Samantha Bee: conservatives think poor babies don’t deserve diapers

On Monday’s Full Frontal, Samantha Bee explained just how devastating the price of disposable diapers is for low-income families.

Bee quoted rapper Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” to point out that “these damn food stamps don’t buy diapers.” Indeed, along with “luxury items” like alcohol and cigarettes, diapers are one of the things you can’t buy with SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more popularly known as food stamps).

But for families with infants, diapers aren’t a luxury; they’re an urgent necessity. You can’t send your children to daycare without them, and cloth diapers won’t do — because, as Bee put it, daycare workers have “some crazy idea that they should minimize the amount of human excrement they get all over their hands.”

Bee played a clip of one man telling local news that he decided to skip meals himself so that he could afford diapers.

Disposable diapers cost almost a thousand dollars a year on average for one child. That means the lowest-income families with infants have to spend 14 percent of their annual income just on disposable diapers.

President Barack Obama is working to raise awareness of the issue — including reaching out to Silicon Valley, since Republicans in Congress won’t touch a new bill that could help.

Bee also scorched California Assembly member Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) for opposing a similar bill in California and saying, “It is not government’s responsibility to give diapers out.”

“Look, you whiny babies, if you didn’t want to wallow in your own filth like a Dickensian orphan, you shouldn’t have chosen poor parents!” Bee said. “It’s called personal responsibility.”

Bee read aloud some comments from Californians on the diaper bill, including one from a woman who said poor women shouldn’t have babies if they can’t afford them.

“Oh my God conservatives, make up your minds about poor babies!” Bee said. “We thought you wanted them to be born. Why else would you oppose free contraception, wage jihad against Planned Parenthood, fight the FDA on Plan B [emergency contraception], and make abortion as unobtainable for poor women as a ticket to Hamilton?”