Bearing Children You Can't Support: Subsidies vs. Eugenics

Bad cases make bad law, or so the saying goes in legal circles. But if ever there was a bad case that cries out for a public reexamination of long-standing legal principle, it is this one.

A recently filed lawsuit reveals that a Massachusetts mother of nine is suing a hospital in Springfield for allegedly sterilizing her against her will.

As ABC News reported, Tessa Savicki "claimed that doctors at Baystate Medical Center had agreed to insert an intrauterine device, or IUD, that she brought to the operating room, but instead performed a tubal ligation that effectively ended her chances of having more children."

The universal first reaction to Savicki's story is "How horrible." But read on, because this woman is hardly a poster child for medical abuse. She, in fact, is filing her second, not first, lawsuit over medical issues. And, according to the Boston Herald, Savicki has nine children from several men, is unemployed and relies on public assistance for two of the four children who live with her. She said she receives supplemental security income, or SSI, for a disability, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Her mother has custody of three of her children. Two of her children are no longer minors.

The hospital has claimed from the start that Savicki, 35, signed a consent form to undergo the sterilization procedure. That form has mysteriously gone missing. If it is not found, it will probably force the hospital to settle or go to court with a dead-bang loser of a case.

Let me make clear I am in no way calling for legalization of forced sterilization. Far from it. I do not understand how the doctor in Savicki's case could possibly have done this to this woman without believing that Savicki had given her consent. As wrong as it may be for her to have any more children, or even the number she has had, that does not give the government or a doctor or anyone else the right to control her reproductive organs. They are hers and hers alone.

But what bears re-examination is how we, as a society (including the taxpayers and the environmentalists among us), react to her decision to have more children than she can possibly raise independent of federal and state subsidies. She is also bearing (selfishly as far as I'm concerned) an overly large brood at a time when U.S. and, indeed, world population growth is pushing the planet's ability to provide such needed commodities as clean air and water, housing and fuel to the planet's absolute limits.

Religious conservatives are quick to compare Savicki's case to one of the Supreme Court's more incendiary decisions, that of Buck v. Bell in 1927. The now-infamous opinion written by the otherwise revered jurist (who coincidentally also hailed from Massachusetts) Oliver Wendell Holmes declared:

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Such an opinion did not shock the pre-politically-correct world of 1927 America in the same way it shocks us now. Terms such as degenerate and imbecile were commonly used to describe people such as plaintiff Carrie Buck, who, by the way, became pregnant after being raped by a cousin. For that "act," she was also described as a loose woman.

The reason Savicki's case calls for a public re-examination of society's approach to profligate child-bearing is because we as a nation are vastly different than we were in 1927. We have changed our laws in a way that subsidizes reproductive behavior that is no longer beneficial to society, and we need to change them back.

In 1927, there were no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP or subsidized housing programs. With the exception of CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program), which came later, the other programs were all products of Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal and in response to the Great Depression. Various social safety net programs (11 percent) along with Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP (20 percent) now command a stunning 31 percent of the federal budget, more than defense (21 percent) and even more than Social Security (21 percent).

We are now spending, as we were not in Carrie Bell's day, billions of dollars to support millions of children whose parents bring them into the world knowing they cannot provide for their basic needs. I've come to the conclusion that societal support for such behavior is a net negative from two perspectives: I am a fiscal hawk and an environmental liberal. The United States is long past the point where additional population is needed or even, quite frankly, can be accommodated. Tessa Savicki's nine-child family leaves a considerable carbon footprint. She's also raising taxes for those of us who are working hard to support ourselves. I visualize such people coming up to me, tapping me on the shoulder and saying, "I want kids I can't support, so you're going to support them for me."