Be Excellent To Each Other

ARARARARARGH.

And the potential damage to the child itself, of course, which is of more concern to me.


Reversible tube-tying, if nothing else. Or store people's eggs and sperm at birth and then sterilise them.

You can't, but there should be a limit where people are told to stop, because they are taking the p*ss out of the benefit system.

Dear Sir and Madam. Please stop expecting taxpayers to pay for your unreasonably sized family.

Yours, The Government.

(enclosed: many condoms).

nope


and nope!

That second picture looks like the worm thing from the Empire Strikes Back.

I'll paste something on here tonight for you then....

What?! Aaarrggghhhh. From your bum as well?!

It sounds just horrible

Poor mite.

You could solve it by having the benefits system as a law of diminishing returns.

No you do not. Seriously, I will hunt you down

Anything that has muscle walls can prolapse, including heart valves.

Yep, I came up with this idea too, a few years back. If there's so many stringest tests for people who want to adopt, there should be the same for people who want children naturally.

Any reduction in benefit for additional children (although they already do for your second one) would only have the effect of penalising the kids. It won't stop stupid people having loads of nippers.

Shit, don't check your PMs.

Or merely not give money to people who can do nothing but fuck. Perhaps if they knew no cash would be forthcoming from the government, they might think twice. Probably not though, but at least then they'd all die of poverty and solve the problem

The *kids* would die of poverty. The parents would keep themselves in Benny Hedgehogs and White Lightning somehow.

If I thought scally parents churned out anything other than scally kids that merely perpetuate the problem, this might bother me, but it doesn't

You speak the truth. There's someone at my work who earns more in benefits than I do because he now has three kids. He works 20 hours. I work 40+. He has a plasma TV, XBox360, Wii etc. I have somewhat less than this.

I think people are conflating two differing concepts in this thread.

1) Preventing overpopulation by limiting births
2) Preventing social issues by preventing people from breeding if they are not able to show the capacity to raise the children in a safe and socially responsible way.

Only the second has anything really to do with the taxpayer, as we have no information on how the Duggers support their kids.

Deliberately. See my earlier post.



No, the 1st has to do with the taxpayer as well, if the parents can't afford to support the kids on their own. In the Duggars' case maybe they can, but it's still a line item for consideration.

But should "not being able to afford it" be a factor excluding people from the right to have children? I think that would be going too far. After all, many wonderfully worthwhile people come from humble origins, and your parents' income has nothing to do with how good a person they are or how well you'll turn out yourself.

*hovers over 'foe' button*

?

One of the infamous next door 3am arguments and beatings was about how the father had spent the money for the kids sandwiches on cider.

They must have some support, the guy would have to be some kind of millionaire to support so many kids. Although I suppose the TV and book deal were profitable, thus funding more kids and making it evermoreso of interest. I see a plan forming.

Or the kids just eat each other.
Or he pimps them out.

If you can't afford to keep a child in nappies and food, then I think you should be prevented from having children, of course. Then again, you don't need to earn much in order to do that. It's not about having wealth, it's about not being below the breadline.

And not being a chain-smoking alcoholic cunt helps too.

So - "sorry, you're too poor to be allowed to breed".

So the welfare state only applies to people who are already alive, in effect.

What about people who can't afford to feed themselves? Should they be prevented from being alive? Let's just euthanise them.

I'm not sure at what point the welfare state should apply to providing funding for people who decide they want to have kids exactly. If I decide I want a new car, should the welfare state fund that?

Is your car alive? Does the future of our species rely on there being more cars?

The future of our species doesn't rely on everyone who wants kids having kids either. In fact, the current greatest threat to our species is the fact that there's 6bn of us, consuming massively more resources than the planet can provide us with.

*pounds 'foe' button so hard it breaks and all myp can see is posts by Mr Chris and Craster*

I like the little snippet of fact that (if true) is something like "If you were to line up every person in China and shake hands with each of them in turn, you'd never reach the end of the line because of the rate at which the population is increasing."

I wept, and recalled Idiocracy.

Then I remembered the good time I had watching that top comedy movie, and cheered up a little.

Then I wept a bit more, thinking about the insanity.

Yeah, sorry. I'll stop now. It's not my fault, he's just so wrong about everything!

I really don't know how you two ended up together.

Seemingly from their DVD and book sales, and judging by their house and my notions of the American benefits system, it looks to me like it's all working out well.Overall, yes. But here in the UK as with most industrialised first-world nations long term trend in birthrates is downward, hence our forthcoming crisis when we have too many old retired people and not enough working young folks to support them. Where now your "sterilise the chavs" policy, hmmm?

Blimey. This threads got a bit Daily Mail-y. I'm.... shocked.

I've got two kids and get a negligable amount of child benefit for the second. I'm pretty sure it goes down to zero at some point, whether that's the next one or the fourth, I'm not sure. The amount I get for the first kid it pretty tiny, anyway. It isn't even enough to pay for nappies.

I suppose the benefits thing is a totally different argument, but there you go.

LTIA

Well, I have been looking around t'internet and yes, they are in receipt of benefits, quite a bit of charity money and TLC (which is a television station that has been running some kind of cutesy documentary on this family since child 14) built their home.

They seem to make a lot of money out of being on television a lot, too, so they are also an all-American TV freakshow. They seem to be billed as some kind of clean-living Walton-esque set-up of a family - all good Christian values.

Apparrently the mother was on the pill for four years after she got married. She went back on the pill after having her first baby, but a year later came off, tried again and miscarried. They blamed this on the fact that she had been on the pill for a year.

So, she was on the pill for 4+1 years. At 39 she had given birth to 16 children.


I hope I am not being unfair. My half-sisters' half-sister (basically her dad was once married to my mother) is 27 and has 9 children, and it makes me angry, because she has a two bedroom house and I find it irresponsible and unfair to the childen. Her partner also has four children from a previous marriage (I thought it was two until last week, but no, it is four). At weekends there are 13 children and two adults in a two bedroom house.

I must say that the woman in question 'E' has some degree of learning difficulties - I find it difficult to blame her entirely. He, on the other hand, does not. E's dad the other day was pleading with her to get implants, a coil, anything, but D refuses to get a vasectomy and she said defiantly 'if I want more children I'll have them'

What can you say to that?

It makes me feel sad, maybe a little sickened. Her kitchen, for cooking for 11 people (15 at weekends) is about 8 foot by four foot. two people can't stand comfortably in there. They are on an urgent waiting list for a new house, but then they have been for about 6 years.

So yes, with a TV deal and a Christian Fundie attitude the Duggan's are at least doing Ok for themselves. It is worse when you have no money and a shack of a house, but I think it s wrong of the media to refer to the Duggans as some kind of 'miracle family' (and that often seems to be the exact term used by a lot of the media if you look around the net.)

Oh yeah, also,

This isn't a problem though, or at least not a long term one, it'll solve itself in 20 years when they die.

The way to solve that problem is not "Have more fucking kids", it's "Have a sustainable number of kids and ride out the consequences of the generation or two when you were fucking stupid".

Also the retirement age is now laughably low, the life expectancy has increased by a decade or two without it changing.

All of

That's why the retirement age isn't now compulsory though, yes?

Except that a lot of firms are forcing people to retire at 65, and the courts have not yet said that that is illegal.

Well that's what the courts have to decide

Increased birthrates is so far from a sustainable solution to that problem that it's not funny.

My point is, the UK, in common with the US and most of continental Europe, does not have a growing population and hence is not going to suffer from any sort of overcrowding issue in the foreseeable future.

I'd like 18 kids. It means I can have sex 17 more times.