One boy, boy for sale, he's going cheap....

Talk about buying votes...wow.

OK I thought you were fed up with Mo and I was going to make an offer if I could get him to work in my garden.

As to the proposal - The majority of women who would consider this offer are likely unmarried, very young and financially unstable. It costs about $5000 to have a baby in a hospital, if there are no complications. So who's going to pay the doctor bills? There's no stigma about being a single mother these days and many of these women would just keep the baby and end up on public assistance. Then the Republicans will complain about all the Welfare Queens in our society. As for replacing those killed in Iraq - we could just start offering better health care to existing people and probably save millions more.

I would love to know if the number of people on the list to adopt from foster care in Texas reaches anywhere near 3,000 people.

And I'd like to know how the state would deal with kids who aren't easily adoptable.

I think this is one of the craziest ideas I've ever seen.

What's to stop a pregnant woman with no intention of getting an abortion to go in and cash in on this?

Chai, I don't think 500 goes a long way when you're pregnant.

You get the money when you place the kid for adoption, Chai. At least they thought that part through.

Mo is not for sale at any price, Green Witch, but he would probably love love love to work in your garden.

And I agree - once seeing the pregnancy through many of the women would probably decide to keep the baby.

oooohhhh...sorry, didn't note the adoption part....

In Cambodia, the asking price for a child is $50 to $800. A lot higher in more developed countries, up to a couple of tenthousand $$ in e.g. some East Euroepean countries.

This would relly bring the market down.

I can just hear their new tourist slogan....

Texas
Come for the babies
Stay for the chicken fried steak!

(In NY -- Get yer red hot babies, right here!)

OK, on first thought this seems like a strange idea... but I am going to ask the question.

Is there anything morally wrong with this idea?

This isn't really selling babies. I can't think of a way this will be abused.

I agree with people who want to lower the amount of abortions in ways that don't involve making them illegal or restricting access. Why isn't this just a creative idea toward this goal.

Of course, if this gives anti-abortion people access to pressure women, it would be a bad thing... but I am asking the hypothetical question assuming that this is not the case.

What's the moral issue here?

Who cares if there were a moral issue? The financial considerations make this an absurdity. If a teen-age girl were in a situation in which her parents would not let her keep the baby in any event, the likelihood of abuse of the system is high--there would be no reason for the parents not to cash in for a course which they intended to pursue in the first place. As has already been pointed out, if a young, single mother keeps her baby, in many cases the mother and child would become candidates for public assistance, so it certainly is not going to save the state money in the long run. But in a case in which a mother did deliver her baby and gave it up for adoption, the state now has the burden of the care of the infant until it is placed in foster care, and the burden of the cost of foster care thereafter, until the child is adopted--so $500 has been tacked on to costs which the state is going to be obliged to pay whether or not there were such a program.

Of course, the most cogent objection which has been raised so far is that $500 is chump change these days, and isn't even a significant fraction of the cost of hospitalization for OB. This is political grandstanding, plain and simple, a shameless appeal to the perceived "values" of the electorate which this joker expects will vote for him.

I don't recall the morality coming up but I suppose one could argue that such a program is immoral because it would most likely be used by only the stupidest girls in Texas. Or the ones that are drug/alchol addicted to the point where no reasonable agency would represent them through an adoption and ones that are too dumb to realize that they would benefit way beyond $500 by working with a private agency.

I could be wrong but I believe that in many private adoptions a woman's medical care is paid for, her living expenses are paid for, she gets a little walking around money and she has someone monitoring her behavior.

I also imagine that some women who never considered abortion would consider handing over their baby for $500 once they see that parenthood is not all fun and games.

I agree with Setanta -- this is nothing more than grandstanding.

Its the essense of the proposal that I find interesting. Don't know if I would support it, but it is a starting point to lower the abortion rate.

Boomerang:

You bring up the idea of "smart girls and dumb girls". Wouldn't the smart ones being using protection or not having sex at all till they can support the accident that is sure to come down the line without such precautions?

I think the dumb ones are the ones having sex in the first place before they are ready for the consequences.

You're right.

I should have said the dumbest of the dumb girls.

I would love to see abortion just go away because everyone was a smart girl. I'm all for lowering the abortion rate. This is simply NOT the way to do it.

I take that sort of back. Not everyone who has an unplanned pregnacy is dumb. Neither is everyone who has an abortion.

But women who would take this $500 would have to be pretty dumb.

Even the smartest boys and girls loose all their common sense when faced with the prospect of actually performing sexual intercourse. Intelligence rarely has anything to do with lust.