The American System

1. Midwives and physicians view births differently; midwives believe that births should be natural biological processes, requiring some support but very few interventions, whereas some believe that physicians believe that pregnancies and births that require specialized care and something that requires technological cures. Many women prefer to have control over their own bodies when giving birth. Therefore, they prefer to give birth at home with the assistance of a midwife because they believe that this is a relatively natural process and a midwife is sufficient by offering them “exhaustive prenatal care and overall maternal health screening, avoidance of unnecessary medical interventions, important reduction in anxiety, and mutual trust between themselves and their clients. I personally prefer to give birth at the hospitals due to the fact that I believe that doctors are the more proper personnel to aid the birth process. I believe that it should be a natural process as well and midwives have supported this process for centuries. However, I have watched too much television and know that there can be many complications to the birth process. Therefore, I prefer to be safe and go to a hospital to have my children.

2. The law has changed the ties between parents and children over time. There have been long-term trends toward the emancipation of the child from its father and from the family in general. The law has protected children from abusive or neglectful parents and would take away children from bad parents and give them away to good parents. In essence, even though children are supposed to be under the supervision of its parents, they have legal rights and the state enforces these laws if they are too young to do it themselves. Due to these protective laws, the authority of family is becoming weaker and weaker in comparison to the past but it is still extremely strong. Adoption has become a very popular means to get rid of the children parents do not want or do not have the resources to raise the children as well as a mean for parents to have the children that they have always wanted. However, adoption also has a dark side to it, where the ideals of adoption were ruined and one side does not get what they want. Children are abused by its foster parents and some get kidnapped so that the parents who desperately want children can fill their void in their hearts. The court always tries to decide what the best interests of the child would be, but this is such a subjective way to decide. However, there can never be a systematic way to decide.

3. There has been controversy about the welfare system for many years. The conservative side believes that the recipients of welfare “are lazy, promiscuous, and pathologically dependent” and that the welfare system does not decrease poverty; in fact, it promotes laziness and single parenting as well as providing incentives for family dysfunctions and nonwork. The liberal side, on the other hand, believes that there should be emphasis on “the value orientation of the welfare system and the welfare poor overhauled” and that the welfare system should provide better economic support for the poor. In 1935, women, who were believed to be not worthy to have family ideal, were denied of aid. In the late 1960s, women who received aid in order to stay at home to care for the family, “just as the ideal of appropriate family life prescribed.” Additionally, the state government has been providing less and less aid to families in order to make welfare less attractive. It wanted women to get training and go to work and welfare was only given if the families met stringent conditions.

The reform of 1996 resulted with a nation “that longer beloved that women and children deserved any special form of protection.” Many still believed that children deserved some type of protection, for they are too young to be self-sustainable. This reform encouraged women to be less dependent on men and go out to look for work to support themselves. It served as a form of success for the women who have been fighting for women rights for quite some time. On the other hand, it also promoted the importance of responsible parents as an integral part of child-rearing and the well-being of the children. I believe that there are many families who deserve welfare but it does promote certain families to be lazy. It is very hard to set the rules to determine which family deserves welfare and which don’t. Every situation is different. This debate has led questions concerning independence and dependency, the responsibility of parents, community ties, family ties, and much, much more.

4. There will always be poverty around the world but there are two main reasons for the poverty gap in the United States. First, many powerful groups in the US believe that welfare does not help the poverty gap because it promotes people to be lazy, weak and dependent. Secondly, due to inadequate welfare, families who are unable to be self-sustaining are forced to find other means to support their families, which includes ones that break the law. Many families came to the United States and have probably heard of the “American Dream.” However, this dream became be harder to attain than before. The price of this dream has risen so sharply that many families are unable to reach this goal with their current salaries and wages. These costs include health care, higher education, high-quality child care, and housing. These aren’t even luxuries; they are merely “indispensable ingredients of the dream.” Solutions to make this dream more accessible include accelerated movement toward universal health insurance, universal availability of quality child care and preschool programs, movement to help students meet the requirements for higher education as well as creating public-private partnerships to expand the supply of affordable housing for the poor and the work-class families. Additionally, new policies to help the poor directly are needed, which includes minimum wages and creating a stable income floor for all poor families to ensure that no children are living under poor conditions. Efforts should be aimed so that every single person in the United States has unlimited opportunities to achieve the American Dream.

5. Clawson and Gerstel provided a comparison between the child care system in the United States and some European countries. Most parents in the US struggle to find child care, which led them to endure long waiting lists and have to frequently change locations. As a result, Clawson and Gerstel suggest that “the programs would be publicly funded and universal, available to all, either at no cost or at modest cost with subsidies for low-income participants.” The people who run these kinds of programs would be paid about the same as public school teachers. The length of each day will cover at least as many hours as the school day, while the “wrap-around” care would be available before and after this time. Not everyone has to participate in this program; admissions to these programs are completely voluntary, but “the programs would be such high quality that a majority of the children would enroll.” Additionally, “parents would be universally offered a significant period of paid paternal leave.” These programs will be extremely expensive, but it is believed that the costs of not caring about these children in the short-term or long-term prove to be far more expensive.