State support for mothers can serve pronatalist rather than egalitarian ends.

Evidence

Writing from a feminist perspective, the essayist Katha Pollitt (2007) commented on the irony that some of the developed countries do the right thing in providing supportive aid to working mothers but for the wrong reason—that is, to produce more babies. Pollitt suggested that societies should develop the talents of the countless millions they already have but write off, rather than embarking on national fertility campaigns to increase their populations. Pollitt suggested that the quickest way for countries to enhance their social capital would be to ban gender inequality and educate girls and women. She declared that the same is true for ethnic minorities who are marginalized rather than provided with the developmental resources to nurture their talents. The moral issue here concerns the harm caused by social exclusion from the opportunity structures of a society. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2643

Categorization

• XREF: The moral framing of who deserves developmental resources vs. who is written off connects directly to Cooper’s social-conservatism argument about stratified opportunity and to moral disengagement’s selective recognition of harm.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Pollitt’s proposal to invest in the marginalized rather than promote births fit with Bandura’s account of how societies morally disengage from those they exclude?
• SEED: A possible essay angle: fertility incentives as state instrumentality that dignifies moral disengagement by masking reproductive autonomy in economic language.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2643