Once again, history’s greatest monster is some poor woman who needs help feeding her children:
Despite the fact that low-income women who give birth to children would logically need increased assistance to care for their larger family, Pennsylvania lawmakers — State Reps. RoseMarie Swanger (R), Tom Caltagirone (D), Mark Gillen (R), Keith Gillespie (R), Adam Harris (R), and Mike Tobash (R) — don’t want their state’s food stamp program to provide additional benefits for that newborn. If a woman gives birth to a child who was conceived from rape, she may seek an exception to this rule so that her food stamp benefits aren’t slashed, butonly if she can provide proof that she reported her sexual assault and her abuser’s identity to the police.
The primary sponsor of this bill, oddly, doesn’t list it among her many accomplishments (including but not limited to promoting “American Law for American Courts“). Even more disheartening, a Democrat is co-sponsoring the thing, though he at least has the stones to put it out there.
Nowhere in the bill is it mentioned that perhaps the men who can’t govern their own dicks should have benefits reduced to them, because women are the ones tasked with providing for their children, and women bear those children, and women raise those children, and women are shamed for getting pregnant and shamed for not getting pregnant and shamed for being raped and shamed for reporting their rapes and shamed for not reporting their rapes and shamed for giving birth and shamed for getting abortions because stupid bitches and that’s why.
As to the actual dollar amount that will be saved by the state through eliminating the horrible scourge of poor fake-rape babies, the bill is silent. There were eight entire cases of fraud proven overall, according to this, in the past month.
So clearly this is a crisis we all need to get working on. Fuck this. If you added up all the fraud and waste and horror that poor people supposedly cause, I doubt it would total a month’s worth of time blowing shit up in Afghanistan, but hey, people on public assistance are already down, so that makes them much easier to kick.
I do not understand what we get out of this, as a society. I really, really don’t. If I thought making poor people feel like shit about themselves would actually end poverty maybe I’d be a little more in favor of doing it, but you know, it’s not about the objects of our charity. It’s about us, and what we deserve to do. To send outward into the world. To show others.
And all of the testing, the probing, the constant suspicion that somebody somewhere is getting away with something, that doesn’t do shit to make people any less poor. All it does is make those of us who are not poor a little less rich.
A.