The two-child benefits limit is a sign of society’s growing inhumanity

Last week a Middlesbrough Conservative councillor apologised after describing benefit claimants as “pond life” who should be “washed and sterilised”. David Smith said: “There are so many genuine cases. But there is a large portion who are claimants that take the absolute piss. Yet they continue to breed. Rabbits, the lot of them.” I thought of Smith as I read through a new report by the Child Poverty Action Group into the impact of the two-child benefit limit – the government policy that, from April 2017, cut at least £53 a week in support from some of the country’s poorest families upon the birth of their third child.

The study is a brutal insight into this morally bankrupt policy. Nearly all families affected reported going without essentials such as food, medication or heating. Domestic violence victims trying to leave an abusive partner said the cut resulted in “stark choices between poverty and safety” for themselves and their children, while several women said they had been forced to consider abortions of wanted pregnancies. It would be easy to believe this is far removed from the words of a fringe politician like Smith, but the two-child policy is simply the legitimate face of this sort of toxic thinking. From its inception, the child limit has been rooted in class-baiting sexism: a dog whistle that says working-class women are breeding too much, and that their offspring are a drain on the public purse.

Ministers billed it as an “incentive” for people on benefits to work, despite official figures showing most families affected already had a job. Iain Duncan Smith claimed it would force people to learn that “children cost money”, as if parents struggling on poverty wages needed this lesson. It wilfully ignored that family planning is rarely clear cut; some pregnancies are unplanned, while a job loss or rent hike can quickly change someone’s circumstances after a baby has been conceived. The study found a lack of publicity by the government meant only half the women affected were even aware of the change before they became pregnant.

Related: Two-child benefit limit pushes families further into poverty – study

The two-child limit has broken the most fundamental tenet of the welfare state: that there should always be a link between support and need. The government has purposely washed its hands of children in hardship. This is perhaps the most disturbing part. Poverty is not so much a mistaken result of the two-child limit, it is the intended consequence. The attitudes that have allowed this to happen have not come from nowhere but have been normalised for years, from reality shows to tabloid fetishisation of “scrounging” families. Added up, each demand to take benefits from low-income parents has been so effective that it has even managed to dehumanise children – as if working-class babies don’t cry when they’re hungry, or if they do, that their suffering doesn’t matter.

By 2024, the two-child limit will have forced an additional 300,000 children into poverty, while 1 million already below the breadline will be pushed into deeper hardship. The only way this will be prevented is if, as a society, we decide their lives matter. “Rabbits” can be easy enough to ignore. Children cannot.

• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People