Should we pay poor people to get sterilized?

My body, my choice

Back in the good old days of Roe v. Wade (unless you were a fetus) we paid poor people to have abortions. Ok, we didn’t pay the money directly to them, but instead paid it through Medicaid to their abortionist.

Abortions that were not paid for by Medicaid were almost always paid for by private insurance or were done for free at abortion clinics as a “public service.” It’s safe to say that the killing of hardly any babies was paid for by the mother, except perhaps in a lifelong emotion way. That’s the way we set up the system.

We didn’t want such women to have babies. We figured that someone who could not figure out the pill, condoms, the IUD, abstinence, the rhythm method, the morning after pill, or the word “no” or even “it’s my period,” was someone we didn’t want as a mother.

So why don’t we pay poor people to get themselves sterilized? That way, they’ll never need an abortion – which is getting harder to get, by the way.

This time, let’s take it half a step further. We can pay the patients’ docs to perform the sterilization, and also toss a little pocket change to the patients themselves. Say $1,000. Many people in today’s America will do virtually anything for $1,000.

Such people richly deserve sterilization. Not because they’re poor, mind you, but because they’re stupid, self-centered, evil people.

Such people should not become parents, for two reasons. First, they’re likely to be bad parents, and might not even be true parents at all. The prisons and tent camps are full of people who had bad parents. Before we stopped humanely institutionalizing such people, they also filled the mental institutions.

Second, poor stupid people tend to beget more poor stupid people. Not always, but it’s a fact that raw, untutored, uneducated intelligence is largely determined by your genes. You can make up for a lot in life with work, perseverance, courage, inventiveness and blind luck, but you can’t do much to improve your intelligence genes (though you can do a lot of pot smoking to disable them).

I suppose the government, which depends on an infinite population of idiots, would object to this, as would leftist think tanks, and woke corporations, and DEI symposia. The next generation of idiots begotten by the last is, after all, useful to them.

But for this, we don’t need no stinkin’ government. What’s to stop private entities – rich individuals, foundations, and NGOs (look it up, it’s one of those terms the cool kids use, like “existential”) from offering ten Benjamins for proof of sterilization?

Elon, are you listening?

Of course, we’ll have a cover. My scheme can be pitched as a way of redistributing wealth to the sort of person who is likely to want it and therefore deserves it. Moreover, it can be presented as a matter of individual freedom and maybe even a Constitutional right.

“My body, my choice” works pretty well. If a person wants to sell his or her fertility for $1,000, just as they now routinely sell sex for $100 or their self-respect for, oh, $1,000,000, then who are we to prohibit it? It’s a win-win for them, and us.