A response to Bill King's July 21 column on the obstacles that might influence a pregnant woman to choose abortion opines that the solution is to hold fathers financially accountable by requiring them to pay for abortions or pay child support. (Page B9, Tuesday.)

First, the lack of affordable health care and day care, along with the increasingly unavailable affordable birth control and family planning services, is not just a problem for single mothers. Two-parent families have the same needs, as very few can survive on just one income.

Yearly income at the current minimum wage equals $15,080 per year at a full-time job.

People employed in food services and off-the-books jobs often make less than that. A recent Chronicle article (Page A1, July 18) stated that a family of four in the Houston area needs more than $60,000 a year to get by, with few frills.

Families that live paycheck to paycheck are one hiccup away from becoming indigent. Merely taking time off for doctor appointments and to have the baby frequently results in loss of employment.

The U.S. is one of only five countries in the world that do not require paid maternity leave (along with Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea).

Nearly 150 countries mandate minimum paid sick leave and 98 countries offer 14 or more paid weeks of maternity leave, but, in the U.S., no company is required to provide this leave. Surprisingly few companies offer it voluntarily.

Second, single women or caretakers who apply for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid or other children's health care already must cooperate with the state in establishing paternity and obtaining support payments for all children receiving benefits.

The application requires that identifying information for the father of each child be listed, under penalty of perjury and other criminal prosecution for lying on a governmental record.

Child support recovered is first applied to repay benefits that have been extended.

However, the old legal axiom of non sanguis adipisci rapa often applies: Fathers who don't work or are incarcerated have no money to give. Fathers who work for minimum wage or less, while living apart from the child or children, also have little cash to offer.

Federal law now allows delinquent child support to be deducted from income tax refunds and disability payments and paid to whomever it is owed, but many women remain unaware that money has been collected.

Of course, it is quite simple to decree that people who cannot provide for their children should not have them.

In the past several months, Chronicle readers via letters to the editor have proposed that women who can't afford birth control shouldn't have sex, that taxpayers shouldn't pay for Houston Independent School District's summer meal program because parents "choose" to not feed their own kids, that "whether" one feeds one's family is, like reproductive sterilization, not a matter for bureaucratic interference and that involuntary sterilization of women deemed (by whom, exactly, is not clear) unfit mothers is defensible.

The Texas Legislature has paved the way to codify all these possibilities, so perhaps it will happen. Until then, however, we are unable to restrict child-bearing to those who are wealthy, intelligent, gainfully employed or affordably idle and able to pass random drug tests.

It is a common modern mantra, most often pronounced by those born to money or who profited from some windfall, that whether one is rich or poor is simply a matter of choice.

I seriously doubt any rational person chooses to live in abject poverty, to become addicted to drugs, to be homeless or to be born into a family that hasn't seen two participatory parents in five generations and values formal education slightly less than a losing lottery ticket.

Few parents "choose" not to feed their kids; the kids are hungry because their parent or parents cannot afford to buy food.

For those who believe governmental assistance enables the poor to live the life of Riley, I suggest you check out the guidelines and then compare those benefits to your own budgets.