Oh, I'm totally with you on the root causes. I'm just resentful that I pay more in taxes to support kids when the parents don't care enough to ensure they have a stable life prior to bringing them into the world.
And while I agree with you that evolution is powerful, reliable birth control is recent enough that we haven't adapted to it. It's quite possible to control when you have kids via abstinence, birth control, and abortion. But it does require long-term thinking and contentiousness, and my point is that these sob stories are mostly missing these personality traits.
I consider such questions to fall under the purview of sexual morality. As such, they are complicated questions that are very poorly served by draconian policies that people who can't afford a kid just should not have one.
Taken to its logical conclusion, I see no reason why that would not lead to a society where murdering kids up to a certain age is the expected norm when the family falls on hard times. If there is a god, I would hope he/she/it would go all Sodom and Gomorrah on it.
When we make public policies, we need to start from a baseline assumption that human sexuality exists and sometimes babies happen and those policies need to respect the privacy of the couple whose coupling created that child and their right to make a hard and complicated decision balancing multiple different interests. Sweeping policies of "just don't have kids" go horrendous places, including forced abortions of late stage pregnancies which are essentially murder because the baby is developed enough it would be viable outside the womb if the mother went into labor.
...or, just accept that if you are going to have kids with no income, both the parents and the kids life is going to be tough. If you're going to make decisions like that, you shouldn't expect the rest of society to pay for it.
You may call that sexual morality, I call it common sense.
That's dishonest arguing. I said no such thing, and I don't want to. By and large parents seem to be pretty happy with their kids, and I say more power to 'em.
Quite the opposite. I'm interested in people changing their decisions in such ways that children have better lives. Simultaneously, I'm am very much against my tax bill and my city's crime rate being higher because of completely avoidable problems.
And while I agree with you that evolution is powerful, reliable birth control is recent enough that we haven't adapted to it. It's quite possible to control when you have kids via abstinence, birth control, and abortion. But it does require long-term thinking and contentiousness, and my point is that these sob stories are mostly missing these personality traits.