I find it hard to believe that the House of Representatives cut funding tor Planned Parenthood. What were they thinking? Surely the most important thing human beings do is raise the next generation. Having more children than you can adequately care for is not going to give any of them a good start.
It should be obvious that parents, especially challenged parents — single mothers, poor or disabled parents, etc. — need all the help they can get. In Freakonomics the authors, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, look at a number of situations in which actually looking at the facts disproves what the general public thinks. For example, they wonder about the crime wave that didn’t happen. A rise in the crime rate was predicted for the 1990’s. Governments responded by building more prisons and putting more police on the streets, and this is the generally accepted reason there was less crime. But when the authors looked at the actual statistics they found that the crime rate was already going down BEFORE the extra police and prisons had been put in place. So what could possibly be the REAL cause? The authors searched around and came up with this answer: Roe vs. Wade happened in 1973. This means that all those babies, that would have been born to poor, unwed, drug-addicted mothers, did not grow up to be criminals in the 90’s. I don’t advocate abortion as a strategy for reducing crime, I would rather see education and easily available birth control to prevent children being born who will grow up to lead violent miserable lives. And I ask those who oppose abortion: are you willing to take on these disadvantaged babies and give them a decent upbringing?
The other study that I think about was one done by Karlen Lyons-Ruth. Bessel VanderKolk talked about it in a workshop at Kripalu in August of 2007. My notes say “Karlen Lyons-Ruth did a study of home visits, in which a home visitor went to young, unwed mothers, and gave them guidance in taking care of their babies. The single most effective mental health intervention is to help mothers learn to care for their infants.” I got the impression that they had done a 20 year study of the infants whose mothers were visited compared with a control group of infants whose mothers were not visited, and that the amount of violent behavior exhibited by both groups was very different. The “visited” infants in general were better adjusted than the control group. I tried to find the study on the internet, but could only find a recent study where the outcomes were the amount of difficulty entering Kindergarten. Still, we can pretty confidently predict, that without some intervention, a kid that’s difficult in Kindergarten will continue to have difficulties.
VanderKolk expressed his disgust at our government which would of course not fund any such program, but would build more prisons instead. He told us that South Africa was funding such a program. He said they won’t see the results for 20 years, but at least they care about the future and are willing to take action.
Bessel Van der Kolk will be presenting a program at Kripalu next July.