My ex husband's brother has EIGHT children. The oldest is 22 and has made him a grandfather twice. The youngest is six. His wife doesn't work, and he is essentially a low paid civil servant.

The thing that saves them is that they are heavily involved in the community and their church – in fact, when the oldest daughter got married the congregation put the whole wedding together for her out of goodness, and refused to let the family help or spend a dime.

But out of all the large families I know, they are certainly the exception rather than the rule.

Revealing a bit of my deep South background here, but as a twelve year old girl involved in Girl Scouts, we "adopted" a local family one year for Thanksgiving. We collected cans, toys, and clothing for the tykes, and our troup leader loaded us into the car and drove us to this family's house.

Our family of six was led by a 22 year old woman. She had her first child at fifteen – he helped her take care of the other four babies. Only two of them had the same father. She had a neighbor watch them during the day while she worked in the carpet mill for $15/hour. They used food stamps when momma's money ran out. They all slept in the same room.

It made me realize that I wasn't as poor as I'd thought, never mind that I didn't have what other girls had, I was still streets above this poor woman and her family.

I think of this now and I think two things could have put this woman on a different path: education and birth control.

Swift commended honesty as the sole criteria in selecting Minsters, noting that clever men (presumeably women as well) had more complicated vices and that you could neither prevent a minester for roguery by legislation or policing if he were not honest or honourable

Honour is a gift a man gives to himself

Myself, I'm inclined towards the not-enough-small-wars theory. We send the wrong people to get killed.

Eliza: You need a licence to have a dog, but you can be a complete numtie and yet be allowed to pop out twenty future muggers, and get paid for it.

Sigh.

John – LOL, no not breeding stock. From my own purely anecdotal observations, the people I know who are poor also have the most children. It's easy enough to make the leap to say "only poor people have large families" and thus supporting, at least on the surface, the Bell Curve. Now there were lots of cultural reasons for this…in the earlier half of the preceeding century. Things like farming, lack of birth control, etc. I look at it and go "my my, the people least able to afford children are the ones having the most?" This leads some people (although not myself) to wonder if we aren't in some way incenting poor people by dangling economic carrots in front of their noses to continually reproduce (the Welfare Mom of legend).

It boggles my mind that you have to take a test to drive a car, to scuba dive (legally), to carry a concealed weapon, to hunt, to graduate school…and yet there is no way we could ever design as assessment of someone's fitness to raise a child. Instead of assessing parental fitness, mental state, and soundness of life, we wait until the child is born and in trouble, and then take him away and place him/her in foster care.

The whole thing pisses me off.

Should I sign this "ready to have children and aware that my ovaries are ticking?"

:-)

Bock – sorry for comandeering your blog…

I was simply enquiring of eliza if she required the IQ check as an ascessmnet of the capacity of parents to raise thir children as useful members of society, or to determine alternatively if she were proposing the IQ check to see if the prospective parents were goog brood stock.

Could you say that again, in English.

Just curious about the IQ suggestion, seems to me you might subscribe to the Bell Curve Hypothesis.

Would the object be to ensure that parents had the appropriate aptidudes to look after the children they gave issue to, or to determine the probable nature of the genetic inheritance.

Society does tend to make it easier for persons of lesser ability to bring forth the next generation

any views?

I meant jail. Silly me.

And really people should at least be required to take an IQ test to have sex, let alone have a child.