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To: Draco
Your contention that the "current war" has a "large" impact on demographics, i.e., that it reduces the number of marriagable males in quantities sufficient to be an excuse for women having children without fathers. Do you think that a diminution in the number of males (married and unmarried) of .000000013% causes the phenomenon cited in the article.

Unfortunately for your argument, I said none of those things. What I said was:

The children of these financially self-sufficient, educated, employed single-mothers-by-choice, will do just as well as the children of widows. Of which there will unfortunately be quite a lot in this coming generation, due to the large number of young men being killed in the war.

Saying there will be "a large number" of widows, is not making any assertion about a "large impact on demographics". There were "a large number" of people killed by the terrorist attacks on 9/11, but 3000 deaths have no significant demographic impact on this nation of nearly 300 million. Due to the war, there will be a lot more young widows in this generation than in the previous one, period.

I also said nothing about the war deaths "reducing the number of marriageable males" -- and since I was discussing war widows with children, those particular deceased men and their widows obviously already HAD married.

I do not think women need any "excuse" to have children on their own, nor did I say so. Nor do I think, nor did I say, that the number of men killed in the war and/or a numerical shortage of men was the CAUSE of women choosing to have children on their own. My ONLY reference to men killed in the war, was that they are leaving a large number of widows raising children on their own -- and that historical evidence suggests that those children will do just fine, despite being raised without fathers.

The point of my post (which you seem to have missed entirely, while you were busy imagining it said all sorts of things which it didn't) was that children raised by their mothers alone do just fine, if those mothers were responsible, loving women to begin with. As long as the mother is financially self-sufficient by one means or another (including veterans' survivor benefits), has at least completed high school, and is emotionally mature and stable, it makes no difference to the child whether the father got killed while the mother was 3 months pregnant with the child, or if the father was an anonymous sperm donor who the mother never expected to have involved in raising the child. If the mother is a welfare dependent, substance-abusing, irresponsible, illiterate mess to begin with, as are most of the single mothers in this country (but NONE of these single mothers using sperm donors fall into that category), there would be no benefit to the child if she married and stayed married to the child's welfare dependent, substance-abusing, irresponsible, illiterate mess of a biological father. The grim statistics regarding children of "single mothers" in this country are overwhelmingly driven by that latter group, which is very large (to a demographically significant degree!). The college-educated, financially secure, emotionally stable women, who are the great majority of the women who choose to become single mothers via sperm donors, have virtually nothing in common with the dysfunctional hordes of teenage welfare mothers, either before or after having children, and the lives of the two groups' children will have virtually nothing in common either.

445 posted on 05/21/2006 8:43:37 PM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: GovernmentShrinker

For brevity~~~~~~~~~

WHAT YOU SAID.


456 posted on 05/21/2006 9:04:09 PM PDT by Gabz (Proud to be a WalMartian --- beep)
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To: GovernmentShrinker

I focused on your inaccurate numeric analysis. That calls into question the rest of your analysis, both its numeric underpinnings and its "sociological" conclusions. Give it a rest. If you have to explain your original post in a significantly longer follow-up post I will take that as a concession that the original analysis was problematic. Give it a rest.


551 posted on 05/22/2006 9:54:39 AM PDT by Draco
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