Jen:

I'll just take a minute here before going off to work to throw a couple other things into the mix.

In my first life, you know, the part where wide eyed idealist go out to save the world, i worked as a teacher, then a jailhouse taecher, then a drug rehab couselor and then 8 years as a social worker so I've kinda seen a side of life that a lot of folk don't get to see. It sounds to me Like you have brushed with it but maybe not at the "porjects" level.

But what I did learn is that even before Clinton's "Welfare Reform" (Haha) Bill the ADC (Aid to Dependeant Children) and AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependant Children) was a terribly punitive system after two children were in the home and the grants (welfare) were not so that a mother with four kids would get appreciably more than one with three. Which was purdy danged little.

Now, there's something about the projects that just breeds angry, violent and non productive people. The system insures it. The schools are in ill repair. The father is generally not in the home because if he were then the ADC checks would be cut off in most cases. Well, what I am getting at is a pragmatic attitiude toward the relatively low cost of assisting a mother in poverty with not having to bare the responsibility of yet another unwanted child, who will grow up in a culture of violence and be a drain on the system perhaps all of his or her life, thru crime, courts and incarceration. Now I know this is a harsh way to look at things but it is worth a moment of relection here in this discussion.

We know, just as before the Roe decision that folks with the means were getting abortions and it is these same folks who seem to have the most problem accepting the possibility that some another woman without the means my be assisted.

Just thought I'd at least throw this into the mix.

Gotta go to work.

Bobert