That is pretty much how much of our society is nowadays. From the recent housing situation to our immigration (lack of) enforcement to our abortion laws. Each of these issues came about, because our culture and laws are set up to encourage people to act irresponsibly… and then bail them out to keep them from having to face the consequences.
In essence, we have a culture which is teaching its young that actions do not come with consequences. Brilliant.
I discussed this a bit in the comments section on this post at HotAir: The obligatory “punished with a baby” post
“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” Obama said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”
Someone made the comment on a blog I was reading – I think NRO – that we cannot just say “be responsible”, we have to have incentives in place for people to be responsible. This was stated in context with the housing situation. Instead of encouraging people to be responsible, otherwise they are going to lose their house, we are giving away handouts to those who were irresponsible. Thus, we actually have laws which are encouraging irresponsible behavior.
Same issue with illegal immigration. We don’t enforce our laws, so it actually encourages and emboldens illegals to come here, knowing they will just get amnesty and no real punishment.
Aren’t we doing the same thing here with our abortion laws? Aren’t we simply encouraging teens to have promiscuous sex? They are not being punished for their irresponsibility, the same way illegals are not punished and irresponsible house-buyers are not punished. We can’t simply say “be responsible”, there must be some sort of thing in place to encourage the responsible behavior.
But, but saying here’s some condoms and here’s some birth control pills and if that fails, hey just get an abortion, those are incentives to continue the irresponsible behavior.
Just something to think about.
Michael in MI on March 30, 2008 at 3:42 PM
I should have stated here, instead of doing the same as Obama and making the equivalence of pregnancy as a “punishment”, that we need to be teaching that actions have consequences. Promiscuous sex leads to pregnancy. The pregnancy is not a “punishment”, but rather a consequence of actions taken.
So, in essence, our abortion laws and handing out condoms and birth control to teens is teaching them that their actions have no consequences.
Michael in MI on March 30, 2008 at 4:14 PM
*****
You are so right… to follow up on what you are stating here, I believe liberal thinking is very much psychologically rooted in satisfying a need similar to codependent satisfaction.
Almost all liberal policies enable behavior with consequences that would strongly discourage participants from continuing, but then the liberal policy reward kicks in to absolve the participant from the bad consequence, thereby perpetuating the behavior. Add welfare to the list of ills you stated… without welfare, people would be hungry, which is a fantastic motivator to go out and get a job. Without free and unfetttered abortion, people would think twice about having unsafe sex… the list goes on and on and on. ANd the liberals who want to “rescue people form their bad behavior are dependent upon that bad behavior so they can feel good about themselves by doing the rescuing. Just like all the votes for Obama, it makes liberals feel good to elect a man who wants to punish whitey because americans have built such a great society they feel guilty about it. Liberalism really is a mental disorder…I forget who said it, but man it is so true…
JustTruth101 on March 30, 2008 at 4:04 PM
*****
“Many would agree that knocking a teenager out of school for a year or more is too high a price to bring a fetus to term.”
Why is that too high a price? There are plenty of people who go back to school and earn a G.E.D. and then go on to succeed. Are “many” who agree to this saying that killing a baby is a better price to pay than a teenager forgoing her high school years? So she misses some dances and such and earns her GED later. So what? How is hat too high a price to save the life of a baby?
Michael in MI on March 30, 2008 at 3:45 PM
*****
Also, saying a baby=punishment is nothing compared to some discussions I have had with women who have told me proudly that they feel a baby is equivalent to an unwanted disease or a unwanted leech on her body, and thus she has every right to get rid of that leech and/or disease. The fact that diseases are not something one can always prevent, but pregnancies are 100% preventable made not a lick of difference in our discussion.
Michael in MI on March 30, 2008 at 3:48 PM
Also, be sure to see Ed Morrissey’s update:
Update (Ed): I have to add something to this thread. My son & daughter-in-law had our granddaughter, the Little Admiral, when they were 18 years old. None of us ever saw her as a “punishment”, not from God or hormones or the universe in general. While we would obviously have preferred that Mom and Dad had a little more preparation for life, we never thought of the new addition as anything other than a blessing.
How so? We saw our son blossom almost overnight into manhood. He threw himself into his new family. Our daughter-in-law spent most of the pregnancy on an IV, and he learned to install and maintain it for her. They fought their school administrators almost their entire senior year, helped along by their very supportive teachers; they threatened to sic truant officers on my son (who was getting the best grades in his life at the time) until I told the district superintendent that I would be calling every TV station in town to let them know that the administrators were pressuring my DIL to get an abortion.
In May, the Little Admiral turns 6, and my son and DIL will both graduate from college. She’ll be a teacher, while he wants to pursue post-graduate work in math and physics. It’s amazing to see what people can do when they accept blessings in their lives rather than treat new life as a “punishment”.
And be sure to read this great account from a commentor at HotAir:
My wife and I had been married for 3 years before we welcomed our blessing. At the time, I had just finished my PhD and was starting a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics while my wife had been working at Pharmicia and Upjohn for 6 months. We decided to move back to our home state of Michigan because we knew we wanted to start a family. My wife was living and working in Michigan while I finished my thesis. When I did rejoin her, she had been telling me about some weird symptoms she had been having such as craving fruit and vegetables and being repulsed/nauseated by meat and onions. Her mother had told her a few months previous that she was pregnant, but my wife, the strong-headed woman that she is, told her mother that she was crazy.
Around the time of my birthday in February of 2001, I implored her to take a pregnancy test. It was positive. It was sooooo positive that my wife did not believe it so I went to a different pharmacy and bought a different test. Again, positive. We could not have been any happier. We figured that she was at most 3 months pregnant. During the first ultrasound, the technician told us that she was at 27 weeks. Wow. What a shock! The following weekend, we started looking to buy a house. We had planned on buying a house anyway but were living in an apartment on a temporary basis.
Things changed dramatically the following week. My wife had her first visit with the OB/GYN. While she was there the doctor found that her pulse was extremely high and her platelets were low….all signs of pre-eclampsia. The doctor told her to immediately go to the hospital for an emergency C-section. I was in my second week of working at my postdoctoral fellowship (8th day to be specific) when I received a frantic voice message on my cell phone that said, “They have to deliver me tonight. I’m in Kalamazoo at Bronson. Come find me.” The reason for the voice message is that my cell phone did not receive signal in the research building. I left my experiments are sped from Grand Rapids to Kalamazoo.
When I finally arrived, I ran through the hospital until I found the delivery unit. When I gave my name to the nurses behind the desk, they kindly took me to my wife’s run. The perinatalogist was there conducting a few tests. One test, a blood clotting test, was being done. After 5 minutes my wife’s blood was not clotting indicating that she could possibly bleed to death if she tried to maintain the pregnancy. The only choice was to deliver the baby premature (28 weeks gestation). In a little while I was given surgical scrubs and a mask to change into and shown how to scrub my hands and arms. As my wife was being wheeled into the OR, the last words she said to me were, “If it’s a girl, name her Jillian.” Not, “I love you” or anything like that. I chuckled and said, “I love you, too” and gave her a kiss.
After the surgeons had started the C-section, I was brought in to sit between my wife and the incubator that was waiting for our little one. At 8:52 PM we welcomed a 2.2 pound, 14.5 inch long baby into our family. It was not as easy afterwards as is sometimes shown on TV. Our baby had to spend an extra month and half after the delivery in the NICU. The baby had pulmonary hypertension and was on a ventilator for the first few weeks. Slowly things started to improve. Weight was being gained. The ventilator was replaced with a CPAP and finally a nasal canula. We did have several setbacks. The baby was diagnosed with very minor bleeding in the brain. Later, we found out that the baby was diagnosed with a cerebral palsy.
We finally got to welcome our addition to our home (that we purchased while the baby was in the hospital). Since the baby was on oxygen, around-the-clock care was needed. My wife took 3 months FMLA to care for our fragile infant. Once the 3 months was up, it was up to me. I had been making progress on my research, but I told my boss that it was either I work part-time at nights or nothing at all because it was my turn to be the caregiver. For the next 7 months, I cared for our baby during morning (4 AM feedings were rough!), day, and afternoon while my wife worked. Since my wife were for a big, evil pharma, she was our main breadwinner. I would go to work from 5-9PM every evening during the week and work one day on the weekends to keep my experiments moving forward. This is when my caffeine addiction started.
Because of the baby’s medical conditions, we were going to the neonatalogist’s office once every 4 weeks. Because of the slight cerebral palsy, we were going to physical therapy once a week at the hospital and had therapy once a week in our home. Every day I would do stretching exercise with an infant that was stiff as a board. The baby continued to grow and eventually no longer required oxygen. This was great news to us since we could not travel long distances. After the baby was discharged from using oxygen, we traveled to my hometown to visit my grandfather (a WWII Navy vet) who was on his deathbed at a VA hospital. I was so happy to see his smiling face (and tears of joy) when he saw his great grandchild 3 weeks before his death. My grandfather had been suffering for years with congestive heart failure. We were certain he was hanging on long enough to see his great grandchild.
As life goes, it is always changing. Pharmacia and Upjohn, where my wife had worked, was “acquired” by Pfizer. She lost her position with the company. Fortunately, she was able to find a new job…..with Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. So we moved our family here 5 years ago. Life has been good even though we are farther away from our family than we would like. A child has continued to grow. We did notice that there were a few changes that we could not quite figure out. We knew our child was behind other kids of the same age since walking did not happen until almost 2 years of age and talking was limited. Because of the way in which our child entered the world, special services from our school district were provided. A child was able to attend a developmental preschool. Before entering kindergarten, our child was evaluated by a school counselor. The most devastating news was given to us. Our child was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Through intensive work with physical and language teachers our child is thriving in first grade with kids of the same age.
I failed to mention that my daughter’s name is Jillian.
Do I consider everything I, my wife and family have been through with Jillian a punishment? Not in the least.
For what was once a bleak future on that cold evening in 2001 has turned into a future of hope and happiness. I could not have been happier when our daughter was wearing a sombrero and eating a sopapilla at Don Pablo’s to celebrate her 7th birthday this past Friday.
Barry O should really choose his words more carefully. This is another reason why I will not vote for this disingenuous SOB.
Dr.Cwac.Cwac on March 30, 2008 at 4:50 PM
