I assume Eleanor Talbot possesses a crystal ball, considering her letter supporting the two-child cap on benefits (8 August). Most parents do consider whether or not they can afford children before having them. However, life happens. You may become disabled. Your partner may die. You may lose your job. No parent can predict these things upon conception, and we should have a system to support all families who fall on hard times, regardless of their size.
Also, children are not responsible for the choices of their parents and they shouldn’t be made to suffer. Moralising about who’s responsible for their upkeep does nothing to change the fact that once a child is born, they have needs that have to be met. A childhood of grinding poverty should not be the punishment for families who have more children. This is the punishment for over a million children forced into poverty or forced deeper into it simply for having more than one sibling.
No child deserves poverty and destitution. All deserve a childhood free of that burden, and we should be outraged that they’re not. Tony Blair promised to end child poverty by 2020. It is possible to end it now, if we have the political will.
Kathleen Foster
Bordon, Hampshire
• While Eleanor Talbot makes some valid points regarding responsibilities as parents for our children, she ignores several realities. Not all women, even in the UK, have freedom of choice as to whether they become pregnant or become a parent; women with a background of trauma, adverse childhood experiences and disrupted family life often lack autonomy and agency generally, and specifically in relation to their bodies; pregnancy and having children can offer opportunities for nurture and attention that some women don’t receive otherwise and (understandably) seek.
I am glad that she had support and felt able to thrive as well as survive single parenthood, but universalising our own limited experiences rarely provides a compassionate or useful response for others, or a basis for policy.
Claire Edwards
Edinburgh
• How sad was I to read Eleanor Talbot’s letter. This is exactly the rhetoric of the non-caring austerity measures this government puts forward. Thousands of children are living in poverty, and not by choice. They are the ones who suffer. None of them asked to be born, but they are the ones suffering.
Linda Theobald
London
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