Rich Enough for Kids?
By Dawn Chinagorom-Abiakalam
Easter Sunday was memorable. Not because of the celebrations, but because of Twitter discourse. If you are wondering, it was on whether poor people should have kids. For hours, I read long threads on child-rearing and why financial stability and social class were fair indicators of whether someone was ready to have children or not. While I thought many of the takes were insightful and intelligent, it concerned me to see how many of us think of choice as a concept. All over the timeline, I kept seeing tweets that followed a similar format to “poor people choosing to bring children into this world is selfish.” And honestly, I oppose that sentiment.
My first problem with it is that it assumes that choice is solely a function of an individual’s actions. By making that assumption, we fail to consider all that becomes inaccessible as a result of poverty. Like, healthcare, contraceptives, and family planning. Raising children is indeed expensive, but so is preventing children. Attacking low-paid people for having children shifts the focus from the real problem, which is the system that makes the tools needed for providing a child with a good life scarce. When we say people with low incomes should wait before starting families, why are we saying that? Is it because they are unable to obtain quality education? Or housing? Food? Is healthcare the issue? And then to these many questions, I ask another, is it not the responsibility of the state to provide these things? In essence, we are afraid of poor people having children because the system we live in has failed to provide us with the very things we need to raise families.
After establishing that choice is taken away with poverty, I find it necessary to address the tendency to be upset about underprivileged people having kids because they want “someone to love or someone to love them.” First of all, in our society, this is uncommon. Poverty does not only rob individuals of their self-autonomy; it robs them of their time. So, no, people who earn low incomes are not sitting around thinking of having children. And even if they were, what kind of society are we creating if we believe that financially empowered individuals are the only ones deserving of families? We should be working towards creating institutions that ensure the provision of basic needs for all. By doing so, we will not rob people of their right to start families. Until we design a society that supports us adequately, the energy spent debating over impoverished people’s choices should be redirected to assisting the reproductive justice activists in our communities.
Quite frankly, pushing the agenda that poor people should not have children is anti-black. It is eugenics. For decades, conversations about children, especially on Africans having children, have plagued the media and academia. Popular belief is that overpopulation is keeping Africa poor, and so, our countries have been flooded with cheap contraceptives (read contraceptive imperialism). Most of the world’s poor populations are Black or of African descent. Presenting the idea that impoverished people should not have children is an indirect recommendation for black folk to cease reproducing. Again, it is eugenics. One may argue that selectively mating financially stable individuals is not the same as advocating for breeding out disabled or black people. However, it would be faulty to overlook the fact that many times these identities intersect. This rhetoric is harmful, and the sooner we get rid of it, the better.
Finally, the argument that poor people are selfish for choosing to have children is erroneous because selfishness can only exist where there is a choice. Unfortunately, life is not theoretical, and our decisions do not exist in a vacuum. Our lives and choices occur in a system, and sadly, in it, choice is financial power.
