Family Planning

Social engineering tempts the right.

Walter Olson from the March 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Consider the front row in the Identity Studies 101 class at Pricey U. There sits 25-year-old Alice, whose tuition is being paid by the taxpayers because she had the foresight to give birth when she was 18. Next to her are Beth, whose parents are writing checks to Pricey at great sacrifice because their daughter insisted on attending college first and embarking on motherhood later (if at all), and Carl, who was never in a biological position to make much of a choice one way or the other. Not in the classroom at all, but working behind a counter in town, are Dora, who has no intention of going to college ever, and Esther, who is in a special plight of her own. She always planned to get a degree but thought she'd be clever and get the government to pay for it, the way lots of girls did, so she just hung out after graduating high school, figuring that before long she was bound to be married with a kid. But now she's 28, the right guy hasn't come along, and she's thinking of getting pregnant on purpose rather than wait any longer. Beth and Carl, their parents, and Dora are all destined to work harder or longer at their jobs so that Alice and possibly Esther can attend for free. Meanwhile, social life at Pricey U. has fizzled because half the women are eight, or 10, or 15 years older than nearly all the men.

The libertarian policy on fixing the family is far less convoluted: Get the government out of the way and let families fix themselves. It's true that the courts should enforce private commitments duly entered into, which may require some rewriting
of current family law. But otherwise it's mostly a matter of repeal, lighten up, un-distort: If we're so uneasy about the effects of day care on kids, why on earth do we keep having the IRS encourage it artificially through the child-care tax credit?

The key step in arresting the rise in illegitimacy, plainly, is that of ceasing to subsidize it. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the state of Vermont "has seen the nation's sharpest drop in teen pregnancies," 25 percent compared with a nationwide 12 percent, following reforms in which the state government stripped away many of the welfare and Medicaid goodies obtainable by becoming enceinte. Until just lately, "if a girl got pregnant, welfare set her up in an apartment," said one teacher, adding that many teens saw pregnancy as a way "to get out on your own." "People got pregnant on purpose
to go on welfare," agreed another official. "It was a culture change," said Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat, of the newly favorable indicators. "The message was getting through immediately that this was not the way of life anymore."

The case against conservative social engineering is, in the end, the case for trusting actual families. Remove the mal-incentives and stop shoveling money at costly misbehavior, and in a free, affluent, and enlightened nation, family structure can begin to regulate itself--unsurprisingly, since parents now as always are best situated to figure out what's best for their kids. In their present gloomy mood, it's the social conservatives who've given up on this most basic of human institutions as too weak to recover without artificial methods.