Families

The Atlantic - The Supreme Court, in striking down Roe v. Wade, has increased the number of children born to financially distressed families; states with no or severely limited access to abortion have done little to support new parents. And Congress is debating whether and how to expand the child tax credit. Legislation that has passed the House would lift roughly half a million children above the poverty line (though the temporary child allowance kept more than 3 million of them out of poverty); the bill is stalled in the Senate. As a general point, the United States, despite being the richest society Earth has ever known, tolerates astonishingly high rates of child poverty. Kids are two or three times as likely to grow up in poverty in the United States as they are in most of our rich-country peers. That is a direct consequence of the United States spending such a small share of its GDP on family benefits such as public child care, home visits, and payments to new parents—a smaller share than all other OECD countries except Turkey, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The country is also an outlier in lacking a comprehensive paid-family-leave program and child care for kids 5 and under.