A Louisiana state representative recently said that he is looking into tubal ligation as a means to decrease the welfare burden on tax-paying residents. This wouldn’t necessarily qualify as genocide, according to the State Representative, because the women who participate in it would be paid $1000.

He said his program would be voluntary. It could involve tubal ligation, encouraging other forms of birth control or, to avoid charges of gender discrimination, vasectomies for men.

It also could include tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children, he said.

[...]

LaBruzzo described the tube-tying incentive as a brainstorming exercise that has yet to take form as a bill for the Legislature to consider. He said it already has drawn critics who argue the idea is racist, sexist, unethical and immoral. He said more white people are on welfare than black people, so his proposal is not targeting race.

LaBruzzo said other, mainstream strategies for attacking poverty, such as education reforms and programs informing people about family planning issues, have repeatedly failed to solve the problem. He said he is simply looking for new ways to address it.

I think what’s most interesting to me, aside from the “how-close-can-we-flirt-with-government-sponsored-sterilization-and-get-away-with-it” element is something my old Women’s Studies professor would probably be impressed that I had noticed. That is, why isn’t this aimed primarily at men and vasectomies? (I can read, so I know that it was mentioned, but I can’t tell whether LaBruzzo included that as an afterthought or if the newspaper put it deep, deep in the article to make the proposal seem more outrageous.) If men were the targets of this legislation, most of the charges of -ism would be negated. More importantly, it wouldn’t represent a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Even when we’re talking about people who have been on welfare for generations, there’s probably a window when they’re interested in doing something else. I could be wrong, but I don’t think very many people actually aspire to go on welfare as soon as they can. I absolutely believe that poor choices send them back to welfare, but I don’t think the woman necessarily lays down with the intent and purpose of getting pregnant and going on welfare. Those are consequences of a poor choice, not evidence of a poor strategy. It’s important to note the difference. I point that out because while tubal ligation would necessarily eliminate the possibility of a woman getting pregnant, one externality of that might be that her window of opportunity would be extended. I’m fairly convinced that it’s not just one or two young women whose dreams and plans were interrupted by an unplanned pregnancy and their lives never recovered. For them, a temporary means of birth control might actually serve them well. But notice, temporary. Tubal ligation ain’t that, and as such, should be permanently off the table. Vasectomies, on the other hand…

The obvious reason that women are targeted in birth-control measures is that they’re the ones who actually get pregnant. But whenever there’s a pregnancy, there was usually a man somewhere in the vicinity. What’s curious to me is that they’re never the target of the discussion (particularly in the case of teen pregnancies, when men older than the mother constitute a statistically significant proportion of the fathers). In the case of Rep. LaBruzzo’s proposal, you’d go from talking about permanent sterilization to something easily reversible; something that could be done just long enough to slip through that window of opportunity, and then undone in time to get that tax credit.

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