{"id":6458,"date":"2009-01-26T10:45:50","date_gmt":"2009-01-26T18:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6458"},"modified":"2009-01-26T10:45:50","modified_gmt":"2009-01-26T18:05:38","slug":"kids-are-free-who-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6458","title":{"rendered":"Kids are Free! Who Knew?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Drudge, in his job as ruler of the em-ess-em&#8217;s world, is pushing this statement by Nancy Pelosi <a href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyfire.typepad.com\/whiskey_fire\/2009\/01\/rise-above-the-depression.html\" target=\"_blank\">as if it&#8217;s supposed to be embarrassing<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding to the new economic &#8220;stimulus&#8221; package, claiming &#8220;contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Pelosi, the mother of 5 children and 6 grandchildren, who once said, &#8220;Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to being a mom,&#8221; seemed to imply babies are somehow a burden on the treasury.<\/p>\n<p>The revelation came during an exchange Sunday morning on ABC&#8217;s THIS WEEK.<\/p>\n<p>STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?<\/p>\n<p>PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children&#8217;s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those &#8211; one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.<\/p>\n<p>STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?<\/p>\n<p>PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This, of course, is one of the least controversial things Nancy Pelosi has ever said. Children cost money? You don&#8217;t say! And it&#8217;s cheaper for the government to give poor people who don&#8217;t want children birth control than for the government to give poor parents who don&#8217;t want their children aid to care for the kids they can&#8217;t afford? Shocking!<\/p>\n<p>I particularly love the gratuitous shot at Pelosi for daring to have had a number of children and still believe that people should have the right to chart their own reproductive destinies. Because evidently, if you have more than 1.5 children, you&#8217;re not allowed to support other people in making the choice to, say, wait a few years to have a kid until they&#8217;re more stable. That&#8217;s unpossible!<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, I know there are people out there who believe that birth control is tantamount to the Killing Fields, but for the rest of us, what Pelosi said is simply a basic level of sanity: helping people not have children when they don&#8217;t want to helps them financially. If you&#8217;re struggling, having a child can push you under completely. Children are wonderful, and I&#8217;m grateful to my daughter. But that doesn&#8217;t mean they&#8217;re cheap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Drudge, in his job as ruler of the em-ess-em&#8217;s world, is pushing this statement by Nancy Pelosi as if it&#8217;s supposed to be embarrassing: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6458\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}