Much ado about nothing. You try to link a discussion of voluntary sterilization in exchange for money to a policy of forced sterilization. See the difference? One is voluntary, one was forced. Don’t want to be sterilized? Don’t take the trip down to the $1000 office and cash the check and lay on the table.

Easy.

Of course the argument could turn to that of taking advantage of desperate people, but the only way that could go would be to insinuate that these poor women who partook of the (as yet non-existent plan) were somehow stupid and incapable of making their own decisions, and need great intelligent warriors from privileged backgrounds to inform them that they would be making incorrect decisions - which smacks of the elitism I often found in my many many non-profit jobs centered on helping low-and moderate income families.

You have access to a computer and the free time to post on a lifestyle blog - you are privileged when compared to most.

If someone wants to get a check in exchange for having their tubes tied, then I’m all for it. It’s called personal responsibility. You make your choices and you live with them. It also costs the taxpayers a lot less in the long run than paying for another child that someone may not want. My only beef is that it should be made available to everyone - dudes too.

Hell I’m waiting for someone to institute mandatory drug testing for anyone receiving welfare or other benefits from the government. I have to be subject to drug testing (as do many in the workforce) so it’s only fair that if you’re getting a free check you have to stay off the happy stuff too.

But that’s a tangent.

This should be available to everyone. It’s difficult enough as it is to get sterilized as a woman, let alone to be a healthy single female under 30 without kids wanting to get sterilized, because she simply just doesn’t want kids. Even educated, well to do, and deemed incompetent in making a decision like wether or not they should have kids by many doctors.

This should also apply to men (and anybody of any economic status), especially because a vasectomy is much less invasive than say, a hysterectomy or getting your tubes tied.

A (*a, not *the) problem with your otherwise egalitarian libertarian boilerplate, Michael, is that we don’t get to choose the circumstances from within which we make “rational” cost-benefit decisions. So the marginal decision can be said to be ours, but the determinative decision–the one that determines which choice will BE rational–has already been made, it’s already a matter of historical contingency.

Further meat for you to chew on: do you really believe that humans are rational actors? Read the warning label on a pack of cigarettes, then look up Philip Morris’s advertising expenditures…

I sympathize with your perspective (assuming you’re actually a libertarian and not a racist or a classist, or a genetic determinist for that matter), because I used to hold similar values. But through further observation and inquiry I came to understand the flaws in my fundamental assumptions.

You sound reasonable, here’s hoping you consider your model critically.

authorizing and implementing are two different things.

10% of people ages 18-29 + however number of people over 29 is still a lot of people, and doesn’t speak to what “use” means. It could be as simple as logging on at a public library to search for jobs.

I don’t know if it still does, but the Holocaust Museum used to have a great exhibit showing how widespread (even in the US) eugenic policies were in the run up to WWII.

Just look at Buck v Bell, where the US Supreme Court authorized forced sterilizations, holding:

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes….

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Disgusting. It’s not surprising that as political and legal theory in the US moved away from its foundational roots in individual, natural rights and shifted to utilitarianism that this happened.

Of course, there are those who swing too far the opposite direction and pretty openly advocate dysgenic laws - which are all over the place. I think our future is more likely to be down the mega-welfare state dysgenic road (like Idiocracy) than the eugenic one.

It’s too bad we have such difficulty just respecting individual rights - both by avoiding laws over reproductive shenanigans and also by not forcing the fittest to subsidize the less fit in an attempt to stop natural selection. Eugenic policies are disgusting and so are dysgenic ones.

I forgot where I was going with this but I do need more caffeine.

re: “vas the deferens?”

BAHAHAHA

pwn = pound

like pound you with my fist. “pound” like “own”.

pound is own
own is pound

English is a growing and expanding language. Grow with us.

i thought it was like ZOMG! where the ‘z’ got typed instead of the shift key when lol-catting. but in this case the ‘p’ was struck and not the ‘o’. eh.

I think it’s disgusting to target people of a certain class/race/etc., and my instincts tell me that the dude from the deep South has intentions along those lines.

On the other hand, there are too many people on this planet (as evidenced by our rapid consumption of resources, climate change, depletion of rainforests, and the extinction of non-homo sapiens species), and population control through voluntary birth control and sterilization is a great idea. The UN, it appears, seems to agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Population_Fund

Paying people money just seems bad form, however, especially when doing so will result in either a bald faced or de facto genocide of particular groups of peoples.