When personal and public responsibility collide

Reading the NYT today I find this article which alternately appalled, infuriated, and saddened me.

Over the last five years, Mysheda Autry has received welfare checks and food stamps, gone through a welfare-to-work program and briefly held several jobs. She has also given birth to her second and third children. (ed. with a fourth due now)

and

“They end up with lots of kids, no family support, no education, no coping skills, so they get a job and lose it and get another job and lose it.’s Its not like they are lying around not doing anything: their lives are constantly on the go as they run behind their kids. But they end up falling way behind. (Gloria M. Guard, president of the People’s Emergency Center)

Appalled by the state of Ms. Autry's life and her incredibly low potential to assume a productive place anywhere in our society. Infuriated that this woman has frittered away her life using only her uterus and poor judgement while being enabled by that portion of society which doesn't share those faults so central to her identity. Saddened to think that the three (soon four or more) children she has given birth to have very little chance of doing better in this world than their mother or grandmother have. Ms. Gard again;

A possibility, once Ms. Autry gets some training, may be work as a home health aide.

Another possibility is that she will continue to do the same things in the same ways with the same results. Earnest efforts to help her squandered.

While she may not beat or intentionally starve her children, this seems like a very clear-cut case of slow-motion child abuse. After eight or nine years of this life her children's potential will be wasted and their lives likely wrecked. Ten years from now you will likely see at least one of her children in prison and what a sorrow that is. What is the solution to the problem Mysheda Autry poses? I'm getting a headache thinking about it. Take the children away and foster them out? Place this unfit woman and children into an institution for the Perpetually Unable To Care For Oneself? Toss her and her children into the gutter to sink or swim? Continue to subsidize her pernicious lifestyle ad infinitum? This creature represents a bad problem without good solutions. What a tragedy. For us all.