On the front page of the Tribune today: “Dan Ryan victim mourned slain friend weeks earlier: ‘Put the guns down‘” — a somewhat cryptic online headline for a story which is, in the print version, titled, “‘I got to bury another child?’ Pregnant mom of 5 is gunned down on Dan Ryan; her brother was slain nearby a year ago.”
The article features this particular Chicago South Side victim of gun violence because, by coincidence, a Tribune reporter had interviewed her in May at a memorial for a friend who was killed. She listed the relatives and friends who had been killed, and, although she acknowledged that (according to the excerpts) at least some of them belonged to gangs, she said, ““Don’t nobody deserve to lose a loved one and …mourn them throughout their life,” she said. “…Stop the violence. Put the guns down and fight like the old days. (If) you can’t fight it out, go sit in the house and think about it.” Hence, the quote featured in the headline.
But consider this mom of 5, ages 1 to 9, pregnant with a 6th: how old would you expect her to be, having had that many children?
She was 24.
What’s more, the father or fathers were nowhere in the picture. Not interviewed by the Tribune. Not mentioned as a mourner. And the children themselves were to be split up, with the boys to be cared for by her father, and the girls by her mother. Who was caring for them when she was out with friends at 4 AM?
Now, I’m not going to start in on “look at these irresponsible welfare queens,” let alone anything harsher than that. This post isn’t about trashing anyone (and I’m not giving her name because I don’t want this post to show up as a hit for anyone who searches for her). But wow — it’s hard to even fathom the degree of dysfunction in these sorts of Chicago neighborhoods, with the combination of gang violence and children born in such conditions as to make “unmarried parenting” sound too sterile a descriptor.
The report says she was just about to start a “second job” as a cashier at a department store. No further details — and, of course, you can’t reasonably expect the Tribune to start spelling out all the details (were these two part-time minimum wage jobs? Did she have any particular job skills or training? Did she have a consistent or spotty job history? Who cared for the children? Was she able to support her family or was she dependent on food stamps, other welfare benefits, and family help?) in an article such as this.
But it’s still hard to read an article like this without asking: why six children? Sure, I get that young poor women want to have kids to provide them some happiness (see Promises I Can Keep, my summary here), but six? It’s hard to believe that she truly couldn’t access or afford contraception — even if she didn’t qualify for Medicaid, there are other programs out there giving it away, and even condoms, while less effective, would have been effective enough that, even accounting for failures, she wouldn’t have had that many kids in such a short time.
So for all the talk about the Hobby Lobby decision and about whether this deprives women of contraception, when we think about the background for the HHS determination that all insurance cover all prescription contraception without copay — this is the context, and the motivator for their decision, the large number of women with unplanned, unwanted, or, let’s face it, simply socially-undesirable pregnancies, not the progressive poster child Sandra Fluke. (See my prior post from last week with comments on the original source document.) But is a no-out-of-pocket-cost contraception mandate really going to make a difference?
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