Kids know about contraceptives. However, access to them is a different story. Moreover, they may know how to put on a condom, but I doubt that most inner city girls know about all the different contraceptive options available, much less have real access to them.
The problem to correcting that is that the Religious Right, has made sure that teaching anything other than pure abstinence in sex education classes and or providing access to contraceptives or teaching about them disqualifies schools from receiving any federal funding for sex ed.
As to your other assertions, frankly you are living in a dream world. They remind me of the old joke: “Vote Republican, it’s easier than thinking”. I did some CASA volunteer work back when I was single. We don’t have the funding or the social infrastructure to start taking away kids from lazy parents even if we wanted to. To take a child away from its parents, you have to prove the parents to be completely unfit to parent that child. Reasons for this would be things like imprisonment, chronic and sustained drug addiction, physical or sexual abuse of the child, or the parents lacking the mental capabilities to take care of the child. Laziness alone simply does not qualify.
So what are you going to do then, just start taking kids away from lazy sit on their *** parents? The problems in doing so are numerous. For one, the costs would far exceed the costs of welfare. Two, the psychological damage inflicted children who are taken away from their parents and placed as wards of the state are very severe. Three, there are not nearly enough foster families to house them all. Four, they would be virtually impossible to adopt out. Few people are looking to adopt entire families of inner city children. Five, it only makes the problem worse, children who are taken from their parents are statistically much more likely to use drugs or become pregnant at an early age. Finally, many of these children are not with their birth parents anyway, but rather their grandparents and in some cases even great-grandparents are stuck raising them.
Deadbeat parents drawing welfare pisses me off as much as the next guy, but unfortunately welfare is a necessary evil. The only alternative would be all the children of those deadbeat parents walking the streets on the brink of starvation looking for handouts like some scene out of Sub-Saharan Africa or something.
It seems to me that the better option is to pragmatically attack the causes of poverty. Less poverty = Less welfare. Less unintended pregnancies = Less poverty = Less welfare = Lower crime = Better schools = More Economic Opportunity = Less unintended pregnancies and the cycle continues.
We have tried simply locking people up. Being that we now have the highest incarceration rate on earth, it obviously doesn’t work. We have tried just ignoring the problem, that doesn’t work either. Prior to all these social programs, the poverty rate was well over 30%, since the 60s, it has never been above 13% or so. Obviously, those social programs have had some success. At this point, the answer is attacking the causes of poverty, not the safety net.
