Children: a lifestyle choice?

"Don't have children you can't afford."

Well, it's a bit bloody late after the kid has been born, isn't it?

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"Don't have children you can't afford."

Let's start at the very beginning: people have children! We're a species that reproduces! That's how the species survives!

(Things I'm not addressing: whether the world is overpopulated. Whether people in rich countries have some kind of moral duty to not have children to make up for the exponential population growth in poorer countries. Immigration vs population growth through birth. Racism.)

Adults have children. Not all adults, obviously, but lots of us. Some of us do it because we really want children! Or we really want to be mums! Or we feel social pressure! Or it just happens! The contraception fails, and the pregnant woman doesn't want to have an abortion!

Some people will engage in a lot of pragmatic decision-making before they become pregnant or knock up their partner or whatever, and they'll have thought about things like "how are we going to fund this screaming poo factory?" and "will I go insane through lack of sleep?" and "is now really the right time?" Other people will not engage in those decisions—they'll certainly make a number of other decisions, though, like "where will baby sleep?" and "oooh, tiny red shoes or tiny green ones?" Some won't be making any sort of decision to get pregnant at all, but will still be happy when they find out they are.

But none of this is the point: the point is that people have children.

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"Don't have children that you can't afford."

Most people will never be in a position to afford private school and horse-riding lessons. That's a reality of the New Zealand economy.

Leaving arguments about whether that's a good thing aside for the moment, there are serious questions to be discussed about what sort of lifestyle a New Zealand citizen should be able to enjoy as a minimum if they so desire.*

I'd place this minimum somewhere like:
- comfortable accommodation that doesn't have major structural issues and can be heated reasonably** cheaply
- reliable access to food of the kind the individuals can and like to eat
- ability to access (some) leisure activities
- ability to travel (at least around the country)
- ability to access education and healthcare
- some other stuff, like clothes

So what all parents should be able to provide for their children, at a minimum is a roof over their heads and food and clothing and some opportunity to do fun things and some opportunity to see the country.

If there are parents in New Zealand who can't do that, I'd argue that we're failing as a society.

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"Don't have children that you can't afford."

It's time for a bit of a chat about Bad Financial Decisions. We all make them sometimes (well, at least everyone I know has made them sometimes). For instance, just last week I spent $90 at the pub at a friend's birthday party I'd had no real intention of drinking at! I reasonably regularly blow all my spending money for the fortnight on new shoes/clothes/bits of computer hardware!

I'm still: paying my rent and bills and buying breakfast and lunch most days and paying off my student loan and paying off my bank loan and saving up (very slowly) for a house deposit and—basically I am not living on Struggle Street. This is mainly because I am 26 and single and don't have dependants and I earn above the median national salary (for a person in full-time employment)!

There are people—lots of people—in this country who earn what I earn and support a family on it. The Bad Financial Decisions they are therefore able to make without their budget cascading into the shitter are smaller, because they have higher unavoidable expenses.

And, right, the size of the Bad Financial Decisions you can make without it ruining your budget gets smaller the poorer you are, so that a (very) wealthy person can invest $30K in a dodgy finance company and lose the lot without it bankrupting them, whereas a poorer person might have to legit decide whether rice or potatos are a more economical choice this week.

And everyone's going to stuff up sometimes. You're going to have weeks where you're like, FML, I just want to get drunk on the couch, so you buy a bottle of tequila and wake up the next morning smelling of alcohol and regret. You're going to spend more than you really should on shoes, or buy the slightly more expensive (but much nicer) loaf of bread, or whatever.

Statements like "people just need to budget better" a) place an unreasonably high expectation on people, and b) ignore reality. The reality is both that it can be extraordinarily challenging to survive on a low income (and people are, by doing so, regularly making very good budgeting decisions) and that people are people and human and make mistakes.

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"Don't have children that you can't afford."

More than just individual Bad Financial Decisions, sometimes stuff goes wrong in people's lives: they get sick, or lose their job, or interest rates go up so their mortgage payment is higher than they budgeted for, or inflation is high, or we're in the middle of a global recession, or their relationship breaks down—

Sometimes those people have children!

Nobody deserves to become sick; very few people deserve to lose their jobs; interest rates and inflation and global financial crises are largely out of the control of Average Citizen Nancy; and relationship breakdowns are by definition the fault of the parties involved but, you know, shit happens.

Even the most careful budgeter in the world won’t think of everything that could possibly go wrong in their lives; none of us can predict the future.

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“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”

Uh, yeah, but they’re here now. What are you proposing we do instead?

We’re ostensibly a civilised society.

Back in the day, unwanted children used to get left on hillsides or hit over the head with a rock; ritualised and common infanticide is found all over the world in ancient civilisations.

But we grew up as a species and produced surpluses and villages and towns and cities and city-states and nations and the UN; and now we have all these laws against leaving your children on hillsides or hitting them over the head with a rock. And it’s a good thing, too.

The effect of it is that people who produce children are expected to care for them, and if they don’t (or if they do, but they’re really crap at it), we take the kids from them and stick the parents in jail if it’s bad enough and shame everyone involved a lot.

At the same time, though, it’s not like there’s a drop-off centre where you can turn up with little Timmy, all “I’ve had him for a couple of years and he’s too expensive and ugh I really hate this parent lark, take him away.” I suspect, based totally on my own brain and not on any research or internet-based anecdotal evidence that any drop-off in levels of adoption in Western nations is connected to the availability of contraception and abortion, and also possibly to the ability of solo mothers to receive State support. But that’s an untested assumption! I also suspect that anyone who rocked up to Child, Youth and Family all “I’ve had enough of Little Timmy, take him away!” would a) not receive that much assistance, and b) be shamed for trying it.

So you’ve had a kid: you’re stuck with him or her (unless you’re going to be sufficiently abusive so as to have the kid forcibly removed from your household and/or be sent to jail, which I think we can all agree is not the sort of thing we want people to do ever.)

The moral of this section is: if society is going to require individuals to do something, and some of those individuals are going to have difficult doing that thing, society is obligated to help them.

To link all this together:

1. People have children!

2. Sometimes people with children face expenses they can’t reasonably anticipate.

3. Sometimes people’s income is inadequate for their needs.

4. Society expects people to care for their children, and makes it difficult to get rid of children (not that many people actually want to, I expect).

5. Points 1 to 4 mean together that society has some sort of obligation to make sure that people with children are able to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.

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“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”

Complaints about the cost of living in New Zealand come, obviously, from people’s dissatisfaction with the cost of living in New Zealand. I don’t think a blanket reply of “well you shouldn’t have gotten knocked up then, should you?” is a very reasonable response to this.

I also think that if a large proportion of families in New Zealand genuinely feel as though they’re unable to easily maintain the lifestyles they want, we should be talking about that. We should be talking about what a reasonable lifestyle actually is: do we expect people to be able to pack the kids in the car and go to the beach for a holiday a couple of times a year? And—and we should also be having a conversation about whether people’s lifestyle desires are reasonably attainable. Like I said earlier, most people are never going to be able to send their kids to private school or give them horse-riding lessons, and maybe that’s okay.

But, uh, I think it’s totally reasonable for a family who earns the median wage (and I am here talking about a household with one working adult) to expect to be able to have a comfortable house and enough to eat and to be able to pay the bills and buy a few luxuries, and if that’s systemically unrealistic then I think we’ve got a bit of a problem.

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“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”

Levelled, right, at single women who have children and who get their income from the state.

There’s, I don’t know, hundreds of years of history here about the purpose of marriage and the operation of wider family networks; about the Poor Laws of Elizabethan England (and similar laws worldwide); about the status of women in law (not good; let’s just take that as read); about the rise of the nuclear family and industrialisation and the effect that had on those wider family and community networks by virtue of requiring highly mobile labour; and about how we fixed some of what capitalism broke by introducing social welfare.

But for the purpose of this exercise:

1. Children are good; and
2. Parenthood is work; and
3. Children, while good, are expensive because they’re not productive and they need a lot of care.***

Parenthood is not paid work! That doesn’t make it not work! See also housework, and also the bit above about the societal obligation to do certain things.

Women who have children and who get their income from the state are doing work in raising the next generation. This is work that we should support. Do I think that living on the DPB gives people an enviable lifestyle which I would like to emulate? No. This is why accusations of teenage girls getting deliberately pregnant so they can live off the state for the rest of their lives (and so on) always makes me think that their lives must be utter shit if they possibly think that a total annual income somewhere around $24K with which they must support a child sounds like a good deal.

And even if they have gotten deliberately pregnant: uh, children are still good! Parenthood is still work!

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“Don’t have children that you can’t afford.”

Levelled at those poor people, who should clearly have got a better job before they started breeding.

I’m not going to lie, this sounds like eugenics. It also sounds like total bollocks.

The median wage/salary for those in full-time employment was, at July 2010 (according to Statistics New Zealand) $44,800. Full-time employment at minimum wage will get you $28,080 a year. There’s a lot more women in part-time employment than men, but I’ll leave that aside for the moment.

My statistical skills are a bit shite, but here goes: the median wage/salary figure is a lot higher than the median income from all sources (the latter gets skewed down by people who work part time or receive benefits).

But even assuming that only people who work full-time or who have a partner who works full-time should be able to have children, there’s still going to be an awful lot of households who have an income between $30K and $50K. The median household income from all sources (including benefits (including Working for Families)) was $64,272 per year as at June 2010. Half the households in the country have a combined income of less than that.

So is $64,272 per year enough to support a family on? What sort of lifestyle will it give? Is that lifestyle a reasonable one? What if the family is earning $44,272 per year – is that enough? Or $22,272? Remember the bit above about parenthood being work, and children being good.

Also think a little about whether you really believe that an adult’s right to choose to have a child should be in any way connected to the size of their bank balance, and then think: if this somehow became official policy, would you be in a position to determine what the magic figure was? And would you be over it?

* I'm totally down with people living off the grid if that's what they want, but I'd place a minimum standard somewhat higher.

** A note about how I use "reasonable": I'm a law student (and it's ruining my life AND my mind) so I tend to think of "reasonable" as meaning "what an ordinary person would think apt and fair in the circumstances". The effect of this is that it isn't a strict standard; to use the heating example, "reasonable" would be tied in to the person's income and the size of their dwelling.

*** I welcome any suggestions of reform of child labour laws. Seriously, drop that in any time you like.

Calm down, love - and other annoyances

I have flatted with the same two women for five and a half years now; they're my closest friends.

These facts are merely background to the point of this post, which is about language.

So David Cameron told Shadow Minister Angela Eagle to "Calm down, love" in the middle of a heated Parliamentary debate. And I can't remember who it was or where I read it, but some MP asked another (male) MP whether he had PMS.

Is this sexist, the papers ask?

In a word: yes.

This is because words have meanings, and those meanings are contextual.

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A story about my flat:

We cook together, and thus we grocery shop together. This one time a couple of years ago, I started crying completely out of the blue in the middle of the cat food aisle.

I get PMS. I have a couple of days every month where I am consumed with impotent rage, usually directionless and a bit feeble. This month I spent a day ratty and ill-tempered at everyone I had any contact with (and some people who I didn't), and every third thought I had was "Heaven forfend you should have to [do X]."

And so on that ill-fated shopping expedition, my cycle was at its peak of rage, and I cried. I was aware at the time that the whole situation was completely absurd, so I was kind of laughing and wailing at the same time; I'm really glad the supermarket was pretty empty.

"Crying in the cat aisle" is now an in-joke in my flat for PMS-related things (and amongst a few other close friends too).

I'm totally down with this. It's an in-joke because it was so uncontrollable and random and ridiculous; and because I love these people I live with; and because we all go through PMS-related ragetastic moments; and because we're careful with it.

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But.

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Meaning is contextual, man. I get to make PMS jokes and explanations because it's my body and my hormones and my anger, and I know better than anyone what my cycle is about and what I'm angry about and whether my anger is at an unusual (for me) level and whether that anger is, in my opinion, justified.

Close friends get to ask me whether I'm PMS-ing because they know me well and they know a bit about my body and my hormones and my anger, and they can call me out about if they like, and I can argue with them if I like.

Acquaintances don't. Random strangers don't. Because they don't know me or those things about me, and they don't get to ever fucking determine how I should choose to frame the discussion I am having.

Why it's sexist and offensive: because a query about PMS isn't just a question about my ovarian cycle (as if that's not intrusive enough). It's a whole lot of other possible statements, including (but not limited to)—
- that the thing I'm angry about isn't worthy of being angry about
- that I'm overreacting
- that I'm being irrational
- that I'm being ridiculous

And none of these things can lead to a good place for me.

Seriously, if it is PMS then I'm probably well-aware of it already and do not need you to tell me that my body chemistry is screwing with my reason. If it's not—if it's not, then you've just nicely dismissed everything I've been arguing as an overblown rant in a beautiful ad hominem one-liner.

And if you're a dude:

I don't know if you've been living under a rock all this time, but for many many centuries women had very few rights in (English) law and society.* Our assets belonged to our fathers and then our husbands; we couldn't inherit land; it was difficult or impossible to get an education or learn a trade or run a business or, you know, act as fully autonomous human beings. Women in the late Victorian period used to get prescribed hysterectomies and clitorectomies for "hysteria". The legal definition of rape specifically excluded anything that took place within a marriage.

So feminism 101: it's not new to describe women as reactionary, hysterical, ridiculous, and incapable of reason. Those were, in fact, some of the justifications used to perpetuate the treatment of women in our society for centuries.

All that (remember that words have meanings and meanings are contextual? GOOD.) gets imported as subtext when a man tells a woman to calm down, love, or asks whether she's PMSing.

And those general societal contexts sometimes get trumped by other contexts, such as that of close friendship and grocery shopping. So, yeah, you do have to be aware of the language you're using about a group you're not part of, even if they throw those words around themselves.

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But, you say, some people are totally down with being asked whether they're PMSing. The way I figure it, there's a range of possible reactions if it's a stranger or the opposition doing the asking:
- at one end, always finding it offensive and hurtful
- thinking the asker is a bit of a dick, in a bad way
- thinking the asker is a bit of a dick, in a good way
- finding it funny
- and at the other end, not seeing the problem

(I think you have to be aware that it's problematic (or at least that some people would find it so) to find it funny.)

And given that you're asking someone whether they're PMSing in an argument during which presumably you are the other side, and you're presumably doing so for the purpose of point-scoring, you've got to be aware that there is a point to score at all: so you at least are aware that it's problematic.

How the hell are you surprised when they get annoyed? Nice going, asshole.

* Which is what I know about, so is what I'm talking about.

women: making choices or making babies (it's not a binary)

I've been following the debate about abortion on the Standard plus various other blogs with interest (for starters, try the Hand Mirror's excellent series on abortion in New Zealand).

It's a difficult subject to talk about. It's fraught with a whole lot of ethics (women's right to autonomous decision-making regarding her own body; the status of a foetus; whether any other person should be involved in a woman's decision-making process) and a whole lot of politics (is there room on a left-leaning Order Paper for a bill about abortion rights and access? Can we convince the punters?). It's also deeply personal for me, a person who could become pregnant (and probably will never choose to do so).

The thing is: I think at least some of the criticisms laid against the firmly pro-choice position from other pro-choice positions are a little disingenous. Here's why:

As I understand it, the firmly pro-choice position boils down to—
1. the person most qualified to make a decision about her bodily integrity and her ability/willingness to carry a foetus to term is the woman whose body it is.
2. that woman should be able to make a decision about whether to continue carrying a foetus to term at any point during the pregnancy.

The effect of this position is abortion on demand, including late-term abortions.

Now, let's take the position I was at until this weekend, which was:
1. without reservation, a woman should be able to decide to terminate a non-viable foetus. This includes all early-stage pregnancies as well as pregnancies which are later discovered to not be viable.
2. I have difficulty in accepting that a woman who is healthy herself and whose pregnancy is at a sufficiently late stage for the foetus to be viable (without significant disabilities such would greatly reduce the child's quality or length of life once he or she has been born) should be able to choose to terminate the pregnancy. This is one of those ethical gut-reactions that I can't suppress or adequately justify.

I still have difficulty accepting 2. above. But I don't think it matters.

The firmly pro-choice position would extend the right to seek an abortion to the greatest number of women who might choose to have one, namely all of them. This would necessarily include a woman who chooses at 38 weeks to terminate her pregnancy despite being in the picture of perfect health herself and knowing that the foetus is also healthy.

I don't know that that woman actually exists. If she does, I haven't heard of her. Women who choose to terminate a pregnancy at a very late stage do so almost exclusively for medical reasons, either their own or those of the foetus. The literature I have read (which is far from exhaustive) seems to suggest that there are women who would like to abort past the current limits in NZ law, but often this is a result of having been unable to access abortion services within the current limits in NZ law.

So why I think my earlier position was somewhat disingeneous is:
1. the firmly pro-choice position extends abortion rights as widely as possible.
2. there may be hypothetical women who would exercise that right in a way that I find morally repugnant.
3. however, if the firmly pro-choice position is restricted (for example, by term limits), it would almost certainly restrict the choices of women who I accept without reservation should be able to access an abortion.

That is to say, by focussing on a hypothetical set of women I am ignoring the needs of actual women. This is not good policy-making.

The other argument I find slightly disingenous is the argument that runs:

"But what about the views of the man/boyfriend/partner/husband/parents/family/wider society? DO OUR VOICES NOT COUNT?"

The firmly pro-choice position is mainly framed as a simple "no." It may in fact be "no"; I haven't done a straw poll, nor is everybody's opinion identical (obviously).

But. Women don't exercise choice in a vacuum. That's probably one of the main points of feminism and feminist theory: that our choices are profoundly influenced by the positions we find ourselves in, and that the positions we find ourselves in may be (and often are) outside our control.

As a corollary of that, women don't make decisions in a vacuum. There's nothing about the firmly pro-choice position which excludes women who are deciding whether or not to seek an abortion from soliciting the opinions of people whose opinion they think are important, and from then considering those opinions in their decision-making process. For some women, the opinion of her partner may well be determinative.1 The point is that other people's opinions should not be determinative (or influential) if the woman exercising her right to choose does not want them to be.

So where's the problem? Most women will want to know what the feelings of their partner are, if they're in a relationship (you expect that, I think, in relationships). Many women will talk to their family, or to close friends, or to whoever they want to. Your voices will be heard! Many women will have regard to how you feel! It may take the form of consultation, where there's no requirement to actually follow what the consulted people ask for, but it will be there in many, if not most, cases.

(There'll be women who choose not to involve anybody else in their decision. And I fail to see the problem with that: they're autonomous human beings too, kid.)

1. You know, [stuff about power imbalances goes here], but I think a woman could legitimately choose to have a baby or not to have a baby because her partner wants one/doesn't want one, and I think it's absolutely that woman's right to decide for herself what factors are and are not important in her decision-making process. That's kind of what this whole thing is about, for me.