions come true. "They begin by claiming that the poor lack moral character. They use stories of welfare cheaters to increase public concern about people getting something for nothing. Consequently, our patchwork of poorly funded programs reaches only a fraction of the poor and gives them less than they need. Those who depend on these programs must cut corners and break rules to keep their families together. This "proves" the original proposition that the poor lack moral character, and the "discovery" is used to justify ever more stringent policies. The result is a spiral of diminishing compassion and greater preoccupation with the moral failings of the poor" (18). This is how this theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They insist that immorality is the root cause of poverty and when assistance to the poor is no where near enough, the poor have no choice but to break some rules in order to survive. Supporters of the theory then point at these infractions and say "see the poor are bad."

The last issue is that of the American Dream. "The American Dream includes owning a single-family house, full health insurance coverage, quality child care for a four-year-old, and enough annual savings to ensure that both children can attend a public, four-year college or university" (15). "The reason that the American Dream is now beyond reach for so many families is that the price of four critical services has risen much more sharply than wages and the rate of inflation: health care, higher education, child care, and housing" (19). "To make the American Dream more accessible to the poor we need new initiatives to expand the supply of these key services while assuring their quality" (19). "This requires accelerated movement toward universal health insurance and universal availability of quality child care and preschool programs. We need to move toward universal access to higher education and we need to create new public-private partnerships to expand the supply of affordable housing for poor and working families" (19). To do all these things requires restoring the value of minimum wage. "Between 1968 and 2002, the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage fell by a third. We need to reverse this trend and assure that in the future the minimum wage continues to rise with inflation. We could establish a stable income floor by transforming our present Earned Income Tax Credit into a program that provided all poor families with sufficient income to cover food and shelter. The key to making these policy initiatives feasible is to remind our fellow citizens what true compassion requires" (19).

The last article written by Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel is entitled, "Caring for our Young: Child Care in Europe and the United States." In the United States working parents struggle to arrange and pay for private care. Clawson and Gerstel write, "Publicly-funded child care programs are restricted to the poor. Although most U.S. parents believe that their children receive quality care, standardized ratings find most of the care mediocre and much of it seriously inadequate" (29). "This system of child care is in great contrast to those of Europe, most specifically in France. French child care is intended primarily as early education. All children, rich and poor, immigrant or not, are part of the same national system, with the same curriculum, staffed by teachers paid good wages by the same national ministry" (30). "In contrast, staff in the United States who work in child care earned $6.61, not only considerably less than teachers but also less than parking lot attendants" (31). Consequently employee turnover averages 30 percent per year, which is not beneficial for the children.

"Recent research suggests that the quality of care for young children is poor or fair in well over half of child care settings" (34). "This low quality of care, in concert with a model of intensive mothering, means that many anxious mothers privately hunt for high-quality substitutes while trying to ensure they are not being replaced. System administrators need to patch together a variety of funding streams, each with its own regulations and paperwork. Because the current system was fashioned primarily for the affluent at one end and those being pushed off welfare at the other end, it poorly serves most of the working class and much of the middle class" (34). "The features that are common to our peer nations in Europe would presumably be a part of a new U.S. system. The programs would be publicly funded and universal, available to all, either at no cost or at a modest cost with subsidies for low-income participants, The staff would be paid about the same as public school teachers. The core programs would cover at least as many hours as the school day and "wrap-around" care would be available before and after this time. Participation in the programs would be voluntary, but the programs would be of such a high quality that a majority of children would enroll" (34). This is what has to be done to improve child care in the United States.