Drug-Testing for Parents Receiving Welfare?

by Lucy S.

I didn't intend to write anything else for the blog this week, but after seeing yet more of these posts on Facebook calling for mandatory drug tests, I wrote a post on there, and this is an expansion of that. 

When I see posts favoring mandatory drug tests for mothers (or fathers - but in reality, it's almost always directed at mothers) who receive welfare, I would like to know if people who feel this way also favor mandatory drug tests for stay at home parents with spouses / partners working for an income. Or maybe the partner should demand it since s/he is providing an income. For that matter, even if the partner provides a much higher percentage of the total income, maybe s/he should demand it. Would anyone just maybe find that insulting?  Would that be a sign of a healthy, equal relationship?

I find it a really problematic notion that somehow if a parent receives an income from the state (and a very meager, inadequate one – Tennessee’s is a whopping $185 a month for a parent with two kids), that somehow gives the state a right to invade her body with these tests as if she is somehow more 'suspicious' because of receiving this income. But if it is privatized to another individual providing the income (and here we always end up connecting to either residuals of patriarchy or very active forms), then everything has changed and it's fine and even warm and wonderful and no one else's business. Now she's under the lordship of her husband!!

It is labor caring for kids and others and doing a multitude of other things – and it is labor whether the person has a partner or not. And the kids are not being raised to hand over to the income-providing partner. They are being raised to become part of humanity, so this labor is really to sustain humanity, and is not some private hobby, nor a gift for patriarchy.

And having been in the position of parenting without a partner around or with one, sometimes working for an income, sometimes not, I can say that it's usually a lot more work to be a single parent (even "stay at home") than one with a partner. (The exceptions are if someone has a partner who needs a lot of help for health reasons or who is dominating and difficult while offering no help.) The single parent has to be "on" a lot more of the time, because there is no partner to take over with babies and young kids, or to cook, or to run to the store for something, or to do all the other work. The single parent has to take those kids along if they're too young to leave, unless they're fortunate enough to have extended family or friends living with them. 

(I think an informal communal situation like that is much healthier than the vaunted nuclear family one, but many single parents live with only their young kids, partly because as a single parent – and oh do I know this from personal experience – you’re more likely to get people treating you as if you don’t know what you’re doing, or who want to emphasize that you’re the one who screwed up, so you’d better be ready to ‘take the responsibility for it.’  I especially love this from anti-abortion folks who value babies’ lives so much, yet see them as punishments to bear once on the scene for the single mom.  So you often need that place of your own just to get everyone off your back and to prove to yourself and others that you are a competent adult.  I should add: my birth family didn’t treat me this way, but there were others I lived with or knew who did.)

I have known married parents who were cruel and negligent with their kids, so if we're so determined to have the state police everyone, why not just say all parents have to be drug-tested? And maybe psychologically evaluated, too, in case they're failing in other ways? I mean, what is the justification for this insulting intrusion into the lives of mothers who collect welfare? What subconscious assumptions and ideologies are being brought along in these calls for testing?

I think mass testing of this kind would be a disaster, but I want to say to these people who keep speaking in favor of it: if you don't want it for yourself or all the non-welfare-recipient parents you know, then why target mothers who get a meager income from the state for doing the same work married / partnered mothers do, but doing it with less help? It’s a disgusting kind of bullying.

I mean, if we’re talking about a mother whose partner left her, it is really adding more injury to her to imply that she is a lesser person for this, a person who needs drug tests, because after all, if she couldn’t hold on to her partner, there must be something defective about her, right?  That’s what it comes down to, and it’s degrading to all women to judge us according to these terms.  (And let us always keep in mind that there aren't nearly enough jobs paying anywhere near a living wage - so it's not as simple as just saying that she should go get a job in this ridiculous economy.)  

Instead of stigmatizing these parents and their kids, how about recognizing their work and care for loved ones under such difficult circumstances in a society full of people who want to punish and degrade them because they had children and the other parent either ended whatever relationship there was before the babies were born, or those relationships ended for some other reason? If people are so worried about these parents or their children, how about if they offer to help the family sometimes or even on a regular basis, so that the parent and kids know that they have some help to count on? How about actively caring for them?

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Postscript:  What a surprise...  In addition to the continual efforts to diminish any governmental economic support (all the neoliberal privatization moves going on in the U.S. and around the world), we find that the big corporations who stand to profit from forced mass drug-testing of people receiving welfare (and even unemployment compensation) are pushing these laws. Alternet has a short article on this. http://www.alternet.org/how-big-pharma-bringing-forced-drug-tests-state-near-you   The pharmaceutical corporate executives have lobbied politicians to put these laws in force and even been behind-the-scenes writers of some proposed state legislation for mandatory drug testing for those receiving welfare or unemployment payments. One reason for the push is that companies have finally decided that it hasn't been worth the expenditures to continue testing their employees, so the big pharmaceuticals need a new base of customers.