This assertion, I gather, is based on your personal preference for how things ought to be. I lived for twenty years in the inner city, where marriage is essentially dead. Not ONE of the shack-up couples I encountered was (a) self-sufficient, (b) childless (unless one was on the way), or (c) not a burden on society. Across America, these are millions of people.
But I suppose you're thinking about the sleep-around-before-committing crowd--white, middle-class couples who postpone both marriage and child-bearing because they are focused on careers and/or "finding themselves." Sadly, pregnancy has a way of intruding into such relationships (it being natural and all), and when abortion does not result, illegitimacy and all its attendant ills quite often follow. Not at all surprising that the same folks who tell pollsters they see nothing wrong with shacking up also see no problem in bringing a fatherless baby into their Brave New World.
But that doesn't make the problems go away. It just spreads around the squalor that is the everyday norm in the ghetto today. And every one of us has to pay the price.
Well, since the statistics show that there are around 6 million couples living outside of marriage, they must all be the inner city type you are referring to. In fact, they are not. The inner city ones are mainly made up of fatherless homes. In 1998, 27% of family households were single parent. 84% of children in single parent households are with mothers. There are over 4 million single mothers who have never married. Few of those involved a long term live in father. 65% of unmarried couples involve both partners working.
So the problem is not the unmarried couples. Far from it, the real problem is the high divorce rate, and the unmarried teen and adult mothers with no father present.
Sadly, pregnancy has a way of intruding into such relationships (it being natural and all), and when abortion does not result, illegitimacy and all its attendant ills quite often follow.
Yet married couples result in a far greater percentage of one parent households because of divorce.
But that doesn't make the problems go away. It just spreads around the squalor that is the everyday norm in the ghetto today. And every one of us has to pay the price.
Agreed, the problems are staggering. They are just not caused by issue raised here.