According to Hafner-Eaton and Pierce, some prefer to give birth at home with the assistance of a midwife for various reasons. These include the increase in obstetrical attempts to manage childbirth in a "medicalized manner", that home births have lower intervention, complication and mortality rates than hospital births, that midwifes focus on the mother as a whole being, viewing birth as a natural function for a woman, and accordingly that midwifes have a special body of knowledge that obstetricians do not have, achieved through experience and familiarity with the female body. I believe that the best setting for giving birth is wherever the mother feels most comfortable. If knowing that she has immediate medical help in case of a sudden emergency is reassuring to her, then the hospital is probably the best setting, but if comfort, both physical, mental and emotional is more important, then birth at home is the best setting. I was unaware of the popularity of giving birth at home, but now see the appeal in giving birth with the assistance of a midwife instead.
The legal ties between parents and children have changed over time as the law progressively views children more and more as distinct individuals. It still though, views the authority of parents as sacred, and while the law controls education and will take a child away from abusive parents, the general rights of parents are constitutionally protected. Adoption laws have changed starting in 1926 when Parliament in England enacted the Adoption of Children Act; before that, adoption was not recognized. Until 1976, parents with children already were not allowed to adopt. Colonial America passed its first adoption law in Massachusetts in 1851, and by the end of the century adoption laws were recognized nation wide, with little emphasis on blood relations. Historically, the function of adoption was mainly economic-it allowed farming families to pass on their property to their own child, even if adopted; it also allowed for family names to be continued, even if the couple was unable to give birth to a biological child. Today, it is more socially acceptable for a single women who becomes pregnant to keep her baby, yet the desire to adopt is still high, so couples have even transcended stereotypical boundaries of race and are adopting children from other countries.
According to Sharon Hays, the conservative and liberal views of welfare differ vastly. Conservatives stigmatize welfare recipients as lazy, permiscuous and pathologically dependent, and believe that the welfare system perpetuates poverty and promotes the increase of dependence on welfare. Liberals instead argue that any problems of morality within poor families are the result of economic hardship, not the cause, and thus that welfare reform needs to focus on providing better economic care to the poor. The main differences between the requirements introduced by the welfare reform of 1996 and the earlier welfare policies include that earlier policies were marked by the War on Poverty, and the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization, that equalized aid, created federal poverty programs and Medicaid. 1996 on the other hand, was marked by the renaming of welfare as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and the establishment of the Personal Responsibility Act, which demanded that mothers participate in the paid labor force, and was unsympathetic to the idea that women and children deserved any special protection. The two contradictory visions represented in welfare reform are the liberal feminist individualism view (the Work Plan) and the family values view (the Family Plan) of welfare. The Work Plan presents work requirements as a way of rehabilitating mothers into productive members of society, while the Family plan uses work requirements as punishment for mothers who fail to get married and stay married. The contradictions inherent in welfare reform thus tells us that the values of our society are declining in regards to family and community values, highlighted by unsupervised teens, abortion rates, drug abuse and declining civic engagement.
According to Block, Korteweg and Woodward, countries such as Norway understand poverty as caused by economic and structural factors rather than bad behavior, and thus take a more comprehensive government approach to combating poverty. The prevailing theory of why poor people are poor in the United States is that it is due to personal moral failings, and that people can overcome and avoid poverty through hard work alone. This theory operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy because due to our poorly funded programs which only reach a fraction of the poor, those who need the assistance and do not receive it must break laws to keep their families together, and are thus forced to act in a way that makes them appear to "lack moral character". According to the authors, in order to make the American Dream more accessible to the poor, we must recognize that the war on this "lack of morality" violates our society's fundamental values, and must focus on what policy changes will revise the American Dream to apply to all our citizens. We need universal health care and universal availability of quality child care and preschool programs, as well as affordable housing opportunities, and overall create policies that target the poor more directly.
According to Clawson and Gerstel, we can improve the child care system in the U.S by taking cues from the success of the European systems and following their various models. This includes making child care programs publicly funded and universal, as well as available to all social classes, paying staff about the same as public school teachers, making hours equal to that of the school day. Additionally, parents must be given a significant period of paid parental leave, with the option to share it between both the mother and father. I feel these are important changes that need to be addressed, as the short term difficulties and costs will be far succeeded by the long term positive effects on our children.