Fecundated

There’s a bit of a ding-dong going on today in the Twitterverse and Bloggersphere (or “online” as it used to be prosaically known) about benefits and children.

The Sun today ran as a headline “Dozen it make you sick”, (http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3097118/12th-kid-for-jobless-scroungers.html) about a family on benefits who are expecting their 12th child. Alongside a deeply (and no doubt intentionally) unflattering picture of the mother looking as much like a Kathy Burke character as they could manage, are various claims and attacks. Among them are that they bring in over £30,000 in benefits.

What the article doesn’t say that the £30k will certainly include housing benefit, which of course they have to pay back to the council for their 5 bedroom home, which won’t be cheap (in fact the Sun says it’s 1,200pcm), meaning they are probably bringing up 11 (and now 12) children on just over £15k. That’s a monthly family income of £1,300. Not bad, except they’re paying to feed and clothe 13 (soon to be 14) people on it. Now, I have no children, but people keep telling me they’re expensive, so is £100pcm each for food and clothing (and anything else) really the lap of luxury? Not to mention he fact that even at £1,200pcm, a 5 bedroom house is still inadequate for 14 people.

None of those provisos has stopped Iain Dale, doyenne of right-wing bloggers, from announcing his horror and dismay at the story and another like it yesterday. “Having children is not a human right,” he rages. He then slightly undermines his position with logic – a very foolish thing to do as a right-wing blogger. “It's irresponsible to have so many children if you haven't the means to support them.”

Yes, Iain. Yes it probably is. But the irresponsibil8ity of it does not counteract the right o have children. The debate is not about whether or not it is right that some people who clearly lack the means to support children continue to have them, it’s about how comfortable anyone should be about telling them that they *can’t* have them.

This supposedly “most Liberal of governments” [© Nick Clegg] has amongst its main cheerleaders media outlets and commentators who denounce the behaviour of British subjects without any idea at all about what they are saying.

If it is not a human right to have a child, then clearly it is fair for the Government to intervene and stop them.

How, exactly?

Oddly enough, when posters suggested to Dale that he was advocating 19th century eugenics, he was pretty upset. He described it as showing the “intolerant left at its worst”. But this is the problem with the “just sayin’” culture, where people shove their oar in to a delicate moral debate without having the intellect or the backbone to follow their ideas through.

Just saying.

The logical outcome of removing the status of child birth as a human right is either a) Chinese style birth bans / sterilisation or b) compulsory adoption. There is no other effective sanction against what the 14-strong family and their ilk have done. Now, the compulsory adoption need not be as blunt as marching in and stealing the babies – perhaps benefits will be removed for the 6th child, and as soon as the parents are proved to be incapable of supporting the children they will be taken away and put into care. This gives the family the chance to become decent, upright citizens and get proper jobs. Hmmm.

The big, pragmatic problem with this is that it costs an awful lot more to keep children in care than it does to leave them with a family (however apparently dysfunctional) who want them. And adoption takes a while to sort out.

So when Ian Dale (and the Tax Payers' Alliance) rages against the iniquity of everything, he must remember that the only cheaper option than continuing to pay these benefits is to sterilise mothers of multiple children or just to kill their babies. I am absolutely certain that Mr Dale does not want these things to happen, but I’d be very grateful if he could pull his finger out and make clear exactly what point he *is* trying to make, instead of just contributing to public benefits hysteria and then squealing when people point out the dangerous nature of his logic.