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by toomuchtodo
783 days ago
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You're not wrong, at all. This is the hard conversation to have. What would it take to improve outcomes? How much spending would it take? To me, it appears we are not willing to fix the overarching system, by which I mean support systems for parents for children 0-18. We don't want to pay for pre-k. We don't want to pay for daycare. We don't want to pay for quality K-12 education (over 1000 US school districts have moved to a 4 day week in an attempt to retain teachers). In some states, we're even unwilling to pay for student lunches. Instead, society as a whole wants to spend as little as possible to get able bodied workers and taxpayers out of the pipeline, while treating early education as babysitting so parents can be productive workers. It also wants to outlaw reproductive healthcare that leads to these outcomes, but does not care about the outcomes. If you want my hot take, the solution is to drive as much funding as possible into family planning. This is where the dollars are most effective. This quickly shrinks the funnel of unwanted children on a go forward basis, allowing for the focus of resources on the remaining pipeline of children to be nurtured and developed by, hopefully, welcoming and resourced parents. There will be second order effects of course (see rapid total fertility rate decline across the world), but I believe we can all agree that suffering reduction for all involved is a worthy cause to pursue. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u... https://www.brookings.edu/articles/preventing-unplanned-preg... ("While the controversies persist, most people agree that empowering women to have only the children they want has positive benefits for everyone in the form of better pregnancy outcomes, improved child well-being, more opportunities for women and their partners, reductions in costs to governments, and lower abortion rates.") |
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